Celebrating the TV of my youth...
some kids tv classics
Posted by 70s 80s 90s kids this is how we rolled. on Saturday, 24 October 2015
A leading web curator noted that children’s books, especially classic ones with timeless wisdom for grown-ups, can be combined with minimalist posters that show complex stories or ideas in clean graphics.
A series of such hyper-minimalist takes on beloved children’s classics was created by designer Christian Jackson.
Children’s book illustrator and Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, in an NPR Fresh Air interview less than a year before his death in 2012, made a heartwarming call to "live your life, live your life, live your life".
According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book. It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world.
However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984.
See also:
Though not particularly taken by recent film adaptations of her novels, and well-used to my family calling me "Mr Bennett", I remember very much enjoying Pride and Prejudice when I read it as a student in France.
Today, Jane Austen is loved mainly as a charming guide to fashionable life in the Regency period. She is admired for portraying a world of elegant houses, dances, servants and fashionable young men driving barouches. But her own vision of her task was radically different, believes The School of Life. She was an ambitious – and stern – moralist. She was acutely conscious of human failings and she had a deep desire to make people nicer: less selfish, more reasonable, more dignified and more sensitive to the needs of others.
I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):
2014
When I think of books whose messages have stayed with me down the years, I often think of Ulverton, which contrives somehow to feel more "authentic" than many a "non-fictional" historical text in bringing the past alive, lifting the edge of the veil and allowing us to see - at times almost voyeuristically - what Dylan Thomas called the "yellowing, dicky-bird watching pictures of the dead".
I realised that the essential book, the one true book, is one that the great writer does not need to invent, in the current sense of the word, since it already exists in every one of us — he has only to translate it. The task and the duty of a writer are those of a translator - Marcel Proust
After the BBC opened up its archives of In Our Time, I came to the episode about Marcel Proust.
"Possibly the best comic strip EVER in the history of the entire universe", claimed one commentator.
I think Dennis the Menace (in its heydey), Gaston Lagaffe and one or others may occupy the same pantheon as Calvin and Hobbes, but there is little doubt that, for all those of us who have been deeply touched by the warmth, humour, sheer humanity with which Bill Watterson blessed us over so many years, these creations occupy a very special place in our hearts.
For the 500-year anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch‘s death, the MOTI Museum in Holland commissioned a modern re-interpretation of the Dutch painter’s famous medieval painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.