There's a spectacular purple beech tree in my neighborhood, big enough to dominate an entire yard, spreading those strange pewter branches out over the street. Beeches are rare in an urban setting as they are sensitive to pollution and extreme heat, but this one is thriving. The true tree of knowledge, beech bark scars easily and will often bear arborglyphs for decades (think Tom Hearts Jane). The tree has another interesting connection to learning and literacy as it's the root word for "book" in many European languages. One of the earliest texts was written in sanskrit on a beech bark page.
Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...
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