Word: adrift
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years later, he painted The Gulf Stream, moving this apprehension from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently...
...neediness come straight from its creator. As Callow meticulously shows, George Orson Welles knew acclaim and misuse from early childhood. Declared a genius at three, staging Shakespeare in a toy playhouse at five, walking on water in his wading pool--the legend goes something like that--he was adrift in a strained family. His opera-loving mother died when he was nine, his suavely alcoholic father three years later. Welles would memorialize his mother in Kane and find father-sponsors in his prep-school principal, Broadway's John Houseman, RKO's George Schaefer. He would also make himself a father...
...some such doldrum, adrift in giddiness or despair, Chabon decided to write about a novelist who can't get his next novel written. Sure enough, Wonder Boys (Villard; 368 pages; $23) is, rather too cutely, not just the title of Chabon's book, but of the novel his hero Grady Tripp can't bring himself to finish. Tripp's well-reviewed early books are receding into the distant past, and he feels fraudulent when his writing students admire them. He pretends optimism to his editor, but the truth is that his half-written book is an unreadable mass of unstrung...
...Jonas manages to pass the deed to the farm on to his son. Miserable, Daniel runs out to the family boat and cries himself to sleep. Obviously, the Hacketts are farmers and not sailors since the gentle bobbing of the boat unlaces the feebly-tied mooring rope, setting Daniel adrift down the river...
...vans and caravans and the whole invading army of mercenaries. And I felt that everyone had something purposeful to do there-except me." No matter that director Nicholas Hytner and the crew were, like expert midwives, carefully bringing Bennett's 1991 play to the screen; the creator was still adrift. "I'd started it all by telling the story," he says, "but I felt as if I didn't have a function anymore...