Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Burmese religious festivals that go on all night and all day, held on various special occasions, like weddings. We stood at the door watching as two female dancers in elaborate face make-up and gold-embroidered longgyis danced to the rhythm of traditional wooden Burmese instruments. The dancers were encircled by small children at their feet and adults further back, all squatting on the floor...
...Irrawaddy River. We had a choice between "cabin" and "deck" and for an extra dollar chose the cabin. Well, the deck looked like steerage, every square inch filled by a body or a basket of smelly goods. The cabin, however, was not much better. It consisted of three wooden bunks and a table, and we shared it with a wealthy Burmese family, their electrical appliances, and eight or nine monks with shaven heads and long orange robes...
...though he can also go on about Lord Nelson and Jiminy Cricket. "Who is this Jiminy Cricket?" inquired a Soviet journalist last week, and the man's eyes grew at the rate of Pinocchio's nose when he heard Turner explain, "Jiminy Cricket was a conscience of a little wooden...
...imaginings. His eye ranges widely, from Rembrandt to Modigliani to an obscure Russian named Pirosmanishvili, who wandered from tavern to tavern a century ago painting pictures of food as inn signs. Berger begins one brilliant essay by describing how peasants in the Haute-Savoie spend winter evenings carving white wooden birds to hang in their kitchens. This leads him to analyze why the wooden birds are works of art, which leads him to wonder why certain things in nature are beautiful...
...fearsomely indifferent . . . It is within this bleak natural context that beauty is encountered, and the encounter is by its nature sudden and unpredictable . . . This is why it moves us." After arguing that "art is always a form of prayer," Berger closes with a quick touch of irony: "The white wooden bird is wafted by the warm air rising from the stove in the kitchen where the neighbors are drinking. Outside, in minus 25 degrees C, the real birds are freezing to death...