Roland Yeomans's Blog, page 11

AN ENCHANTED KINGDOM WAITS WITHIN YOU

 

There is a land not too far from where you sit right now.

Its velvet grasses miss the press of your feet.

The billowing clouds strain to see your body walk slowly up the rising hill.

The fragrant winds blow through the lonely tree branches, whispering your name as they seek some trace of you.

It is where the magic lives.

That realm is lonely, wondering where you have been.

And where have you and I been?

We have been caught up in the drudgery that writing has become. 

Burdened by life's duties and our own doubts, we have lost our way. 

We have lost the magic.

Did we lose it straining for that first perfect sentence in our new novel?

Looking at the blank, impatient computer monitor did we forget the simple wonder of just writing the first simple sentence that occurred to us?

That creative power which bubbles so tingly at the beginning of our book quiets down after a time. 

The journey becomes slower and slower, the inertia of doubt steadily dragging our steps.

Do we continue doggedly on or do we stop to refresh ourselves?

The answer to that question determines whether we find our way back to the magic or not.

How do we refresh ourselves?

How do we refresh ourselves on a long wilderness walk? We stop by a stream and drink.

Drink of those poets and writers who sparked that love of the written word spoken in the lonely heart of the reader.

As a hiker takes shade under the canopy of a huge oak, 

listen to the music of those artists who stirred you to imagine images that you just had to write and make live in your own way.

Then, you shall write as a child writes ... 

not thinking of a result but thinking in terms of discovery as if you were hiking once again where the magic lives.

It is the Zen of writing: 

the creation takes place between your fingers and the keyboard, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.

The magic is there waiting for you. It will come if you but get out of its way and let it in.
Come back before the ghost of H P Lovecraft comes looking for you!

YOUR MOTHER WAS NO SARAH CONNERS

 

She was better ...

She had no stunt double.

They do not teach how to be a good mother in public school.

Wishing someone a Happy Mother's Day is a chancy thing these days.

The person you greet may have lost a beloved mother ... or a hateful one.

Both losses leave wounds slow to heal and ones no one likes to be reminded of.

Take Mary Ball Washington, the mother of George Washington ...

In the drama of her son’s life,Mary Ball Washington has been cast as a villain and a saint—or written outentirely. 

In reality, she was an independent woman at a time when few otherswere.

If you are a mother, you are not seen as you are by others ... not even by yourself.

All you can do is try to be better than yesterday ... and if your children have flown the nests ...

Forgive yourself for past mistakes and forgive your children for not having the wisdom the years have pounded into your head.

May this Mother's Day find you well as can be no matter your circumstances, Roland

Why Do You Continue With Your Blog? IWSG Post

 

https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html
Admit it ... your traffic is down. Why?
Instant gratification?
Why read paragraphs? We answers now. Short ones.

Podcasts?
YouTube can spoon feed us information.

Short Attention Spans?
We are the microwave thinkers today.

The Allure of Social Media
It gives the illusion of immediacy and intimacy without the irritation of actually being there for someone.
So Why Continue?
Cyber Journal --
Your blog is your cyber-journal. It helps create order when your world feels like chaos.
You get to know yourself when you write down your fears and doubts.
It helps you de-stress and calm down.
It puts you in touch with like minds. 

Cyber Diary --
What is  the difference between a journal and diary you ask?
You can go back through the years and see patterns to avoid or recognize as benefits to encourage in the future.
You see who you were and ask it you like what you see.

Think what you were like 2 years ago?
Heck, I can't even remember what I wanted to buy unless I write down a list before I go shopping.
How about you?
Think "Kaizen" 
The Japanese concept of continuous improvement.
Embrace the change you see around you, becoming a lifelong learner.
Engage with your visitors, visit their social media.
Have fun with your blog. It will show.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BLOG LATELY?

APRIL 30TH -- MAN IS WHAT HE HIDES

 Samuel McCord here --

 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/151877668X




André Malraux wrote:

“Man is not what he thinks he is,
he is what he hides.”



Portrait by Benjamin D. Maxham

Take Henry David Thoreau.

I read his Walden at least once every year, but he could not stand up to his mistakes. 

At the age of 26, he accidentally set fire to 300 acres of the Concord woods on this day in 1844.


Thoreau had taken a few days off from the family pencil-making business, and set out down the Sudbury River with a friend.

A spark from their first fire, a noonday fish-fry — this courtesy of a borrowed match, as they had forgotten to pack their own — ignited the dry shoreline grass.

When stomping and whacking the flames didn’t work, the friend went for help and Thoreau,

 after a little more futile effort, climbed a nearby cliff to observe the scene while he waited for the firefighters.

What did he write of it?

"I said to myself:

'Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it.'



Reminds me of what President Reagan wrote:

“Politics is not a bad profession.

If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”



And speaking of books --


Memorial for Margot and Anne Frank at the former Bergen-Belsen site,along with floral and pictorial tributes
On this day, a Wednesday it was, in 1952,

the diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish victim of the Holocaust was published in English titled "The Diary of a Young Girl".

Her diary, later entitled "The Diary of Anne Frank", became one of the most popular books in the world and is included in most schools as recommended reading.

Anne Frank died of typhus just before her 16th birthday in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.  


Recognizing that the war was ending, Hitler had retreated to his Fuhrerbunker several months previously. He and his new wife, Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before,

committed suicide on this day in 1945 by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting themselves in the head.




My faith in the Great Mystery was wounded by what I found in those death camps. 

It took Victor Standish entering my life again to heal it.



And on the topic of books, Anne Dillard was born on this day in 1945. 

Her wry perspective on life and writing is reflected in this quote from her LIVING BY FICTION:

"You know how a puppy, when you point off in one direction for him, looks at your hand.

It is hard to train him not to.

The modernist arts in this century have gone to a great deal of trouble to untrain us readers, to force us to look at the hand.

Contemporary modernist fine prose says, Look at my hand. Plain prose says, Look over there."



https://www.amazon.com/The-Writing-Life-Annie-Dillard-audiobook/dp/B004QM6N7W/
On this date in 1939,
200,000 people attended New York World’s Fair, official opening, featuring futuristic technologies such as FM radio, television, and fluorescent lighting.



On this day in 1940,
Jimmy Dorsey and his band recorded the song "Contrasts." Along with his brother Tommy, the Dorsey Brothers eventually became an unmatched rival during the big band and swing era. 


Roger Zelazny, ghost here.
You scoff. Be my guest ...

it makes it so much easier for us.

There is more to reality than you are capable of comprehending ...

after all, you are but flesh.



Oh, you are wondering who Roger Zelazny is.

Don’t be embarrassed. In life I wondered much the same thing.



Once the name, Roger Zelazny, drew crowds.

I made somewhat of a splash in Science Fiction in the sixties,

endured and evolved in the seventies and eighties.I went the way of all flesh mid-way through the nineties in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And Roland mourned me as a distant older brother gone over the crest of the hill before him, leaving him cold and alone.

Oh, and I inspired him to take up the pen and follow my steps into weaving tales in the genre I call Science Fantasy.

APRIL 29TH -- LOST TIME IS NEVER FOUND AGAIN

 Ghost of Mark Twain here again, children --

How mankind defers from day to day the best it can do, and the most beautiful things it can enjoy,

without thinking that every day may be the last one, and that lost time is lost eternity!


We are nearing the end of the month, and it occurs to me that some of you are much closer to your end than you would imagine. 

Cherish each moment.  I wish I had done that more.



On this day in 1969, old Duke Ellington got the Medal of Freedom on his 70th birthday.


In 1965, the Music Jury of the Pulitzer Prize Committee unaminously recommended him for a special award, but the Advisory Board declined it. 

Heathens!

Old Duke just smiled, "Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young!"


I like especially what he once told me, "I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues."

Now, there's a man for you!








Ah, gentle readers, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magicians,

who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.





Painting, c. 1485

On this date in 1429,

young Joan of Arc arrived to relieve a siege in Orleans.  The siege had been going on since October of the previous year,

and Joan's success in lifting the siege was the first of a series of stunning victories.

Think of it: a young peasant girl, unschooled in the arts of war, leads seasoned men and commanders to a victory long denied them.


That is the way with us:

 we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it. 


On this day in 1945:

Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun. 

The two married in the Fuhrerbunker, where they had been living underground for months, and committed suicide together the next day.




American troops guarding the main entrance to Dachau just after liberation, 1945

Dachau was liberated. 

Dachau was one of the first concentration camps opened, and was the site of some of the worst atrocities of World War II.

When it was finally liberated, most of the 30,000 inmates were severely emaciated, and many more had died.



Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable.

 Of the entire brood he is the only one--the solitary one--that possesses malice.

That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices--the most hateful.

He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel.

He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.




1992 --

In a sour example of "justice",

an all-white suburban Los Angeles jury acquited four white police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King.

The case centered on a video, taped by an amateur cameraman which caught the scene on film

as the four police officers beat, kicked and clubbed unemployed laborer Rodney King while other officers looked on.

Three days of rioting ensued.  Man sure doesn't improve with age does he?


John Dillinger

On this day in 1934, the Outlaw, John Dillinger,

is still on the run from a nationwide hunt after escaping from a band of policemen

with orders to catch him dead or alive 1 week ago in North woods Wisconsin.



On this date in 1958, Michelle Marie Pfeiffer was born in Santa Ana, California, U.S.

  Michelle Pfeiffer is an American actress who has won a number of awards including

a Golden Globe Award ( The Fabulous Baker Boys ) and a BAFTA Award ( Dangerous Liaisons ).

That gal is recognized for her talent and beauty

and was at one time featured in People Magazine's '50 Most Beautiful People in the World' issue in 1990.




I keep showing up in her boudoir, asking her to put on her catwoman outfit.  She keeps asking me to jump in the cat litter box!






The newly married Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the balcony ofBuckingham Palace.

The couple married in Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011 (St. Catherine's Day) with the day declared a bank holiday in the United Kingdom.
On this date in 1974, old Richard Nixon announced the release of the Watergate tapes.   

Nixon had tried to keep the tapes private for months and had exhausted virtually every legal channel, 

including executive privilege. He resigned before he could be impeached in August of that year.
There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Politicians!

Now, Roland has told me unreservedly NOT to pick him for Y when it come to authors.
But when did you ever know me to do what I am told?
The audiobook, GHOST OF A CHANCE, is now out, detailing Roland's and my adventures as he is sought for the murder of the ghost of Ernest Hemingway! 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534981861
Roland starts off the book with a quote from himself -- something he hardly ever does:

"To all of life there is a shadow. The shadow of sadness, doubt, despair. Still it is but an echo of a heart moving forward."
-Roland Yeomans

APRIL 27 -- For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson



Emerson in 1857


Hello, readers ... I am the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ah, I see your eyes rolling up now.  "That old stuff-shirt" you groan. 

I have heard it all before ...

and from no less a luminary than Mark Twain in his mocking of Whittier, Wordsworth, and myself as we listened in 1877.

He left for Europe not long afterwards,  the critics howling for his blood.  I thought it mildly amusing, not insulting at all.


But Samuel McCord found my company tolerable aboard the Demeter in 1853. {RITES OF PASSAGE} 

But I digress:


On this day in 1882, I died at the age of seventy-eight.

Although my last decade was one of increasing debility it was also one of international accolade and local adulation.

 When the "Sage of Concord" as critics uncomfortably called me returned from my last trip abroad,

I found the band playing, the schoolchildren singing and my burned home rebuilt by the community. 




"…the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought."

—from my essay on “Self-Reliance” 

 

Speaking of Milton ...

 The epic status of Milton’s Paradise Lost can obscure the fact that, when published, it was a controversial and risky venture — so risky for the publisher that, on this day in 1667,

Milton signed a contract to receive only 5£ for his work (with an additional 5£ after the sale of 1,300 copies). 


I hear this strange book firm, Amazon, is much the same way.

Part of the controversy was over the anticipated religious outcry over the way Milton had portrayed this figure or that doctrine.

Ever the voice of liberty, Milton saw his epic as an attempt to deliver poetry from “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” 

Hart Crane is another who, in The Bridge, aimed for an epic.

 He is also another who struggled with addictions, and who jumped to his death, from a boat between Cuba and America on this day in 1932.

"Follow your arches to what corners of the sky
they pull you
Where marble clouds support the sea
Wreck of dreams." 

Oh, that wily Clemens thought to snare me with the challenge of selecting an author whose name begins with X. 



Hardly a feat for one with a classical education.  I choose Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and social and religious critic.
I even wrote a poem entitled, Xenophanes: 



"If oxen had hands, they would sculpt their gods to look like oxen."

"God is one eternal being, spherical in form, comprehending all things within himself, is intelligent,

and moves all things, but bears no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind."


Samuel McCord listens to this in the dark of Meilori's and mourns his lost love: 

Gentle readers, do your senses a favor and listen to this healing melody: 

 

APRIL 26 -- FATE KEEPS HAPPENING

 

On this day in 1893 I, Anita Loos, was born.


Anita Loos and John Emerson
by Edward Steichen for VANITY FAIR (1928)

“I've always loved high style in low company.” - Anita Loos

So of course that rascal, Clemens, suggested I take over today's posting. 

So what dreary dross does he leave me to talk about?


In 1865 on this date,

John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, is surrounded by federal troops in a barn in Virginia.

He ends up dead, although there remains some doubt as to whether he took his own life.

And in dealing with the government, darlings, when there is doubt ... there is no doubt.




On this date in 1986, an explosion and fire at the No. 4 reactor of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

results in a nuclear meltdown sending radioactivity into the atmosphere.

And Russia is still making things "hot" for the Ukraine.  At least those boys are consistent!

I joke to blunt my memory of those poor souls who entered the Shadowlands from that terrible accident.

Let us have a moment of silence for those two brave volunteers who jumped into certain radioactive death to prevent an even worse disaster:




In 1989, a deadly tornado destroys all structures in an area of 2.3 sq mi in Saturia, Bangladesh

leaving 80,000 homeless and a reported death toll of 1,300.

And there is simply nothing funny about shattered lives and anguish no matter the distance from your front porch.


In 1982, Rod Stewart, that awful singer who must sandpaper his vocal chords every night,

was mugged in broad daylight in Central Park.  If you are wondering why I am smiling -- I was that broad.





Oh, who am I you ask? 


You darlings are just so wonderful for a dead girl's ego.  I started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in my teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films,


but my most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as "a masterpiece of comic literature."  (Even if I do the quoting myself!)



The family has always used the correct French pronunciation of our last name which is lohse.

 However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them ...

And watching them try to say it correctly made them look as if they were on the verge of a seizure! 



In his journal entry for this day in 1838,  Ralph Waldo Emerson  describes a pleasant afternoon spent

with  Henry David Thoreau , and a lesson learned:

"Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau.

At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say,

"Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience.

Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Niagara."



The two old dears were new friends at this point, Emerson’s nearby journal references to Thoreau just as delighted:

“My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity & clear perception.

How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing quacking world."


All I can say is that old Emerson must have been acquainted with the world of agents and Hollywood!


“It isn't that gentlemen really prefer blondes, it's just that we look dumber.”
― Anita Loos

Excuse me, Anita, my dear -- but I must interrupt.  I can brook no one else to be chosen for the letter W in authors.

Allow me to introduce myself, readers. 

I am the ghost of Oscar Wilde and the star of the 1895 Egyptian supernatural thriller: DEATH IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE.

"Is the story about me? If so, I will listen to it, for I am extremely fond of fiction."
 - Oscar Wilde

 

APRIL 25 -- FOR UNPUBLISHED WRITERS EVERYWHERE

 

"Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."

 - Ella Fitzgerald, born on this day in 1917.


  

Ghost of Mark Twain, here --

 On this date in 795, old Pope Leo III was attacked in a procession in Rome.  His attackers commenced to try to blind him and cut out his tongue. And folks have been trying to blind and muzzle those who they disagree with ever since. 


On this date in 1719, ROBINSON CRUSOE was published.

Though the book is Daniel Defoe's most well-known work, he actually didn't write fiction until he was in his sixties. 

So you struggling writers out there don't give up and experiment with other genres, don't you know?

The book is based on the experiences of a Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk.


 The guillotine was first used on this date in 1792:

  The iconic method of execution in the French Revolution got its start a few years earlier with the execution of a highwayman named Nicolas J Pelletier.

  Eyewitness accounts report that the crowd at the execution was dissatisfied with the guillotine since they found it too "clinically effective," and therefore not entertaining enough.

But folks got their heads together and come up with Reality TV and most seem pleased with the results!



Now some folks used claymation to make a cartoon of my "THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER" in 1986.

I worked on the book periodically from roughly 1890 up until 1910.

The body of work is a serious social commentary, addressing my ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race."

This here cartoon was banned from TV.  And truth to tell, children, it rather creeps me out my own self!

Watch at your own peril ...



 
 My first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, was published on this day in 1867.

  In my autobiography, I tell of first trying to pitch the book to a New York publisher, and being laughed out the door.

  Twenty-one years later, while on holiday in Switzerland, I bumped into the publisher again, who introduced himself hat-in-hand:  "I am substantially an obscure person but I have a couple of such colossal distinctions to my credit that I am entitled to immortality—to wit:

I refused a book of yours and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century."
  It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so,

and said it was a long delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken his life several times every year,

and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again.



Thinking on what author to pick for V that's got the same sharp wit as me --

Oh, don't go glaring at me like that Gore!  When we go at one another, the sparks fly, don't you know?

I pick you, Gore -- Gore Vidal! 



“The unfed mind devours itself.” 

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President.

One hopes it is the same half.” 


“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”  ― Gore Vidal 

APRIL 24 -- Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

 Hello, seekers of oddities ...

A 1766 portrait of Rousseau I am Jean-Jacques Rousseau ... or rather his ghost





My friend, Samuel Clemens, is morose this day for on this date in 1066,

Halley's Comet appeared in the night sky over the English Channel and was seen as a harbinger of national disaster --

which it was as William the Conqueror defeated English forces at the Battle of Hastings and the rest, pun intended, was history.

Why is my friend, Samuel, morose over Halley's Comet?  His spirit is tied to that celestial object, but that is a tale for him to tell. 



On this date in 1800, President John Adams approved legislation to appropriate $5,000 to establish the Library of Congress. 

The first books were bought from Great Britain. 

And so like the British,

their troops promptly burned them when they burned down a great deal of Washington, D.C. in 1814. 

What Britain gives, it eventually takes away.



Ah, but to be sane in a world of mad men is in itself madness.


Take my friend, Oscar Wilde ...



On this day in 1891 his The Picture of Dorian Gray was published.

The novel caused an uproar for

 "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity,"

but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing ...

until the British in their hypocrisy imprisoned him for having loved too well if not too wisely.

Only in France could he find refuge. 



You might accept that a man of my sensibilities would roam the Library of Congress,
a brilliant witness to the alliance of literature and architecture against the transforming and destructive forces of time.

But I wager you will find it odd that I return again and again to the Bob Hope archive, anchored by a career file of some 85,000 jokes, many of these tied to the politics of the day.

“Kennedy looked a little nervous,” Hope quipped after one of the1960 presidential debates. “He’d never been allowed to stay up that late before.”

“If you criticize Gorbachev too much,” he warned during the last years of the Cold War, “you’re kaputski. Kaputski — it’s an Old Russian word meaning, ‘Siberia is lovely this time of year.’ ”

Many of Hope’s political jokes can resonate beyond their original era: “No one party can fool all of the people all of the time. That’s why we have two parties.”



On this date in 1908, Ralph DePalma made his debut in New York.  In 25 years of racing, he would win 2000 times, including the Indy 500.



 But the Frenchman in me applauds most his pushing his car over the finish line in 1912 when,

while leading by five and half laps, his car broke down.  He may have lost but he won the hearts of every Frenchman who watched. 



The romantic in me weeps on this day, for on this date in 1942 Lucy Maud Montgomery died.

 Montgomery spent her first three decades in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, the place which she and her Anne of Green Gables books have made famous.

After almost three more decades in the Toronto area, she was buried back in Cavendish, though in town rather than in the sort of spot described in “A Request”:

"When I am dead
I would that ye make my bed
On that low-lying, windy waste by the sea,
   
Where murmurs creep
From the ancient heart of the deep,
Lulling me ever, I shall most sweetly sleep.
While the eerie sea-folk croon
On the long dim shore by the light
                                    of a waning moon…."



Fellow Frenchman, Gustave Flaubert, had his Three Tales published on this day in 1877.

It contains “A Simple Heart,” one of his most famous stories, especially since Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984).

Criticized by George Sand for his detached style,

Flaubert created the servant Félicité, whom he describes as “a poor country girl, pious but mystical, quietly devoted, and as tender as freshly baked bread.”

His aim, he said, was the furthest thing from irony: “I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself.”


Well, I must depart. 

My friend, Samuel Clemens, and I intend to deflate the ever-growing ego of Winston Churchill ...

especially on this day when in 1953, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

The ghost of Bob Hope intends to join us.  Last year, he told Churchill:

“I'm surprised the Queen knighted you, Winny.  What with your ambition that's like asking Morris the Cat to watch your tuna salad."  



Are you wondering which author I will pick for the letter U?

A most erudite, under-appreciated one: Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov

He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humorist, newspaper and magazine columnist.

A noted wit and raconteur, he was a fixture on lecture circuits for much of his career.

He was also a respected intellectual and diplomat who, in addition to his various academic posts, 
served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and President of the World Federalist Movement.

In 2003 Durham University changed the name of its Graduate Society to  Ustinov College  
in honor of the significant contributions Ustinov had made as chancellor of the university from 1992 until his death.

“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.”
― Peter Ustinov

APRIL 23 -- YOU LIVING TAKE GREAT CARE

 

Self portrait, J W M Turner, oil on canvas, circa 1799



Ghost of Rupert Brooks here:


Rupert Brooke
 I died on this day in 1915, while serving in the British Navy on the Mediterranean during that War which was heralded as the war to end all wars. 

I do believe the history of the world is but the bloody path of one long war with only momentary pauses while everyone reloads.


My poetry is said to have either reflected or affected the mood of the British public between late 1914 and late 1915.


I was also - and often still am - criticized. For some, the 'idealism' of the war sonnets is actually

a jingoistic glorification of war, a carefree approach to death which ignored the carnage and brutality.

 Such comments usually date from later in the war, when the high death tolls and unpleasant nature of trench warfare became apparent,

events which I wasn't able to observe and adapt to. 

My critics would be surprised to discover that I agree with them.  I saw hollow-eyed spirits of my slain brothers tramp endlessly into the Shadowlands their souls broken --

And my conceit and heart broke with the sight.

So please, you living, take great care what you write, for your words will linger on after you in hollow accusation should they not be wise ones.



Twain in 1867

Ghost of Mark Twain, here --

Tarnation! Thank you there, Rupert, for stripping the silver lining from the clouds of today!

Feeling put upon, pilgrims, 'cause of your writing?  Take note of this: 

On this date in 1849 Fyodor Dostoyesvsky (try writing that last name with a few Bourbons in you, children)

was arrested with other members of the revolutionary Petrashevsky (I gotta stop drinking Bourbon a'fore I write these posts!)

He spent 8 months in prison and experienced a dramatic release when the group was lined up to be shot ...

then let go at the last minute.

{Seems Captain Sam had his Colt aimed at a certain important head at the time.}




Shakespeare is guessed to have been born on this day in 1564.

  No sure date is recorded.  But the caterwauling infant he was happened to be baptized three days earlier --

and 3 days after the birth was the customary time of dousing those poor young-uns in that time.

Old Shakes' plays are performed and read today more than ever before, seeing as how he managed to capture

the full range of human emotion and inner conflict with a perception that remains sharp to this very day.



So since he was born on this date and old Wordsworth checked out on the same date in 1850,

folks decided to celebrate WORLD BOOK DAY on this date as well. 



But for all the caterwauling about these poets above, I, myself, like the painting of J.M.W. Turner better even  though the old cuss will never tell me what J. M. W. stands for! --


  "…And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things…."

  - Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (William Wordsworth)
  A'wondering who I'll pick for T?

Well, now, I will not pull a Hemingway, and nominate myself!
 


Me and J.R.R. are friends here in the Shadowlands, so of course, I'm picking Tolkien.

He was a patriot during WWI -- but a smart one.  He delayed joining until he finished the last year of his studies.  Then, he joined.


In a letter to Edith, his wife, Tolkien complained, "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."

That's the way of it in war no matter what century I reckon.
 

 Tolkien was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the British Expeditionary Force, arriving in France on 4 June 1916.

His departure from England on a troop transport inspired him to write his poem, The Lonely Isle.

 He later wrote, "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then ... it was like a death."



Although Kitchener's army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together.

Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him, 'a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy:

especially the plain soldier from the 'agricultural counties.' 

He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time, he had been imprisoned in a tower, not of pearl, but of ivory.


"By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead," he once told me.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien