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The Violent Bear It Away is by Flannery O'Connor . It is her second novel. She published 3 short story books and 2 novels. Today it amounts to 3 books with the stories collected into one volume.  I'm also reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch . The Gooch. She was briefly famous as a child for teaching a chicken to walk backwards. "I ain't worried what my underhead is doing." p. 171. I guess the underhead is subconscious, or maybe the thinking mind, or the observing ego. Who knows. I google scholar-ed it and came up with nothing. Tarwater is the kind of American that says he's going to do things and not talk about it. The introvert who has some thoughts, but doesn't want society to interfere with his vision of what he thinks he knows. A Trump supporter.  I'm not a Catholic (I'm a Buddhist ), but I do sort of like her exploration of the wounded atheist struggling to fight off Christianity. Makes me think of my father, who

This will be my Hegel Resources Page. Other Resource Pages: The Daily Idea Wikipedia: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  (1770-1831): Hegel has been seen in the twentieth century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad, but as an explicit phrase it originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte  (1762-1814). His mother died when he was 13. He was sent away to school where he read widely in the Enlightenment . He read Rousseau . He watched the French Revolution from Germany and the reign of terror . His friends read Kant . For Hegel the moment Jesus cried out "why hast thou forsaken me", was the moment he knew sin and evil, for evil is the separation of the individual from the universal. He was in Jena when Napoleon entered the city as he raged across Europe. He had an illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–1831) with his landlady Christiana Burkhardt née Fischer. He moved to Bamberg where he was appointed as a headmaster. In 1811, Hegel married Marie

  I just searched for Moby Dick movies, and Amazon Prime has a few versions of the movie.  1. 1998 version with Patrick Stewart. 2. 2010 one has William Hurt, with 3 episodes. Also on YouTube in one shot 3. 1956 version by John Houston Here is a list of all the adaptations . Many nights I fall asleep to Moby-Dick . There's an excellent reading on Librivox, which is free. I took a class in college, and I read Redburn , which is another awesome nautical novel by Herman Melville . Later I read Moby-Dick . I need to reread it. Reading his bio, I'd like to read White Jacket . Seems like he had an up and down career, wasn't appreciated, took a job and wrote poetry.  Last night I got the idea. The white whale is Jesus, just like unicorn is Jesus. A unique animal is Jesus. The white whale took Ahab's leg; The problem of evil.  Ahab is going to solve the problem of evil by killing Moby-Dick, killing god. Not sure if that lines up.  From the Wikipedia page of Moby-Dick : &quo

 "Every indisputably great person I’ve ever met has managed to transcend the trappings of their own power or celebrity or wealth by not taking themselves, or the trappings, at all seriously. Vaclav Havel comes to mind, as does John McCain. And every indisputable jerk I’ve ever met has done the exact opposite." Bret Stephens

  Bonedog by Eva H.D. Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not; whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely, so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything's worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return. Coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect, and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots, seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home m

My first conscious dramatic loss was my dog brownie when I was 7 or something. It was in the Smokey Mountains where my grandparents retired, outside of Hayesville. They'd bought a brown dog for me and called him Brownie. He was a puppy. My aunt ran over him, I guess he was laying under the car, in the shade on a hot summer's day. He was wiggling about, obviously incapacitated by being run over. My grandfather got out his .22 rifle, and put Brownie out of his misery. My grandmother told me not to watch. They buried him and put a wooden cross over the spot where they buried him. Last time I was in Hayesville, I saw the cross where Brownie is buried. Reading Hamnet, it is just so sad. We don't even know if Shakespeare got there in time for the burial, but the novel imagines into the space, creates a family to whom the loss was grave. Quite sad.  We lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg yesterday. She was 87 years old. I don't know much about her beyond her being towards the liberal en

  I was watching Dodsworth (1936) on AP last night and when I read that it was based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis, I wondered how many Americans had won the Nobel Prize. I have not read Lewis, Buck, Bellow, Brodsky or Singer. I feel like there is a better list of American writers. I guess I should check them out though. I know they often excerpt Lewis' Babbitt in Language Arts classes.  I don't remember reading him. The list feels subjective, but I guess there is some objectivity. I never really felt much attachment to objectivity until Trump came along, because of his gaslighting and relentless spinning. I guess all politicians spin.  His spin seems to be of a higher order of evil. Brodsky is the only poet before Dylan, and I wouldn't say he was the best American poet. He was 32 when he was expelled from the USSR so I'm not sure how American he is. Singer was Polish and came to the USA at 33, during WW2. My pop has a book of Dylan's poetry, and I've perused it,

Harari says that the agricultural revolution didn't make us any happier, indeed the people who worked in farming, life became harder. Hunter gatherers had better lives, though infant mortality and injuries were more serious. Every step in the evolution of human civilization didn't necessarily improve things. He's saying that happiness is biochemical, we have set points, and good or bad things happen and we are unhappy or happy for a while, but we eventually reset to the happiness baseline. So how would we even measure if things are getting better. You win the lottery and your happiness returns to baseline pretty soon. You get in a horrible accident and have a lame leg, and your happiness returns to the baseline in a year. I wouldn't know how to evaluate many of his claims, but they are provocative, interesting and make you think that that's all I want out of a book. There is a larger perspective. I liked learning a lot of little history tidbits that I didn't kno

 It's not her birthday until December 10th, so I'm not sure why the flood of stuff about her is going on. There is an Atlantic article . And there's a reading marathon signup, and last years' marathon . I have a biography of my shelf I'm dying to get to. Hope to go to her museum some day.

(High School) I've gotten about half way through Gravity's Rainbow . I tried to write down all the characters while I was reading it in the 90's. It's too chaotic for me.  The below video introduction says it's a bit of a slog. But now I understand that difficult novels are appreciated because they are not accessible. You can read and reread the novels many times. Some books I read and I think I never need to reread that book again; it's plot based, not complex. Mind you a good plot isn't to be sniffed at. But difficult close to obscurity is also interesting. Joyce comes to mind. I started enjoying the complexity and obscurity due to time of Shakespeare. So now I want to approach these works.  I'm a whole to the parts learner, which makes Pynchon difficult, but I just read about what I'm reading and I get the gestalt. Perhaps later I can appreciate without resorting to that. I'm going to try reading Vineland with his subreddit to actually comple

I've been dying to read Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, and I got it from my library. Hamnet is of course the name of the twin born to Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare. His twin was Judith . Turns out there is a novel about Judith written by William Black in 1884. Illustration to ‘Judith Shakespeare’ I read the novel. There are assumptions being made. Are they based in facts or made up to flesh it out? By a quarter of the novel I am hooked in. The chapters move back and forth in time. I want to read reviews and interviews, but I don't want to contaminate my first reading of the novel. Spoiler Alert! If you haven't read the novel, skip to links . I have read three quarters of the novel and my feeling is this: what Shakespeare's life was like is a projection of us. We know so little. O'Farrell has created a caring loving relationship with Anne Hathaway. Anne is called Agnes, and she is part wild, part witch, in tune with the natural cures, and even goes into the

 In the past, I got too angry reading the conservative side of politics. I suppose that was immature of me. Trump was the first president that made me interested in politics because what he was doing seemed so wrong. Because he was so disgusting, it helped me appreciate the other side when they are not disgusting and reasonable.  I see the value now of reading right wing writings. One is that they are a reality check with the left's rhetoric. They can take it too far sometimes, it doesn't seem fair, but there are other times when it hits the mark. It also helps to see the side I like portrayed in a negative light.  I got frustrated that conservatives would defend Trump, I began to feel like there was no debate, it was more of a silly game of my guys is in power. There is no justification to a nihilistic power grab, and the whims of a nihilist. They may say there is some underlying ideology, but it's pretty scant.  Now that the next president will be Biden, some huge misstep