Word: odd
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...Alain Souchon. Delerm's writing contains unexpected metaphors that focus on small observations, like the image of a naked woman that forms and disappears in a cup of sake in the song Evreux. Critics dismiss his style as precious, and ridicule his distinctive enunciation - drawn-out syllables and unexpected, oddly placed, upward inflections - as affected. But there's a certain quirky charm in his words and the way he sings them. Fanny Ardant et Moi, a rare up-tempo number, recounts Delerm's imagined relationship with the French actress 27 years his senior. "We are listening to Gregorian chant...
...every morning the loveliest little greenish-purple lizard would dart back and forth. She had exactly that aspect of intense creaturely otherness. I liked her a great deal." What does it feel like for a Pulitzer winner to put words in the mouth of a lizard? "Dizzying and odd-but that's as it should be," he says. "I just have the very vaguest stirrings of what I want to write next-and again, it's something I can't possibly do." -By Lev Grossman
...image can be brought to a head--or, even better, made more ambiguous--by its smallest elements. He also helped redefine the knucklehead weirdness of snapshot photography as a powerful new aesthetic. The foregrounds washed out by flash, the figures cut off by the edge of the picture, the odd foot that pokes into the frame--like Jimi Hendrix, turning the "error" of amplifier feedback into another kind of guitar riff, Friedlander used those "gaffes" to get places where mere perfection could never take him. His pictures, with their lyrical congestion, don't resolve into a single meaning. They have...
...Around midday, a man armed with a rifle strolled up the track. The soldiers froze. Spotting the odd-looking bush from about 10 m away, the man "went for his weapon," according to the patrol report. "It was the last thing he did,'' says the trooper. The SAS men opened fire. Alerted by the gunshots, armed men fanned out from the village below, some climbing the path toward the gun emplacement. The troopers fired shots and threw a grenade in an effort to keep them back, but the Afghans split up and outflanked them. Within minutes, bullets were whizzing from...
...ExxonMobil, success has bred an odd problem. With oil prices hovering near $50 per bbl. recently, the energy behemoth has been churning out profits. Over the past 12 months (through the end of March), earnings gushed to $28 billion--almost 40% above the previous year--on revenues of $306 billion. With minimal debt, the oil giant, based in Irving, Texas, is sitting on a $30 billion hoard of cash. The problem: What will the company do with all that loot...