Categories
Archives
-
-
-
-
Recent Posts
- “As we say in church, I look back on a job well done.” — LaVern Baker
- “Excessive consciousness is a disease.” Happy Birthday, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Each time I see it, I know I accomplished what I set out to do as an actress, that I created a person.” — Bibi Andersson on Persona
- Review: Die My Love (2025)
- “Here in the movies I can be as mean, as wicked as I want to – and all without hurting anybody.” — Claude Rains
- #OTD Open season, 1938
- “I have a fan base that’s super, super loyal.” — Lance Kerwin
- Happy Birthday, Ralph Macchio, or: How one episode of Eight is Enough saved my life
- “A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.” — journalist Ida Tarbell
- “People say I’m a one-note actor, but the way I figure it, those other guys are just looking for that one right note.” — Joel McCrea
Recent Comments
- Gale on For John Wayne’s Birthday: Hondo (1953) at MoMA: John Wayne in 3D
- Pam on The Books: “Rally Round the Flag, Boys!” (Max Shulman)
- Steve on The Books: Ellen Terry & Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence
- sheila on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- Maddy on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- sheila on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- sheila on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- sheila on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- sheila on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- sheila on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- Frances on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- Lyrie on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- mutecypher on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- Melissa Sutherland on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- Maddy on Publication day: The Art and Making of Frankenstein
- Jay on The Books: “Talk To Me Like the Rain … And Let Me Listen” (Tennessee Williams)
- O on “Since when was genius found respectable?” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- sheila on “The other girls weren’t singing quite like I was.” — Wanda Jackson
- sheila on “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” — Carrie Fisher
- sheila on “Acting gives me permission that maybe I don’t give myself in real life.” — Gillian Jacobs
-
Tag Archives: Rebecca West
“Sunlight on a broken column.” — T.S. Eliot
It’s T.S. Eliot’s birthday. Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot’s influence in order to be able to write. His voice, his way, became THE way. (Interestingly enough, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Harold Bloom, Harriet Monroe, Hart Crane, Henry James, Jeanette Winterson, John Dryden, John Milton, Lord Byron, Marianne Moore, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Blake, William Carlos Williams
23 Comments
“I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.” — poet Elinor Wylie
She was born on this day. I am not familiar with the full scope of Elinor Wylie’s work, but what I do know strikes my fancy. Unlike the other free verse modernists of the day, Wylie liked structure and form. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Harold Bloom, poetry, Rebecca West
4 Comments
June 28, 1914: “But if ever a man went anywhere of his own free will, Franz Ferdinand went to Sarajevo.”
June 28, 1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – setting out in their motorcade in Sarajevo that fateful morning, as the assassins, unseen, move into position. Here are two excerpts from Rebecca West’s towering Black Lamb and Grey … Continue reading
“That is no country for old men.” — William Butler Yeats
“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats William Butler … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Camille Paglia, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jeanette Winterson, John Millington Synge, Jonathan Swift, Louis MacNeice, Maud Gonne, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Rebecca West, Richard Ellmann, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Ulysses, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden
15 Comments
“I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” — Rebecca West
It’s her birthday today. It is hard to talk about her without referencing the generations of writers she inspired, all of whom admit their debt. Robert Kaplan is the most open about it (in Balkan Ghosts, which launched his career, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Austria, Balkans, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, France, George Bernard Shaw, Germany, Katherine Mansfield, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, nonfiction, politics, Rebecca West, Roman empire, Russia, Serbia, W.B. Yeats, war, Yugoslavia
21 Comments
“I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” — Jonathan Swift
“When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him.” — Jonathan Swift I don’t have much time to read for pleasure these … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, Charlotte Bronte, Dr. Samuel Johnson, fiction, Gulliver's Travels, H.L. Mencken, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jane Eyre, Jonathan Swift, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats
12 Comments
Happy birthday music hall star Gaby Deslys, with her famous swan bed and controversial cleavage
Born in Marseilles, Marie-Elise-Gabrielle Caire eventually changed her name to Gaby Deslys. She moved to Paris, determined to be an actress or a dancer. She started out in the chorus line, and gradually got bit parts here and there. She … Continue reading
“All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with the spirit of place.” — D.H. Lawrence
“Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it – if he wants a safe seat in the audience – let him read somebody else.” — D.H. Lawrence, 1925 D.H. Lawrence was … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, D.H. Lawrence, England, H.D., Harold Bloom, Joan Didion, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden
3 Comments