Monthly Archives: December 2012

A Year in Books/Day 223: Swanson on Swanson

Posted on by
9
  • Title: Swanson on Swanson
  • Author: Gloria Swanson
  • Year Published: 1980/This Edition: 1981 (Random House/Pocket Books)
  • Year Purchased: Mid-1990s
  • Source: Antique Barn, Ohio State Fair
  • About: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”-George Bernard Shaw. Every Hollywood memoir should come with the preceding GBS quote as a disclaimer. That, or the generic perception is reality. Either will do. With that out of the way, we could get down to the important business of enjoying good Tinseltown autobiographies for what they are: damn fun entertainment. Underneath the ego and the stage-managed pathos, these one-person exercises in reputation preservation usually contain heaping amounts of self-deprecation, humor, and memorable industry anecdotes, with the self-subjects somehow, through a strange, magical process, coming across as down-to-earth and larger than life; normal and privileged; lucky and talented; flawed and beautiful. Continue reading →

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

Posted on by
8

Heading into this holiday season, we have so much to be thankful for: health, love, happiness, good friends, and our wonderful blog readers. Books at Middlemay Farm nominated us for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award, and we couldn’t be more honored.

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

The rules of this award are:

1. Display the award logo on your blog.
2. Link back to the person who nominated you.
3. State seven things about yourself.
4. Nominate fifteen other bloggers for this award and link to them.
5. Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award’s requirements.

I’m answering the seven things this time, so here you are:

  1. My second wedding anniversary is on Tuesday, and I am so excited.
  2. I have Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes my life extra interesting.
  3. Since May 2007, The Chef and I have lived in 3 apartments (all on the first floor) in the same renovated loft building. We love change, but are also really lazy.
  4. I have no sense of direction.
  5. I’ve had 8 or 9 hairstyles and 5 different colours in the last 16 months.
  6. I have my first 5 tattoos mapped out.
  7.  I watch Miracle on 34th Street (1947) at least 10 times between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. Every single year. I repeat, every single year.

My nominees are:

ALL of you lovelies. During this peaceful holiday season, I cannot and will not choose favourites. I love every blog I read and follow. You know who you are, so congrats on being so awesome! I will leave you with this anticipatory ditty:

 

 

Why I’m Blowing Off Writing Tonight to Watch Old Movies and Trim the Tree

Posted on by
14

The essay I wrote yesterday in honor of my friend Frank really took a lot out of me. I’m drained. I’ve decided that I deserve a break from wading through my creativity. Tonight’s entertainment?

Top Hat Poster (1935)

Top Hat poster (1935)

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 7th-10th December

Posted on by
7
  • Cicero died on 12/7/43 BC. “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” (On the Laws; Brutus; On Duties)
  • Willa Cather was born on 12/7/1873. “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” (O Pioneers!; My Antonia; The Song of the Lark; One of Ours)
  • Thornton Wilder died on 12/7/1975. “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.” (The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Our Town; The Skin of Our Teeth; The Matchmaker)
  • Robert Graves died on 12/7/1985. “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” (Good-bye to All That; The White Goddess; I, Claudius; The Greek Myths)
  • Thomas De Quincey died on 12/8/1859. “The public is a bad guesser.” (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
  • James Thurber was born on 12/8/1894. “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.” (The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities; My Life and Hard Times; My World and Welcome to It; The Male Animal (with Elliot Nugent); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)
  • John Milton was born on 12/9/1608. “A Mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell , a Hell of Heaven.” (Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained)
  • Dame Edith Sitwell died on 12/9/1964. “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” (Clowns’ Houses; Alexander Pope; I Live Under a Black Sun)
  • Emily Dickinson was born on 12/10/1830. “I’m nobody, who are you?”
  • Luigi Pirandello died on 12/10/1936. “Drama is action, sir, drama and not confounded philosophy.” (Six Characters in Search of an Author; The Rules of the Game)
  • Damon Runyon died on 12/10/1946. “I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.” (Guys and Dolls; The Damon Runyon Omnibus)
  • Mark Van Doren died on 12/10/1972. “Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.” (Spring Thunder; Winter Diary; Collected Poems 1922-1938; The Transients)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

[Intermezzo] Wherein I Offer You a Few Disjointed but Heartfelt Memories of My Dead Friend Frank on Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

Posted on by
115

Dear World,

Frank died at 87 1/2 years old. Picture this: When he was a tow-headed little boy, just a toddler, his parents dressed him in short pants and a striped shirt and posed him on the hood of the family Model T, grinning. Feisty. He was named after a prominent ancestor, Benjamin Franklin, and they shared more than a name: both were brilliant, larger-than-life, charismatic. Actually, he came from a long line of characters: a grandfather who died, in his 90s, as the result of a bar fight, a father who was an early aviator. That family bred their men big, bold, and memorable. Frank, my Frank, my friend, came of age during the Great Depression. He had an older brother, equally brilliant; when it came time for Frank to attend college in ’37 or ’38, there was no money left. None. His brother had the degree that Frank would never get. He didn’t sweat it, moved on with life. Somewhere along the way he met a beautiful lady and they got married. Everything changed on 7 December 1941. Continue reading →