Thursday, April 28, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Have you read a good book lately?
"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."
- Rene Descartes
- Rene Descartes
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Culture of '60's
Edited by Rian Hughes, 'Lifestyle Illustration of the 60s' is an assemblage of magazine artwork from 1960 to1969. Over 1,000 retouched images of stylistically diverse illustrations reveal the ranging social aspirations from the cultural decade of sexual freedom and political optimism.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Thoughtful Inscription
"Quod petis, hic est, Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus."
('Whatever you seek is here, in this remote place, if only you have a good firm mind.')
Auchinleck House
Perhaps the finest example of an eighteenth-century country villa to survive in Scotland, Auchinleck House is where the renowned biographer James Boswell indulged his penchant for ‘old laird and family ideas’.
('Whatever you seek is here, in this remote place, if only you have a good firm mind.')
Auchinleck House
Perhaps the finest example of an eighteenth-century country villa to survive in Scotland, Auchinleck House is where the renowned biographer James Boswell indulged his penchant for ‘old laird and family ideas’.
Built around 1760 by Boswell’s father Lord Auchinleck, its architect is unknown; it seems likely that Lord Auchinleck himself had a hand in the neo-Classical design, perhaps influenced by the Adam brothers. Boswell’s friend and mentor Dr. Samuel Johnson famously argued over politics with Lord Auchinleck in the library here, when they visited at the end of their tour of the Hebrides in 1773.
Landmark Trust has restored not only the house with its magnificent library looking across to Arran, but also the pavilions, the obelisks and the great bridge across the Dippol Burn, on whose picturesque banks are an ice-house and grotto.
Visitors to the house pass beneath an extract, chosen from Horace by Lord Auchinleck, carved into the pediment:
Visitors to the house pass beneath an extract, chosen from Horace by Lord Auchinleck, carved into the pediment:
Quod petis, hic est, Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus
(‘Whatever you seek is here, in this remote place, if only you have a good firm mind’).
Source:
Friday, April 8, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Henry 3 interview in 9 parts
aded by speakvisual on Sep 11, 2010
This is a rare interview conducted in New York in 1956 with author Henry Miller and his friend Ben Grauer engaged in a lengthy, candid and insightful discussion about his life, his work and what it means to live the true life of the spirit.
This is a rare interview conducted in New York in 1956 with author Henry Miller and his friend Ben Grauer engaged in a lengthy, candid and insightful discussion about his life, his work and what it means to live the true life of the spirit.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Daily Prague: Charles Bridge in winter.
Daily Prague: Charles Bridge in winter.: " By MICK RUD It's finally the first sunny weekend in Prague. So, we decided to remember the winter days. Here are a few shots of..."
Bridge
Castle
Julia, girl of the day.
Bridge
Castle
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Charley (edit later)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/books/steinbecks-travels-with-charley-gets-a-fact-checking.html?pagewanted=all
A Reality Check for Steinbeck and Charley
By CHARLES McGRATH
In the fall of 1960 an ailing, out-of-sorts John Steinbeck, pretty much depleted as a novelist, decided that his problem was he had lost touch with America. He outfitted a three-quarter-ton pickup truck as a sort of land yacht and set off from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with his French poodle, Charley, to drive cross-country. The idea was that he would travel alone, stay at campgrounds and reconnect himself with the country by talking to the locals he met along the way.
Noah Berger for The New York Times
The camper that John Steinbeck drove across the United States in 1960.
Steinbeck’s book-length account of his journey, “Travels With Charley: In Search of America,” published in 1962, was generally well reviewed and became a best-seller. It remains in print, regarded by some as a classic of American travel writing. Almost from the beginning, though, a few readers pointed out that many of the conversations in the book had a stagey, wooden quality, not unlike the dialogue in Steinbeck’s fiction.
Early on in the book, for example, Steinbeck has a New England farmer talking in folksy terms about Nikita S. Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding (or -brandishing, depending on whom you ask) speech at the United Nations weeks before Khrushchev actually visited the United Nations. A particularly unlikely encounter occurs at a campsite near Alice, N.D., where a Shakespearean actor, mistaking Steinbeck for a fellow thespian, greets him with a sweeping bow, saying, “I see you are of the profession,” and then proceeds to talk about John Gielgud.
Even Steinbeck’s son John said he was convinced that his father never talked to many of the people he wrote about, and added, “He just sat in his camper and wrote all that [expletive].”
In the current issue of the libertarian monthly Reason, Bill Steigerwald, a former journalist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes that not only is the meeting with the actor made up, but on the evening in question, Oct. 12, Steinbeck wasn’t anywhere near Alice. He was in Beach, N.D., more than 300 miles to the west, staying not in the camper but in a motel.
According to Mr. Steigerwald, Steinbeck stayed in motels a lot — when he wasn’t at luxury hotels. On a night when he supposedly camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., Steinbeck was actually at the Spalding Inn, a hotel so fancy that he had to borrow a coat and tie to eat in the dining room.
Nor was Steinbeck alone that much. On more than half of his trip he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine. All told Mr. Steigerwald estimates that Steinbeck spent no more than a couple of nights in the camper itself, and says, “Virtually nothing he wrote in ‘Charley’ about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”
The Reason article is a distillation of a blog Mr. Steigerwald wrote for The Post-Gazette for several weeks in 2010 while retracing Steinbeck’s journey in a leased Toyota Rav4. And he did sleep in the car, he pointed out in a recent phone interview. He stopped frequently in Wal-Mart parking lots, and once he parked in a car dealer’s lot, impersonating a used car. Mr. Steigerwald insisted that he began his project not intending to expose Steinbeck but to commemorate his journey and to write a book about how the United States had changed in 50 years.
“I didn’t set out to blow the whistle,” he said. “As a libertarian, I kind of like the old guy. He liked guns; he liked property rights.”
In the published version of “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck’s itinerary is often hard to follow, so Mr. Steigerwald created a timeline, drawing on newspaper accounts, biographies and Steinbeck’s letters, to determine where Steinbeck was on such and such a date. Discrepancies with the book’s account immediately popped up. Mr. Steigerwald also consulted the handwritten first draft of “Travels With Charley” — now at the Morgan Library & Museum — where Steinbeck’s wife is a much more frequent presence than she is in the final text.
“This is just grunt journalism,” Mr. Steigerwald said of his research methods. “Anyone with a library card and a skeptical gene in his body could do what I did.”
He added that he was a little surprised that his findings hadn’t made more of a ripple among Steinbeck scholars: “ ‘Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you?” He added, “If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?”
Susan Shillinglaw, who teaches English at San Jose State University and is a scholar in residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif., said in a phone interview: “Any writer has the right to shape materials, and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out. That doesn’t make the book a lie.”
Talking about the authenticity of the characters in “Travels With Charley,” she said, “Whether or not Steinbeck met that actor where he says he did, he could have met such a figure at some point in his life. And perhaps he enhanced some of the anecdotes with the waitress. Does it really matter that much?”
Jay Parini, the author of a 1995 biography of Steinbeck who wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of “Travels With Charley,” said he was surprised to learn that Elaine Steinbeck had accompanied her husband on so much of the trip. “I spent several hours with Elaine, and she never mentioned that,” he added. “She made a big deal about how painful it was for them to be separated and how she insisted that he take the dog along for company.”
About the book’s accuracy he said: “I have always assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. He probably wasn’t using a tape recorder. But I still feel there’s an authenticity there.”
He added, talking about Mr. Steigerwald’s discoveries: “Does this shake my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the techniques of a fiction writer. Why has this book stayed in the American imagination, unlike, for example, Michael Harrington’s ‘The Other America,’ which came out at the same time?”
In 2010, Bill Barich published “Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America,” an account of his own Steigerwald-like journey, in which he came to some more upbeat conclusions than Steinbeck had. “I’m fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book,” he said recently. “The dialogue is so wooden.”
He added: “Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson.”
In some ways, Mr. Barich went on, Steinbeck’s view of America was much darker than he let on in the book. “The die was probably cast long before he hit the road,” he said, “and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country. His perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that.”
A Reality Check for Steinbeck and Charley
By CHARLES McGRATH
In the fall of 1960 an ailing, out-of-sorts John Steinbeck, pretty much depleted as a novelist, decided that his problem was he had lost touch with America. He outfitted a three-quarter-ton pickup truck as a sort of land yacht and set off from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with his French poodle, Charley, to drive cross-country. The idea was that he would travel alone, stay at campgrounds and reconnect himself with the country by talking to the locals he met along the way.
Noah Berger for The New York Times
The camper that John Steinbeck drove across the United States in 1960.
Steinbeck’s book-length account of his journey, “Travels With Charley: In Search of America,” published in 1962, was generally well reviewed and became a best-seller. It remains in print, regarded by some as a classic of American travel writing. Almost from the beginning, though, a few readers pointed out that many of the conversations in the book had a stagey, wooden quality, not unlike the dialogue in Steinbeck’s fiction.
Early on in the book, for example, Steinbeck has a New England farmer talking in folksy terms about Nikita S. Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding (or -brandishing, depending on whom you ask) speech at the United Nations weeks before Khrushchev actually visited the United Nations. A particularly unlikely encounter occurs at a campsite near Alice, N.D., where a Shakespearean actor, mistaking Steinbeck for a fellow thespian, greets him with a sweeping bow, saying, “I see you are of the profession,” and then proceeds to talk about John Gielgud.
Even Steinbeck’s son John said he was convinced that his father never talked to many of the people he wrote about, and added, “He just sat in his camper and wrote all that [expletive].”
In the current issue of the libertarian monthly Reason, Bill Steigerwald, a former journalist for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes that not only is the meeting with the actor made up, but on the evening in question, Oct. 12, Steinbeck wasn’t anywhere near Alice. He was in Beach, N.D., more than 300 miles to the west, staying not in the camper but in a motel.
According to Mr. Steigerwald, Steinbeck stayed in motels a lot — when he wasn’t at luxury hotels. On a night when he supposedly camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., Steinbeck was actually at the Spalding Inn, a hotel so fancy that he had to borrow a coat and tie to eat in the dining room.
Nor was Steinbeck alone that much. On more than half of his trip he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine. All told Mr. Steigerwald estimates that Steinbeck spent no more than a couple of nights in the camper itself, and says, “Virtually nothing he wrote in ‘Charley’ about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”
The Reason article is a distillation of a blog Mr. Steigerwald wrote for The Post-Gazette for several weeks in 2010 while retracing Steinbeck’s journey in a leased Toyota Rav4. And he did sleep in the car, he pointed out in a recent phone interview. He stopped frequently in Wal-Mart parking lots, and once he parked in a car dealer’s lot, impersonating a used car. Mr. Steigerwald insisted that he began his project not intending to expose Steinbeck but to commemorate his journey and to write a book about how the United States had changed in 50 years.
“I didn’t set out to blow the whistle,” he said. “As a libertarian, I kind of like the old guy. He liked guns; he liked property rights.”
In the published version of “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck’s itinerary is often hard to follow, so Mr. Steigerwald created a timeline, drawing on newspaper accounts, biographies and Steinbeck’s letters, to determine where Steinbeck was on such and such a date. Discrepancies with the book’s account immediately popped up. Mr. Steigerwald also consulted the handwritten first draft of “Travels With Charley” — now at the Morgan Library & Museum — where Steinbeck’s wife is a much more frequent presence than she is in the final text.
“This is just grunt journalism,” Mr. Steigerwald said of his research methods. “Anyone with a library card and a skeptical gene in his body could do what I did.”
He added that he was a little surprised that his findings hadn’t made more of a ripple among Steinbeck scholars: “ ‘Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you?” He added, “If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?”
Susan Shillinglaw, who teaches English at San Jose State University and is a scholar in residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif., said in a phone interview: “Any writer has the right to shape materials, and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out. That doesn’t make the book a lie.”
Talking about the authenticity of the characters in “Travels With Charley,” she said, “Whether or not Steinbeck met that actor where he says he did, he could have met such a figure at some point in his life. And perhaps he enhanced some of the anecdotes with the waitress. Does it really matter that much?”
Jay Parini, the author of a 1995 biography of Steinbeck who wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of “Travels With Charley,” said he was surprised to learn that Elaine Steinbeck had accompanied her husband on so much of the trip. “I spent several hours with Elaine, and she never mentioned that,” he added. “She made a big deal about how painful it was for them to be separated and how she insisted that he take the dog along for company.”
About the book’s accuracy he said: “I have always assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. He probably wasn’t using a tape recorder. But I still feel there’s an authenticity there.”
He added, talking about Mr. Steigerwald’s discoveries: “Does this shake my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the techniques of a fiction writer. Why has this book stayed in the American imagination, unlike, for example, Michael Harrington’s ‘The Other America,’ which came out at the same time?”
In 2010, Bill Barich published “Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America,” an account of his own Steigerwald-like journey, in which he came to some more upbeat conclusions than Steinbeck had. “I’m fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book,” he said recently. “The dialogue is so wooden.”
He added: “Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson.”
In some ways, Mr. Barich went on, Steinbeck’s view of America was much darker than he let on in the book. “The die was probably cast long before he hit the road,” he said, “and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country. His perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that.”
Attitude of Gratitude
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." - Epicurus |
Monday, April 4, 2011
Penguin Goes Shopping
This 10-year-old King Penguin was rescued from a fisherman's line and refused to leave after he was healed. He was adopted by a family in a small town in Japan and became a beloved pet who has his own personal air-conditioned cold room. Lala is so smart - he walks to the fish store with his little backpack to shop for fresh fish every day. You are gonna love this little video!
Movie: 'Adam' mentions a book
Pretending to Be Normal: Living With Asperger's Syndrome [Paperback]
Liane Holliday Willey (Author), Tony Attwood (Foreword)
From Kirkus Reviews
Asperger's Syndrome is one of the constellation of conditions known as autism. As both Willey and her young daughter have AS, her life story provides a startling look at how those with the syndrome experience the world. Willey grew up knowing only that she was somehow different, extremely intelligent, and extremely quirkybut accepted and valuedseems to have been the assessment of her parents, physicians, and others early in her life. Her peculiaritiesinability to find her way in unfamiliar places, and extreme aversion to people coming too close to her, to noise, to confusionbecame a devastating issue when she left home for the unfamiliar environment of college. From then on, Willey struggled mightily until she reached the safe haven of marriage to an outstandingly sympathetic partner, a fulfilling job teaching college, and motherhood. When her own daughter, one of twins, was diagnosed as an infant with Asperger's Syndrome, Willey immediately recognized herself: ``social action impairments, narrow interests, an insistence on repetitive routines, speech and language peculiarities, non-verbal communication problems and motor clumsiness . . . each of these symptoms is manifested in a variety of unique and diverse ways.'' Willey here compares her own experiences with her daughter's, her daughter's with her twin sister, who doesn't have AS, and the childhood peak in intensity of her daughter's symptoms with her own waning symptoms in middle age. In her appendices Willey offers extensive practical help and resources to AS sufferers. But even those not directly affected by AS will find this an eye-opening view into a parallel world. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Autobiography of a woman and her child diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. Author shares her daily struggles and challenges. Includes appendices providing coping strategies and guidance. For the general reader as well as professionals. Softcover.
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