The most engaging were three works firmly rooted in one genre or the other, avoiding the slightly bland hybrid quality of some longer full-company works.
"There is a bland vacation quality to most Maine literature and it is all, except for Sarah Orne Jewett, a sort of translation.
Then there is its bland surface quality, a uniform skin of flattened, interwoven pieces of rubber, instead of the more familiar feathers or expressive tendrils that tend to characterize the artist's greatest achievements.
His prose, even when impassioned, has a bland, synthesized quality, and in his Parisian mode it has deliberately been boiled down to the bones; the ease with which this style can be translated contributes to his popularity overseas.
The apartment's bland, anonymous quality, Kermani has decided, along with its cultivated disorder, makes it an undetermined, freeing place to be, the sort of place where any aesthetic is as appropriate as any other; where Ashbery's eye may chance on a surprising conjunction of objects and his mind can meander in unexpected directions.
Attracted to the bland and neutral quality of office furniture, designers Ward van Gemert & Adriaan van der Ploeg decorate found objects, like closets and tables, with one-of-a-kind designs.
Not long ago it would have been possible to convey the bland, lazy, pedestrian qualities of this picture — its lackadaisical pacing, by-the-numbers performances, irritating music and drab visual texture — by likening it to a made-for-TV movie or an episode of a series on basic cable.
But they no longer produce stripped-down econoboxes like the Hyundai Aspire of the 1990s, with its bland styling and questionable quality.
Critics and analysts have widely praised the company's new autos, but persuading shoppers — some who swore off G.M. products decades ago because of poor quality or bland designs — to visit showrooms has remained difficult.
