Word: everydayness
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...such earlier novels as Square's Progress and Office Politics, Sheed constructs a bright, cutting prose from the dross of everyday slang. He wields that prose with a subtle ear for speech rhythms and a sardonic eye for the telltale gesture. In this new volume, he also musters a quality that had been somewhat lacking in his earlier, coolly satirical work: a sense of urgency. The milieu of childhood that occupies him here seems to have tapped deep, previously unsuspected currents of emotion. Still the accomplished novelist of manners, he is now taking a more searching look...
There's some truth, of course, in what the Beatles say. We all know that politics in-the-streets has its problems; that bruality and anarchy are risky and ugly. But we also know that far greater brutalities than any protesting students can bring about are committed everyday by governments, and that reality makes the Beatles' viewpoint trivial, insensitive, and unnecessary...
...only since television has the soaper got right down to the nubby-grubby of everyday existence - suicide attempts (The Doctors), incestuous desires (Days of Our Lives) and various physical com plaints, such as "uterine inertia" (An other World). The trouble with such contemporary traumas is that no one does much about them onscreen; the folks just sit around talking about their problems and drinking black coffee in the kitchen. The only time there is any live action in the typical soaper, it seems, is Friday. That's when the writ ers always slip in the "tease" that will lure...
This year, Dartmouth College's Congregation of the Arts, a summer program whose concerts normally concentrate on works of living composers, took the unusual step of devoting seven days to Webern. The performances demonstrated how much of Webern's vocabulary has passed into the everyday musical language. As such, they sometimes sounded like a lexicon of contemporary clichés: jagged leaps of melody, pointillistic instrumental textures, dryly intellectual twelve-tone patterns. At other times they underlined qualities in Webern's music that have remained fresh and inimitable to this day: delicacy, astringent lyricism, nearly inhuman purity...
...Courrèges' main excitement was a white, rib-knit jump suit, with a tunic for daytime wear and a sequined pants outfit with see-through top for after dark. Not to be outdone, Yves St. Laurent turned out an even more daring evening gown, then produced for everyday a series of wide-cut pants suits just possibly ugly enough to be chic. At least Lauren Bacall, on hand for a CBS-TV fashion special, thought they were. "I'm going all over New York in them," she promised. "And I dare any maitre d' to throw...