Word: spooning
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...were arriving from Russia, the Ukraine, the Carpathian Mts. The newcomers claimed to be Catholic but they lived by the Julian Calendar (Christmas on January 7), segregated men and women in their churches, had married priests who gave them the bread & wine of the mass mixed together in a spoon...
Unmentioned in geographies, Spoon River is a middlewestern small town that appears on every American literary map. It has been there since 1915, when Poet Edgar Lee Masters published 200-odd hard-bitten epitaphs from an imaginary small-town graveyard, entitled the collection Spoon River Anthology. Bizarre in 1915, the book's candor seems natural in 1937, thus serves as a calculus of the reading public's growing ability to accept life's poison with life's meat...
Those who figure that an author's abilities should at least keep pace with his public's have had their calculations upset by Author Masters' post-Spoon River performances. Thirty-two generally humdrum volumes of prose and verse have poured from his pen into the literary ocean, and have disappeared with faint gurgles barely audible to the public at large. But the sense of Poet Masters' potential ability lingers on; and to a loyal band of U. S. readers every new Masters book comes bound in hope as well as boards...
...Spoon River Anthology Poet Masters took an on-the-level look into a country graveyard, recorded what he saw with somewhat embittered candor, somewhat graveled acquiescence. In The New World, with a more opinionated candor and a more griped acquiescence he looks at U. S. history not on its level but reverentially from below and disgustedly from above, presents accordingly a vertically wall-eyed view of it. But his straightforward earnestness is as honest as his previous straightforward sight, and all U. S. readers will find themselves rising to their feet at Poet Masters' benediction...
...Loon's Geography (1932), Ships (1935) and other books, Hendrik Willem Van Loon has avoided the full light of adult criticism by seeming to write not quite for adults, has thus been able to remain one of the great inestimables of the literary world. Critics who resent being spoon-fed from the vast Van Loon pudding are easily convinced by the Van Loon illustrations that his books belong in the nursery. Some children feel vaguely dissatisfied with Artist Van Loon's inky snarls and scratches. Between these critical extremes, chuckling down history's and culture...