Word: directionless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cozzens, to give him the benefit of any doubt, may have wanted Worthington's distended and directionless nar rative style to serve as a form of complex characterization and ironic statement: it is Worthington's recurring point that life is drift as much as design. In a wry put-on, Cozzens may have intended'to mock that notion. But if that is the case, the novel still fails, because Cozzens has chosen to write against the grain of his own special talent-that of a meticulous and compulsive craftsman-which demands the imposition of a precise design...
...part of the world that had gone no place since the Civil War, the directionless road of vaudevillian fame was far more apt as a symbol of Arkansas' dead-end economic and political condition than as a sampling of Ozark humor. For all its majestic forests and fertile bottom lands, its bountiful natural resources and the Mississippi on its eastern frontier, the state remained for long decades a kind of limboland...
...wood blocks, maracas, xylophones, glockenspiels and tubas. All are brought into play in Short Symphony, a 14-minute piece subtitled "Testimony to a Big City." It bristles with jazzy splashes, but too often falls off the pace like a mudder on a fast track. It is restless, aggressive, often directionless music, a personal statement of what Bazelon calls his "violent, silent world inside." Just how he arrived at his present state of agitation is a case study of the tribulations faced by most young composers nowadays...
...Cohen concedes that any man who stays on LSD for three days would require repeated, increasing doses, and might have reactions not previously seen by psychiatrists. Equally important is the basic personality of the LSD user: on college campuses and in beatnik dives in California, most users are young, directionless and more confused than hostile; New York City may well have a greater proportion of hard-core misfits, with different problems...
...dances, familiar Broadway exercises in directionless motion, stem from the King of France school of choreography-"the King of France with 40,000 men went up the hill, and came right back again." Most of the score seems to have been written in invisible notes and dissolving lyrics, although two numbers, I'll Never Be Lonely Again and If I Ruled the World, have a plaintive and perhaps durable charm...