‘I woke raging with desire for you’, Laurence Olivier told Vivien Leigh in unseen letters – The letters between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh are going public for the very first time, and I’m thinking this story will make you want to read more of them. It always amazes me when people think that the early decades of the 20th century were more restrained than current times. Case in point, Olivier and Leigh, who started out as a secret couple until they were free to marry in 1940, and who remained married for 20 years. You might think, given the great passion of their relationship, that they would not have divorced, but perhaps the extremity of their feelings also made it difficult to remain together for so long.
Olivier wrote more than 200 letters to Gone With The Wind star Leigh during their affair, which begun in 1939 and ended with their divorce in 1960.
In the early years of their affair, when they were both still married so had to conceal their relationship, Olivier candidly expresses his sexual desire for Leigh.
In one undated letter, believed to be from 1938 or 1939, he wrote: “I woke up absolutely raging with desire for you my love… Oh dear God how I did want you. Perhaps you were stroking your darling self.” –The Telegraph
What This City Did With An Abandoned Walmart Is Absolutely Brilliant. You’ll Love It – You have to click through to the story to see the incredible photos of this library, created from an abandoned Wal-Mart, and inclusive of not only a state of the art library, but also a cafe, used bookstore, and farmers market. And it happened in Texas. Which pretty much means it can happen anywhere. So why doesn’t it?
Officials in McAllen, Texas, were faced with this problem when their local Walmart shut down. Instead of letting the giant store sit vacant, they did something amazing. They transformed it into the largest single-floor public library in America. –Grow Food-Not Lawns
Superman’s New Comic Book Costume Revealed – For those of you anxiously awaiting the unveiling of Superman’s new costume, you can see some images here. I have to say that the gloves are, uh, interesting, and it definitely looks more costumey to me than Jim Lee’s version, but not hugely transformed, either. At least not in this version.
Some people are saying it resembles Henry Cavill’s Batman v Superman costume, but I’m not really seeing that. While the BvS costume is more colorful than its Man of Steel predecessor, Jim Lee’s Superman design wasn’t exactly washed out.
Personally, I was never a huge fan of Jim Lee’s take, so I’m happy the big guy is getting a new look. At first glance, this one seems like an improvement. It’s certainly not what my ideal Superman costume would look like, but it works for me. This is just one image, though – we’ll have to wait to see what it looks like in the hands of other artists and across a number of issues. –Screen Rant
Is Being a Writer a Job or a Calling? – Obviously I love these little Bookends essays, since I post them here often enough, and this one is no exception. Given all the talk about who much authors should be paid, this back and forth between Dana Stevens and Benjamin Moser is both timely and insightful. Is is predictable that Moser is on the side of calling, while Stevens is on the side of the job? Although I really like Stevens’s take on the question:
Really, the last person you want answering this question is a professional writer, someone in whose daily life the concepts of inspiration, obligation, craft, ambition and economic survival have grown together into a paradoxical tangle. Of course we’re going to lean toward saying writing is a calling — that’s our job (or at the least, our way of soothing ourselves for not having found a better-paying one). Who wouldn’t choose the role of literature’s divinely chosen handservant over that of some schmo hustling to meet a deadline? There are many days — today is one, to be honest — when I am just that schmo, beset by overlapping commitments, late on bills, typing the same sentence over and over with minuscule variations that somehow make it worse each time, wishing I had learned a proper trade — carpentry maybe, or coding. But that moment in the sycamore tree still feels to me like a kind of summons, and I’m glad I answered. –New York Times