Word: weirdly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NONE OF THE PIECES are without merit. Even the weakest essay, a biographical essay of Johnny Appleseed cozily entitled "The Mushpan Man," though a sort of Readers Digest version of the weird ascetic's life, has its strengths. Most notably, it recalls to mind a forgotten geography of places with names like Chillicothe and Bucyrus and rivers with names like Broken Straw Creek, the Kokosing and White Woman's Creek. It is a geography far afield from our familiar one of ambition--of graduate degrees, mammoth corporations, fat salaries, and prestigious universities--and one well worth remembering...
...myth is: in a wildlife organization and a private zoo on his home isle of Jersey in the English Channel. There, hundreds of endangered species are kept in safety. Many of them are odd, but in the author's view, not one of them can compare with the weird and lethal species on the other side of the bars. -By Stefan Kanfer
There are no women in the diner, or at least none with any speaking lines. Crammed into a tight booth and certain of their terrain, the guys can relax and laugh at the world around them. At the weird kid who memorizes all the lines from the movie Sweet, Sweet Success and recites them to no one in particular. At the enormously obese man who manages to consume all of the items on the left side of the menu--"that's not a human," someone exclaims, "it's a building with legs...
Love has its own secrets, but the "water" sub-plot of this forked work has a complexity too. In fact, it gives Cheever an ideal playground for assembling one of his patented concatenations of weird events. A down and out barber shoots his dog in full sight of his neighbors, two women wrestle in a supermarket, a baby is mistakenly abandoned. Also, Cheever cannot was quite to eloquent nor so humorous about the country side as he can about sex. But he succeeds in constructing his labyrinth of characters and circumstances more significantly and puts forth a well-crafted threnody...
...units across a well-defined boundary in Indochina, but the seeping-in of hostile forces across trackless jungles. These forces were supplied from neutral countries that wanted only to be left alone. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos; North Vietnamese sanctuaries were established in Cambodia. By a weird inversion of logic, whenever we reacted by seeking to intercept the totally illegal supply lines, it was we who were accused of violating the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos...