Word: everydayness
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...paintings on display in the drugstore window in the town of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., were as bright as a calico dress, gay as an old-fashioned quilt-bustling scenes of country folk doing everyday chores. The artist was obviously untrained, but to Manhattan Collector Louis Caldor, who spotted them and bought them for an average of $4 each, they had a kind of magic. Who had painted them? An old lady of 78, Caldor was told, who lived down on Cambridge Road. She was Anna Mary Robertson Moses, and from that moment until she slipped quietly into death last week...
Instead she emerges as a vital and extraordinarily real human being. As she tells her own story, her unique perceptivity gives the admittedly limited world of her contacts a special freshness. Josephine has a penchant for questioning the connections ordinarily drawn between different aspects of everyday experience. An invitation bearing her name inspires the following reflection: "It was the hit-or-miss of these words that struck me most. I knew the collocution was supposed to represent me and no one else, but it always seemed odd that so loose an approximation as a name could have a claim...
...Pedersen, are "fairytale pictures," and like all fairy tales, they have a touch of sorcery. Pedersen has never broken faith with childhood; basically he is an unspoiled innocent whose paintings sometimes have the quality of folk art, and almost always have the atmosphere of the nursery. The most ordinary everyday experience catapults him into fantasy. "To make a painting," he explains, "is a process by which you stand somewhere and make a jump out into the air and then fall back again. And when you make the next jump, you attempt to make it even better and farther...
...gets tired of hearing about the "imminent breakthrough" in the war against the common-cold virus. This war has failed because of the fundamental delusion that a virus is the principal cause of colds, everyday experience notwithstanding. The fact is that a common cold is due to an overwhelming, generalized vasodilation of the body's capillaries, brought on by a combination of factors such as exposure, overeating, oversleeping, alcohol, viruses, dust, frustration. Thus the typical candidate for a common cold is a man who on Saturday night ate a big dinner, followed by several alcoholic drinks, then took...
Perhaps more significantly, a real majority of the commission (11 members) recommended that separate laws be enacted for Sundays and for holidays. This obviously makes sense if you consider Sunday to be the Lord's Day, and holidays to be only an arbitrary interruption of everyday life; but it seems inconsistent to separate the two when Sunday is no longer the Lord's Day, but only a "common day of rest...