David’s favorite picnic food is tian. She asserts that it’s simple for the experienced cook, especially if you have a tian, the Provençal earthenware casserole it is cooked in. You also need freshly baked bread, butter, cheese, and wine. David’s...
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...
David realized the elements of her ideal and described it in “Eating out in Provincial France.” “There has to be water,” she declares, “and from that point of view, France is wonderful picnic country, so rich in magnificent rivers,...
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...
Wilder added the picnic to Love in the Afternoon as a setting for comic action and romantic courtship. His sources for the film Paul Anet’s Ariene, juene file Russe (1920), and Paul Czinner’s film adaption The Loves of Ariene (1931) do not have picnics....
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...
“Heroic Survivors of the Picnic.” is Gwen Raverat’s bittersweet memory of a miserable picnic. It’s the next-to-last anecdote in her memoir Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. I think she means to suggest that life was no picnic but that she...
Benuzzi’s original title for his memoir was Fuga sul Kenya – 17 giorni di liberta [Escape on Kenya – 17 days of liberty]. But being deeply impressed by Vivienne de Watteville’s Speak to the Earth, her memoir of camping on Mount Kenya, * he renamed the...
