Word: pedestrian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Transparent and Purple. "Mystery is the important thing," says Ethel Scull, Pop-art patron and wife of the owner of a fleet of New York City taxicabs. "I'll never, never wear a see-through without a body stocking," she insists, remembering the passing pedestrian who had one look through her first one before "his glasses fell off." Model Penelope Tree substitutes a satin bra for the body stocking, refusing to go without anything. "It's hard enough getting people to pay attention to what you're saying," she says, "without focusing their attention on your bosom...
Taken on its own terms Tonight at Noon may be entertaining, like reading a bus poster. But on the whole it is pedestrian and pretentious. The book does not deserve a nasty pen. It deserves a shiny pie plate...
...beleaguered man, life is an uphill obstacle course. Between the cradle and the grave stretches an endless multitude of problems, every one of which cries out for decision. At what moment is it safe for the pedestrian to challenge the hazards of wheeled traffic? If a picnic is scheduled for tomorrow, what are the odds against rain? By what mysterious standards does a man pick a friend, a pastime, a profession or a wife...
Vonnegut's eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie, seen back to front, into a vision, which in its weird way is as effective as any short passage ever written against war: "American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . .The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted...
PUSHKIN, by David Magarshack. In a solid, if sometimes pedestrian biography, the poet who was a founding father of Russian literature often seems more like a rakehell uncle...