Word: saguaro
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...jazzmen, in turn, have taken to scribbling. Lippincott. backed by his own quintet, recently recited a piece about how the guy in the combo feels when he is going way out ("We were all there waving at the hillside Picasso men who turned out to be saguaro cactuses . . . We were all there together, really, still, now, always, rotating, revolving, dancing, now, always"). The jazz accompaniments are both premeditated and improvised, but all of them are far too sketchy to stand by themselves. If the poets are sold on J. & P., most of the jazzmen are cooling on it. An exception...
Here he praises the saguaro, the prickly pear and the wicked cholla cactus with all the exuberance of a convert. His companions are no longer Columbia University students, whom he once taught as Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, but creatures of the Sonoran sands -road runners, elf owls, jack rabbits, Gila monsters, tarantulas and scorpions...
...Gila monster stalking a desert rat, a summer torrent building up into a wall of water, the blossoming of cactus flowers. The splicing and re-splicing gives the film such a rapid gait that within a few minutes a wild pig chases a bobcat up a hundred foot saguaro, a poisonous wasp vanquishes an equally deadly tarantula, and red hawk devours a rattlesnake. The most callous little boy will lie awake until three a.m. after viewing these battles...
Arizona Cacti. The giant saguaro cacti, Carnegiea gigantea (named for Andrew Carnegie)-which are not especially useful, but add an exotic beauty to Arizona's landscape-have now & then fallen sick, but in 1940 a bacterial disease attacked them with unusual virulence. Some giants developed oozy cankers, bled to death in a fortnight. Some developed rot pockets. Some looked healthy, then toppled suddenly to reveal decayed roots. The disease still rages and Plant Pathologist James Greenlief Brown of the University of Arizona and co-workers told how to save the giant cactus from extinction. Small sores...