Despite the many jokes, it’s seldom the case, but many presume ants interrupt picnics. Deborah Gordon offers that ants rarely disrupt picnics; John O’Brien suggests maybe they do. In Ants at Work, Gordon plays down the picnic: “Indeed the observation that where there...
The Midsummer’s Day picnic is ruined when flying ants fall into the strawberries, cucumber sandwiches, and silver cream jugs. Everyone runs for cover. Belying the humor, the dying ants in e cream jugs and teacups, is Byatt’s metaphor contrasting the...
Graham’s “Picnic” is a young girl’s bitter remonstrance of a mother betrayed by a father who is a serial adulterer. The poem’s narrator, about twelve years old, has a compulsive need to retell this story of a picnic, her father’s...
Martin’s picnic in Birdsong is situated in a forest clearing on the shore of a tranquil river. The group stops to picnic, ignoring the sign prohibiting boating and fishing that the picnickers have blithely ignored. Unless you miss its significance, the sign...
What’s to be done after a long night of love-making? Go on a picnic, of course. Eastwood’s picnic setup in Bridges of Madison County is stagy: a cloth on the grass, a cooler, oranges (never peeled), and apples (never eaten). Coca-Cola (never opened)....
Hercules Protecting the Balance Between Pleasure and Virtue is Ligare’s allusion to Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads (1498c.). What Dürer implies, Ligare makes emphatic. His essential change is the picnic. He shows no food; instead, Ligare places Pleasure on a blue...
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...
