Word: peculiarities
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...association of glass with steel that gives his work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define...
...this she means the peculiar twain of her parentage. Her father had been a Nazi officer, labeled the "Mad Sadist of Bleritz" for his genetic experiments in a concentration camp and executed after being tried at Nuremberg. One of his victims was the half-gypsy girl who became Sandra's mother. She was, the daughter notes ironically, "really lucky, and was all of 15 when I was born, at the very end of the war." Sandra, of course, never knew her father, and the mother who raised her was demonstratively sinking into madness. Given the bizarre facts of her conception...
...moved from New York City to Los Angeles, where she stayed at home and reared their daughters. Although Frances was the inspiration for Norman's acerbic TV character Maude ("All of Norman's work is autobiographical -- Archie Bunker was based on his father"), the show- business community was a peculiar culture that reduced Frances, who did not want to be either a starlet or a producer, to an atrophying, bitterly depressed Hollywood wife. After much therapy, she chose to end her 28-year marriage. (Norman Lear, 66, has since married a psychotherapist, with whom...
...what is peculiar to American Samoa, one need travel only 40 miles across the waters to Western Samoa, a relatively forgotten independent island that has four times as many people as its American namesake, but no congressional support. In Western Samoa, people speak English in the gentle, sea-lapping cadences of the South Pacific; in American, they favor the twang of Beach Boys and Valley Girls. In Western, residents play the genteel old colonial game of lawn bowling; in American, they converge on a twelve-lane bowling alley. And in Western, the roads are lined with pigs, while in American...
...nature of his triumph, though, is elusive and peculiar. Larkin and his contemporaries inherited the scorched earth of modernism -- the towering shadow cast by Yeats, the multilingual complexities introduced by Eliot and Pound, the daunting technical virtuosity of Auden. Starting out, Larkin had the good taste to imitate all these (except Pound), with some Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. He got out from under his predecessors only when he learned to lower his voice, to submerge complexities of thought and feeling beneath a serene, limpid surface...