If the curled lip of derision is Martin Amis's characteristic essay trope, and the wink of complicity is Calvin Trillin's, then the shrug -- the frustrating adolescent kind -- is Ms. Belkin's.
The book is composed of four essays: "Characteristics of Total Institutions" (1957); "The Moral Career of the Mental Patient" (1959); "The Underlife of a Public Institution A Study of Ways of Making Outt in a Mental Hospital"; and "The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades".
Another paragraphing characteristic found in some essays was a change of margin which was the opposite of what one would expect, the first line starting at the left margin and the remaining lines hanging.
The grim charm of Emerson, and his wisdom, are caught imperishably in that characteristic paragraph from the essay, "Illusions".
Unsurprising, then, that much of his recent work has been prone to grandiloquent celebrations of Russian nationalism; most notoriously, there was the queasy moment in 1998's The Barber of Siberia when he halted the film for a few minutes to depict a lavish military parade overseen by Tsar Alexander III – a role essayed, with characteristic modesty, by the film-maker himself.
And the black writer Zora Neale Hurston in a 1934 essay, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," said that Mae West "had much more flavor of the turpentine quarters than she did of the white bawd".
Equally vibrant but more rigorously scripted, the newly composed "Will to Adorn" evoked Zora Neale Hurston's essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression" with a lavish charm bracelet of exuberant shades and explosive gestures.
Indeed, her work is the best support I know for an assertion made by Zora Neale Hurston, in her still startling 1934 essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression": The Negro's universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire self.
Within a few years, Schlick wrote the essays which are characteristic of his early Positivist thought.
The Arabic and Sephardic pieces tended to be more intricately modal and to allow for more extended, virtuosic improvisation, which these players essayed with their characteristic energy and nuance.
This article includes a comprehensive pictorial essay of the characteristic MRI features of common and uncommon benign cysts and "cyst-like" lesions in and around the knee joint.
