5/24/2023 0 Comments Jane austen love & friendship![]() ![]()
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![]() ![]() He somewhat achieved that, as in his youth (see the cover photo by Beaton), he was considered astonishingly handsome, and used cosmetics and hair dyes throughout his life to enhance his natural attributes. ![]() I think the most amusing and telling anecdote in the book comes when he was a mere tot of four: his father queried his sons on what they wanted to be when they grew up, and whereas Stephen's brothers opted for businessman and engineer, the precocious Stephen replied: "I want to be a Great Beauty, Sir". ![]() Tennant was perhaps the most flamboyant of the 'Bright Young Things' that came to be notorious following the First World War, and despite not having much of a career as either a writer (he spent fifty years composing and rewriting a magnum opus called 'Lascar', that remained unfinished at his death in 1987) or an artist, he continued to fascinate the English public due to his many eccentricities - and the fact he knew virtually everybody who was anybody - from the Queen Mother to Greta Garbo to Cecil Beaton to Virginia Woolf, etc., etc. I'd vaguely recalled the name of Stephen Tennant (he's mentioned once in Holroyd's exhaustive Lytton Strachey: The New Biography), but it wasn't until a recent viewing of Terence Davies' 'Benediction', his magnificent film bio of Tennant's lover, poet Siegfried Sassoon, that I became entranced by the subject - Stephen really steals the show in that film. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Life itself 2014![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I woke up Wednesday morning wondering if people really cared about movies anymore - not out of a sense of despair, but because after swimming in political speculation, I wondered how quickly anyone would flip back to arguing about Oscar races.Īnd because the arts are often treated as frivolous decorative adornments to life rather than the lifeblood that gives us a culture worth saving, I forget, sometimes, that they matter.īut because I also teach college, I went off to campus for a day full of teaching cultural theory and criticism. The movie of the week for November 6 through 12 is Life Itself (2014), which is streaming on Netflix and available to digitally rent on Amazon. What you can count on is a weekend watch that sheds new light on the week that was. Old, new, blockbuster, arthouse: They’re all fair game. Every weekend, we pick a movie you can stream that dovetails with an event from the previous week. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments The lost symbol abridged dan brown![]() ![]() ![]() It's The Da Vinci Code set in Washington D.C. There is the enormous body count, caused by a sociopathic serial murderer who for some reason never quite gets around to killing the main characters, although the secondary and lower characters have about a 10% survival rate. There are the fake etymologies-Amen at the end of a prayer is supposed to derive from the name of the Egyptian god Amun-everything is connected to everything else! There is the beautiful woman companion with absolutely no sexual attraction whatsoever. There is the ominous secret society, this time the Freemasons. ![]() There are the lectures about the "real meaning" of architecture, secret societies, language. There is the bad guy who turns out not to be so bad. ![]() There is the physical freak with an inexplicable obsession-this one is a 'roid-fueled bald guy with a full body Nair addiction, who has tattooed every inch of his body, except for the very top of his head. The excessive use of italics for emphasis-when you can't make the point by repeating it, do it again in italics in its own paragraph. There are the ridiculously short chapters. What is there to say about this book other than it is exactly what you would expect from a Dan Brown Novel(TM). ![]() ![]() ![]() He has a dedication to detailed design, innovation, and product research, but most importantly, to excellent customer service. His current focus has been helping clients better understand the impact furniture has on a student’s performance and well-being. His project types include higher education, K-12, commercial interiors, retail, hospitality, and residential. His extensive experience with vendors makes him invaluable to the furniture selection, specification, bidding, and procurement processes. His vast knowledge of design, finishes, and interior architecture allows him to be an integral part of the project’s multiple phases, from design development and well into the construction document process. Joaquin is a licensed interior designer and artist who believes beautiful spaces have the power to transform your daily life. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Eifelheim by michael flynn![]() ![]() ![]() There are certain expectations and assumptions we bring to a story like this, which are heightened by the frame narrative of cliologist Tom (a science that sounds made up, but isn’t) and his physicist girlfriend Sharon. But Michael Flynn takes that idea beyond anything you’d expect for a potboiler sci-fi novel, creating a meticulously researched and wonderfully written combination of historical fiction and science fiction. It’s an immediately engaging concept, which would be worth checking out no matter who was writing it and no matter how it turned out. ![]() ![]() That’s the elevator pitch for Eifelheim: a first contact story set in medieval Germany. In the modern day, historical researcher Tom uncovers evidence of a village that inexplicably vanished in the 14th century – not unusual in the era of the Black Death, but this region was never resettled, leaving behind only rumours of evil demons and cursed ground. Venturing to investigate, parish priest Dietrich discovers a group of strange travellers have arrived injured, frightened, and terrifyingly alien. In the year 1348, in the village of Oberhochwald in the Black Forest, a terrible thunder and fire tears through the nearby woods despite the cloudless sky. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Starship troopers book 2![]() ![]() It is a limited democracy, in which only "veterans" of Federal Service are eligible to vote, run for office, hold certain jobs, or even teach some subjects at school. ![]() It is also significant, and controversial, for its description of the Terran Federation's political system. It was also the first science fiction book to appear on the U.S. Starship Troopers is notable for early use of the concept of Powered Armor and being an early example of the Space Marine trope. Much of the military action in the novel parallels the Pacific campaign of World War II ending at Guadalcanal. ![]() The story traces the evolution of Juan "Johnnie" Rico from feckless civilian into an Officer and a Gentleman during the Bug War as a Framing Device and example. Heinlein, a former naval officer who had received a health-related discharge before he could gain actual combat experience, interviewed infantry soldiers and officers to get the "flavor" of ground combat for his book. It waxes Anvilicious on the merits of soldiers being willing to give their lives for their country and the proper merits of a soldier, an officer, and an army and nation as a whole. ban on nuclear testing, and published in 1959. Heinlein as an argument against a unilateral U.S. Starship Troopers is a Military Science Fiction novel written by Robert A. ![]() 5/24/2023 0 Comments Perelandra amazon![]() ![]() But in the many layers of its allegory, and the sophistication and piercing brilliance of its insights into the human condition, it occupies a place among the English language’s most extraordinary works for any age, and for all time. ![]() Readers who fall in love with Lewis’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Namia as children unfailingly cherish his Space Trilogy as adults it, too, brings to life strange and magical realms in which epic battles are fought between the forces of light and those of darkness. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, of which Perelandra is the second volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus’s The Plague and George Orwell’s 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of the moral concerns. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Arnett is not a flowery writer-she says what she means-and her honesty allows us direct access to her characters and their lives. This is a book where prose style and content work together beautifully. Jessa was in love with Brynn-had loved her before Milo had, in fact-and both Jessa and Milo are unable to get out from under the weight of the loss. His wife, Brynn, disappeared years earlier. Milo has become a shadow of himself, no longer caring for his daughter and stepson. She tries to keep the taxidermy shop running and to hold the family together, but their mother, reeling from the death of her husband, is falling apart, breaking into the shop to arrange the mounted animals in compromising positions. Years later, in her thirties, Jessa finds her father dead by suicide. In the opening pages, young Jessa-Lynn and her brother Milo watch their father, a taxidermist, cut open a deer. In Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, the messy life of a family is laid bare on the page. ![]() 5/23/2023 0 Comments Harem of Freaks by Crystal Ash![]() ![]() We're playing with fire, sending our two worlds on a collision course.Īnd I don't know if we'll survive the crash. I'm insatiable.īut freedom comes at a price, one that might be too high to pay. But when the Sons of Odin become my personal bodyguards, I'm not just curious. Men who have killed, pillaged, and ransacked this broken country I'm trying to fix. I know a governor's daughter shouldn't dream of men with haunted eyes. Until they delivered me right back to my father. Death and carnage are all they know, and yet I felt safer on the back of their bikes than in the ivory tower where I was imprisoned.įor a moment, I was finally free. My saviors are three brutal men on roaring motorcycles-the Sons of Odin MC. All my life, he hid me away like a precious jewel for being too curious, too attracted to danger. ![]() My father isolated me while chaos swept the country. ![]() |
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