Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feel you are finding out more than you require about tax law and outlawry in contemporary Japan. But arcana have their own peculiar charms -- and their special usefulness in Itami's larger design. When his single-minded characters are thwarted in the pursuit of their hearts' odd desires, they have a tendency to burst into sudden, angry flame. And to elicit hysterical responses from bystanders astounded when a quiet oddball turns into a bright-burning fireball...
Mamet added to the production's mystique by declining all requests for interviews and refusing to explain the play's odd title. It appears to derive from a blessing in medieval verse and song, "God speed your plough." According to Silver, it means approximately, "Do your work, and God will help you." Director Gregory Mosher, who has staged twelve of Mamet's plays and is one of his closest friends, suggests instead that the phrase "has to do with turning fresh earth -- and of course there is a sexual...
Winogrand would have replied that the very qualities of the camera that conventional taste had discounted -- the embrace of whatever wanders into its frame, the eccentric bunchings of form it collects, the odd instants it can freeze for further study -- were its unacknowledged assets. Given the proper attention, they would draw viewers into departments of feeling where standard pictures would never take them. To the unprepared, and even sometimes to the well prepared, there are Winogrands that indeed look haphazard and slight -- dedicated studies of unyielding scenes. But for every one that mumbles, there are a dozen that fit together...
...anthropocentric and hence, by most contemporary creeds, hopelessly old-fashioned. But Wilbur's poems always allow the animal and vegetable kingdoms their tumultuous integrity. Their energy is a cause for celebration, and so, equally, is the power of the human mind to absorb, assimilate and assort all these phenomena. "Odd that a thing is most itself when likened," writes Wilbur, extolling the ability of language, metaphors, similes to capture the spectacle of reality. Even then, abstractions can be unsettled by the tug of the here and now. A bluefish swims beneath...
Much of Roth's work with live specimens took place when he worked with the U.S. Army. As an army entomologist, Roth was in an odd position. When he first started working in the lab, the group was studying the biological detoriation of materials and soon expanded their scope to basic insect behavior. "When I first arrived there, the philosophy was, 'Don't worry about the application of the finding, someone else will do that,'" Roth recalls...