Word: awkwardly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ambivalent past can be a source of strength and creative energy. Today Jones-also known as Imamu Amiri Baraka-has a black wife and is the leader of Spirit House, an African culture center in Newark. But the past can also cause awkward ironies. Why, for example, should Jones, as dedicated as he is to the unique genius of African cultures, be so dependent on the white man's academic jargon and propaganda techniques? Their dead weight has a consistently bad effect on the otherwise vital and aggressive street style of many of the essays and manifestoes contained...
...Logic. The first part is hilarious. Esther Greenwood, as the heroine is called, is an awkward rube of a girl with "fifteen years of straight A's" behind her but absolutely no experience of life -even as it was known to teen-agers in the '50s. She and her fellow "guest" editors are herded around the city "like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids." Upon discovering caviar, Esther consumes a pound or so at a magazine luncheon, paving her plate with chicken slices and smearing on the high-priced spread. But she knows that the whole enterprise...
...dossiers on the guests. At one time, Dick demanded considerable solid research, but he found that it worked against him: he was referring too often to his notes while the conversation got ponderous. He now requires less material and feels that this helps make for spontaneity. It also produces awkward silences when a subject runs dry unexpectedly...
...MOTHER was uncomfortable; she found it difficult to explain what she was asking. We live in Nashville, but she had grown up in Alabama, and her family still live there. It was an impending visit to her family which had occasioned the awkward discussion. "Could you just cut your hair a little? Most people won't do anything, but... there is a class of people ... 'white trash'..." She couldn't say much; the Southern redneck has been used so many times as a stereotype to describe all Southerners that discussion of the subject has become painful for many, particularly...
...about an airline delay. Such an explanation might have been easily accepted were some other figure, a Marcuse or a Galbraith, to be late; but Ali, like so many other black people of prominence, has been so immersed in an atmosphere of violent ephemerality that the explanation seemed an awkward cover-up of shadier dealings. Someone in the crowd said, "Maybe the pigs have got him won't let him show...