Shopper News Blog: Imagine That Design Company turns a table into an event
The Knoxville News-Sentinel 1/22/2021 Knoxville News Sentinel
KARNS
Nancy Anderson, Shopper News
A beautiful and unique table design can turn a humdrum dinner into an elaborate event. Even in the face of a pandemic when gathering is discouraged, Jessica Brock of Imagine That Design Company found a way to make a party special in the family bubble.
“I know gatherings are discouraged right now, parties are a no-no and that really made me worry about my business. I discovered that people staying at home still want to celebrate milestones or even just elevate Sunday dinner.”
A new collection of old Didion essays, called "Let Me Tell You What I Mean," has been published. Here's where to rediscover the essay "Why I Write," a spark of earnest hope behind the writer's distant cool.
by Two and a half centuries ago this year, the first comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language was published. The lexicographer (def. “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge”) was Dr. Samuel Johnson, better known then as an essayist and moralist, and (as is more obvious now than then) a serious Christian in a deistic, even skeptical age. Nine years earlier, a bookseller named Robert Dodsley asked the 36-year-old Johnson about compiling a dictionary. Dodsley considered it a rebuke to national pride that England lacked anything to equal the great dictionaries of France and Italy, each the product of teams of academics. At first Johnson declined,
Credit: Everett Collection
To be a certain kind of girl (or boy, though their heroes always seem a little easier to come by) is to dream at some point of growing up to be Joan Didion. In the diamond-cut clarity of her prose, both fiction and journalism found a new touchstone; in her cool-eyed persona that famed mystique, wreathed in cigarette smoke and ennui lay the promise of a life less ordinary, one where glamour and gravitas could somehow coexist.
In what implausible world, after all, would any mere writer a woman, no less! And by then an octogenarian be deemed aspirational enough to sell sunglasses that cost more than a smartphone, as Didion did in a 2015 ad campaign for the Parisian fashion house Céline? Or retain the sort of relevance, more than 50 years into her career, that the advent of a new collection becomes a bona fide literary event? Accordingly,