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- “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.” — poet/engraver/visionary William Blake
- “You can’t dance in a long dress.” — Tina Turner
- Happy Birthday, Emir Kusturica
- “What’s the difference between an exile and an expatriate? It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.” — Irish poet Derek Mahon
- Posters in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (2023)
- “[I wish] to trace the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional.” — George Eliot
- “There were so many things I wanted to say, stream-of-consciousness things, designs and patterns while listening to music. I felt I might be able to say [them] if I had an unending canvas.” — pioneering experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute
- The (Fractured) Male Gaze
- “Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.” — Jodie Foster
- Happy Birthday, Graham Parker
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- Chris on “There were so many things I wanted to say, stream-of-consciousness things, designs and patterns while listening to music. I felt I might be able to say [them] if I had an unending canvas.” — pioneering experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute
- Mitch Berg on “What’s the difference between an exile and an expatriate? It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.” — Irish poet Derek Mahon
- Sean Giere on “I don’t like being approached by people who look at me too intensely, who needed something from me that I didn’t have. I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair
- Jessie on Review: May December (2023)
- Jessie on Review: Holy Frit (2023)
- Jessie on She’s not a bad person. Honest she isn’t: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s The Killer
- Ginny SH on “There’s nothing you can tell me about guilt.” — Martin Scorsese
- Clary on The (Fractured) Male Gaze
- sheila on “I don’t like being approached by people who look at me too intensely, who needed something from me that I didn’t have. I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair
- SeanGiere on “I don’t like being approached by people who look at me too intensely, who needed something from me that I didn’t have. I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair
- sheila on She’s not a bad person. Honest she isn’t: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s The Killer
- Melissa Sutherland on She’s not a bad person. Honest she isn’t: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s The Killer
- sheila on “There’s nothing you can tell me about guilt.” — Martin Scorsese
- sheila on “There’s nothing you can tell me about guilt.” — Martin Scorsese
- sheila on Review: May December (2023)
- sheila on Talking 1953 movies with Jason Bailey and Mike Hull: A Very Good Year podcast
- sheila on Review: Holy Frit (2023)
- sheila on “Given as much to the gutter as to the gods” — Nick Tosches
- sheila on She’s not a bad person. Honest she isn’t: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s The Killer
- sheila on She’s not a bad person. Honest she isn’t: Kerry O’Malley in David Fincher’s The Killer
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Tag Archives: H.L. Mencken
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” — H.L. Mencken
“You know what H.L. Mencken said one time about religious people? He said he’d been greatly misunderstood. He said he didn’t hate them. He simply found them comical.” – Kurt Vonnegut Today is the birthday of one of the greatest … Continue reading
“Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, England, Ernest Hemingway, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.L. Mencken, Harold Bloom, John Keats, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams
14 Comments
“If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.” — poet Countee Cullen
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing! — Countee Cullen It’s his birthday today. Cullen is often compared to Langston Hughes (my post on Hughes here), seems a little unfair, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged H.L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, poetry
8 Comments
“When I aim at praise, they say I bite.” — Alexander Pope
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! -— Alexander Pope, from “Eloisa to Abelard” Alexander Pope was born on this day in 1688. He was so huge … Continue reading
Posted in On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Christopher Smart, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Eminem, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, H.L. Mencken, Jonathan Swift, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, poetry, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Jefferson, William Blake, William Wordsworth
2 Comments
“Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.” — poet Anne Spencer
Anne Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer was yet another poet-librarian, like Dudley Randall, and many others. It was part of a tradition, one worthy of more study (there are websites devoted to it!). As the daughter of a librarian, I am … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Anne Spencer, H.L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, poetry
2 Comments
2018 Books Read
2018 Books Read 1. Tamburlaine, Part 1, by Christopher Marlowe I finished 2017 with Paradise Lost, in the mood to continue with rigorous challenging poetry. I decided to read the complete plays of Christopher Marlowe (re-read in most cases). The … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce
Tagged Annie Proulx, books read, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Marlowe, Clifford Odets, Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, fiction, Finnegans Wake, friends, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Ian McEwan, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Kirov, nonfiction, Olivia Laing, Pauline Kael, poetry, Poland, politics, Robert Kaplan, Romania, Ron Chernow, Russia, Ryszard Kapuściński, Stalin, Tom Wolfe, true crime, Truman Capote, Victor Serge
7 Comments
Bookshelf Tour #10
An extremely dog-eared section of my library. These books are rarely on the shelf since I dip into them so often. — The mighty Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker, but also so much more. Her dance writing … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged bookshelves, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Joan Acocella, Lester Bangs, William Hazlitt
4 Comments
2013 Books Read
It’s been a hell of a year. Devastating as well as redemptive. I started it out in Memphis, and end it here in New Jersey. And now my new niece Pearl has arrived! It’s been both a busy year as … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Anne Fadiman, Annie Proulx, Arthur Koestler, Balkans, books read, Darkness at Noon, Edvard Radzinsky, Elinor Lipman, George Eliot, H.L. Mencken, Henry James, Herman Melville, J.D. Salinger, Jeanette Winterson, Joan Acocella, Joan Didion, John Banville, Joseph Heller, Joshua Ferris, Lester Bangs, Lorrie Moore, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, Russia, Sam Cooke, Shakespeare, Tana French, Thomas Carlyle, Victor Serge
33 Comments