flense

As described by Bock (1991) and the Great Northern Peninsula Craft Producers (2002), seals are hunted in the spring and flensed. The meat and fat are scraped from the sealskin with the sharp blade of a curved knife.

In Shapero's drawing Skinned Alive, 2004, one piece of paper, rendered with intricate markings that resemble fur, or perhaps tree bark, lies crumpled over another smooth sheet, like an integument that's been flensed. The drawing portends what's admissible here: dimensions stripped of their properties, meanings of their supports.

For flippers, we dissected out the humerus, which was then flensed, boiled, and air-dried for at least two weeks.

Pathology of lesions observed in whales flensed at Saldanha Bay, South Africa.

His lungs feel as if they are being flensed, or their ticking filed at with fleam teeth; he is coughing himself fraught to fractions--curd, clot, each necrotic clod through the cud--a decimal at a time."

She lay on a chaise in a darkened bedroom of that quiet, discreet sanitarium [sic], waiting, counting the hours until the scabs that encrusted her flensed skin should disappear.

Where Davenport-Hines is less successful is in his occasionally far-fetched speculations regarding such matters as the long-term effects of circumcision on Auden's psyche; or the supposedly vast significance of Emile Coue's psychological theory (mostly houe, I think); or, most absurd, the hypothesized epiphany of evil which Auden experienced while watching a whale being flensed in Iceland - an experience which, in Davenport-Hines's view, profoundly and permanently affected Auden's subsequent outlook on life.

Vladimir and Estragon's theological discourse on the fate of the thieves hung with Christ is a vermiform appendix of Beckett's Catholic upbringing; it is an alien presence in the Godot world, otherwise so carefully flensed of historic particularities.

How the characters (and audience) reach this unlikely comic moment has everything to do with what's come before, in the stiff, formalized, pretence-laden world Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou have created -- or flensed away -- for us.

On 18 January 1858 a trypot and three empty casks from the Saratoga were towed to shore where a group of "Spaniards" had agreed to "take the oil from the carcasses, on halves." We interpret this to mean that the team on shore received whale carcasses after the blubber had been stripped for cooking aboard the vessel, and that for their efforts they were allowed to keep half of the oil produced from the flensed carcasses.

The surface evidence at McKinley Bay suggests that whales were flensed and processed on the beaches to the south of the site.

Soft tissue was flensed from the femurs with a knife.

Members of the public whose day jobs make these parallel talks and presentations impossible to attend can content themselves with the constructive alienation of reading the works in situ, flensed their discursive and didactic blubber.

To give you a sampling: "the word flensed / from the body of God" (from "The Story of Adam and Eve"); "After the bell, women / leopard into eves" (from "After the Bell Has Called the Women from the Fields"); and, in a nod to Adrienne Rich, the last line of the collection, "A human organ salvaged from the wreck, / my own heart tinned" (from "The New York Botanical Garden").