Charles Addams. “Goodness, Murray, it wouldn’t be a picnic without ants.” The New Yorker (June 11, 1949)
Imagine a noir picnic at which you tell your hosts a shark-feeding-frenzy story. That’s Orson Welles’ idea of dark times in The Lady from Shanghai. Imagine, too, that the story told by Michael O’Hara is intended as an allusion to his host and...
Cadmus’s What I Believe (1947-1948) is a beach picnic without food, inspired by E.M. Forester’s essay of the same-named. Forster is the dark man reading a book with the red cover in the lower left foreground. The figures are based on some of Cadmus’ friends and former...
Rogers, a nineteen-year-old Private first-class soldier, met Stein and Toklas in 19717 Nimes while on furlough. Working with an ambulance unit attached to the French army, the U.S. had not yet entered the war. Rogers followed Stein and Toklas into the Hotel de...
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...
Medearis’ Family Reunion is a joyous and humorous evocation of an American extended family gathering. Featured Image: Roger Medearis. Family Reunion (1950). Colored lithograph.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, aka Grandma Moses, is an American primitive artist whose paintings convey a strong pastoral sentimentality. In all her paintings, the subjects are the people of her town, Hoosic Falls, NY, whose activities she celebrates. The Family Picnic...
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...
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...
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...
