Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...There was no reference to today," he recalls. "You were overwhelmed, even seduced, into a past age." His mirror rooms fulfill a similar function today by allowing the viewer to experience weightlessness and the expanding universe of tomorrow. Red Grooms traces back the genesis of his Chicago to his boyhood efforts in Nashville to duplicate the Ringling Bros. Circus in his own backyard and to his student days in Italy, where he toured with his own puppet show. For Grooms, the progression was from canvas, to collage, to "stickouts," to full-scale environments, which he likes to call simply "installations...
...book, written between hunt-club meets, called Burke's Steerage, or the Amateur Gentleman's Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes. White was not very good at falconry (goshawks and merlins kept getting away), but it became his passion; it had the advantage of belonging to the boyhood of history. Later, for perhaps the very same reason, he threw himself into the study of Gaelic, spent years translating a 12th century Latin bestiary, and became an armchair authority on the Emperor Hadrian...
...want of trying. The whole corpus of Updike's fiction before Couples amounts to a memoir of his boyhood. His mother has called those writings "valentines" to the friends and family back home in the small (pop. 5,639) Pennsylvania Dutch farm town of Shillington, three miles from Reading, where John was born. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, is a cosmopolitan, well-educated writer herself (four stories in The New Yorker since John blazed the way), and she has always loathed everything about Shillington. She admits now to having broken up a high-school romance of John...
...Updikes were so poor and isolated, John recalls, that "in a way I've always felt estranged from the middle class-locked out of it." In one of the dozens of stories that he wrote about his boyhood, he describes how "the air of that house crystallizes: our neglected teeth, our poor and starchy diet, our worn floors, our musty and haunted halls." The "genius" of his mother he wrote elsewhere, "was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity," and under her companionship, "consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant...
...Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts...