Word: quaint
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...modernism--one of Barth's correspondents describes "those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism"--hardly fits a novel that follows a schematic masterplan. You see, if you take the seven letters of the title-word "letters," superimpose them on a seven-month calendar using a quaint motto, so that the letters of the motto form the letters of "letters," then each letter of the motto will fall neatly onto a date in the calendar, one for each of the letters in the book...
...Edelhart's writing is so exaggerated. Edelhart occasionally delivers a piercing phrase. His writing rarely drags, but among the abundant exclamation points lurk tired ideas--suggestions that today strike even grandmothers as quaint...
...been thinking all week about a light way of approaching this afternoon's invasion of Harvard Stadium by the Boston University Terriers. I wanted to poke fun at a school that draws a meager 100 or 200 fans to its Saturday afternoon brawls. There's something quaint about the way the Terriers battle an Astroturf in makeshift Nickerson Field, nestled amid the three high-rise party factories commonly known as West campus...
Schlesinger enriches Yanks' conventional plot machinations with fine atmospheric details and fetching performances. The movie's locations include quaint shops and pubs, foggy, blacked-out streets, a glorious art deco movie palace and enough green pastures to make even an Irishman go dizzy. Most of the cast accomplish the not inconsiderable feat of standing out against the colorful backdrops. Though Gere at times slips into self-conscious mannerisms, he makes his character, a mess sergeant from Arizona, an appealing innocent abroad. Devane is a charming commanding officer, despite his disconcerting tendency to sound like Jack Nicholson. Both Eichhorn...
...partly the spectacle of Western decadence that aroused the Ayatullah Khomeini to orgies of Koranic proscription. Alcohol, music, dancing, mixed bathing all have been curtailed by the Iranian revolution. Americans find this zealotry sinister, but also quaint: How can almost childish pleasures (a tune on the radio, a day at the beach) deserve such puritanical hellfires? But Americans are also capable of a small chill of apprehension, a barely acknowledged thought about the prices that civilizations pay for their bad habits: If Iran has driven out its (presumably polluted) monarch and given itself over to a purification that demands even...