Season 6: Bonus Content, "Book Lunch" featuring Annie Dillard's "An American Childhood"

Journey of an Aesthete Podcast https://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com/

#pennsylvania #pittsburgh #1950sThis will be the livestream on this wonderful book by Annie Dillard that was originally scheduled on September 27 but postponed due to the storm. On this book lunch we take the deepest dive into Annie Dillard's 1980s masterpiece "An American Childhood". More on this livestream event, here: I chose Annie Dillard's book for two rather different reasons. One, admittedly more conventional, reason is that it is one of the great works of prose in the contemporary English language in what we used to consider a "canonical" sense. Dillard was already by this book's release in the 1980s a Pulitzer Prize winner for Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. The second reason is that during an episode of Hannah Arendt's Life Of The Mind I was cherishing Arendt's prickly and uncompromising tone and spontaneously thought of the name of Dillard as a writer whose tone I felt was different from Arendt in some important respects. Like Arendt though, Dillard is still an unusually independent minded thinker, resisting any and all ordinary categories of political, religious or philosophic affiliation while remaining steadfast in her unique spiritual convictions and practices. If there is an author to whom she is closest it is perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson, both in the complexity and abstraction of her ideas coupled with an accessibility and relatability to a general audience. Her book is a memoir of growing up in 1950s Pennsylvania in a wealthy family - one that also happened to cherish intellectual knowledge and culture most highly. (The latter also an Arendt connection). In Dillard's words herself, it is a memoir of her "waking up to life" in the widest sense. It is also one of the most passionate accounts of bibliophililia I have ever read. it is a definitive book about books and among the thousand books I have read I know of no book with more love for the book itself within its pages. And it is this last instance that "An American Childhood" is an ideal for a book lunch. #pennsylvania #pittsburgh #1950s #1940s #1980s #spirituality #christianity #judaism #Islam #Buddhism #books #bibliophile #library #bookstore #family #pulitzerprize #leonuris #annefrank #diaryofannefrank #memoir #autobiography #creativenonfiction #poetry #feminism #nature #wilderness #city #urban #ecology #environmentalism #episcopalianism #catholicism #marktwain #comedy #humor #joke #radio #television #carnegiemellon #winter #summer #storytelling #adolescence #criticalthinking #presbyterian #andrewcarnegie #steel #railroad #spiritualism #american #unitedstates #germany #scotland #ireland #louispasteur #science #biology #virology #medicine #childhood #georgestevens #giant #jamesdean #rockhudson #elizabethtaylor #hollywood #geology #industrialrevolution #pittsburghsymphony #philadelphiaorchestra #thecainemutiny #johnhersey #hiroshima #worldwar2 #holocaust #suburbia #socialsim #baseball #softball #sports #bridgeovertheriverkwai DISCLAIMER: Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.

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