Posts Tagged ‘litertaure’
“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night”*…
Look, these days, I’ll take my cheering wherever I can get it. And this weekend, Ella Dickson put a smile on my face with her thread of book rocks, each one painstakingly painted to look like a novel. They are quite impressive, especially considering the uneven canvas. In 2018, Dickson, who is a math teacher at Beaumont School in St Albans, did a similar project with children’s books, but this summer, she’s used her isolation to whip up a crop of “some grown up books” to hide when libraries reopen. Because grown ups need wonder and discovery too!…
Via Emily Temple: “A math teacher has painted 45 book rocks to hide in her local library (when it reopens).”
* Isabel Allende
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As we extol Easter eggs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that William Sydney Porter was released (on good behavior) after serving three years in the Ohio Penitentiary for bank fraud and embezzlement; a licensed pharmacist, he had worked in the prison’s infirmary. But on his release, he turned to what had been a pastime, writing. Over the next several years he wrote 381 short stories under the pen name by which we know him, “O. Henry,” including a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine.
His wit, characterization, and plot twists– as evidenced in stories like “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief”– were adored by his readers but often panned by critics… though academic opinion has since come around: O. Henry is now considered by many to be America’s answer to Guy de Maupassant.
“The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience”*…
In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher.
Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.
Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”
Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.”…
Read the letter in full at “Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours.”
See also Neil Postman’s and Alan Moore’s agreement.
* Aldous Huxley, in his letter to George Orwell
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As we question authority, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966, the date that LSD was declared illegal, that The Love Pageant Rally was held in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The first big free concert of it’s sort in the park, it was organized by Allen Cohen and artist Michael Bowen, the creators of the San Francisco Oracle, which first hit the streets in September 1966, to mark the banning of the drug– which effectively created a neighborhood of outlaws in the Haight, where acid was a staple of community culture. Music was provided by the Grateful Dead and by Big Brother and the Holding Company; Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were on hand.
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