Tag: literature

Do Not Be Afraid

I first read Heaney as an undergrad at Wofford College in a literature class from Prof. Dooley… I was immediately transfixed by his writing (and his story as a linguist that comes through in all that he wrote). I was fortunate enough to attend a reading he did at Yale’s Battell Chapel while I was studying in my first year at Yale Div in October of 2000.

Being at Yale, of all places (for a country bumpkin from rural South Carolina), hearing one of the great poets read his own work on a cold and snowy October evening was something like a theophany. I certainly understood then the concept of “do not be afraid” and it has sat with me ever since when I read Heaney, which I try to do often (as should you)…

Noli Timere: Seamus Heaney, Translation, and a Wall in Dublin | MultiLingual:

Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and playwright, passed away in Dublin on 30 August, 2013, after a short illness. His last words, sent by text message to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died, were Noli timere (Latin for Do not be afraid). I took the photograph below in Dublin, a short walk from my home, capturing his last words in tribute.

Orbital

I finally got around to picking up Orbital and can’t wait to read it in the next few weeks. This line with the author Samantha Harvey’s interview in The Guardian stuck out to me as something that very few of us discuss openly, but is certainly a reality of modernity…

‘I’m so not an astronaut!’ Samantha Harvey on her Booker-winning space novel – and the anxiety that drove it | Books | The Guardian:

“I pretty much hit 40 and became anxious,” she says. “I don’t know why. I think maybe I just decided it was time to have some sort of crisis.” Suddenly, she could no longer sleep. “I was finding the world kind of abrasive. Everything was too noisy and too busy and too huge.”

“Maybe we need more middle-brow in our culture mix today.”

Amen…

How I Learned About Great Literature from Comic Books:

Opinion leaders nowadays would scorn these graphic novels. They would justifiably point out the narrowness of canon enshrined in their garish pages (even though, as the recurring presence of Afro-French author Dumas indicates, there was more range here than you might assume).

They would deride the corny images, loaded with anachronisms and stereotypes. And they would probably mock the middle-class aspirations of parents who bought these ten-cent classics for their children. It’s all so embarrassingly middle-brow.

But maybe we need more middle-brow in our culture mix today.

Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?

Fun read…

Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?:

The very first children’s books in English were instruction manuals for good behaviour. One of the earliest, The Babees Book, from around 1475, is a list of instructions: ‘Your nose, your teeth, your nails, from picking keep.’ It’s striking how many of the early children’s conduct manuals focused on nose-picking.

Maya Angelou’s Partnership with Hallmark

I’d forgotten about this completely… fascinating read:

Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate and a fellow Random House writer, questioned Angelou’s partnership with Hallmark, the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States and, among the literati, commonly associated with trite expressions.

“It lowers the understanding of what poetry actually can do,” Collins said to the Associated Press. “Hallmark cards has always been a common phrase to describe verse that is really less than poetry because it is sentimental and unoriginal.”

Source: Why Maya Angelou Partnered with Hallmark | The National Endowment for the Humanities