Word: barnful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reveal themselves as performers, or shamans, or unloved children, or observers of bugs through microscopes. The Australian writer Thomas Keneally is a builder, a gifted, painstaking maker of books. After 20 novels, including Schindler's List and A Victim of the Aurora, a reader imagines him rummaging through his barn for old beams and bricks stored years before and never used. Stories, perhaps, told by his grandparents, who were storekeepers in Australia's Macleay River Valley. He sorts the tales, considers which can still bear weight, begins to sketch a plan for A River Town (Doubleday; 324 pages...
...like wool long johns. Take the predicament of 122,000 year-round residents of New York State's 6 million-acre Adirondack Park. The park was to be "forever wild," and the state's 22-year-old Adirondack Park Agency regulates growth. But it also generates fury--expressed by barn burning, tire slashing and vehicle shooting, in addition to much heated talk. One of the angriest is Richard Schoenstadt, 44, a surveyor's assistant who bought 54 riverfront acres, intending to subdivide. The apa insisted on an exhaustive biological inventory. Then, says Schoenstadt, who between fighting and complying lost...
...simple farmer; we'll call him Merle: "Some things jes git better with time..." (more Copelandesque strains) Merle goes on to describe the painstaking process by which the "tobacco smooth enough to be Select" is cultivated and packaged. We follow the camera through Merle's tobacco fields to his barn, where another man cuts and dries the tobacco leaves. The crop will become Wintson Select's "Perfectly Aged Tobacco," rolled into cigarettes and smoked by hardy consumers who will eventually get cancer...
...advertisement betrays a multiplicity of hidden messages. The image of the cigarette/ phallus remains central, perhaps suggesting Merle's own doubts about his manhood. As Merle stands, patriachal, yet despairing amidst the rolling fields of tobacco, the camera shifts once again to an image of sexual negation. The Barn is a Keatsian cave of forlorn despair and homosexual repression, suggesting void on both a sexual and an ontological level. The only hint of resolution comes in the form of conversion. All seems resolved as the tobacco is mysteriously rendered into phallic triumph in the form of the omnipresent cigarette...
...viewers, are left with a feeling of loss, of mystery. Where is Merle? Has he been left behind, or has he chosen his solitary condition as toiler? Has he been marginalized by a phallocentric culture, or empowered by his decision not to penetrate The Barn's confines? One is reminded of the opening credits of "What's Happenin' Now?" where we see Rerun, an androgyne clearly alineated from patriarchal norms, run after the phallus/ truck, always wanting, but never, never having...