Word: peculiar
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THERE WAS ONE peculiar thing about many of these houses: curious ornaments under their eaves, a kind of gingerbread or lathed dowel work created when the houses were built in the eighties or nineties by, we fantasized, a craftsman who while still a boy had come back from Lee's troops--Lee's Miserables, as one good Baptist preacher punned--or Johnson's, retreating north from Sherman. (Sherman's Memoirs, horribly written, in a thick green volume with the general's stars on the spine, talks about approaching Exeter...
...with the ancient snapshot, the static portrait and the severe documentary. Some of them are a bit special: albums of Victorian children and antique pornography. More than nostalgia or a desire for escape is at work, however. Portraits, especially of anonymous folk from the otherwise dead past, exert a peculiar fascination. One broods over them, foolishly nodding and speculating about what the people were really Like and the lives they must have...
People are often small and tucked into the corners, but in a manner more humorous than threatening--for their poses are simple, normal ones of stretching, day-dreaming, or pausing on the street. It's simply that the most usual moments, like the most usual objects, grow peculiar or even grotesque when the light changes, a car passes, a window frames them...
...While his writing is slick, sophisticated, and catchy, he retains a gravity in due respect to the political importance of the press. Entertaining as the style is, however, he's presenting a serious critique. What emerges most strongly are the hazards of pack journalism. The reporters have achieved a peculiar fraternity of chummy fellow travellers who, at a moment's notice, will forsake each other for a scoop...
...peculiar period between after school and prime time was known in radio as no man's land. It thus became every child's territory. An ominous waltz introduced I Love a Mystery, featuring Jack, Doc and Reggie, proprietors of the A-1 Detective Agency-"No job too tough, no mystery too baffling." Superman was brought on with the sound of the bullet he could outspeed and of the locomotive he could overpower. Terry and the Pirates, Buck Rogers and Little Orphan Annie were liberated from the frozen postures of the comic strip. Captain Midnight; Tom Mix; Jack Armstrong...