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...
Vargas Llosa imagines Lima as a city of extremes. It’s beautiful if you “concentrate on the landscape and the birds, but it’s “ugly if you notice the piles of garbage festering as it “piles up on the outer edge of the Malecón and spills...
Ian McEwan’s <em>Enduring Love</em> (1998) McEwan’s menu for Joe Rose and Clarissa Mellon’s picnic is black olives, mixed salad, mozzarella, focaccia, and white wine, specifically Daumas Gassac, perhaps the author’s favorite. Roger...
Russell Kaye’s Tailgating on Ken Johnson’s Nissan is a picnic on wheels that gives new meaning to the expression of lighting a fire under the hood. For this “grillz- on-the-hood,” the menu is bacon and eggs fried on a saw blade; burgers cooked...
Dickens devotes the better part of the chapter “Blissful” to his text so that he shows how Copperfield is obsessed. “She was too bewildering,” David later explains, “To see her lay the flowers against her little dimpled chin, was to lose all presence of mind and power...
Kentridge likes copies of images, each a variation on reality fluctuations. Sometimes he makes triptychs, other times diptychs as in the Picnic/Panic etchings produced for Sleeping on Glass (1999). For the diptych Picnic/Panic, Kentridge contrasted cups and saucers on...
