Word: hives
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...closed, the light inside is dim, and even those objects that are not black seem to be. The place is a continuous collage, from the ground floor workrooms-a former garage filled with stacks of the owner's working material: wood slats, newel posts, balls, balusters, a hive of infinitely replicated fragments awaiting wholeness-to the severe bedroom, with its pressed-metal industrial closets and barracks-like austerity. The collage extends into the cupboards, which, when opened, reveal a hoard of oddments and chotchkes: vanity sets, inlaid boxes, tarnished trays, ugly Edwardian candlesticks with silver frills, like the stock...
...house belongs, of course, to the sculptor Louise Nevelson. She has lived in it for close on 30 years, acquiring more rooms, filling them up. By now it is the hive of the queen bee, where Nevelson presides over a small force of workers: carpentry and joinery assistants who help with the sculpture, and her archivist, friend, photographer and general factotum Diana MacKown. Nevelson still leaves it often enough to be a near legendary sight in Manhattan's galleries and shops, and an enduring staple in the pages of Women's Wear Daily. She likes to swathe herself...
Bees are never tame, even when they live in movable frame hive boxes and work in the service of a beekeeper. Even, then, they are perfectly wild...Beekeepers are generally old men, white and sterile. The bees themselves are old women, women without children, past softness. They are each other's captives, partners in a marriage where there are no smiles, no kisses, no words even, only slavery and stinging...
McKay himself is a rich Bostonian of refined sensibility, great kindness and few brains. Because bees tend to start new swarms if the old queen is removed, and can do so up to four times a season, McKay figures he can parlay the ten hives he is taking to Kansas into 10,240 hives in five years. Each hive can "cheerfully" produce 80 to 100 lbs. of honey a year. This he will ship east in summer for sale. The music boxes will take up the trading slack in winter...
...other: what it's like to travel on the Erie Canal: how a character is inadvertently shot; the way in which daguerreotypes are made. He does a lot with bees too, but. as the book implies, they have enough metaphorical possibilities for a series of novels. A hive is a feminist state, with an automatic system for keeping warm that is activated when the temperature in the hive drops to 57° F. Male bees are scarce, underfed and all but useless...