Word: weirdly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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About a month ago a small Free French force left the great swamp known as Lake Chad (see map, p. 23), heading north. They passed through nightmarish, weird, surrealistic terrain-along an enormous dry river bed, past sudden oval valleys with lush black soil floors, across a stark desert of slippery sand and sharp stones, across an eroded tableland, through the magnificent mountain peaks (highest: 11,200 ft.) of Tibesti, along the edges of 1,000 ft.-precipices looking down on valleys full of bulrushes, across wastes of crumbling volcanic rock. They drank from sweet wells and pools bitter...
...Quixote reminds me somehow of Petrouchka. It displays the same variety and endless change of pace, the same fertility of invention, and the same amazing use of woodwinds and brasses for striking effects. The introduction contains a weird passage describing the crack-up of Don Quixote's sanity, in which a set of muted trumpets, combined in almost psychopathic harmonies, leap out wildly from the rest of the orchestra and then immediately subside into nothing but troubled mutterings. The famous sheep episode employs muted brasses to suggest the bleating of the sheep, and further on, open trombones play a familiar...
Toledo's intellectuals and painters treated him like royalty, but Spain's King Philip II didn't like him, and Toledo's ordinary citizens thought his weird, restive, distorted canvases the work of a madman. Critics suggested that he was astigmatic, if not insane. When he died in 1614 his fame was already on the wane, and soon his greatest paintings were tucked away in dim sacristies and behind altars. The flashy, flattering portraits of brilliant Court-painter Velásquez became the rage, and El Greco was forgotten. Forgotten he remained for nearly 300 years...
...every once in a while some ant-shaming book designer has insisted on doing his printing as if Gutenberg had never existed, engraving each page laboriously by hand. Such a designer was William Blake, who a century and a half ago painstakingly etched a dozen books (with weird, mystical illustrations) on copper plates...
...Lady Who Came To Stay (by Kenneth White, based on a novel by R. E. Spencer, produced by Guthrie Mc-Clintic) relates the dreadful events in "the upstairs sitting room of the Garvis home," a ponderous, gloomy Victorian chamber. Here three weird maiden sisters -one of them an unspeakable witch in a bathrobe-live in apparently acute sex frustration with their widowed, musical sister-in-law and her daughter. Finally the last of the weirds, afraid of becoming more so, decides to burn the house down...