Why Should We Read Flannery O’Connor? An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Literature | February 12th, 2019

Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle. –Flannery O’Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable”

Why did Flannery O’Connor write? To convert us? The devout Catholic was not immune to a certain apologetic impulse, or a sense of her own purpose as a vessel for divine truth. Or did she, like Greek tragedians, write to inspire pity and terror? “I don’t have any pretensions,” she once demurred, “to being an Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience.” In any case, what drove her may be a less interesting question than what should drive us to read her.

O’Connor wrote, as most great writers do, because she was compelled to write. What we gain as readers is the deeply unsettling, but also deeply pleasurable experience of recognizing our own flawed humanity in her violent, manipulative characters, none of whom, somehow, are ever beyond redemption. O’Connor’s authorial voice does not judge or condemn but exposes to light the flaws that even, or especially, her most respectable characters would rather hide from themselves and others.

By use of what she called “a reasonable use of the unreasonable” she shows murder, contempt, and deception as shockingly ordinary states of affairs, belying the polite fictions of civility and social niceness. Perhaps no setting could better illuminate the contrasts than the piously violent segregated mid-century American South. O’Connor’s “mastery of the grotesque,” notes the TED-Ed video above by Iseult Gillespie, “and her explorations of the insularity and superstitions of the South led her to be classified as a ‘Southern Gothic’ writer.”

The label may fit superficially, but “her work pushed beyond the purely ridiculous and frightening characteristics associated with the genre to reveal the variety and nuance of human character.” O’Connor herself suggested that what set her apart were “the assumptions… of the central Christian mysteries.” Though we need not read her work this way, she grants, there is “none other by which it could have been written.” We might say that her committed belief in the idea of universal human depravity gave her unique insight into the meaninglessness of class and race distinctions. Few writers have taken the idea as seriously, or approached it with more wicked playfulness.

Why did she write? One reason is she “took pleasure in challenging her readers,” as the video explains. But it was pleasure that she chiefly desired to share. We can vivisect her stories, carve them up and seal them in jars labeled with politics and theologies. Yet “properly, you analyze to enjoy,” she wrote. “It’s equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment.” Lovers of O’Connor know the answer to the question of why we should read her. Because they take as much pleasure in reading her stories as she did in writing them.

Discover this enjoyment on your own. Hear Studs Terkel read her story “Revelation,” hear Estelle Parsons read “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” and hear O’Connor herself read that 1959 classic of her Southern grotesque style, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Flannery O’Connor Renders Her Verdict on Ayn Rand’s Fiction: It’s As “Low As You Can Get”

Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Neil Gaiman Reads His Manifesto on Making Art: Features the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

in Art, Books, Graduation Speech, Life, Literature | February 11th, 2019

I think you’re absolutely allowed several minutes, possibly even half a day to feel very, very sorry for yourself indeed. And then just start making art. — Neil Gaiman

It’s a bit early in the year for commencement speeches, but fortunately for lifelong learners who rely on a steady drip of inspiration and encouragement, author Neil Gaiman excels at putting old wine in new bottles.

He repurposed his keynote address to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts’ Class of 2012 for Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World, a slim volume with hand lettering and illustrations by Chris Riddell.

The above video captures the frequent collaborators appearing together last fall at the East London cultural center Evolutionary Arts Hackney in a fundraiser for English PEN, the founding branch of the worldwide literary defense association. While Gaiman reads aloud in his affable, ever-engaging style, Riddell uses a brush pen to bang out 4 3/4 line drawings, riffing on Gaiman’s metaphors.

While the art-making “rules” Gaiman enumerates herein have been extrapolated and widely disseminated (including, never fear, below), it’s worth having a look at why this event called for a live illustrator.

Leaving aside the fact that each ticket purchaser got a copy of Art Matters, autographed by both men, and a large signed print was auctioned off on behalf of English PEN, Gaiman holds illustrations in high regard.

His work includes picture books, graphic novels, and lightly illustrated novels for teens and young adults, and as a mature reader, he, too, delights in visuals, singling out Frank C. Papé’s drawings for the decidedly “adult” 1920s fantasy novels of James Branch Cabell. (1929’s Something about Eve featured a buxom female character angrily frying up her husband’s manhood for dinner and an erotic entryway that would have thrilled Dr. Seuss.)

In an interview with Waterstones booksellers upon the publication of Neverwhere, another collaboration with Riddell, Gaiman mused:

…a good illustrator, for me, is like going to see a play. You are going to get something brought to life for you by a specific cast in a specific place. That way of illustrating will never happen again. You know, somebody else could illustrate it—there are hundreds of different Alice in Wonderlands.

Which we could certainly take to mean that if Riddell’s style doesn’t grab you the way it grabs Gaiman (and the juries for several prestigious awards) perhaps you should tear your eyes away from the screen and illustrate what you hear in the speech.

Do you need to know how to draw as well as he does? The rules, below, suggest not. We’d love to take a peek inside your sketchbook after.

Embrace the fact that you’re young. Accept that you don’t know what you’re doing. And don’t listen to anyone who says there are rules and limits.
If you know your calling, go there. Stay on track. Keep moving towards it, even if the process takes time and requires sacrifice.
Learn to accept failure. Know that things will go wrong. Then, when things go right, you’ll probably feel like a fraud. It’s normal.
Make mistakes, glorious and fantastic ones. It means that you’re out there doing and trying things.
When life gets hard, as it inevitably will, make good art. Just make good art.
Make your own art, meaning the art that reflects your individuality and personal vision.
You get freelance work if your work is good, if you’re easy to get along with, and if you’re on deadline. Actually you don’t need all three. Just two.
Enjoy the ride. Don’t fret it all away. (That one comes compliments of Stephen King.)
Be wise and accomplish things in your career. If you have problems getting started, pretend you’re someone who is wise, who can get things done. It will help you along.
Leave the world more interesting than it was before.

Read a complete transcript of the speech here.

Hear Neil Gaiman Read a Beautiful, Profound Poem by Ursula K. Le Guin to His Cousin on Her 100th Birthday

18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City tonight as host of Theater of the Apes’ monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

George Orwell’s Essay “British Cookery” is Officially Published 70 Years After It Was Rejected by the British Council (1946)

in Food & Drink, Literature, Politics | February 8th, 2019

Image by BBC, via Wikimedia Commons

Voltaire once joked that Britain had “a hundred religions and only one sauce.” In my experience, that sauce is a curry, which was already a British staple in Voltaire’s time. No doubt he had something much blander in mind. Of course, it’s all hyperbolic fun until someone takes offense, as did George Orwell in 1946, when he wrote, against Voltairean stereotypes, about the misunderstood pleasures of British food. His essay, “British Cookery,” was commissioned by the British Council, but they subsequently deemed that it would be “’unwise to publish,’” reports the Daily Mail, “so soon after the hungry winter of 1946 and wartime rationing.”

Not that it matters much now, but the Council has formally apologized to the deceased Orwell, over 70 years later. Senior policy analyst Alasdair Donaldson explains they are “delighted to make amends” by publishing the essay in full, alongside “the unfortunate rejection letter.” You can read it here at the British Council site. Orwell grants that the British diet is “simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous… with its main emphasis on sugar and animal fats…. Cheap restaurants in Britain are almost invariably bad, while in expensive restaurants the cookery is almost always French, or imitation French.”

Elsewhere, he concedes, “the British are not great eaters of salads.” Indeed, he says, “the two great shortcomings of British cookery are a failure to treat vegetables with due seriousness, and an excessive use of sugar.” He does go on at length, in fact, about what sounds like a national epidemic of sugar addiction. Such lapses of taste are also what we would now label a nutritional emergency. He may seem to grant too much to critics of British cooking. But this is mainly by contrast with spicier, more vegetable-friendly cuisines of the continent and colonies. The kind of cooking he describes makes creatively varied uses of sturdy but limited local resources (except for the sugar).

Orwell’s brutal honesty about British food’s deficiencies makes him sound like a trustworthy guide to its true delights. One of the truths he tells is that “British cookery displays more variety and more originality than foreign visitors are usually ready to allow.” The average visitor encounters British food principally in restaurants, pubs, and hotels, which, “whether cheap or expensive” are not representative of “the diet of the great mass of the people.” This may be said of many regional cuisines. But Orwell is devoted to a native British cooking which had, at the time, almost disappeared after six years of war rationing.

This cooking is rich in roast and cold meats, cheeses, breads, Yorkshire and suet puddings, potatoes and turnips. The British diet is, or was, Orwell writes, eaten by the lower and upper classes alike, under different names and prices. Seasonings are few. “Garlic, for instance, is unknown in British cookery proper.” What stands out is mint, vinegar, butter, dried fruits, jam, and marmalade.

Orwell himself included a marmalade recipe. (A handwritten note reads “Bad recipe! Too much sugar and water.”), which you can see below. Decide for yourself how much sugar to add.

ORANGE MARMALADE

Ingredients:

2 seville oranges

2 sweet oranges (no)

2 lemons (no)

8lbs of preserving sugar

8 pints of water

Method. Wash and dry the fruit. Halve them and squeeze out the juice. Remove some of the pith, then shred the fruit finely. Tie the pips in a muslin bag. Put the strained juice, rind and pips into the water and soak for 48 hours. Place in a large pan and simmer for 1/2 hours until the rind is tender. Leave to stand overnight, then add the sugar and let it dissolve before bringing to the boil. Boil rapidly until a little of the mixture will set into a jelly when placed on a cold plate. Pour into jars which have been heated beforehand, and cover with paper covers.

An increasing number of people are cutting back or quitting nearly every main ingredient in what Orwell describes as authentic British cooking: from meat to dairy to gluten to sugar to suet…. But if we are going to give it a fair shake, he argues, we must try the real thing. Or his version of it anyway. He includes several more recipes: Welsh rarebit, Yorkshire pudding, treacle tart, plum cake, and Christmas pudding.

Orwell’s “British Cookery” wars with itself and comes to terms. He fills each paragraph with frank acknowledgements of British cuisine’s shortcomings, yet he relishes its simple, solid virtues. He writes that “British cookery” is “best studied in private houses, and more particularly in the homes of the middle-class and working-class masses who have not become Europeanized in their tastes.” It’s a kind of cultural nationalism, but perhaps one suggesting those who want others to understand and appreciate a specific kind British culture should invite outsiders in to share a meal.

Try George Orwell’s Recipe for Christmas Pudding, from His Essay “British Cookery” (1945)

George Orwell’s Five Greatest Essays (as Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Hiltzik)

Foodie Alert: New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restaurant Menus (1851–2008)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi, Technology | February 5th, 2019

“What’s the one thing that all great works of science fiction have in common?” asks a 1997 episode of The Net, the BBC’s television series about the possibilities of this much-talked-about new thing called the internet. “They all tried to see into the future, and they all got it wrong. Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: all, to some extent or other, wrong. And there’s another name to add to this list: William Gibson.” But then on strolls Gibson himself, fresh off the writing of Idoru, a novel involving a human who wants to marry a digitally generated Japanese pop star, to grant the interview above.

In it Gibson admits that computers hadn’t gone quite the way he’d imagined thirteen years earlier in his debut novel Neuromancer — but in which he also offers prescient advice about how we should regard new technology even today. “The thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn’t actually like the internet at all!” Gibson says in a more recent interview with Wired. “I didn’t get it right but I said there was going to be something.” Back in the mid-1980s, as he tells the BBC, “there was effectively no internet to extrapolate from. The cyberspace I made up isn’t being used in Neuromancer the way we’re using the internet today.”

Gibson had envisioned a corporate-dominated network infested with “cybernetic car thieves skulking through it attempting to steal tidbits of information.” By the mid-1990s, though, the internet had become a place where “a really talented and determined fifteen-year-old” could create something more compelling than “a multinational entertainment conglomerate might come up with.” He tells the BBC that “what the internet has become is as much a surprise to me as the collapse of the Soviet Union was,” but at that point he had begun to perceive the shape of things to come. “I can’t see why it won’t become completely ubiquitous,” he says, envisioning its evolution “into something like television to the extent that it penetrates every level of society.”

At the same time, “it doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists” — still very much a concern in certain parts of the world — and even the most promising technologies don’t merit our uncritical embrace. “I think we should respect the power of technology and try to fear it in a rational way,” he says. “The only appropriate response” is to give in to neither technophobia nor technophilia, but “to teach ourselves to be absolutely ambivalent about them and imagine their most inadvertent side effects,” the side effects “that tend to get us” — not to mention the ones that make the best plot elements. Seeing as how we now live in a world where marriage to synthetic Japanese idols has become a possibility, among other developments seemingly pulled from the pages of Gibson’s novels, we would do well to heed even these decades-old words of advice about his main subject.

via Big Think

How Chris Marker’s Radical SciFi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyberpunk Prophet William Gibson

Cyberpunk: 1990 Documentary Featuring William Gibson & Timothy Leary Introduces the Cyberpunk Culture

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

in Literature, Technology, Theatre | January 29th, 2019

Often compared to The Tempest, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame may have as much of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in it, though the author was unwilling to acknowledge the influence to Theodor Adorno. Beckett’s central character, the blind, aged Hamm, spends all of his time in a throne haranguing the other three, in a gloomy place, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkinson wrote, “somewhere between life and death.” Hamm might have been the Danish prince grown old and bitter, left with nothing but what Beckett called Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.”

In any case, Hamlet has long been thought of as a prototype of the absurd, a play where little happens because its protagonist is too haunted to have relationships with the living or make decisions, a condition he complains about in scene after scene. Trauma, existential paralysis, crippling doubt punctuated by fits of rage and violence—these are the makings of the 20th century anti-hero. If the play has a classical hero, a man of action and resolve, it is, absurdly, a dead man, Hamlet’s father, who testily declares his purpose in his final speech, “to whet thy almost blunted purpose.”

Should Hamlet be turned into an immersive VR and augmented reality experience, allowing viewers to inhabit a character’s point of view, they might not opt to see things as the moody, depressive, speechifying prince. In Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, we instead get to inhabit the ghost, who only appears in the play a handful of times but still fills every scene with his glowering presence. The 60-minute VR “modern adaptation” is a co-production of Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and Google.

“Both extremely long by the standards of virtual reality and extremely short by the standards of Hamlet,” writes Elizabeth Harris at The New York Times, the film “can be watched in 3‑D using a V.R. headset or in two dimensions on a desktop or mobile device” (see it above). On a vast, darkened set cluttered with fine but shabby furnishings in heaps, glowing lamps, a bathtub, and a car, actors perform condensed scenes while we, as ghost, freely roam about, viewing the action in three dimensions, a device intended to give the viewer “a sense of agency and urgency as an omniscient observer, guide and participant,” the production notes.

The film’s creators, Harris writes, “hope that beyond the fresh experience it provides, it will also serve as a tool to bring great theater to wider audiences—and bring bigger audiences to theater.” It may have that effect, though one might feel it privileges digital effects over the truly immersive, full experience of Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.” It’s hard to think the “great Shakespearean” Beckett would approve, but he found little to his liking.

Younger, less cantankerous audiences might, however. “Many young people’s first experience of Shakespeare is not all that great,” says director Steven Maler. Hamlet 360 allows the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company to “scale up” their mission to “truly democratize Shakespeare and theater.” Experience it for yourself above or on YouTube and learn more at Boston’s WGBH, who recently premiered the film. The actors “deliver powerful performances,” the PBS station writes, “that bring the play forward to today, making it both current and timeless.”

via The New York Times

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Performing Arts, From the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Paris Opera Ballet

30 Days of Shakespeare: One Reading of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Public Library, on the 400th Anniversary of His Death

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hear Neil Gaiman Read a Beautiful, Profound Poem by Ursula K. Le Guin to His Cousin on Her 100th Birthday

in Life, Literature, Poetry | January 28th, 2019

It’s quite profound, isn’t it? — Helen Fagin, aged 100

Every time I open my laptop to discover a friend posting a vintage photo of their parent as a beaming bride or saucy sailor boy in lush black and white or gold-tinged Kodachrome, I know the deal.

Another elder has left the building.

With luck, I’ll have at least two or three decades before my kids start sniffing around in my shoe boxes of old snapshots.

In the meantime, I’ll wonder how much of the emotion that’s packed into those memorial postings gets expressed to the subject in the days leading up to their final exit.

Seems like most of us pussyfoot around the obvious until it’s too late.

There are, of course, medical situations that force us to acknowledge in a loved one’s presence the abyss in their immediate future, but otherwise, Western tradition has positioned us to shy away from those sorts of discussions.

Perhaps our loved ones prefer it that way.

Perhaps we do too.

It’s clear that author Neil Gaiman enjoys a special relationship with his 100-year-old cousin, Helen Fagin, a Holocaust survivor and professor of literature.

He has shared memories of her with those attending his public appearances and in honor of World Refugee Day.

His wife, musician Amanda Palmer, included a verse about Helen’s 98th birthday in her song “A Mother’s Confession,” below, fleshing out the lyrics with footnotes on her blog.

In celebration of Helen’s centenary, Palmer asked Brain Picking’s Maria Popova to recommend a poem that Gaiman could read aloud during another in-person birthday visit.

Popova settled on “How It Seems To Me,” a late-in-life poem by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, a close friend of Gaiman’s who died in January of 2018, 12 years shy of her own centenary:

HOW IT SEEMS TO ME

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul commingles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be.

Then slow time hardens self to stone

while ever lightening the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vastness and dissolve in light,

the long light after time.

It’s a hell of a hundredth birthday gift, though far from a one-size-fits all proposition.

Perhaps when you are a nonagenarian, you’d rather the young people err on the side of tradition with a comfy new robe.

There are octogenarian birthday boys and girls who’d pick an African violet over the misty self, tricky to keep alive though they may be.

As filmed by Palmer, Helen seemed to receive the gift in the spirit it was intended. Life equipped her for it.

via Brain Pickings

18 Stories & Novels by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Readings by Neil Himself

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City in February as host of Theater of the Apes book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Books That Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)

in Books, Literature | January 11th, 2019

Samuel Beckett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wikimedia Commons

Clad in a black turtleneck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beckett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of modernism. After the 1955 premiere of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (watch him stage a performance here), Kenneth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more austere, bleak and despairing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.

An intensely private man, he managed to mesmerize the public even as he turned away from the limelight. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 (after being rejected in 1968), his wife Suzanne, fearing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “catastrophe.”

A recently published collection of his letters from 1941–1956, the period leading up to his international success with his play Waiting for Godot, casts some light on at least one corner of the man’s private life – what books were piling up on his bed stand. Below is an annotated list of what he was reading during that time. Not surprisingly, he really dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is important.” He dismisses Agatha Christie’s Crooked House as “very tired Christie” but praises Around the World in 80 Days: “It is lively stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

You can see the full list below. It was originally published online by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Books with an asterisk next to the title can be found in our collection of 700 Free eBooks.

Andromaque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days* by Jules Verne: “It is lively stuff.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest* by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame* by Victor Hugo

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux

Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is important.”

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

La 628-E8* by Octave Mirbeau: “Damned good piece of work.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in March, 2015.

via Cambridge University Press

Monsterpiece Theater Presents Waiting for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beckett

Rare Audio: Samuel Beckett Reads Two Poems From His Novel Watt

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Actress Lucy Lawless Performs the Proto-Feminist Comedy “Lysistrata” for The Partially Examined Life Podcast

in Literature, Music, Podcasts | January 9th, 2019

Remember Lucy, aka Xena the Warrior Princess, perhaps better known to younger folks as Ron Swanson’s (eventual) wife on Parks and Recreation? Before her career re-launched via major roles on Spartacus, Salem, and Ash vs. Evil Dead, she took some time off to study philosophy and so got involved with The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast, which is coming up on its 10th birthday and has now been downloaded more than 25 million times.

She has now joined the gang for cold-read on-air performances with discussions of Sartre’s No Exit, Sophocles’s Antigone, and most recently Aristophanes’s still-funny proto-feminist comedy Lysistrata. For the discussion of this last, she was joined by fellow cast member Emily Perkins (she played the little girl on the 1990 TV version of Stephen King’s “IT”) to hash through whether this story of stopping war through a sex-strike is actually feminist or not, and how it relates to modern politics. (For another take on this, see Spike Lee’s 2015 adaptation of the story for the film Chi-Raq.)

And as a present to bring you into the New Year, she provided lead vocals on a new song by PEL host Mark Linsenmayer about the funky ways women can be put on a pedestal, projected upon, unloaded upon, and otherwise not treated as quite human despite the intention to provide affection. Stream it right below. And read the lyrics and get more information on bandcamp.com.

Pablo Picasso’s Tender Illustrations For Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1934)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: A BBC Adaptation Starring Harold Pinter (1964)

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Why Should We Read Flannery O’Connor? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Neil Gaiman Reads His Manifesto on Making Art: Features the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

George Orwell’s Essay “British Cookery” is Officially Published 70 Years After It Was Rejected by the British Council (1946)

Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World

Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

Hear Neil Gaiman Read a Beautiful, Profound Poem by Ursula K. Le Guin to His Cousin on Her 100th Birthday

The Books That Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)

Actress Lucy Lawless Performs the Proto-Feminist Comedy “Lysistrata” for The Partially Examined Life Podcast

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