Tennessee Williams’ Catastrophe of Success

It seems it was not only Jerry Salinger who had trouble dealing with success and fame.

Longreads

Four days before the 1947 Broadway opening of A Streetcar Named Desire, the New York Times published an essay by Tennessee Williams on the depression he’d experienced after the success of The Glass Menagerie summarily ended life as he’d known it.

Fame had turned Williams into a “public Somebody” overnight, a crisis that ultimately landed him in the hospital, “mainly because of the excuses it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask.”

The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.

I was not aware of…

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What is Hobby Lobby?

This is from their About Us page on their website.

Our Story

In 1970, David and Barbara Green took out a $600 loan to begin making miniature picture frames out of their home. Two years later, the fledgling enterprise opened a 300-square-foot store in Oklahoma City, and Hobby Lobby was born. Today, with more than 750 stores, Hobby Lobby is the largest privately owned arts-and-crafts retailer in the world with approximately 32,000 employees and operating in forty-seven states.

Hobby Lobby is primarily an arts-and-crafts store but also includes hobbies, picture framing, jewelry making, fabrics, floral and wedding supplies, cards and party ware, baskets, wearable art, home accents and holiday merchandise.
Corporate headquarters include a 9.2 million-square-foot manufacturing, distribution, and office complex in Oklahoma City.
Affiliated companies include Hemispheres, carrying unique home furnishings and accessories from around the world, and Mardel Christian and Education Supply, offering books, Bibles, gifts, church and education supplies as well as homeschooling curriculum. Hobby Lobby also maintains offices in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Yiwu, China.
What began as a $600 start-up, continues to grow and expand–enabling customers across the nation to live a creative life®.

We are committed to:

Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with Biblical principles.

Offering our customers exceptional selection and value.

Serving our employees and their families by establishing a work environment and company policies that build character, strengthen individuals, and nurture families.

Providing a return on the family’s investment, sharing the Lord’s blessings with our employees, and investing in our community.

With our Super Savings & Super Selection Everyday®, we have everything you need to Live a Creative Life!®

Store hours are Monday through Saturday from 9:00am to 8:00pm. All Hobby Lobby stores are closed on Sunday.

©2017 Hobby Lobby

Over the top

I’m a fan of this game and have the Tank expansion. I’ll have to have a game and blog about it. Nice articles and pictures here.

Faith&Steel

The kickstarter went off and the game is now available retail and Andy and I finally sat down to a game of Plastic Soldier Company’s The Great War.
My initial impressions of the game were good and our first couple of games did not disappoint.

Andy had painted his Brits first and I did my Germans, so the board looked great. The photos not so much, given I was just wielding my phone under the kitchen light.

We played the second of two “training” scenarios. We skipped the first as we are both comfortable with the basic mechanics from playing Memoir ’44. The second mission represents a local assault by the British and introduces the opening bombardment mechanic.

Andy’s Brits get ready to go over the top

The format of the game won’t surprise anyone familiar with the Command and Colours series such as the popular (and cracking) Memoir ’44.  At first glance, Great…

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Censorship in Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

Currently reading a new biography of Jerry Salinger, if I may be a tad familiar, so of course this caught my eye. There’s a legend that my father suspected the Beatles of being a communist plot so this seems plausible I guess!

A R T L▼R K

On the 16^th of July 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, a novel by J. D. Salinger was published by Little, Brown and Company in the United States. Initially intended for an adult audience, the book soon found its own readership and has since become enormously popular with adolescents, mainly as it explores themes such as teenage angst, alienation and rebellion. Before its publication, there did not seem to be the awareness that adolescents should be looked upon as social outsiders with a particular way of thinking and living. Sarah Graham, author of a Routledge guide to the novel, said that, “It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognisable social group. Before that, people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years.” The Catcher in the Rye was…

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hobby lobby’s parallel universe of antiquity studies

Interesting article about the effect of privatisation on the resources of an academic discipline and much else besides. I suppose this sort of thing follows from industrialization

scatterplot

An artist’s sketch of the Museum of the Bible, currently under construction. Source.

The following is a guest post by Fiona Greenland.

Last week’s news that Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby faced civil forfeiture for illegally importing Iraqi antiquities came as no surprise to cultural property experts. The company had been under scrutiny since 2015, when news of the investigation broke. And even before the investigation, scholars, including Roberta Mazza, an ancient historian at the University of Manchester, identified inconsistencies in the provenance histories, or ownership records, of antiquities obtained for Hobby Lobby-backed Museum of the Bible. Equally unsurprising in the wake of the forfeiture announcement were the muddled claims about Hobby Lobby funding ISIS. The forfeited antiquities at the heart of the civil complaint were shipped in late 2010 and early 2011 – prior to the period when ISIS is known to have been associated with archaeological looting in…

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all persons are fictional

I’m reading this and I’m thinking does this mean I don’t exist? Whatever it’s all good thought provoking stuff I think you’ll agree.

scatterplot

In the wake of the Hobby Lobby decisions, there have been renewed discussions of corporate personhood. The argument is relatively simple: the 19th century Supreme Court made a mistake when it created the legal fiction that corporations are persons. I don’t want to get into that argument here. Instead, I want to make a slightly different argument: all persons are fictions.

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Post the third: Currently reading

I’m always reading loads of books at once. It’s probably a bad habit but usually I get round to finishing them off eventually. Mind you as I think about it there’s probably dozens maybe even hundreds in this category. I’ll almost certainly not get round to finishing them all, even if I can remember what they all are. But who cares?, anyway here’s a quick list of some I’m in some expectation of actually finishing.

1) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. An example of hysterical realism I’m told. It’s the sort of thing I tend to enjoy. I don’t really like plots but I do respond to atmosphere I guess. There’s plenty of this here.

2) Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno.  Enjoying this so far. Written as a set of attributed footnotes but quite readable.  It’s a biography of the writer of The Catcher in The Rye, who it seems was damaged by his wartime experience.

3) The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan an account of the D-day landings in which Salinger was involved.

4) The Desert War. A Purnell’s History of WW2 Special – one my favourite books from my younger days. I counted over 50 campaign and battle maps plus numerous illustrations of equipment,  weapons and vehicles. Great stuff really, especially when your 13. Let’s create a few Memoir 44 scenarios out of this lot!

5) The Battle of the Atlantic by John Costello and Terry Hughes. The story of the U-boats and the Atlantic convoys they were attacking in WW2.  Published in the 70’s and a book I read as a schoolboy. Still worth a read today.

6) The Moscow Option by David Downing.  Alternative WW2 ‘history’ from the early 80’s. What happens when Hitler is put into a coma by a plane crash in early August 1941? All quite interesting.

This alt history seems to be all the rage at the moment although traditionally I think historians have frowned upon it, regarding it as empty speculation. Maybe it’s a sign of the times.

 

Continue…

Write a bit more to see how it looks. That story in the Guardian by Helen Pidd about the Manchester Chinese bike hire scheme’s teething troubles was darkly comic maybe. Manchester clearly isn’t Singapore. 

First blog post

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

My plan is just to have some motivation to write stuff regularly.  I’m mainly going to witter on interestingly one hopes about my various interests and whatever’s catching my eye on the day. What am I interested in? Well I like reading history and military history and anything spinning off from that which is potentially a lot! I like boardgames and wargaming too. A bit of science, maths and music provides alternative diversions and finally playing a bit of guitar and keyboard makes a change.  I like science fiction quite a bit and spin offs and movies. I might go on about any of this and any thing else I’m temporarily bothered about.  Oh and the history of ideas etc. Etc. Oh and food and drink; mainly drink if I’m honest.