Tea at Trianon: The Cartoons of Flannery O'Connor

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The Cartoons of Flannery O'Connor

From Brain Pickings:

When she was about five, O’Connor began cartooning, creating small books, and writing comical sketches, which she illustrated with her own drawings. Like William Faulkner, whose little-known, gorgeous Jazz Age drawings graced his college newspaper, O’Connor also contributed artwork to school publications throughout high school and college, earning a reputation as a cartoonist before she became a famous writer. The latter she had tragically little time to enjoy — O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus at the very beginning of her career as a writer, when she was only twenty-five, and spent the remaining twelve years of her life on her mother’s farm in rural Georgia, writing feverishly and traveling to give more than sixty public lectures. But the artwork she began creating in the early 1940s, shortly before entering graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, exudes its own magic and reveals O’Connor’s remarkable talent as a diverse creator. Her cartoons, created mostly in pen and ink and linoleum cuts, poke humor at student life and comment on the profound impact of WWII. Underpinning her visual art is the same distinct blend of humor and uncompromising fierceness that makes her literary style so singular and so memorable. (Read more.)