The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog
A few months ago, I went through a major Flannery O’Connor phase. I read her novels for the first time, and re-read the short stories, none of which I had looked at in years. In the middle of this surge of renewed enthusiasm for her work, I stumbled across this fantastic 1959 recording of O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” at Vanderbilt University. The most striking thing about it is the way in which O’Connor’s bone-dry Georgia drawl seems not merely to suit her writing perfectly, but also somehow to embody it. There’s a kind of bleak drollery inbuilt in her speech that seems to me to be the very voice of her fiction. The most remarkable thing about listening to this recording, though, was not getting to hear O’Connor herself talk, but rather the fact that when I when I went back to read her work, I would hear this voice echoing along in my head as I read the printed words. It brought a phantasmal new dimension to my experience of her writing.
Read the rest at newyorker.com
By , March 20, 2012 at 11:28 pmOf course. Why would the gmerenovnt want the people to talk, share and god forbid create an actual community. No that would be too hard, we would not be easily controlled, I mean think of it, people outside with the sun shinning and sharing their ideas together, creating a discourse of humanity. However then, could the media manipulate us? It was much easier when we willingly held ourselves prisoner in our dark rooms by ourselves, relentesly pounding away at the keyboard under the false pretense of an individual. Our founding fathers (in America), were smart. They knew that power corrupted and would probably break down and cry if they could see the way the nations leaders are sticking it to their own people, not unlike the oppresion that the American Revolutionaries experienced. I hope this nation is not lost to apathy, stand up for yourself and your rights. The outlawing of gambaling on the internet I saw as a begining of a huge cencorship. We as humans have created the internet, an amazing route of information and that’s it. Information, it is very dangerous, and the elite class knows this. Dont let them destroy America.