Word: billiard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...world's richest market, the U.S. underpins the prosperity of many out-of-the-way places, including the little Belgian villages of Froyennes and Callenelle. Their sole industry is making cast-resin billiard balls, the high-quality type used in tournament play, in the better pool halls and by the more discriminating owners of home tables. The painstaking job requires baking a resin mixture in molds in ovens of varying heat for periods of from seven days for a white cueball to 15 days for a striped ball (Nos. 9 to 15). The two firms of Usines de Callenelle...
Barthelme is a genius at self-consciousness. He uses cliches to make the reader think; he uses parodies to stir emotion. Like a billiard shark trying carom shots, he plays worn emotional impacts and responses against one another. The meaning behind the meaning in his stories is that the old main lines of communication are down. The simple, the forthright, the straightforward can no longer be confidently said. For the time being at least, messages must be sent by mirrors. And at that game, Donald Barthelme knows no peer...
Today the most recurring objects in his sculptures are croquet and billiard balls ("the world, and also the idea of Orpheus as an entertainer and juggler"), dolls ("man in his universe"), and ironing boards ("connotations of heat suggest hell"). Weather, rather than paint, creates his mellowed patinas, as well as the myriad uses to which each object has been put. But more than any natural beauty, it is his arrangement into harmonious compositions that give Boghosian's rescued miscellany a sad, precious sense of fatality...
...building itself, decorated with Teddy Roosevelt's African game trophies (since sold to bargain-hunting undergraduates), oak paneling, and coat of arms, there was opportunity for a real Harvard club. Its basement held a large room with eighteen billiard tables where a member could obtain free instruction from "a well-known professional." A kitchen, a printing office, and some rooms of the CRIMSON completed this floor. Above in the hall now used as freshman dining rooms, was a living room. An athletes' training table occupied what is now the Union kitchen. Upstairs, a library of 25,000 volumes filled...
...Large Billiard Table" color and pattern tie the composition together, while the changing point of view from two to three dimensionality pulls it apart. For all the brilliance of these paintings, it is "Wheatfield"--a small work compared to the others--which is the most eccentric, and the most subtle and fascinating in its daring use of materials and sophisticated intentions...