Tag: my back pages

My Back Pages: A Streetcar Named Desire

I have a feeling that I read Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” before I ever saw the film adaptation directed by Elia Kazan. I seem to remember checking out some Williams plays from the public library one summer during my teen years, since I’d enjoyed reading “The Glass Menagerie” for school and wanted to know more of his work.

Re-reading the play years later, and seeing the masterful film version as an adult woman, I feel a heart-wrenching sympathy for the fading Southern belle Blanche DuBois. She’s a tragic figure, with all her deceptions and vanities and her reluctance to look harsh reality in the face. “I don’t want realism,” she cries. “I want magic!”

Continue reading “My Back Pages: A Streetcar Named Desire” →

My Back Pages: George Orwell’s 1984

During freshman year of high school, my literature class was required to read 1984 (or, to be absolutely correct, Nineteen Eighty-Four) by George Orwell. Some of the novel’s finer points probably went over our heads, but we grasped the main concepts. The story of protagonist Winston Smith and his doomed personal rebellion against “Big Brother” and the Party that governs every detail of his life is a powerful one, even if you’re just fourteen years old and don’t really know all the historical context that surrounded the writing of the book. Continue reading “My Back Pages: George Orwell’s 1984” →

My Back Pages: Sherlock Holmes & The Hound of the Baskervilles

I was recently writing a review of some body products inspired by Brideshead Revisited and I ended up flipping through my well-loved copy of the novel in search of scent-related lines. There were more than I remembered. This is often the case: I pick up a book that I haven’t read in a while and I end up noticing references to perfume, fragrance, the sense of smell.

This series of posts will look back at stories and poems that include mentions of fragrance. Continue reading “My Back Pages: Sherlock Holmes & The Hound of the Baskervilles” →