Word: trenchers
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...Marine who served in China during World War 11, Peckinpah worked his way into the movie business by acting and directing in small theaters, then writing and directing westerns. In writing Straw Dogs, based on a novel called The Siege of Trencher's Farm, Peckinpah kept little from the original except the climactic siege itself. He then spent weeks searching for a town with the primitive and isolated quality he wanted...
...their best to placate them with a sumptuous feast. Dressed in their best black silk and carrying burning joss sticks, the women recite invitations to their dead ancestors to partake of roast pig's head and sticks of sugar cane, peanuts and white rice. As offerings to less trencher-minded spirits, they burn paper imitations of currency and clothes...
...nothing to take lightly. Both hosts and guests came dressed in their most splendid clothes, the chiefs wearing elaborately carved wooden hats adorned with ermine skins and sea-lion bristles, and carrying their ceremonial staffs. The meals alone involved prodigious waste: one massive, carved, 14-foot-long wooden trencher held 120 gallons of fish stew. The host would often perform a ceremony roughly equivalent to lighting a cigar with a $100 bill: he ladled out the savory fish oil onto the fire. The stoic guests proved themselves unimpressed by sitting motionless even when the flames blistered their legs...
...final fact that there is in all this much material for thought. The symposium, it should be added, leaves the material facile verbiage. Mr. Hale, alone of the three ventures into the inner recesses of the young intellectuals' cannery, and passes some crumbs from Sherwood Anderson's trencher, crumbs anent the arbitrary character of Communist literary criticism. For the rest, the Hoot is conventional and mild. Two undergraduates have collaborated on a dull catalogue of duller New Haven, and Mr. Charles Seymour writes with pale whimsy on artistry in dining. But it remains for the three reviwers to smother...
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