Word: whaled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Newspaper reporters divided their attention between F.D.R.'s youngest son John and a passenger notable chiefly for having made 22 previous crossings. Desperately, they wove vignettes from such unpromising material as the pet white mouse in a first-class stateroom, the ship's minor collision with a whale, and a vicar selling oak trees to reforest Sherwood Forest. With the weather still too cold to swim or sun, the passengers danced, drank, and rested. The most popular place on the ship was the cinema, which was packed to capacity for both afternoon and evening showings of first...
...surface, of course, politics and history have little to do with a simple, slightly offbeat excursion to Iceland. But for the two young poets the laws of metaphor applied. The ancient island democracy was a place where "Ravens from their walls of shale/Cruise around the rotting whale." Europe was the beached behemoth and the ravens, the Blackshirts and the SS. Out of their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical...
...exceptions. Toward the criminals they pursued for twelve decades, from Jesse James to Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, the Pinkertons seemed to direct the same obsessive passions Melville imputed to Captain Ahab, who was a first-class tracker by any detective's standards: "He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down." Adopting a godlike motto ("We Never Sleep") the Pinkertons did not so much solve cases as play Puritan avenging angels in private duels with the devil...
...navy. Passion has given way to technology. For the enduring challenge of any personal crusade against the forces of darkness requires simplicity of means, and the possibility of confrontation with evil personified. Given the choice, Ahab might well have accepted radar and sonar aboard the Pequod but the Great Whale's looming, symbolic presence would soon have been reduced to a series of blips and bongs...
McClelland is obviously interested in formal, traditional calligraphy. The exhibit includes "The Whale," an old English poem which he wrote out in insular uncial letters on a regular page layout. Both the language and the letters are alien--they could be written in Islamic script and have equivalent elegant linear formality. But the letterlines and page forms have a universal meaning independent of phonetics or linguistics. They be-speak exoticness, magnificence, and respect-compelling beauty...