Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Although the content of the show strikes frequent depths of trite polemic, the zealousness of the 300-odd performers, many traveling over the globe for MRA, more than lends an excitement sufficient in itself to justify the expenditure of an evening and to pose the pressing question of what MRA will mean given real momentum. The idealistic drive of this movement finds rare equal at the present moment. In utter seriousness the show's participants call themselves a "task force." They feel themselves engaged in a crusade to save civilization. MRA's overriding interest rests not in its feverish adherents...
Nose-Grinding. Through all his grumbles and rising gorges, Edward Lear painted furiously. He rose before dawn, trudged about all day until he found a landscape that pleased him. Then, after myopically surveying the scene over his spectacles, he began his hasty sketches on odd-shaped scraps of paper from his notebook. His watercolor sketches were meant mostly to be notes for his fastidious and stilted oils, over which he labored long and hard ("I hate the act of painting. . . . It is like grinding my nose off!"). A few of the oils rode into the Royal Academy on the coattails...
...illustrate books (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), photographing its muck and loveliness, miseries and grandeur, all with the same puritanical detachment. His pictures have no tricks in them, only an intensity of understatement which makes him one of the top half-dozen photographers alive. Says he: "After 20-odd years of work I still have great difficulty maintaining enough calm to operate well, at moments when some sort of perfection is in sight...
Died. Tristan Bernard, 81, large-nosed, spade-bearded "last of the boulevardiers," Parisian novelist and playwright; of a heart ailment; in Paris. Besides 50-odd novels, Bernard wrote more than 40 musicals and plays, most of the latter successful, none profound, all witty. His Exile was probably the shortest play ever staged...
...apprehensive expression of a chimpanzee, and his features so far departed from the normal that those who met him found themselves looking back again and again to see if they could be as they were remembered, though the total impression was by no means monstrous, merely animal and odd...