Gordon’s picnic is a snapshot of the Fayerlees and Meriwether’s Southern family reunion. It’s an August tradition for more than one hundred folks from all over the South and elsewhere. It’s not a happy day. As revealed by Sally Maury, who was...
Vian’s L’Écume des jours is variously translated as The Foam of Days, The Scum of Days, or Froth on the Daydream. Take your pick. It was filmed by Charles Belmont as Spray of Days (1968) and retold as an opera by Edison Denisov (1986). It was without a picnic until...
Winston Smith’s relationship with Julia (no last name) is among the most satisfying moments in Orwell’s 1984. It’s an interlude of romantic entanglement that begins a lustful relationship ending in pain and utter defeat. Leaving the dust of London for a safe place in...
Time and details in Beckett’s Malone Dies are contradictory and often obscure. Events of the narrative are confusing, especially as it reaches a bloody climax that ends when Malone hacks six to death at a picnic. The picnic is narrated by the protagonist Malone...
Bill Masen and Josella Platon, exhausted survivors of vicious triffids, mutant plants with a taste for human flesh and blood, are stranded in a ruined landscape of Southampton. Wistfully, they are waiting to escape to Isle of Wight, a new Eden, which has been cleared...
Stevens’s A Place in the Sun is a rework of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. He renames the characters, too, so that Clyde Griffiths becomes George Eastman. It’s like renaming Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Tarzan. He and his screenwriters are emphatic...
Giant is Ferber’s novel about how a Virginia belle, Leslie Lynton, learns to be a Texan. Among her lessons is what to eat during a Texas-style picnic at her husband Reata, her husband Bick Jordan’s ranch. At first, Leslie realizes what she is looking at is...
Leo Colston’s memories of Brandham Hall fifty years earlier are an infinite source of trouble. Now about sixty-two, he is still trying to understand why. Sometimes Leo is called Mercury or the postman because he’s the go-between surreptitiously delivering...
It’s a tender moment when Helen Shaw and Joel Aaron climb a hill to picnic and enjoy the view. They do not bring food or picnic gear but sit on the rock facing the sun. They are good friends, not lovers, and Aaron soon will be leaving Joel for Israel. Helen...
Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents is a light-hearted comedy about a garment factory in a small town in Iowa. Junction City is a shock to Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent of the Sleep Tite Pajama Company, because he used to be Chicago. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, he...
