His eyes, grey and wet like the belly of a fish, rolled back and forth in their place with every other breath he took. Once in a while he’d shake his head and let out a ‘wheeeeww’. A long kind of exhausted sigh that seemed to say this is the awfullest sort of work I’ve ever had to do in my life.
I’ve always wondered about the man’s mannerisms. This doesn’t quite satisfy that curiosity but it’s more than I ever thought I’d see.
True, I’ve had a vague but incessant obsession with the lettered curmudgeon since reading Innocents Abroad some time back in the 90’s, but I can’t be alone in finding this little piece of footage incredibly awesome.
Silent film footage taken in 1909 by Thomas Edison at Stormfield (CT) at Mark Twain’s estate. Twain is shown walking around his home and playing cards with his daughters Clara and Jean. The flickering is due to film deterioration, but this is the only known footage of the great author.
Ezra believed in God. He just didn’t believe in Brother Eugene Ledbedder. And it was Preacher Ledbedder who showed up every single Sunday morning to stomp and sweat around an old wood pulpit. Who threw open-palmed hands up into the air and pointed fingers at his congregation whenever he said words like eternal and damnation and adultery.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the muse and ancient understanding – from the TED series.
”[Flannery] O’Connor is important to the way this movie [The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada] is constructed. What you do is you consider some so-called religious thinking without the didacticism of the classical approach. You look for the allegorical intentions of what we’re taught in the Bible, and then find some way to have it revealed or expressed by common experience. You’ll find this happening over and over again in O’Connor, who was a rather classical Catholic thinker who wrote about nothing but backwoods north Georgia rednecks.”
- Tommy Lee Jones
Free online Yale video lectures for:
Milton
A study of Milton’s poetry, with some attention to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.
The American Novel Since 1945
The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones.
Modern Poetry
The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance.
I’ve long since given up trying to emulate her elegant air. Partly because I have two left feet and hobbit shaped toes. Mostly because it takes a lot of effort to achieve effortless. And that’s the epitome of Mal.
The one person I know who somehow manages to make labour look graceful. Like afternoon tea at Claridge’s, only more dignified.
Mal is now a mom.
My hair is chaotic. It curls naturally. But never in a soft or pretty way. On weekends I try to give it a break from T3s and ghds. The result is never satisfactory. But I digress.
Today Steph and I ate ice cream in waffle cones and lay on the floor and enjoyed the rush. A veritable Trainspotting scene it was. But that’s just us.
Plan is to spend one day very soon making homemade pizzas – in full pizza making attire – listening to the Practical Magic soundtrack – centripetal motion perpetual bliss – and scrapbooking to our little hearts’ content. Because I desperately want to scrap book and because Steffy’s the only person I know with enough get up and go to actually make me sit down and do it.
Yesterday I said something about the EU and someone actually asked, “What’s the EU?”
Yeah…
The woman was from California and that made me feel a little better. But not much.
There’s something seriously wrong with something, somewhere when you’re accused (and I was) of intellectual snobbery just because you can’t disguise the dumbfound when someone asks you a question like that. Shocking.
But not as shocking – okay, so maybe it is – as people not knowing that Steve Martin is a ridiculously talented writer and musician. I adore the man. I get ‘updates’ on a total of three authors. Steve Martin is one of them. I’m reading “Born Standing Up” in between headaches caused by 2666 and plan on putting Roxanne on repeat over the weekend. Because there’s no better cure for the things that ail us.
That is all.