Word: peculiare
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...after all, one of the peculiar aspects of senility that it tends to derail the brain into the trackless waste of childhood reminiscence. Allen wanders through such barren terrain in Radio Days, a series of vignettes drawn from his boyhood during the glory days of radio. Time progresses, but to no discernible end. While the vignettes are not quite incomprehensible, they certainly are not laden with meaning, either. Kind of like Reader's Digest...
...words on the page are made up, inventions: "Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself." So much for sincere, straight-from-the-shoulder storytelling. People who want to know what really happens in a work of fiction, a peculiar but widespread desire, are going to find themselves bewildered. Only one incontestable fact can be gleaned from the book: The Counterlife got written...
...that the problem of fraud in scientific research will be taken care of. Instead it says: we're stumped, got any ideas? That is not the typical way Harvard administrators deal with problems. Such openness from administrators is always welcome, though in this instance it seems motivated by the peculiar knottiness of the problem...
...cosmic" energies; these revealed themselves in "vibrations," the formative agents of all material shapes. Hence the desire to paint archetypal forms, so that Mondrian's rectangles and Kandinsky's floating circles are to be read as a kind of sacred geometry, pyramid power in paint. Hence, too, the peculiar use of light by artists like Franticek Kupka -- a shuddering, lyric vibration that implies the sublimities of landscape without describing them. Then there is the imagery of duality and paired opposites -- light-dark, vertical-horizontal -- and of synesthesia, whereby colors correspond to musical tones, or textures to tastes...
...mildly interested in the geopolitical picture, the state of the Union, the family and store. But we would be a lot more curious about the life we could not see so readily, the secrets of an era that lie like pike beneath the news, and then, on their own peculiar impulse, rise to the surface in a later time, like ours, like yours. More than that, we would like to know what it felt like to be alive back then. That will be more difficult to convey, in part because we assume that to be human feels just about...