Word: dogpatch
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...private-eye fiction and for westerns, Estleman is, fittingly, never better than when describing a road and vehicles in combat on it. He is almost as good at evoking places, whether a sterile office complex, a blind-pig saloon in a ghetto, a shack in a Michigan version of Dogpatch or a patio in a smug suburb. His ear for diverse patois seems impeccable, and so does the inner mechanism that tells him when an unlikely escape can be plausible or when violence must instead turn into calamity. Downriver (Houghton Mifflin; 210 pages; $15.95) offsets those virtues with a plot...
These geographical conditions conspired to provincialize American culture. Today, no colonial weather vane or goffering iron fails to find its collectors, and the productions of traveling limners evoke an enthusiasm that might once have seemed excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made...
...know," Fowler said, chewing on a lip. "It looks like the Dogpatch of baseball...
Public education in Arkansas has long been the Dogpatch of the nation's school systems. Many poorly financed districts in the state have tiny, rundown schoolhouses staffed by some of the lowest-paid teachers in the country. Consider, for example, the Thornton school district (total enrollment: 300), located in the timber country of southern Arkansas. The last time its tenth-graders took the basic skills test they placed in the bottom 12% of national scores. The average teacher's salary is only $11,663, and not one teacher is certified to teach physics, foreign languages or art. Says...
...Misty Rowe as Daisy Mae, off-Broadway Joe just laughed along with the twittering crowd and won a round of sympathetic applause. "Singing is a new experience, and there's lots of room for improvement," he admitted later. But shucks, said the pride of Dogpatch, "the people surely liked the show...