Word: oddness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the Republicans were gathering in Miami Beach and Hubert Humphrey was campaigning in the Midwest, Eugene McCarthy was incommunicado at week's end on an island off Maine, relaxing and visiting with his good friend, Poet Robert Lowell. An odd combination? Not exactly, for if Eugene McCarthy is a very cool politician, he is also an ardent versifier. If elected, he would be the first dedicated President-poet since John Quincy Adams-and one of the few rhymemakers in the contemporary world to double as head of government...
Though he has always been a poetry buff, McCarthy only began writing his own about four years ago, as a "kind of escape." He will scribble a few lines in longhand at odd moments in planes or hotel rooms, then type them out at home and file them away in a looseleaf notebook. Knocking on McCarthy's door during this year's presidential campaign, Paul Gorman, one of his speechwriters, found that the candidate was too busy to talk. With a book entitled Mammals of North America in front of him, the Senator was writing a poem called...
Ever since his first appearances with Chicago's improvisational Second City troupe, Alan Arkin has been doing a series of disappearing acts. The authentic Arkin vanishes into a part, never to be seen again. Like Peter Sellers, he has ample physical credentials for a cab driver but rather odd ones for a star. His blunt, anonymous face was born to grouse behind a steering wheel. His voice - often hidden behind a Puerto Rican or Mittel-European accent - is a grainy urban product, like soot. His hair is rapidly disappearing; his walk is a series of slumps...
When the tenth and final volume of their massive The Story of Civilization appeared last year, Historians Will (82) and Ariel (70) Durant promised readers one last postlude volume distilling the observations and conclusions of their 40-odd years of scholarship...
...only vaguely aware that the first two volumes of his diaries and letters had brought him a quality of fame that had eluded him all his life. Perhaps the knowledge that he was being hailed as a Pepys to his age and peers might have struck him as an odd and final irony. "To be a good diarist," he once observed, "one must have a little snouty sneaky mind...