Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 2

Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze blade: a good carpenter, Cash is.

We could have stocked cheaper chickens, but I gave my promise as Miss Lawington said when she advised me to get a good breed, because Mr Tull himself admits that a good breed of cows or hogs pays in the long run.

So when Miss Lawington told me about the cakes I thought that I could bake them and earn enough at one time to increase the net value of the flock the equivalent of two head.

But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.

You can see that girl's washing and ironing in the pillow-slip, if ironed it ever was. Maybe it will reveal her blindness to her, laying there at the mercy and the ministration of four men and a tom-boy girl.

Braggioni is cruel to everyone, with a kind of specialized insolence, but he is so vain of his talents, and so sensitive to slights, it would require a cruelty and vanity greater than his own to lay a finger on the vast cureless wound of his self-esteem.

Braggioni loves himself with such tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity that his followers—for he is a leader of men, a skilled revolutionist, and his skin has been punctured in honorable warfare—warm themselves in the reflected glow, and say to each other: “He has a real nobility, a love of humanity raised above mere personal affections.”

During these long evenings which have spoiled a long month for her, she sits in her deep chair with an open book on her knees, resting her eyes on the consoling rigidity of the printed page when the sight and sound of Braggioni singing threaten to identify themselves with all her remembered afflictions and to add their weight to her uneasy premonitions of the future.

“It may be true I am as corrupt, in another way, as Braggioni,” she thinks in spite of herself, “as callous, as incomplete,” and if this is so, any kind of death seems preferable.

When she appears in the classroom they crowd about her with smiles on their wise, innocent, clay-colored faces, crying, “Good morning, my titcher!” in immaculate voices, and they make of her desk a fresh garden of flowers every day.

For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.

She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish.

A mood come alive, Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song.

The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt.

Exploring the unique and idiosyncratic characteristics of regions across the country, these writers provide access to locales that readers might never be able to experience otherwise.

Bound up in the tradition of women writers in the nineteenth century who wrote realistic portrayals of their experiences in domestic fiction, regionalist literature has long looked to the quotidian to capture something true about a specific time and place. Though the subject is the simple, day-to-day experiences of living, in the hands of novelists and poets, these moments come to represent the essence and personality of a place.

For instance, Jeffrey Yang’s Hey, Marfa, named among the best poetry collections of 2018 by the New York Times, brings the eponymous small West Texas town to life on the page through its careful use of detail.

And while most readers will not have such extensive background knowledge, ways of speaking—patterns of speech, colloquialisms used—can create a sense of richness and authenticity in a piece of writing.