RTC Monthly: A World Torn Asunder

Episode 160: Ciara Shuttleworth!

The Drunken Odyssey

Episode 160 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the poet Ciara Shuttleworth,

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

plus Don Royster writes about how Isaac Asimov helped him to appreciate Shakespeare.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

To read about Ciara’s post-residency road-tripping with Flat Jack, here is part 1 and part 2.

To read Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of The Declaration of Independence, go here.

View original post

MidCentury Modern: Winter Park’s Hidden Heritage

Preservation Winter Park

Nils Schweizer’s downtown Winter Park office; photo by Rick Kilby

by Christine Madrid French

On the surface, the wildly popular television show “Mad Men,”set in the 1960s, chronicled the life of high-flying advertising executive Donald Draper and his stylish coworkers.  On a broader, cultural level, however, the show can be credited with a bringing about a national resurgence of mid-century mania.  Increasingly, well-heeled homebuilders are favoring the modern designs that Winter Parkers are seeing pop up all over town.   And, advised by publications like “Atomic Ranch,” some homeowners are doing the previously unthinkable—ripping out replacement wood flooring to reveal the sparkling terrazzo underneath.  Can harvest gold appliances at Southeast Steel be far behind?

While you may have been following this trend, were you also aware that Winter Park boasts an extensive inventory of midcentury gems?  Indeed, Winter Park’s renowned architectural heritage isn’t just about turn-of-the-century Victorians, 1920s bungalows and 1940s Mediterranean…

View original post 1,511 more words

LYNX CENTRAL / ORLANDO, FL

Fantastic

The Transit Interpretation Project: TrIP

PHOTO BY DAVID MORAN

EXHIBITED IN TRIP: THE COMMUTERS SHOW

View original post

Episode 158: Julian Chambliss

The Drunken Odyssey

Episode 158 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the historian Julian Chambliss,

plus Dmetri Kakmi writes about how reading Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky taught him how to write about psycho-geographic dis-associations.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Check out Julian Chambliss’s site here.

Check out John Sims’ site devoted to the Confederate flag project.

Check out the news coverage of the Flag Funerals Project by (in order of decreasing journalistic competence) WESH, WKMG Local 6, and WFTV.

Read The Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s statement about the Massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church here.

Check out the pro-slavery comment made at a diversity panel at CPAC in 2013 here.

To read about the Stop Owlcatraz movement…

View original post 61 more words

Producer Gordon Gray Hoping For A Facebook Miracle; Race Against Time To Save His Daughters From Rare Brain Disease

Deadline

In his long career as a film producer, Gordon Gray is best known for making inspirational fact-based sports movies about subjects who overcame long odds, from baseball pitcher Jim Morris in The Rookie to football player Vince Papale in Invincible, to the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic hockey team in Miracle. After Gray and his wife Kristen learned in March that both their 4-year-old daughter Charlotte and 20-month-old daughter Gwenyth have the incredibly rare and potentially fatal degenerative brain disorder Batten disease, it is Gray who is up against the odds and in need of a miracle.

After they received a nightmarish medical diagnosis in March, the Grays were told so few suffer from the disease — maybe 10 at any given time in the world — that there has been limited research towards a cure even though the disease was first discovered in 1903. At present, there is…

View original post 1,334 more words

Oldest City

Florida Superlative

The Oldest City

St. Augustine is the nation’s oldest city, right? The Spanish explorer and Florida’s First Governor Pedro Menendez de Aviles disembarked from his ship in St. Augustine in 1565, set up camp, and the rest is history, as they say. But what about Jean Ribault, Rene Goulaine de Laudonnaie and Fort Caroline in 1562? Or maybe Mayport, which Ribault sailed passed on his way to the high bluff on which Fort Caroline sits? And what about Don Tristan de Luna y Arellano trotting around Pensacola in 1559? Of course all of these “earliest” settlements are European settlements. It seems as though in the race for the oldest Florida’s more 50 indigenous cultures encountered by Europeans simply don’t “count.”

St. Augustine is the nation’s oldest continuous settlement by Europeans. Fort Caroline, you lose out. De Laudonnaie and Ribault established their fort and hung around for a bit, but ultimately…

View original post 730 more words