Word: cowing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During dinner, McGuane sips nonalcoholic beer and talks about an upcoming cutting-horse competition in Billings. Cutting, a highly stylized ritual in which a horse and rider "work" a cow in much the same way a defensive guard tries to block a basketball, is a dear topic for the McGuanes. They also happen to be formidably good at it. Laurie is Montana's defending cutting- horse champion, Tom was No. 1 the year before, and the two are the leading contenders for the 1989 trophy. "We take turns," Laurie laughs...
McGuane is alert to revealing parallels between the art of cutting cattle and the craft of writing novels. "You cannot work cattle by force," he explains. "A cutting horse separates a cow from the herd through a kind of choreographic countermovement. It's very much like fiction: you can't sit down and say, 'Goddammit, I'm going to blast out these sentences and send them to the publisher' -- this kind of John Wayneism of literature. You just can't." He finds the notion of a so-called Rocky Mountain school of literature equally specious. Still, he admits that "there...
...decline in U.S. dairy production, milk prices are jumping over the moon. After churning out a record 146 billion lbs. of milk in 1988, suppliers are producing about 2% less this year. Reasons: lower federal dairy subsidies, a drought-related decline in feed crops and a falling milk-cow population. As a result, some customers are finding milk in short supply. Even the U.S. Agriculture Department is having trouble buying enough to supply Government nutrition programs...
...tourists drawn to the remote prairie for a look at what townsfolk fondly call the "big, pregnant whale." Says local newspaper editor Robert Halpern: "This is a real shot in the arm for retail sales and real estate -- and community pride too. We used to get attention for our cow pastures. Now people know we're doing all we can to fight the drug...
...checked shirts and blue jeans, drives around the 12,000-acre Ukraina collective farm, which lies just 100 miles from the Rumanian border, as if it were his own 2,000-acre spread in Ohio. He walks the fields, checking the condition of the crops, and drops by smelly cow barns and even smellier pig farms to dispense tips about raising livestock. In the evening Ralph gives lectures and shows American agricultural films. Christine, 54, a petite ex-schoolteacher, likes to engage the farmers and their families in conversation...