Word: meaningless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death. (I do not speak here of the book clubs, circulating libraries, paperbounds, and imported brown-covered erotica; Henry Miller and Herman Wouk bestride this cultural colossus, alternately sagacious and sadistic with their American public...
...stern dictatorship backed up by the brute force of the military. The general's past political record, however, has been one of strict adherence to constitutional forms, even in the face of bitter frustration. In 1946, when it became clear that the Constitution would make the Presidency meaningless, de Gaulle resigned the post voluntarily, even though he had the power to force his way on the Assembly by a military coup. In the present crisis sparked by the Algerian generals' revolt, he has insisted that his return to the government be purely constitutional, and the complexion of his cabinet...
...have to agree to send itself on "permanent vacation," give De Gaulle a free hand until a new French constitution could be written. Under the new constitution, as De Gaulle envisages it, France would no longer be ruled by a single house of Parliament. (The French Senate is as meaningless as Britain's House of Lords.) Instead, the nation would have two coequal chambers dividing legislative power somewhat as the U.S. House and Senate do. For the executive, i.e., himself, De Gaulle would insist on power comparable to that wielded by the U.S. President...
...Cold War is by continuing it. Certainly, there seems little hope that the Kremlin will relax its antagonism to the West. Under these conditions, the U.S. could gain little from a summit conference without either making broad concessions to the U.S.S.R. or agreeing to meaningless generalizations which might hamstring American policy in the future. The Government will have to weigh the alternatives and choose its ground; there is nothing to be gained from drifting with the current...
...Kirchner puts a cat in front of a mirror which conflicts with it and behind a figure which jumps behind it in terms of color, is a complete mystery. Once a painting functions as an entity, poetic licence is justified. But until it does the word is meaningless. This painting does not. If the term "expressionism" means something more than emotionalism, then there is more expression in a plum by Chardin. There is more expression, for that matter, in the study by George Kolbe which accompanies his excellent sculpture. The drawing is a modest, simple statement; one note on pitch...