TODAY: In 1943, Nikki Giovanni is born. “How is it that blindness, in a largely ocular-centric culture such as ours, holds such (metaphorical) power?” M. Leona Godin considers Homer, Borges, and the lived reality of the blind writer. | Lit Hub Rebecca Rego Barry digs through Marlon Brando’s personal library—not decorative objects but true reading
Literature
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s landmark 1922 poem, is full of rich symbolism. But its symbolism is also highly ambiguous, making it difficult to explain the poem by appealing to a particular symbol or image alone. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important symbols in The Waste Land, and what
My nerves felt short-circuited, incapable of the sensory overload I have experienced when holding my newborn son for the first time or carving up powder on a black diamond run at Mt. Bachelor or standing before Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm at the Met or listening to the Stones play “Sympathy for the Devil” live in San
What do the phrases ‘salt of the earth’, ‘light of the world’, ‘God and mammon’, ‘blessed are the meek’, ‘turn the other cheek’, and ‘pearls before swine’ all have in common? Along with another now ubiquitous expressions, they all originate in the same place: the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ teachings to his followers which
The Longest Year: 2020+ is a collection of visual and written essays on 2020, a pivotal year that shifted our way of experiencing the world. In most publications, images work in service to words—here they work in tandem. // In the fifth in the series Mitchell S. Jackson considers photographer Darryl DeAngelo Terrell’s series, Project
‘The Circular Ruins’, first published in 1940, is one of the most richly symbolic short stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. One of his most powerful and suggestive explorations of the nature of reality and dreams, ‘The Circular Ruins’ can variously be interpreted as a story about artistic creation or about the world,
Big Man called me over to the cell bars and whispered that he had that grandaddy skunkweed. I turned away in reflex. Wanting nothing more than to tell him to fire it up. But every time I get loaded I end up sitting in self-disgust, feeling guilty, trying to will myself out of the euphoria.
Previously, we’ve gathered together some of the best poems about the colour red and some of the best poems about the colour white. But what about if we put those two colours together? What are the best poems about the colour pink, whether they’re poems about pink flowers, being ‘in the pink’, or other ‘pink’
TODAY: In 1910, William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, dies at 47. “Then the devastating Tulsa Disaster burst upon us, blowing to atoms ideas and ideals no less than mere material evidence of our civilization.” Read Mary E. Jones Parrish’s account of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. | Lit Hub History Jess McHugh
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ‘April is the cruellest month’ – the five words which don’t, strictly speaking, constitute the ‘first line’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, as I have previously discussed –
June 4, 2021, 1:03pm Every time a Democratic president is in office, conservative publishing houses rush to capitalize on the opportunity, publishing political screeds against the president in the hopes of a best-seller. It’s a rule of thumb at this point—at least, until this year. According to The Atlantic, right-wing publishing houses have minimal interest
The Lord’s Prayer has been called, by the authors of the Dictionary of the Bible, a ‘simple act of worship’. But there are a number of curious aspects of the Lord’s Prayer which are worth analysing closely, because they are less straightforward. There is also the not-inconsiderable issue that there are, in fact, two Lord’s
TODAY: In 1928, Karola Ruth Westheimer, better known as Dr. Ruth, is born. “It’s hard if not impossible to see the Black and brown faces in Terrell’s cyanotype portrait project and not muse on those years that my survival was steeped in precarity.” Mitchell S. Jackson reflects on Darryl DeAngelo Terrell’s photography in the latest installment of
‘A Hanging’ is a short essay by George Orwell. However, to this simple statement we should probably add two caveats. One is the difficulty of categorisation, when Orwell himself described this ‘essay’ as ‘a story’, suggesting it was fiction rather than an account of a real-life event. The other caveat is about the by-line under
June 3, 2021, 3:53pm Why, then the world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open. Dust off your Elizabethan collars and prepare for some midsummer madness, Bardolators (yes, that is the correct term), because beloved Big Apple institution Shakespeare in the Park (a theatrical program that has staged productions of the Big Willie’s plays
Along with George Orwell, it was perhaps Franz Kafka (1883-1924) who did the most to diagnose the political and existential malaise of the twentieth century. And just as we use the word ‘Orwellian’ for so many aspects of modern-day life, from policing speech to the use of video surveillance, so ‘Kafkaesque’ has become synonymous with
TODAY: In 1964, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, the first Finnish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, dies. “You had to believe the people who sent you had a clue. You had to believe they cared.” Read Frank Light’s dispatches from the “reconstruction” of Afghanistan, circa 2004. | Lit Hub Politics Natasha Trethewey considers
Although many people can list some if not all of the rules commonly known as the ‘Ten Commandments’, it may come as a surprise to many non-Christians – and perhaps even to a fair few Christians – that nowhere in the Bible does a definitive list of ‘the Ten Commandments’ actually appear. Actually, that’s not