Word: swamps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...difficult to imagine that teenagers living in a place filled with swamp snakes, blue-tongue lizards and wobbegongs (carpet sharks) would still experience itchy adolescent ennui: the desire for something--anything--to happen. But that's exactly what Winton deftly captures in his linked collection, set in the hardscrabble whaling town of Angelus, in Western Australia. We follow Vic, the most developed of the characters in the book, as he confronts the quagmire of family, the bitterness of pride, his own prickly regrets and the impossible, inescapable Australian landscape. It turns out he has more to fear from the dangers...
...heritage. The Army's Rangers take their name from Rogers' Rangers, the New Hampshire militiamen under Major Robert Rogers, who skillfully used the Indians' tactics of stealth and surprise against them during the French and Indian War of the 1750s and '60s. From the irregulars under Francis Marion (the "Swamp Fox"), who harassed the British in the Revolutionary War, to Brigadier General Frank Merrill's Marauders, who bedeviled the Japanese in Burma during World War II, old-time American fighting men often proved adept at unconventional warfare...
...John James Audubon becomes, by dilution, the common duck stamp, so one detects the vestiges of Homer's watercolors in every outdoor-magazine cover that has a dead whitetail draped over a log or a largemouth bass, like an enraged Edward G. Robinson with fins, jumping from dark swamp water. Homer was not, of course, the first "sporting artist" in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, and brought to it both intense observation and a lyrical sense of identification with the landscape--just at the cultural moment when the religious Wilderness of the 19th century...
...with oils) from dark to light. It is hospitable to accident (Homer's seas, skies and Adirondack hills are full of chance blots and free mergings of color) but disaster-prone as well. One slip, and the veil of atmosphere turns into a mud puddle, a garish swamp. The stuff favors broad effects; nothing proclaims the amateur more clearly than niggling and overcorrection. It can be violated (Homer sometimes did his highlights by tearing strips of paper away to show white below), but it also demands an exacting precision of the hand--and an eye that can translate solid into...
...gracefully in an Amazon lagoon and, unseen by her, the Gill Man miming her strokes a few feet below, like the hidden id ready to surface. In this eerie pas de deux, the creature's attentions are both predatory and appreciative. He could be her destroyer or her lover: Swamp Thing or Wild Thing...