Word: gourds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prosperous. The happy people of Huhsien county are the last Arcadians. Socialism, as it were, equals Ovid plus electricity. Their sacks of grain bulge like the bellies of good-luck gods. Every bulb of garlic in their fields is the size of a baby's head. Each melon and gourd displays, in its massive and purposeful rotundity, the benefits of collective selfcriticism. Like the bulbous backside of a Cadillac in America 20 years ago, the distended cabbage and the steatopygous turnip are images of Good Government. In this land, imagination goes about its business with methodical certainty. There...
...Christ teaching.The gestures of Ciceronian rhetoric lent authority to the poses of carved apostles; Orpheus with a ram on his shoulders was transformed into Christ the good shep herd. Winged victories became angels. Bacchus turned into the drunken Noah; a late 3rd century carving of Jonah resting under the gourd tree was based on the older Greek image of Endymion asleep. The more refined an early Christian work was, the more subtly it might display its classical affiliations...
...months of war, oil lamps had been supplanted by the light bulb, the gourd by the bidet, pineapple juice by Coca Cola, lotto by roulette, Rocambole by Pearl White, the messenger boy's donkey by the telegraphist's bicycle...
...cliff to inspect a vulture's nest. Then, wearing a bracelet of elephant's hair to deter a tusker's charge, he stepped out to meet the warriors in a Masai village. Recognizing Bobby right away as a brother, the ocher-smeared men shared a gourd of ox blood and milk with him. But he may have to do something about his hair. "The Masai men have elaborate hair styles molded with mud and ocher," explained long-haired Bobby. "They kept fingering my hair to see if it was real...
...long, poignant sequence, the old man and his businessmen friends hon or their old teacher, nicknamed "the Gourd," who responds to their tribute by gratefully consuming large quantities of liquor. The men are touched by his almost desperate drunkenness, even as they feel threatened by his low es tate (he has been reduced to running a small noodle shop) and advancing years, so they take up a collection...