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Tag: Tom Stoppard

Quarantinaversary: A links round-up

Last week I was reading a bunch of things where people said that quarantinaversary was going to be very hard for everyone so we should go easy on ourselves, and I was like, la la la, I’m doing amazing, I’m not even slightly having a hard time, I have escaped the trauma of quarantinaversary. And then this week came along, and my brain now comprises a (1) scrambled egg. Pride goeth before a fall! All of this to say, please be gentle with yourself if you’re having a hard time right now. Here are some links! Gabrielle Bellot writes about…

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At Last, the Recess: A Links Round-Up

Well this has been a hell of a Congressional season, and one of my damn senators still hasn’t held a damn town hall. But at least we’re getting a short break. Roxane Gay on Confederate and why she doesn’t want it. I’m going to share this one quote because it’s really good: It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed. I’ll never not want to post links about Tom Stoppard and how…

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Review: Arcadia, Tom Stoppard

There is a particular sort of novel of which I always profess to be passionately fond: the sort with one plotline in the olden days with people doing their olden-day thing, and one in the present with eager scholars researching the very olden-day events in the other plotline.  (Is there a word for this sort of book?  Can there be one?)  If you have ever reviewed a book like this on your blog, I have probably commented to say something like, “Love this sort of book!  Adore!  Worship!  Cannot imagine my life without!” and added it to my reading list…

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Stomping around my bedroom late at night

I do not appreciate the suggestion that Oscar Wilde’s cleverness consisted in paradoxical epigram.  I will accept gracious tributes to Wilde’s way with epigrams, like Dorothy Parker’s: If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit. We all assume that Oscar said it. Thank you, Dorothy Parker.  You have lovely qualities and could bang out epigrams with the best of them. I will not, however, sit idly by in the face of any slighting reference to Oscar Wilde that implies that he was not as witty and charming as he is…

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Booking Through Thursday

I like this one: This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. So here are my fifteen books that will always stick with me, more or less in the order in which they entered my life: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte Emily Climbs, L.M .Montgomery Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card Macbeth, William Shakespeare The Chosen, Chaim Potok The Color Purple, Alice Walker Harry Potter and…

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Lovin’ on Tom Stoppard

Speaking of The Mousetrap, here is a Tom Stoppard anecdote.  If you have never seen The Mousetrap and you don’t know whodunit and you don’t want to, don’t carry on reading this paragraph. You have been warned.  Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of The Mousetrap and those country house type mysteries, and it’s also a parody of theatre critics.  And it steals lots of plot elements from The Mousetrap, as the title The Real Inspector Hound suggests, which might have caused the Mousetrap people to object.  But!  But but but!  They couldn’t!  Because if they…

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