Word: boyhoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hanema alone, the chase into neighborly beds comes close to the course of tragedy. Unlike the others he is hounded not only by lust, curiosity and boredom but by a terrible sense of time fleeing. He is haunted by the past by shepherds paralyzed in webs of lead his boyhood Dutch Reformed Church, by his father's rough hands tending the fragile flowers in his greenhouse, most of all by his parents' death in an automobile accident. ("Piet pictured shattered glass strewn across the road...
...extends to oral encounters between Piet and Foxy-looms Updike's central metaphor. He finds in sex an expression of his own Piet-like quest to recapture the past. Nostalgia suffuses him, goads him, at times frightens him. At home, in Ipswich, Mass., Updike spends hours leafing through boyhood photograph albums. "I find old photographs powerful," he says. "There's a funny thing about the way the flux of time was halted at this particular spot. You just can't get back...
...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...
...good movie about some bad days at New York City's police department. From the commissioner on down, everybody is up to his badge in problems. Commissioner Anthony X. Russell (Henry Fonda) is sleeping with another man's wife and hating himself in the morning. His boyhood buddy, Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore), has been caught double-dealing with a crime syndicate in order to protect his erring son. And as if letting Benesch (Steve Ihnat) get away were not bad enough Detective Dan Madigan (Richard Widmark) has all he can do to keep his pretty blonde...