In
soporific batting conditions Yorkshire declared soon after tea on 113 for two, Joe Root unbeaten on nine and Andrew Gale six not out.
If he has little patience for delusional universalists, he has even less for left-wing critics of mass art such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who viewed popular culture as a means of social control, a variation on Aldous Huxley's
soporific drug soma in Brave New World.
The author stresses the crucial role of the 1990s, a decade he describes as 'relaxed, even
soporific' in Western Europe, with its quintessential figure the ideology-light Silvio Berlusconi, while the multiple crises in the East were the product of the search for transition, the ideal of unity and the aspiration to find a third way between the Soviet-style communism and American capitalism of the Cold War years.
The voice-over, at first rather refreshing in its utter lack of drama (the actress who plays Sandra is an amateur), eventually becomes
soporific. And as the work's diegetic paths fork and fork again, our compulsion to sort the actual from the fanciful gradually loses momentum.
One that is nearly mesmerizingly
soporific is Four Methods of Flush Riveting done for the Lockheed Co.
The music is for the most part reflective and lyrical, relaxing but not at all
soporific. It can serve as nice background music for a quiet evening, but if you turn it up and actually listen to it, you will find plenty to capture your imagination.
Not that there is anything
soporific about the stories being told--far from it.
After Shapiro exposed Dukakis's
soporific choice, reporter Brit Hume asked Republican vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle to identify any work of literature, art, or film he'd experienced in the previous two years that had had a particularly strong effect on him.
Similarly
soporific production sinks the light, attractive melody of "Birthday Boy."
Week in and week out, Gennaro devised numbers that brought the badly needed dash and pizzazz of show dancing to a broadcast whose overly relaxed atmosphere bordered on the
soporific. At least, that's what you thought if you were one of those boomers, already listening to rock on the radio and looking in vain for any sign that it existed on the television shows your parents had on; for us, the Peter Gennaro dance numbers hinted at the existence of a cooler universe.
To the ancient Greeks, however, the lotus was a
soporific, more potent than opium.
(Had the popular press done its job, we wouldn't have had to do it for them.) Some of us just prefer knowledge, even if it's unsettling, to
soporific ignorance.