Word: freakishness
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...line's novels are, they nevertheless offer a mosaic of clinically observed poor and pitiable people. Recent French novels, on the other hand, have abjured any attempt to examine man on a Proustian or Balzac -ian scale in favor of esthetic gimcrackery, narrow psychological study and freakish private experiment. As a literary construction, Castle to Castle is equivocal-a hateful papier-mache funfair castle inhabited by real monsters...
...life, this sense has made its victims unwilling, if not unable, to participate in a traditional society; they are the sideshow of mass culture, offering freakish realizations of hidden fears and fantasies. In art, absurdity has changed form by radically altering the relationship among man, his pride and his gods. The dramatic structure that created the liberating pity and terror of the Oedipus plays, for example, only makes sense if one truly believes that there are gods who would destroy a man who grows too arrogant. Even the Freudian metaphors that have been used to give modern meaning...
...near to matching the insane intensity of his screaming popes of 1949-53. A study of three male bodies, to be sure, shows one crouched like a foetus and another with his leg in a splint, but the third, who dangles apelike from a pole, has an amiable if freakish mien. A woman lounging in a deck chair turns a face wreathed in a hideous grimace-yet, on second glance, it is obviously nothing more than the grin of a well-fed Cheshire...
Caper flicks, as the trade calls them invariably involve some lovable folk; who pull off an enormous and improbable heist, only to be foiled in the last reel by a freakish turn of fate. Disaster can come in many forms: a runaway poodle (The Killing), a cremated coffin (Ocean's 11), or a kid with a photographic memory (The League of Gentlemen). At their best, caper movies can be wry little existential parables; at their worst, they are merely two hours of closeups on nervous thieves and unyielding safe dials...
Until recently, the idea of Orientals performing Western music seemed about as freakish as Heifetz playing the one-string ichigenkin. Now all that has changed. In the past few years, American and European concert halls have experienced something close to a full-scale invasion by talented Korean and Japanese musicians. Last week, Japan's Seiji Ozawa, 32, conducted programs of Rossini and Hindemith in Canada; Korean Violinist Young Uck Kim, 20, performed Saint-Saëns' Concerto No. 3 in Corpus Christi, Texas; and an eight-year-old Japanese cherub named Hitomi Kasuya played part of a Mozart...