Word: boring
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...love of Joyce Gary's life is life. Inevitably, bits and pieces of his own have cropped up in his joyous string of novels. Gulley Jimson, the rascally painter of The Horse's Mouth, bore the knowing brush strokes of Gary's three-year try at being an artist in turn-of-the-century Paris and Edinburgh. In Mr. Johnson, still the best novel written about modern Africa, Gary drew on his tours of duty as an officer in British West Africa during and after World War I. In A House of Children, written...
...years the club was a front-runner in the fight for repeal of the Chinese Exclusion laws. When an act of repeal was finally voted by Congress, it bore the name of the club's longtime ally in the capital, Democratic Senator Warren Magnuson. To the victory celebration in Seattle's Chinese community, Chiang Kai-shek sent another message: "All Chinese deeply appreciate your removing us from the stigma of exclusion ... It is worth 20 divisions to me in morale...
Skin drums were long banned by the British in order to suppress African tribal traditions, but Trinidad musicians discovered they could make a kind of music with tubes of bamboo. "Bamboo-tamboo" bands competed with each other, thunking large-bore tubes on the ground and whacking smaller sticks together in the air to create a rich polyrhythmic effect; onlookers, unable to resist the compelling beat, would pound anything that would make noise. But by the early '30s bamboo was on its way out-the police had found that the sticks were too likely to be used as weapons. Then...
...turning up at the right moment, or the right person at the wrong one, or somebody showing funk or something important disappearing, there is endless gang-aft-agleying, and Someone Waiting seems more an obstacle race than a thrill er. Never believable, in time it becomes something of a bore, and though Leo G. Carroll plays the father with his usual deftness, it is on the audience that he really seems to be taking revenge...
...Kenneth Widmerpool, who first appeared in the series as a clodhopping schoolboy, the butt of Jenkins' witty friends. But now those friends are ruined, bitter, broke or drunk. But Widmerpool, the earnest bore, alone seems to be making a go of it in a suddenly makeshift world. He works in a financial house that specializes in discounting bills. Widmerpool's job as a bill-broker becomes a symbol of Author Powell's thesis...