In Culture
Fuji Musumè (藤娘) or Wisteria Maiden is an Otsu-e (Japanese folk painting in Ōtsu, Shiga) subject thought to have been inspired by popular dances. These painting were often sold as good-luck charms for marriages. Fuji Musumè is also a famous classical Kabuki dance.
In Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Bean Trees, Turtle refers to wisteria vines as bean trees, because the pre-bloomed flower pods are shaped like beans. Later, she and Taylor learn that wisteria is a legume (i.e., is in the bean family) and that wisteria and other legumes engage in symbiotic relationships, just as the book's characters do.
Read more about this topic: Wisteria
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)