Motley Kamuka

I talk about Fuller, and nobody has ever heard of her. I find that quite shocking. Of course it took me to my 53rd year. Margaret Fuller  (Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli) (1810 – 1850) was a Concord Transcendentalist with Thoreau, Emmerson, Hawthorne and father Alcott and Louisa May Alcott. She wrote a travel book when she traveled around the Great Lakes, and wrote a book on women . She was an editor of a New York newspaper, and the Transcendental organ Dial. She went off to Italy where she was a war correspondent, had a child, and died tragically within sight of the beach off Fire Island, when the lost ship broke upon a sand dune during a hurricane. Thoreau went and searched the beach for her body and found a button. Lost is her book on the war in Rome. Megan Marshall  won the Pulitzer for her biography of Fuller. She has written biographies on the Peabody Sisters and Elizabeth Bishop, the last whom she took classes with. Such a good writer, I want to read her other biographies...

I started reading The Splendor of Longing in the Tale of Genji  (1987) by Norma Field. It's academic, footnoted. I looked up Norma Field , she was born in Japan to an American father and Japanese mother. At age 10 she went to the American school in Tokyo and after graduating high school, she moved to America. After a series of degrees she ends up teaching at the University of Chicago , from which she is retired from. She is the same age as my mother, who was also born in Japan, during the occupation to 2 Americans. Field won the American Book Award in 1992 for  In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century's End. Links: YouTube  Field talks about America's ignorance about the impact of the atomic remedy.  I'm listening to The Tale of Genji on  The History of Literature . It's a general introduction.

I'm pretty sure everyone has a subtle, nuanced mind, each one attuned to various things. Obama was the first president, where I thought I could see the workings of a mind that I appreciated. I can't understand the callousness and tough love of republican presidents, their kind of lying and rhetoric rubs me the wrong way. Clinton too was a centrist in a nation that had swung far to the right. Biden and Clinton would be republicans in other countries.  That's why I don't see the red scare stuff as effective in talking about Biden. He's clearly in the pockets of big business, who allowed him to win, and while that red scare stuff does work with a certain kind of person, he is against Medicare for all, and anything that would truly help all of America.  Obama is both committed to justice and the future in ways that challenge a republican mindset, but was also not interested in stepping into narrow us versus them binary thinking, and was thus seen as a race traitor by so...

Another offshoot of Shakespeare 2020 is Dickens 2021 Novels. Not sure if I can juggle Transcendentalism, Tale of Ganji, and Thomas Pynchon, plus Dickens and my need to read outside assignments. I read extra books during college, just because I wanted to read things I didn't have to, and I continue to enjoy the freedom of reading whatever. But, it starts today. Maybe I can hop on. I can't remember which ones I've read so I'm thinking I'll have to read them all like I did with Shakespeare. Charles Dickens  was born in 1812 (Thoreau 1817, Emerson 1803, Fuller 1810, Hawthorn 1804, Melville 1919). He was born in Portsmouth Hampshire. He wrote Pickwick Papers by 1836 (Walden 1854, Moby Dick 1851, Scarlet Letter 1850). The reading schedule is as follows: Dickens novel/novella reading schedule 2021 The Pickwick Papers : January 4-29 Oliver Twist: February 1-12 Nicholas Nickleby: February 15 – March 12 The Old Curiosity Shop: March 15 – April 2 Barnaby Rudge: April 5-23 Ma...

Moncure D. Conway  (1832 – 1907) was a radical writer descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland but spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine and his own autobiography. Caroline Sturgis Tappan  (1818 - 1888) accompanied Fuller on her trip around the Great Lakes. Helen Hunt Jackson  (1830 – 1885) an American poet and writer who became an activist on behalf of improved treatment of Native Americans by the United States government. Lydia Maria Francis Child (1802 – 1880) was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Harriet Martineau  (1802–1876) was a British social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist. Germaine de Staël  (1766 –1817) was a woman of letters and poli...

When I used the Librivox app, which seems to be titled Audio Books and Novels, but was called Free Audio Books when I first downloaded it, I could only find Fuller's Summer On The Lakes . But somehow her  Woman in the Nineteenth Century is on the website, but not the app.  The language is so foreign that I find listening to the book, it just ploughs along, and I don't get caught up or quit. She was accompanied on the trip by Caroline Sturgis Tappan , though she wouldn't marry William Tappan until 1847. Caroline Sturgis attended Bronson Alcott's Temple School, Dorothy Dix's school for girls, and became Margaret Fuller's private student, and she participated in Fuller's Conversations series with her sister Ellen Sturgis Hooper. She published poems in Dial and wrote 2 childrens books. She researched the book in the Harvard Library and she is considered the first woman to be allowed into the library. The book was completed in 1844. Scholar Dorothy Z. Baker , au...