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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 11:32:14 GMT
Source: Vidal, Gore (1987). ‘William Dean Howells’, Armageddon: Essays 1983–1987. London: André Deutsch. pp. 192-193.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 11:40:25 GMT
Benjamin Franklin
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 11:41:50 GMT
James Baldwin
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 11:42:39 GMT
Kemsley, James. Ginger Meggs (comic strip).
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 11:45:19 GMT
Crace, Jim. Arcadia. p. 10.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 12:03:34 GMT
White, Patrick. The Tree of Man.
White is certainly one of my very favourite authors (there might be a dozen so described - at an off-the-cuff guess). His writing is incisive, acerbic, and picturesque (even though often in the negative of that quality). His characters are incredibly full, real, and alive. And terribly Australian.
I read The Tree of Man in 1990 as I sat on my front verandah, overlooking a formerly vacant 10-acre gully recently occupied by residents of a newly built public-housing project who were coping with the aftermath of a flash flood.
The houses backed onto a steep embankment that had not been well shored-up and had still a bare earth face; neither retaining wall nor grass nor shrubbery held it together. Consequent upon a downpour (about 100 mm in the hour!), many cubic metres of the embankment slid down and flowed through the new houses. The frantic residents could be seen sweeping the mud-flood out their front doors while it still flowed in the back, and they had their radios blaring on some ghastly commercial station belting out flood warnings and anachronistic pop songs.
All that happened as I was reading the above-quoted passage, and the reality and that passage of White's complemented each other most uncannily. I shall never be able to separate the two in my memory.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 12:05:42 GMT
Baldwin, James (1978). Just Above My Head. New York, NY: The Dial Press. pp. 499-500.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 12:09:17 GMT
And on armchair Marxists:
Davies, Robertson (1985). What's Bred in the Bone. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 232-233.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 12:10:38 GMT
Okay, okay - I'll shut up and go to bed now. At least no-one will be able to complain of having nothing new to read for the day! ;D
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Post by Pete on Aug 18, 2008 16:57:54 GMT
And on armchair Marxists: Davies, Robertson (1985). What's Bred in the Bone. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 232-233. At last! Someone else who has heard of Robertson Davies!! I discovered him about 7 or 8 years ago, quite by accident, and immediately became addicted. The addiction takes the normal form of buying everything else he has written, reading it, then buying another complete set for my father, who set me on this road to ruin we call 'A love of books'. I'm not sure if Dad is quite so addicted but he's always keen on new (old) authors.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 18, 2008 22:01:47 GMT
In the Song Lyrics thread, Alan P posted the lyrics of Strange Fruit.
Those verses reminded me of another, equally dark piece on the same topic, from another of my all-time favourite authors, James Baldwin. He wrote not only great fiction, but powerful polemic. I doubt that it could be set to music; the words are music themselves (albeit hardly pastoral!).
Warning: This is a highly emotive piece, so don't read it if you can't handle it.
Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. pp. 421-423.
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Post by Paul Doherty on Aug 19, 2008 0:04:22 GMT
Warning: This is a highly emotive piece, so don't read it if you can't handle it. How will I know if I can handle it, Verbivore, until I've read it?
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 19, 2008 3:37:49 GMT
How will I know if I can handle it, Verbivore, until I've read it? Paul: It's rather like my approach to answering people's silly questions (no, not the one asked above, but really silly ones that I have a habit of answering provocatively): "If you can't handle the answer, don't ask the question". If one is self-cognisant enough to realise that one is easily offended / upset, it's good advice. ;D
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Post by Paul Doherty on Aug 19, 2008 12:46:57 GMT
OK. I'll risk it then.
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Post by Verbivore on Aug 20, 2008 10:34:44 GMT
Edmund James Banfield was born in Liverpool, England, in 1852. He arrived in Australia at the age of two-and-a-half. Like his father and brother, he was a newspaperman. Settling in northern Queensland, he wrote for the Townsville Daily Bulletin and the North Queensland Register. Some of his better known material was published in four books: The Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908), My Tropic Isle (1911), Tropic Days (1918), and the posthumously published Last Leaves from Dunk Island (1925).
I share with you a couple of passages from a "modern" compilation of his previously "lost" writings.
A Village in Kent
If there be a place in the whole of "Merrie England" which has preserved its primitive character, which is as yet unsoiled and unadulterated by contact with the turbid overflowings of cities, surely it is Lenham. It was only last week that the oldest inhabitants of the quaint old-fashioned village were paralysed with fearful apprehensions as the first through train from Maidstone to Ashford whistled away with the more foolhardy and audacious of their relations. To them this dreadful, awe-inspiring railway, which tears along and screeches as it goes, quaking the solid earth as though it would rouse their ancestors who have slept so long and, up to the present, so peacefully beneath the yew trees yonder, is as a sign -- it is the beginning of the end. They will not approach the station where the strange monster stops for a moment and then rushes off again, panting in its eagerness to be away; but when one of them has by dint of persuasion trusted himself among a bevy of able-bodied and lusty relations upon a bridge to listen to the train as it thunders beneath, behold how staunchly he clings to the parapet.
Noonan. M (Ed.) (1989). 'A Village in Kent', in The Gentle Art of Beachcombing: A collection of writings by EJ Banfield. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. p. 45
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