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Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’
Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O'Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, “were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters' minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means." In imagining those events of irreversible magnitude, O'Connor could sometimes seem outlandish--even cartoonish--but she strongly rejected the notion that her perceptions of 20th century life were distorted. In April of 1959--five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus--O'Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. Related Content: Related:  Read, Write, Reflect

Mind Matters One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern LifeBy Mitch HorowitzCrown Publishing, 2014352 pp.; $24 cloth George Orwell once wrote that you had to be a part of imperialism in order to hate it. A comparable sentiment drives author and editor Mitch Horowitz’s inquiry in One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. This temperament sets One Simple Idea apart from recent takedowns of the movement such as Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s bald rejection of the cult-like mandate to treat her breast cancer with a positive attitude, and journalist Oliver Burkeman’s exploration of a “negative path” to happiness in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. And so it is that Horowitz, sans rose-colored glasses, attempts to record the lineage of the American positive thinking movement. More useful as part of these works would have been testimonials.

A Bibliophile's Defense of Physical Books | The New Republic The committed bibliophile is cousin to the obsessive, an easily seduced accumulator frequently struck with frisson. Cram your home with books, and you’re lovingly called a collector; cram it with old newspapers, and you’re derisively called a hoarder. But be honest: The collector is a hoarder, too—a discriminating and noble-minded hoarder, perhaps, but a hoarder just the same. Not long into George Gissing’s 1903 novel The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, you find a scene that no self-respecting bibliophile can fail to forget. In a small bookshop in London, the eponymous narrator spots an eight-volume first edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “To possess those clean-paged quartos,” Ryecroft says, “I would have sold my coat.” A pleasing vista onto the early twentieth-century life of one English writer, Gissing’s autobiographical novel is also an effusive homage to book love. What does it mean when what you own is essential to who you are?

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic | | Notebook Maureen Tkacik [from The Baffler No. 19, 2012] Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?” Omniscience is the operating principle by which everyone understands everyone else in Washington, D.C. Quinn wore a light beige pantsuit with a pink blouse that conjured the seventies.

6 Books to Kick Off Post-College Learning This piece was written by Noodle VP of Operations Adam Shapiro. You went to a good college. Learned a lot. (Certainly paid a lot.) But did you acquire the entirety of knowledge necessary to be a fully functioning contributor to the betterment of society? (Or at least someone who can contribute to the victory of your pub trivia team?) No? With your college education and these books, you'll know everything worth knowing. An Incomplete Education 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't An Incomplete Education answers thousands of questions with incomparable wit, style, and clarity. Mental Floss Presents: Condensed Knowledge A Deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again A great magazine cooked up this hearty helping of brain-food. The Lazy Intellectual Maximum Knowledge, Minimal Effort It's a small-attention-span world out there, and not everyone's interested in paging through lengthy tomes to deepen their intellect. The Philosophy BookBig Ideas Simply Explained

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? | World news | The Observer Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. The sign outside her building says "Clinic". Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. The number of single people has reached a record high. Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. Official alarmism doesn't help. Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. They don't seem concerned.

Story Cartel If He Hollers Let Him Go - by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Discussed: Ohio’s Rolling Farmland, Hippies in Tie-Dye, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kanye West, Oprah, A Simpler Way of Life, Seventy-Year-Old Comparative Literature Professors in Birkenstocks, Negritude,Thurgood Marshall, Black Activism, Patrice Lumumba, Stepin Fetchit, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Hemp Stores, Reuben Sandwiches, Dusk in Yellow Springs Although the city of Dayton is small and has been hit hard by the decline of industry, in Xenia and Yellow Springs the land is green, fecund, and alive, even in the relentless heat of summer. Xenia is three miles from where the first private black college, Wilberforce, opened, in 1856, to meet the educational needs of the growing population of freed blacks that crossed the Ohio River. Yellow Springs, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was initially established as a utopian community in 1825. In 1852, Horace Mann founded Antioch College and served as its president. Chappelle’s comedy found fans in many worlds.

5 Amazing Libraries You Didn't Know You Had Access To Suz Massen, Chief of Public Services at the Frick Art Reference Library was gracious enough to come in and speak to my Intro to Reference class at Pratt Institute this week and I was surprised and excited to find out that the Frick Library is freely available to the public! This got me wondering what other great libraries are out there which I thought were closed and private that actually allow the general public access without having to apply as a researcher. Here are five amazing libraries you might not realize you have access to: 1.) The Main Reading Room in the Library of Congress includes a collection of over 66, 000 volumes, their Computer Catalogue Center, and access to over 800 databases, around 600 of which can only be used on-site at the library. 2.) The Strahov Library located in the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic contains 18,000 religious texts, including many editions of the Bible in numerous languages. 3.) 4.) 5.) Please list others in the comments!!!

Hey Mama by Kiese Laymon A black mother and her son talk about language and love in the South. Image by Jennifer Packer, Mario II, 2012. Courtesy the artist Hey Mama, I’m feeling alone this morning. Hey Kie, I’m tired. Mama, you always say that. You hug yourself by not allowing haters to distract you and by believing in yourself. Oh, lord. Don’t say “ain’t got” Kie. Or what? Or nothing. Nah, I’m serious. It depends on the judges. Mama, how have we been having the same conversation about language for thirty years? You are a grown man, but you’re still a black boy from Mississippi to people that want to hurt you. I have pictures of the look on my grandma’s face the first time she held my first two books. Hiding won’t protect us. I’m not talking about hiding. I don’t even really do Twitter, Mama. My friends tell me you write crazy-talk on that Facebook, and that Twitter. Mama. They’re trying to fix black boys on the cheap, without reckoning with white supremacy. What have you been thinking? I’ve been thinking too much.

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