The Bookity Book & Tall Grass Salon

maxmordon

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Almanac

Another spoken poem. B-days of humanitarian Albert Schweitzer and early feminist writer Emily Hahn.

Geez, I'm still not back in form...boo to the kids at your sister's school, Max. And good luck in your own classes. What you taking?

At the end she told my mother she will continue to believe but will call them just "Christmas presents" from now on. I teach Introduction to Cinema. Due to the crisis, most college professors have left so institutions are terribly understaffed.

The funniest thing just happened to me. I've been writing a couple of articles for a website and only know they told me they pay writers when they realize they haven't pay me! I'm the worst freelancer ever.
 

lacygnette

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Another spoken poem. What's up with that!

Intro to Cinema - fascinating. What's your list of films? I want to be sure I've seen them all.

Today we have 2 good eggs on the Almanac. Schweitzer and Emily Hahn. The obit her granddaughter gave was priceless...
 

Chris P

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A sweet poem but a few too many similes for my taste. It comes off as amaturish when there's too many.

Birthday of Martin Luther King. If you ever get to the burialplace and memorial.in Atlanta I gurantee you will be moved. The Lorraine hotel in Memphis is almost as good, but the sadness of what happened at the same time adds power but takes away from the hope. I wanted to propose on the spot at the Lincoln Memorial where he gave the I Have A Dream speech, but it was full of bratty kids and clueless tourists (so I did it around back overlooking the river).

It's also the baptismal date of Moliere (presumably church records were kept when municipal records were not) who I've not read, and the birthday of Marie Duplessis, the lover of Alexander Dumas.
 
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Maryn

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I happen to live where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are buried, and the tourists taking each other's pictures with the headstones kind of rob the spots of the solemnity they deserve. Susan didn't live to see women get the vote.

And Maryn didn't read the poem. There's days like that, huh?

Maryn, announcing this to be among them
 

lacygnette

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Almanac. Sweet poem, notable more for the story than the language.

Mary Carr's b'day - her reasoning as to why memoir has taken off is compelling.

A rhyming poet (we know how I feel about that) and the father of Hamilton, which my husband doesn't want to see because he hates the music. I'd go for the staging.

Have a great week everyone. BTW Chris, overlooking the river ain't shabby!
 

M Louise

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Lured in by that mention of Mary Karr on memoir: “I think as fiction has become more hyperintellectual or dystopic or unreal, I think people hungry for the real — for real, lived experience — have been forced to migrate to memoir.” While I'm not sure fiction is in such a dire state, I do know that I found myself absorbed with voyeuristic abandon in all five volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard's fictionalised memoir as if I was reading someone's uncensored private diary.
 

Chris P

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I agree about the poem. It took me a couple times through to get it, but it told a nice if sad story.

I don't agree with Mary Karr's assesment of fiction becoming inaccessible. If anything, I think memoir is in danger of being overly embellished and therefore inaccessible. Just look at the success of (and controversy surrounding) James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. I also don't believe a single word Tucker Max writes. Post-truth? It doesn't matter if it happened as long as it could have happened, would make a better point, and I say it happened. Tina Fey's Bossypants is a great memoir because it's not embellished. I feel like I could know her (which maybe proves Mary Karr's point).

That said, one of my favorite writers is Dave Eggers, who shines at fictionalized memoirs such as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is the What and Zeitoun.


ETA: Welcome to AW and Joe's, M Louise!
 
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M Louise

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Thanks, Chris!

I was thinking of the critic Thomas Mallon pointing out historical inaccuracies in Mary Karr's first 'memoir' The Lying Club and how many memoirs and biographies are heavily fictionalised. But memoir as a genre is too complex and vast for generalisations. James Frey's controversial stance was to invent extreme and scandalous details about rehab treatment (including his being forced to undergo dental surgery without anaesthetic, as I recall) in a recovery memoir that would be read as factual and 'honest'. The same criteria apply to Holocaust eyewitness accounts of the death camps or to contemporary war memoirs that claim to present verifiable truths about imprisonment, torture, battles. A slippery area. And many fictions are thinly disguised factual accounts of marriages breaking up or parenting struggles (Rachel Cusk).
 

Maryn

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By golly, there's an almanac today, too!

I liked today's poem. It made me think of Shakey Six when she talks about teaching her rural students. I should direct her to the link if I see her around.

And it's Ben Franklin's birthday! I never know what to get him.

Maryn, thinking something electric
 

Chris P

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As a kid I was fascinated by the Franklin half dollars. We had the Kennedy ones by then, so the Franklins were rare and mysterious.

The poem reminded me of my 12th grade English teacher. We were her last class before retirement and although she stuck with it to the end, she made it fun even if her class was tough.

Back to memoirs, one of my book challenge books this year is American Demon by Jack Grisham, the singer for the hard core punk group TSOL. The reviews make it sound like I have a pretty intense read ahead of me, and I'm interested to see which parts I believe and which I don't.
 
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lacygnette

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Almanac. Meh to the poem.

Peter Mark Roget's birthday. I didn't tumble on the name until half-way through the bio. I love you Peter. One of my fav all time books - I spent hours looking up words as a kid. Now I use the on-line version, which seems cheating somehow but is really fast.

Also Glidden who created, at the same time as others, barbed wire using...wait for it - a coffee grinder.

And today is the birthday of Pooh's daddy. Love, love. I had a dog named Pooh-Bear and a cat named Tigger. And when I was younger, I identified with Eoyere!

Finally b'day of one of the Hardys. Not the one with Tess, or the one in Inception, but the one with Laurel...

Welcome to our newby! And yes, Maryn, where's Shakey Six? At least I see Kyla on Facebook, but Shakey's MIA.
 

Chris P

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I thought the poem was overly sentimental. It's captured the thought but I was more interested in the daughter's experience.

I've never read the Pooh books, despite being named after Christopher Robin (and secondarily St. Christopher).

Speaking of barbed wire, I spent part of the afternoon walking around the National Mall, all set up for the inauguration. Fencing and barricades are everywhere, and it's a bit unnerving that the inauguration officials have the resources to put up so much crowd control in less than a week. Not to be overly dramatic, but it makes me realize how quickly the government could round us up and herd us around if it ever decided to.

I am going to go on Friday simply because I don't know how long I'm going to live in DC and this might be the only one I can ever get to. I wish wish wish it was someone else, but I did what I could. I will be at the women's march on Saturday, too, and will enjoy that much more I'm sure.
 

M Louise

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Not my kind of poem either. Makes me wish Edgar Allen Poe could have time-travelled to read HD and read her take on Helen.
 

Maryn

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New day, new almanac. Did somebody mention Poe?

Maryn, with a wink
 

Chris P

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Lol. Where are you in Southern Hemisphere? I'm going to guess Australia, but super cool no matter where.

Poe was, as he was for many, one of my first intros to poetry and short stories. I loved the PBS Vincent Price series where he read a lot of Poe. Cask of Amantilado was very well done with Price filling both Montressor and Fortunado's roles.

Eta: Now it looks kinda cheesy, but oh well.
 

M Louise

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I'm from a sweltering Cape Town, Chris. More interested in watching TV on the Women's Marches than the Inauguration -- a women's march in solidarity here in central Cape Town on Saturday that may coincide with your late Friday night!

I also enjoyed Vincent Price reading Poe.
 

Chris P

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I've not been to Cape Town. I hear it's lovely and I hope to go some day. I do a lot of work in Africa (I lived in Uganda for two years) and although I've been to Johannesburg probably 10 times I've never left the airport so I can't count it as somewhere I've been.

I will be providing pictures of the Women's March tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it! Let us know how the SA event goes.

Almanac

I couldn't get into the poem. I'm too much trained as a scientist to see "integument" as anything other than an exoskeleton and very non-poetic.

Robert Frost read a poem at the JFK inauguration, birthday of movie director Federico Fellini and Tammy Hoag (in my homestate from the tiny town of Cresco) and comedy legend George Burns.
 

M Louise

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Next time get a taxi out of Johannesburg International Airport, Chris, and take a look around! Cape Town is crammed with tourists right now, magnificent despite drought. I'm heading off into the city to join marchers, taking bottled water, sunbloc, floppy hat and goodwill. Even though I'm an ocean and a land mass or two away, that bizarre inauguration speech yesterday made me feel like taking refuge in a deep underground bunker stocked with canned goods, a library of books etc and not emerging for at least four years.

I sometimes wish the epistolary novel would make a comeback (anniversary of the first American novel published in 1789).
 

Chris P

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Almanac

Today's poem was a bit of nostalgia and was otherwise okay.

It's the birthdays of Ethan Allen (I know more about the furniture than the person), Roger Nash Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Louis Menand (essayist for many top-end magazines), Christian Dior (smelly perfume guy), and Maxmordon (well, he's not in the Almanac but he SHOULD be).

Regarding Power of Sympathy, I read that years ago. It took a while for me to get into the epistolary style. The story was cute, but not remarkable. Samuel Richardson's Pamela was much more compelling (although I had big time problems with the story arch, his Clarissa is supposed to be even better) and Hanna Webster Foster's The Coquette deserves more attention than it gets.
 

Chris P

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I wanted to reply about that inauguration speech separately. He was talking to his voters and not to America as a whole or to the world. I didn't note a single nod to the political diversity (let alone racial, religious, or gender) he'll be having to manage now that he's in office. His vision of unity is to power drive his agenda and unite by proving he's right. This is the MO of a bully. You're right, "bizarre" is the only word for it. I work 100 meters from the Mall, eat my lunch there when it's nice out, and feel at home there. Yesterday, standing there amid the thin crowd (those aerial comparison shots are completely accurate--I was in the clump in front of the Smithsonian Castle) seeing that guy huge on screen and hearing those angry, fearful and hateful words I was absolutely sick and felt like I was in some sort of movie. I can attest that on any given comment, only about one-third of the spectators applauded (at least in the section I was in).

The parade was a non-starter too. After Trump slunk by in his limo a few members of congress went by then everyone left when the next line of police cars started coming. We all thought it was over, and it wasn't until this morning I learned there was some tractor brigade and an actual parade. Afterward I went to an Afghan halal kabob restaurant and enjoyed being the only Euro-American there and hearing little English. I felt better then (really, I did).

Time to get on the bike to head back to town for the Women's March! Pics to come.

Enjoy your Marches, or whatever you are doing this day. :)
 

Maryn

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You're wise to take the bike in. I bet every other mode of transportation is going to be awful.

We debated asking our Virginia relatives if we could visit for the Women's March, but instead will probably go to Seneca Falls to join its gathering at the Women's Rights National Park.

Maryn, card-carrying member of the ACLU except for the card part
 

Chris P

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I posted some pics in another thread. Today was much needed for me. I felt like I reconnected to the values I hold. Although I never gave up on them, the election did throw me and I felt very discouraged. But the march today reminded me that there are millions of us who share my values and are willing to speak up about them. The message was not whining, but a recognition that we were caught napping. The answer is to get active and work for the change we want to see.
 

lacygnette

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Almanac.

Sorry, I can't focus on it. I know poetry is important, but I need poetry of protest right now. From the empty space here, I imagine many are feeling the way I do - absolutely blasted. I drove 90 miles to march in a tiny Florida town and felt better - 800+ people. But then came all the executive actions. I had a melt-down when it came out that he was censoring the EPA. I worked there. I know how important the work is. I'm starting not to feel safe anymore (perhaps POC have felt this all along...)

I have joined a group that's working nationally for response. It's based on the Indivisible document. They will be sending out weekly emails of actions that can be done. If any of you are interested, here's the link to get started. http://jenniferhofmann.com/home/wee...emocrats-independents-republicans-conscience/ Pass it on if it seems right.