What's your favourite book? Go ahead and tell us!
Edit: Because this is a sticky, all current topics on favorite authors and favourite books will be locked and all future topics will be locked or trashed. (:
(Edited by RelientKFan824 at 1:52 pm on July 24, 2006)
Editor, poet, critic, travel writer, historian, philosopher, essayist, biographer, autobiographer, political activist, university lecturer, librettist, humanitarian, gardener--George Woodcock(1912-1995) seems entitled to wear almost as many hats as there are works to his credit--which stand at somewhere between 120 and 150, not including his radio and TV plays, documentaries and speeches. He no longer wears any hats, though, having gone some fifteen years ago to that mysterious and undiscovered country, that hole where we all go and speak and write, eat and drink, no more.
In the wider world Woodcock was and is most well-known for his books on the philosophy of anarchism and its history as well as for his well-received biography, The Crystal Spirit, on his friend George Orwell. From a Canadian perspective he was a literary champion and the founder of the journal Canadian Literature in 1959, finally passing on its editorship eighteen years later. The journal was the first of its kind and it provided a much-needed place for the exploration and celebration of the works of Canadian literary authors. In 1959 I was in grade ten, in love with Susan Gregory and baseball and I had just joined the Bahá'í Faith. Fifteen years later I was living in Tasmania as a senior tutor in education studies at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. -Ron Price with thanks to Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, Spring 2009.
You were not known to me, then, George; my life was filled with so much else even until just the other day, when into the early evening of my life when I chanced upon a short bio-piece which introduced you to me, to your life and work. You were born just four months before the Master went through southern Ontario while you were out in Winnipeg that summer before going to England and spending the next 35 years and then returning to Canada to lay your bones at the age of 82. I shall say no more about your life, George, only to thank you for all that you did in your years of living. I hope to get to know you better in these lengthening years of the evening of my life.
Ron Price 1 September 2009
At the start of my travelling-pioneering life, in 1962, the first collection, a monumental edition, of The Letters of Oscar Wilde were published. I was far too busy at the time dealing with 9 subjects in Ontario's grade 13 curriculum, with my burgeoning erotic inclinations, my incipient bipolar disorder, the nature and direction of the new religio-political commitment I had recently been socialized into over the years 1953 to 19621 and, in October of that same year, a socio-historical event that took our global society as close as it has yet been to a nuclear war.2 -Ron Price: refer to 1the Baha'i Faith and 2 the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That edition of his letters went out of print but, when I was working in the Northern Territory of Australia, a new edition became available. I was still too busy and there was so much else going on in my life at that time: work, family, a new Baha'i community, just getting through the day....and so it was that it was not until I retired from full-time, part-time and casual work that I had any idea of your brilliance, Oscar. Your life was inseparable from your work; indeed, until that retirement in my own life, my writing was by far the less important part of my life, too, by far. I became like you, Oscar, my own public relations expert, inventing and reinventing myself, perfecting ads all over the place. I've got to hand it to you, dear Oscar, you were a clever dude with those words.
You said: I was a problem for which there was no solution; I can resist everything except, of course, temptation; if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you; and, man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth1-------and on and on you went evolving, as a conscious process of your self-expression and your self-dramatization, discovering the artistic context which best matched your temperament and character, devoting your career to investigating the most elusive subject matter: the self, creating an expressive medium for your findings, for your many voices, many personae and your wide range of tones and masks....Me, too, Oscar, me too on the long, stony and tortuous road.
1 Oscar Wilde Quotes, "The Quotations Page," www.quotationspage.com.
Ron Price 12 June 2009
the first book my dad ever read me was Battlefield Earth.
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