Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O'Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, “were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters' minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means." In imagining those events of irreversible magnitude, O'Connor could sometimes seem outlandish--even cartoonish--but she strongly rejected the notion that her perceptions of 20th century life were distorted. In April of 1959--five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus--O'Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. Related Content: Related: Read, Write, Reflect

Mind Matters One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern LifeBy Mitch HorowitzCrown Publishing, 2014352 pp.; $24 cloth George Orwell once wrote that you had to be a part of imperialism in order to hate it. A comparable sentiment drives author and editor Mitch Horowitz’s inquiry in One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. This temperament sets One Simple Idea apart from recent takedowns of the movement such as Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s bald rejection of the cult-like mandate to treat her breast cancer with a positive attitude, and journalist Oliver Burkeman’s exploration of a “negative path” to happiness in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. And so it is that Horowitz, sans rose-colored glasses, attempts to record the lineage of the American positive thinking movement. More useful as part of these works would have been testimonials.

The Short Story Podcasts Broadening the number of resources The Short Story brings its readers, we are extremely pleased to provide this set of podcasts, courtesy of the Florida Centre of Instructional Technologies (FCIT) from the University of South Florida (USF). In due time, we hope to provide a greater number and range of podcasts to TSS. If you would like to offer your own recordings, please contact us as at info@theshortstory.co.uk to discuss the details. This set of twenty five short story podcasts is from Sherwood Anderson’s influential short story collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Source: Anderson, S. (1919) Winesburg, Ohio. New York, NY: B.W. 1.The Book of the Grotesque An aging writer ponders the many people he has met and the stories he has heard in his lifetime. Audio Player 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.Death, concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth Willard As her life comes to a close, Elizabeth Willard shares her life experiences with Doctor Reefy.

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic | | Notebook Maureen Tkacik [from The Baffler No. 19, 2012] Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?” Omniscience is the operating principle by which everyone understands everyone else in Washington, D.C. Quinn wore a light beige pantsuit with a pink blouse that conjured the seventies.

Free Music Downloads Online for Educational Use | Royalty Free Music Who says you can't get something for nothing? Royaltyfreemusic.com offers a variety of FREE high-quality royalty-free items, including royalty-free stock footage, royalty-free sound effects, royalty-free clip art, royalty-free images, royalty-free photos, and of course, royalty-free stock music. Our free Royalty Free Music section provides you with the resources you need to complete a variety of educational, personal, and non-profit projects. Need to put together a school presentation by tomorrow? Check out our collection of free royalty-free stock photos and free PowerPoint music for images and slideshow music that are certain to impress your teacher. If you are an educator who would like to use royalty-free music in your classroom, click the Free Music Programs link to submit an application to download stock music free of charge.

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? | World news | The Observer Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. The sign outside her building says "Clinic". Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" – a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. The number of single people has reached a record high. Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. Official alarmism doesn't help. Japan's under-40s won't go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. They don't seem concerned.

Step 8: Cools tools to embed Welcome to the seventh step in our free professional learning series on class and student blogging! The aim of this step is to introduce you to a range of easy to use online tools that you can embed into posts and pages. We’ve embedded examples of each tool in this post to help you work out how the tool could be used with your students. Back to Top Why enhance posts with interactive tools If you look closely at class blogs you’ll notice many of have cool interactive tools embedded in posts and pages. There’s a gazillion online tools nowadays and most of them provide code that you can use to embed what you’ve found or created into your posts or pages. Below are popular tools used by educators by activity type to help get you started. Tools were chosen on the basis of their popularity, easy of use and being able to be embedded into posts/pages.Back to Top Audio Hosting Websites AudioBoo AudioBoo is a website, and a smartphone and tablet app, which allows users to post and share sound files. Voki

If He Hollers Let Him Go - by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Discussed: Ohio’s Rolling Farmland, Hippies in Tie-Dye, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kanye West, Oprah, A Simpler Way of Life, Seventy-Year-Old Comparative Literature Professors in Birkenstocks, Negritude,Thurgood Marshall, Black Activism, Patrice Lumumba, Stepin Fetchit, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Hemp Stores, Reuben Sandwiches, Dusk in Yellow Springs Although the city of Dayton is small and has been hit hard by the decline of industry, in Xenia and Yellow Springs the land is green, fecund, and alive, even in the relentless heat of summer. Xenia is three miles from where the first private black college, Wilberforce, opened, in 1856, to meet the educational needs of the growing population of freed blacks that crossed the Ohio River. Yellow Springs, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was initially established as a utopian community in 1825. In 1852, Horace Mann founded Antioch College and served as its president. Chappelle’s comedy found fans in many worlds.

10 podcast per imparare (o migliorare) l’inglese - Linkiesta.it Nel settembre 2014 è uscita la prima puntata di un podcast, intitolato Serial, di cui si è discusso parecchio. È stato il programma che è arrivato più in fretta a 5 milioni di download nella storia di iTunes e ha scatenato una serie di discussioni sulla rinascimento di un medium, quello dei podcast, che da dieci anni viveva in una nicchia quasi immobile di mercato. Ora, anche in Italia, migliaia di persone hanno iniziato ad ascoltare podcast e, magari, con la fine della prima stagione di Serial, non sanno più con cosa andare avanti. Ne abbiamo scelti 10 che possono riempire il grande vuoto e fare anche qualcosa di più: aiutarvi a migliorare (almeno la comprensione) l’inglese. Serve un minima base di partenza e un po’ di pazienza: alla prima puntata capirete il 50% di quello che dicono, alla seconda il 60%, alla terza il 70%… tempo cinque episodi e niente vi potrà più fermare. This American LifeDurata: 60 minuti Sito ufficiale - Puntata da cui partire: Dr. Start upDurata: 20-30 minuti

Hey Mama by Kiese Laymon A black mother and her son talk about language and love in the South. Image by Jennifer Packer, Mario II, 2012. Courtesy the artist Hey Mama, I’m feeling alone this morning. Hey Kie, I’m tired. Mama, you always say that. You hug yourself by not allowing haters to distract you and by believing in yourself. Oh, lord. Don’t say “ain’t got” Kie. Or what? Or nothing. Nah, I’m serious. It depends on the judges. Mama, how have we been having the same conversation about language for thirty years? You are a grown man, but you’re still a black boy from Mississippi to people that want to hurt you. I have pictures of the look on my grandma’s face the first time she held my first two books. Hiding won’t protect us. I’m not talking about hiding. I don’t even really do Twitter, Mama. My friends tell me you write crazy-talk on that Facebook, and that Twitter. Mama. They’re trying to fix black boys on the cheap, without reckoning with white supremacy. What have you been thinking? I’ve been thinking too much.