Word: weirdly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...particularly rationalist either, however, since scientific rationalism has as much trouble dealing with luck as theology does. The best it has to offer is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is absolutely impossible to predict the exact behavior of atomic particles. Luck is a weird, pagan, primitive business. Or else, in modern dress, it is a frigidly heartless existentialism. In any case, whatever its occasionally whimsical moments, luck has a philosophically terrifying core...
...book moving. There are no add personalities that stand out. no irreverant wits. Perhaps Brito's preference for "having quiet technicians and completely bland people around" really is wonderful. ("They don't notice anything wrong...They keep us all sane," Brito claims.) But this lack of funny incident, of weird quirks is what separates the book from other inside tours of biology, such as Horace Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation. Judson made the most of personalities. of squabble. of anecdotes; this dirt makes his book memorable. Goodfield is content to let the madness come from the pace...
...student reflects on the meaning of all this: "Isn't it funny to be starting our senior year and at the end of it, unlike every senior class here in I don't know how many years, no war to be thrown into? Isn't that weird...
...rate, the Great American Short Story is in big trouble as it continues its long and weird career. As an art form it wallows along in a colossal identity crisis with hardly any important practitioners, and as a money crop it remains hopelessly unmarketable. Though tortured young aesthetes sporting carefully squalid clothes, students, and housewives produced over 300.000 short stories last year. The missives dropped into oblivion with hardly a sound. There is simply nothing to do with them. The circle of magazines with significant readership trafficking in short fiction remains plodding and exclusive, and, young short story writers...
...characters, but it remains whispy and gently, one of the beauties of life. Helprin is no one to probe the horrors and malaise of the Wasteland. The characters all avoid direct confrontation with the vaguely acknowledged dislocations of modern life, and thereby don't get desperate or weird or done in. They just get wistful and dreamy. And this dreariness, this systematic response to life is embraced by all the characters in "Ellis Island" and Other Stories. Most of the characters live so much of their lives in the hermetic seclusion of their own minds that the line between reality...