Word: queequeg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author's attachment to misfits and backwaters never goes out of style. Neither does his premise: two aging gunfighters give it one more shot. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are descended from the noble buddy system of American literature. Exotically paired males, like Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim, fling themselves at the wilderness and sooner or later paddle into the mainstream. McCrae and Call join the mythic flow by stealing a herd of Mexican cattle and driving them from Texas to Montana. Why leave semiretirement and undertake a journey better suited for younger...
...canvas, sewn together with an offhand and improvisatory air, misled some critics into thinking of him as a kind of craftsy '60s bricoleur fiddling with mandalas by the seaside. (The sight of Shields, 6 ft. 4 in., with his shaven bronze dome of a head, nautical beard and Queequeg-like mien, daintily stitching in a studio littered with harpoons and coot decoys, is one of the more striking images of role reversal the art world affords.) In fact, his imagination goes far beyond that: it has a sparkling, lyric quality, which comes not so much from preordained imagery...
...season to another: from Chicago's December, say, to Florida's moral equivalent of high summer. Then they fly back into the wan, smudged month that they left, and they are tan. In deep winter, they are exotics walking among all those gray faces at lunchtime like Queequeg on-the streets of Nantucket...
What makes The Methuselah Factor refreshing is that Georgakas has merged those two trends of the 1970's, concern for the future of humankind and aggressive me-ism, the Ishmael and Queequeg of this whale of a book. At times the book reeks of excess attention to individual concerns. Many of Georgakas' 'prolongevous' lessons would require people to pay such attention to lengthening their own lives that they could have little time or energy for passionate activism. He also largely dispels notions of national or racial bases for longevity, convincingly arguing that long-living communities can boast of unusual proportions...