Wood ants ruin a picnic in Angels & Insects. It’s a comic episode adapted from A.S. Byatt’s novella, Morpho Eugenia, a novella about predatory deception among the English gentry. Taking advantage of Midsummer’s Day, the Alabaster family settles...
Harvest Celebration demonstrates a satirical view of Soviet rigidity and social realism and embraces sexuality and lascivious behavior for fun. The subject is a send-up of the farm collective as an agricultural paradise pictured in official Soviet art, such as Feodor...
Vertiel’s picnic is a lovers’ tryst in a finca above Marbella, a town on the Costa Brava. Robert Masters and Carmen Fernandez, a flamenco dancer, are having a farewell picnic because she is leaving for Madrid to dance with an important company. She packs a...
Irvin’s A Month by the Lake is touted as a romantic comedy about how two lonely middle-aged people break their stiff Englishness and kiss at a picnic. It takes place at a hotel on Lake Como, and the story moves so slowly that it might as well be titled “A Month at...
Cress’ An Outing defies expectation. No one that I know has managed to project such a cantankerous couple on the grass. Cress is surely squinting at Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Maybe? Not happy! See Fred Cress. An Outing (1996)
Woodson’s We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past (1997) is a joyous family gathering with mounds to eat. It’s a story about an African American family reunion picnic in an urban park. The narrator, a young girl, comes with her Grandma, who has worked frying...
Bad day, worse picnic! Featured Image: Sue Williams. Picnic (from Whitney Biennial Portfolio). Lithograph. (1997)
Winnie-the-Pooh’s Picnic Cookbook, Inspired by A. A. Milne, purports to be for is a tongue-in-cheek adult cookbook masquerading in kid’s clothing. Picnics are loosely linked to Milne’s Pooh stories, and the picnics suggested are the likes of:...
All hell might break loose. Earth may be obliterated, but A. J. Frost and his sweetheart Grace Stamper ignore their food preferring sex foreplay instead. “Do you think,” asks Grace, “that anyone else in the world is doing this very same thing at the same moment?”...
Among ruined picnics, Kingsolver’s Congo picnic ranks high. It’s a highlight of misadventure in The Poisonwood Wood Bible, a novel the name of which is derived from a misunderstanding of the local language. Reverend Nathan Price says, “Tata Jesus is...
