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Today in History
Thanks for reading Norton and Beth. It's nice to share every day History.
October 3, 1895It’s the anniversary of the 1895 publication of Stephen Crane’s novel “The Red Badge of Courage”, the story of Civil War private Henry Fleming. The story begins late at night around a campfire:
Quote 1: “The youth was in a little trance of astonishment. So tomorrow they were at last going to fight. There would be a battle, and he would be in it. For a time he was obliged to labor to make himself believe. He could not accept with assurance an omen that he was about to mingle in one of those great affairs of the earth. He had dreamed of battles all his life.”
Quote 2: "He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life - of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess. But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles. There was a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever." Chapter 1
Quote 3: "He wished, without reserve, that he was at home again making the endless rounds from the house to the barn, from the barn to the fields, from the fields to the barn, from the barn to the house. He remembered he had often cursed the brindle cow and her mates, and had sometimes flung milking stools. But, from his present point of view, there was a halo of happiness about each of their heads, and he would have sacrificed all the brass buttons on the continent to have been enabled to return to them. He told himself that he was not formed for a soldier. And he mused seriously upon the radical differences between himself and the men who were dodging implike around the fires." Chapter 2
Quote 4: "Once he thought he had concluded that it would be better to get killed directly and end his troubles. Regarding death thus out of the corner of his eye, he conceived it to be nothing but rest, and he was filled with a momentary astonishment that he should have made an extraordinary commotion over the mere matter of getting killed. He would die; he would go to some place where he would be understood. It was useless to expect appreciation of his profound and fine senses from such men as the lieutenant. He must look to the grave for comprehension." Chapter 3
Quote 5: "He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part - a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country - was in crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand." Chapter 5
Quote 6: "To the youth it was an onslaught of redoubtable dragons. He became like the man who lost his legs at the approach of the red and green monster. He waited in sort of a horrified, listening attitude. He seemed to shut his eyes and wait to be gobbled." Chapter 6
Quote 7: "The tall soldier turned and, lurching dangerously, went on. The youth and the tattered soldier followed, sneaking as if whipped, feeling unable to face the stricken man if he should again confront them. They began to have thoughts of a solemn ceremony. There was something rite-like in the movements of the doomed soldier. And there was a resemblance in him to a devotee of a mad religion, blood-sucking, muscle-wrenching, bone-crushing. They were awed and afraid. They hung back lest he have at command a dreadful weapon." Chapter 9
Quote 8: "He [the youth] now thought that he wished he was dead. He believed that he envied those men whose bodies lay strewn over the grass of the fields and on the fallen leaves of the forest. The simple questions of the tattered man had been knife thrusts to him. They asserted a society that probes pitilessly at secrets until all is apparent. His late companion's chance persistency made him feel that he could not keep his crime concealed in his bosom. It was sure to be brought plain by one of those arrows that which cloud that air and are constantly pricking, discovering, proclaiming, those things which are willed forever to be hidden. He admitted that he could not defend himself against this agency. It was not within the power of vigilance." Chapter 10
Quote 9: "The youth reflected. He had been used to regarding his comrade as a blatant child with an audacity grown from his inexperience, thoughtless, headstrong, jealous, and filled with tinsel courage. A swaggering babe accustomed to strut in his own dooryard The youth wondered where had been born these new eyes; when his comrade had made the great discovery that there were many men who would refuse to be subjected by him. Apparently, the other had now climbed a peak of wisdom from which he could perceive himself as a very wee thing. And the youth saw that ever after it would be easier to live in his friend's neighborhood." Chapter 14
Quote 10: "Besides, a faith in himself had secretly blossomed. There was a little flower of confidence growing within him. He was now a man of experience. He had been out among the dragons, he said, and he assured himself that they were not so hideous as he had imagined them. Also, they were inaccurate; they did not sting with precision. A stout heart often defied, and defying, escaped." Chapter 15
Source: http://www.bookrags.com
The Red Badge of Courage
You've become a regular read Antonio. I particularly enjoyed today's about the Marx Brothers. You even got an out-loud chuckle with the quips. Keep them coming.
Today October 4 is the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. He was born in Assisi, in central Italy, in 1182. He started out as a wealthy man-about-town, until he fell into a serious illness in his 19th year. He was praying in the dilapidated Church of St. Damiano one day in 1206, and he heard the voice of Christ saying, “Go, Francis, and repair my house which, as you see, is well-nigh in ruins.” He went and took some of his father’s money for the project. He went on to found the Franciscan Order, which was dedicated to poverty, penance, and the relief of the sick. In “Canticle of the Sun,” Saint Francis of Assisi praises God for some of the wonders of the material world. Francis believed that everything in the natural world was a gift from God and, as such, deserved to be appreciated and valued. Because of this, Francis refers to the sun, wind, air, and fire as his brothers, and to the moon, stars, earth, water, and death as his sisters. St Francis is the Saint Patron of Italy.Canticle of The Sun
Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor
And all blessing.
To you alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy
To pronounce your name.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;
In the heavens you have made them, bright
And precious and fair.
All praise be yours, My Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
And fair and stormy, all the weather’s moods,
By which you cherish all that you have made.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,
So useful, lowly, precious and pure.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
Through whom you brighten up the night.
How beautiful is he, how gay! Full of power and strength.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces
Various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon
For love of you; through those who endure
Sickness and trial.
Happy those who endure in peace,
By you, Most High, they will be crowned.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those She finds doing your will!
The second death can do no harm to them.
Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
And serve him with great humility.
Translation by Benen Fahy, O.F.M.
from St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies
edited by Marion A. Habig, copyright 1973, Franciscan Herald Press
St. Francis of Assisi: A Biography
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LauraT wrote: "I live in Perugia, the main city in Umbria, where Assisi is, and we've always lived under the shadow of this imposing Saint. In a catholic Country as ours, San Francesco is a really pivoting figure..."Thanks Laura. Francis of Assisi did not wish his followers to be exactly like him. His dying prayer, uttered as he lay on the dirt floor of a hut near his beloved Portiuncula chapel, was: ‘I have done what is mine; may Christ teach you what is yours!’ An excellent piece of advice for all of us in modern times ...
October 5 is the birthday of French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, born in Langres (1713). He was a prominent thinker during the French Enlightenment, and he was good friend with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The two men met regularly at cafés in Paris to discuss music, philosophy, and their troubles with women.
From 1745 to 1772, Diderot was the chief editor of Encyclopédie, a book meant to replace the Bible as the source of knowledge. It was the first book of its kind to subject all the entries to rational analysis, debunking a lot of ancient wisdom along the way. For instance, it included an entry on Noah's ark that tried to estimate how many man-hours Noah and his sons must have spent shoveling manure off their boat. Previous encyclopedias restricted themselves to serious topics like theology and philosophy and science, but Diderot tried to cover everything he could think of: emotions, coal mines, fleas, duels, bladder surgery, stockings, the metaphysics of the human soul, and how to make soup.
To Diderot is attributed this sentence: "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Diderot lifted this formulation from the atheist French priest Jean Meslier (1664-1729), who preceded Diderot, and whose multivolume memoir’s subtitle says it treats “Of the Vanity and Falseness of all the Divinities and All the Religions of the World, to be addressed to my Parishioners After my Death to serve Them as a Testimony to Truth.” Meslier’s memoir, Mon Testament, was rediscovered and posthumously published by Voltaire, who frequently borrowed from Meslier, as did Diderot.
Meslier became very popular not only among the intellectuals of the French Enlightenment but among liberal revolutionaries in czarist Russia–an 1819 quatrain by Pushkin nods to Meslier when it says, “with the entrails of the last Pope, we will strangle the last Czar” (this was one of the poems that got Pushkin sent into administrative exile in South Russia by the czarist police). Marx appreciated and quoted Meslier as well–and when the Bolsheviks came to power, they erected a stele in Red Square dedicated to the “Heroes of Liberty,” where Meslier’s name appeared next to that of Spartacus. Louisa May Alcott, too, borrowed the Meslier “entrails” quote (citing Voltaire as its author).
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Source: www.thenation.com/article/letters-103/
The Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert: Selected Articles
It was on this date October 6 in 2007 that Jason Lewis and the Expedition 360 team completed the first entirely human-powered trip around the world. Steve Smith first had the idea while sitting in his office in Paris, so he invited Lewis, a college friend, to accompany him. They had a pedal boat built, which they called the Moksha, a Sanskrit word that means "liberation." They set off from the Meridian Line in Greenwich, England, on July 12, 1994. They headed southeast, pedaled their boat across the English Channel, and cycled through France, Spain, and Portugal before embarking on their crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean crossing took 111 days, and they landed in Miami, Florida. They biked and skated across the continental United States. Steve Smith left the project in Hawaii to write a book about the first leg of the journey.
The team had to stop from time to time to raise money to fund the trip; Lewis took odd jobs at cattle ranches and funeral homes. About a year into the expedition, his journey very nearly ended altogether. He was rollerblading along the side of a Colorado road when he was run over by an 82-year-old drunk driver. Both of Lewis's legs were broken, and he narrowly missed having one of them amputated. He spent six weeks in the hospital and a further nine months recovering before he could resume his journey. There were other low points, like being arrested in Egypt as a suspected spy, contracting malaria, having two hernia operations, and being robbed at machete-point. He only returned home once during his journey, to visit his ailing father, before resuming the trip from where he left off. He crossed the Meridian Line on this date in 2007, more than 13 years after he left it.
Lewis followed the definition of circumnavigation set forth by Explorer's Web: he started and finished at the same point; he crossed two diametrically opposite points on the globe; he crossed the equator at least twice; he passed through all longitudes; and he traveled at least 40,000 miles. He was assisted by a team of volunteers after Smith left, but the entire journey was made on human power alone, with no help from motors, animals, or even sails to capture the wind.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Source: http://www.expedition360.com
Dark Waters
On this day, October 6, in 1955, poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The reading was intended to promote the new gallery. The poet Kenneth Rexroth organized the reading, and in preparation, he introduced Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg introduced everyone to Jack Kerouac, and they became the core of the group of writers known as the Beats.
Ginsberg was the second to the last to read, and he started at about 11 p.m. He was 29 years old, and he had never participated in a poetry reading before. He started off in a quiet voice. But as he read, he found his rhythm, and he took a deep breath before each of the long lines in "Howl" and then said each line in one breath. Jack Kerouac chanted "Go, go, go" in rhythm while Ginsberg read, and the audience went wild.
Howl, poem in three sections by Allen Ginsberg, was first published in "Howl and Other Poems" in 1956. A “footnote” was added later. It is considered the foremost poetic expression of the Beat generation of the 1950s. A denunciation of the weaknesses and failings of American society, Howl is a combination lamentation, jeremiad, and vision. The poem opens with a description of the despair and frustration of American youths:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix ...
The poem was praised for its incantatory rhythms and raw emotion; critics noted the influences of Ginsberg’s mentor William Carlos Williams (who wrote an introduction to the 1959 edition), Walt Whitman, and William S. Burroughs. Howl also was an unabashed celebration and critique of the masculine. The poem became the anthem of 1950s Beats. Its frank references to heterosexual and homosexual coupling landed its publisher, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in court on charges of distributing obscene material, but he was acquitted in 1957 in a landmark decision.
Sources: www.writersalmanac.org
www.britannica.com
Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg's Epic Protest Poem
On this day October 8 in 1971John Lennon released his second solo album, Imagine. The title track was the best-selling song of his solo career and was included on BMI’s list of the top 100 most-performed songs of the 20th century. Lennon said that he and Yoko Ono received a prayer book, which inspired him to write the song. He said: “The concept of positive prayer … If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion, not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing, then it can be true.” The song’s call for peace and tolerance continues to resonate with people all over the world."
“Not the only one: how Yoko Ono helped create John Lennon’s Imagine. A new book about the making of his 1971 solo album restores his artist wife to her crucial role in his musical life. She looks back to a time of peace and love, and anger … this book is a document of Lennon and Ono’s intense partnership at the time, in love as well as work. It gives particular attention, albeit subtly, to how Ono’s approach to creativity inspired the Imagine album. This includes the name, the word “imagine” being instrumental to her 1960s conceptual artworks, which Lennon famously saw for the first time in London’s Indica Gallery in 1966, on the night he met her …”
Source: The Guardian (https://bit.ly/2C1ybSL)
Imagine John Yoko
Mod
October 9, 1940 - It's the birthday of John Lennon. He was born in Liverpool, England, in 1940, during a German air raid, or so the legend goes. The nurses put him under his mother's hospital bed to protect him. John's mother, Julia Stanley, was one of five sisters, all of them fierce in their own way; she was the free spirit, and married Freddy Lennon on a whim in 1938. Freddy was away with the Merchant Marine when his son was born and, not really ready for family life, managed to find a ship to be away on for most of the boy's first five years. Julia, with an absent husband, decided she might as well live the single life, so she gave John to her sister Mimi to raise. In 1945, Freddy returned and invited the five-year-old boy on an outing to the seaside, intending take him to New Zealand, but Julia found them, and the parents decided to make their son choose between them. Since Freddy had been more like a playmate than a parent, John chose him at first, but when Julia walked away, crying, John ran sobbing after her. Their reunion was short-lived, however, because Julia brought him back to Aunt Mimi's, and that's where he grew up.
He didn't show any musical inclination as a child, but he did love drawing and reading, especially Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, and the Just William stories by Richard Crompton. He had a knack for puns and wordplay at an early age, as well as a fondness for absurd humor. He was bright, but often in trouble in school; he had an angry streak that expressed itself through insolence, petty crimes, and tough talk. When Elvis Presley came on the scene in 1956 with his single Heartbreak Hotel, Lennon had a new focus: rock and roll.
"Nothing really affected me until Elvis," he later said. Liverpool kids were among the first in Britain to hear the records coming over from America; they got them from American sailors who docked in the port city. Soon Lennon was listening to Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. A year later, he'd formed his own band, the Quarrymen, with some school friends, and soon after that, Paul McCartney and George Harrison joined the band. By 1960, they were calling themselves the Beatles.
Even when caught up in the riptide of Beatlemania, Lennon never lost his love of wordplay. In 1964, he published a slim volume of line drawings and nonsensical short stories called In His Own Write. A Spaniard in the Works (1965) followed a year later. Critics believed he had been influenced by James Joyce, though in a 1968 interview on BBC-2, Lennon said he'd never read Joyce. "So the first thing I do is buy Finnegans Wake and read a chapter. And it's great, you know, and I dug it, and I felt as though he's an old friend. But I couldn't make it right through the book, and so I read a chapter of Finnegans Wake and that was the end of it. So now I know what they're talking about. But I mean, he just went ... he just didn't stop, you know."
In the psychedelic era, his childhood favorite, Lewis Carroll, inspired his surreal lyrics at least as much as LSD did. His song "I am the Walrus" (1967) was inspired by Carroll's poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter." "To me, it was a beautiful poem," Lennon later said. "It never occurred to me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what it really meant, like people are doing with Beatles work. Later I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy."
One of his most poetic songs, "Across the Universe," was written in response to an argument with his first wife, Cynthia. He went downstairs after she fell asleep and wrote the lyrics, which include, "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup ..." and "thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox." In a 1970 interview, he said, "It's one of the best lyrics I've written ... the ones I like are the ones that stand as words, without melody." In 2008, NASA transmitted the song as part of an interstellar message to the star Polaris, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the song's release, the 45th anniversary of the Deep Space Network, and the 50th anniversary of NASA itself. It was the first time a song was deliberately transmitted to deep space.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind,
Possessing and caressing me.
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
That call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box they
Tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Sounds of laughter shades of earth are ringing
Through my open views inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
million suns, it calls me on and on
Across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono
October 10Now constantly there is the sound,
quieter than rain,
of the leaves falling.
Under their loosening bright
gold, the sycamore limbs
bleach whiter.
Now the only flowers
are beeweed and aster, spray
of their white and lavender
over the brown leaves.
The calling of a crow sounds
Loud — landmark — now
that the life of summer falls
silent, and the nights grow.
“October 10” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint, 2012.
Wendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America." Wendell Berry lives on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky near his birthplace, where he has maintained a farm for over 40 years. Mistrustful of technology, he holds deep reverence for the land and is a staunch defender of agrarian values. He is the author of over 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His poetry celebrates the holiness of life and everyday miracles often taken for granted.
Critics and scholars have acknowledged Wendell Berry as a master of many literary genres, but whether he is writing poetry, fiction, or essays, his message is essentially the same: humans must learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, which analyzes the many failures of modern, mechanized life, is one of the key texts of the environmental movement, but Berry, a political maverick, has criticized environmentalists as well as those involved with big businesses and land development. In his opinion, many environmentalists place too much emphasis on wild lands without acknowledging the importance of agriculture to our society. Berry strongly believes that small-scale farming is essential to healthy local economies, and that strong local economies are essential to the survival of the species and the well-being of the planet. In an interview with New Perspectives Quarterly editor Marilyn Berlin Snell, Berry explained: "Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place." ….
Source: www.poetryfoundation.org
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
October 11, 1542: Sir Thomas Wyatt dies. He was a pioneer of sonnet-writing in English, one of the first English poets to use the form. ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ is one of the earliest sonnets in all of English literature. There is a surprising connection to King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Wyatt (1503-1542) probably wrote ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ some time during the 1530s, and the poem was published in the 1550s after his death.
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
This sonnet is a loose translation of a poem by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, who had been the first major poet to use the form. Petrarch left such a mark on the sonnet that one of the most famous sonnet forms is still often referred to as the ‘Petrarchan sonnet’. Such a poem is fourteen lines long and is divided into two ‘chunks’ (to use a not very technical term), an eight-line section (called an ‘octave’) and a six-line section (a ‘sestet’). Often there is a volta or ‘turn’ at the beginning of the sestet: the direction of the sonnet’s argument changes. The octave is rhymed abbaabba (as above) and the sestet adopts many different rhyme schemes; Wyatt, in ‘Whoso List to Hunt’, employs cddcee. This is important because it introduces a couplet at the end of the sonnet that would become a fixture of the English, or ‘Shakespearean’, sonnet some half a century later.
However, Wyatt alters Petrarch’s original in a number of key ways, including the rhyme scheme for that sestet (Petrarch’s original sonnet did not end with a couplet). The poem might be summarised thus: the speaker addresses the world, claiming that if anyone should choose (‘list’) to go hunting, the speaker knows of a hind (female deer), but the speaker must count himself out of the chase. This is all metaphor, of course: the ‘hind’ is really a beautiful woman, and the ‘hunt’ is the courtship of the woman. But this speaker has had enough, and knows he’s lost the chase. However, he cannot entirely give up, since whenever he tries to leave off, he finds himself pursuing her anyway (‘Fainting I follow’). But such pursuit is foolhardy and futile: it’s like trying to contain the wind in a net. The sestet concludes by saying that this hind has already been claimed by ‘Caesar’ (implying a king or other powerful ruler), as revealed by the declaration hanging round the deer’s neck (‘Noli me tangere‘ is Latin for ‘do not touch me’ – the words also have Christ-like overtones, implying that this ‘hind’ is almost divine in her beauty – Christ beseeched Mary Magdalene ‘do not touch me’ when she encountered him after the Resurrection). What’s more, the ‘hind’ is a wild creature, though she appears tame, suggesting that to breach the command round the animal’s neck would be a dangerous thing to do.
The poem stands up well on its own, thanks to its intricate play of sounds (‘hind’ playing off ‘hunt’ in that first line, for instance), so that one need not know more about Tudor politics and life at the court of Henry VIII to appreciate its message. Wyatt also displays masterly control of the movement of the sonnet: look at the way ‘behind’ at the end of the fourth line picks up, and contains, the ‘hind’ from the first line, and how ‘therefore’ a few lines on echoes ‘afore’ from the previous line. This neatly plays out, through the movement of the poem, the speaker’s own sense of stasis and frustration: he cannot move forward (‘afore’), instead destined always to fall ‘behind’, just as the rhymes seem reluctant or unable to progress.
One biographical note on the poem adds an extra layer of meaning. Wyatt was a poet at the court of Henry VIII, and knew Anne Boleyn, the king’s second wife. (Wyatt’s great poem ‘They Flee from Me’ may also be about Boleyn.) Whether Wyatt and Anne were ever sexually or romantically involved remains unknown, but it seems likely that Wyatt admired Anne and the ‘hind’ in this poem can be seen as a veiled reference to her. (It’s even possible to detect her name in ‘an hind’; though perhaps detecting a little Anne – Annette – in ‘a net’ in line eight is taking the wordplay too far.) In this reading, ‘Caesar’ clearly refers to Henry himself, the all-powerful ruler who ‘owns’ Anne. But the poem stands aside from its biographical story as a great early example of the English sonnet. One can provide an analysis of the poem without resorting to speculation about the poet’s biography; but the Anne Boleyn connection does provide another possible meaning to the ‘hind’ of the poem.
Here is the poem with its original sixteenth-century spelling:
Who so list to hounte, I know where is an hynde,
But as for me, helas, I may no more.
The vayne travaill hath weried me so sore,
I ame of theim that farthest cometh behinde.
Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore
Faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore,
Sithens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.
Who list her hount, I put him owte of dowbte,
As well as I may spend his tyme in vain.
And graven with Diamondes in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte:
‘Noli me tangere for Cesars I ame,
And wylde for to hold though I seme tame’.
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt
Another good piece Antonio. I agree with Wendell Berry. Without a series of strong local economy's you can't have a strong national economy. The purpose in getting involved globally is to increase the sales of the local producers. Or, at least, have the local producers produce what's in their best interest. It all comes down to $ Are we better off paying more and importing less? It all depends on how much we export. Anyway, good thinking piece. Thanks
Local economy, national economy, global economy. Too many conflicting economies for a global world. We can't go back to future ...
October 12 It's the birthday of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, born in Geneva, New York (1910), best known for his beautiful English translations of Homer's Odyssey (1961) and The Iliad (1974).
He was also an influential classics professor at Harvard, and he believed that Homer's work should be always read aloud. One of his students said, "Every Tuesday afternoon, he'd start [class] by saying to us, 'Listen to this, now [...] It was meant to be listened to.' The 12 of us would listen, very quiet around the blond wood table, our jittery freshman muscles gradually unclenching." Robert Fitzgerald described Homer as "a living voice in firelight or in the open air, a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons, a master performer at his ease, touching the strings, disposing of many voices, many tones and tempos, tragedy, comedy, and glory, holding his [listeners] in the palm of his hand."
Source: www.nytimes.com ( https://nyti.ms/2OgTC9H)
A Guide to The Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald
Saturday 13 October 1660To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again.
Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord’s, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr. Sheply to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters. After that I went by water home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine basket, which I bought her in Holland, and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it.
Within all the afternoon setting up shelves in my study. At night to bed.
Source: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660...
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
October 14, 1894It's the birthday of poet E.E. Cummings, born Edward Estlin Cummings in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Harvard professor, and Cummings grew up in a privileged and happy household — he said, "As it was my miraculous fortune to have a true father and a true mother, and a home which the truth of their love made joyous, so — in reaching outward from this love and this joy — I was marvelously lucky to touch and seize a rising and striving world."
At times he rebelled against the strict Christian morality and academic world of his parents. He wrote in one early poem: "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls / are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds." He said, "I led a double life, getting drunk and feeling up girls but lying about this to my Father and taking his money all the time."
He graduated from Harvard, enlisted in the Ambulance Corps, and then moved to Greenwich Village to write poetry. His Harvard friend John Dos Passos used his influence to find a publisher for Cummings's first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923). Cummings complained that the editor cut the manuscript down from 152 poems to 66, and took out the ampersand in the title to write out the word "and." One critic said that his poems were "hideous on the page," and another corrected all his punctuation when she quoted him.
He continued to publish books, but 12 years after his first collection of poems had come out, Cummings was still unable to find a publisher for his newest manuscript. He ended up self-publishing it with financial help from his mother — he titled it No Thanks (1935) and dedicated it to the 14 publishing houses who had rejected the book.
Slowly, his fame grew. His Collected Poems (1938) was a big success, but his six-month royalty checks were small — one for $14.94, another for $9.75. His mother still gave him a monthly check to help pay his living expenses. He started giving poetry readings, and by the last decade of his life, Cummings was a celebrity. His poetry readings were hugely popular, sold-out events — he packed venues from college campuses to theaters. He charmed his audiences — reading energetically, lingering on individual words, striding around the stage as he spoke, and timing his readings to the second. In 1957, he read to a crowd of 7,000 in Boston.
During a reading at Bennington College in Vermont, the huge crowd of students greeted him by reciting his poem about Buffalo Bill en masse. The crowds were so enthusiastic that Cummings had to establish what he called "rules of engagement": he refused to autograph books or attend dinners or other social functions. He sometimes sneaked out after readings by what he called a "secretbackentrance."
Young women came up to him on the streets of New York to give him bouquets of flowers, or left them on the doorstep of his Greenwich Village apartment. By the time of his death in 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in America, after Robert Frost.
"66"
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
"66" by E.E. Cummings, from Complete Poems. © Grove Press, 1994.
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Complete Poems, 1904-1962
It was on this day October 15 in 1764 that Edward Gibbon thought up the idea of writing “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” His six-volume work, published between 1776 and 1788, covered more than a thousand years of Roman history, from 180 A.D. to the fall of Constantinople.
“AFTER leaving Florence I compared the solitude of Pisa with the industry of Lucca and Leghorn, and continued my journey through Siena to Rome, where I arrived in the beginning of October. My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But, at the distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation....
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire: and, though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work. . .
I have presumed to mark the moment of conception: I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden [At Lausanne]. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotion of joy on recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame.”
— Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (World's Classics edn.,1907), pp. 155-9,160,205.
Source: www.ourcivilisation.com
Autobiography of Edward Gibbon - As Originally Edited by Lord Sheffield
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. His father was a successful surgeon and his mother a writer and literary hostess. Wilde was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Wilde became involved in the aesthetic movement. After he graduated, he moved to London to pursue a literary career.
His output was diverse. A first volume of his poetry was published in 1881 but as well as composing verse, he contributed to publications such as the 'Pall Mall Gazette', wrote fairy stories and published a novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1891). His greatest talent was for writing plays, and he produced a string of extremely popular comedies including 'Lady Windermere's Fan' (1892), 'An Ideal Husband (1895)' and 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (1895). 'Salomé' was performed in Paris in 1896.
Drama and tragedy marred Wilde's private life. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and they had two sons, but in 1891 Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed 'Bosie'. In April 1895, Wilde sued Bosie's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, for libel, after the Marquis has accused him of being homosexual. Wilde lost and, after details of his private life were revealed during the trial, was arrested and tried for gross indecency. He was sentenced to two years of hard labour. While in prison he composed a long letter to Douglas, posthumously published under the title 'De Profundis' . His wife took their children to Switzerland and adopted the name 'Holland'.
Wilde was released with his health irrevocably damaged and his reputation ruined. He spent the rest of his life in Europe, publishing 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' in 1898. He died in Paris on 30 November 1900.
The Ballad Of Reading Gaol - Poem by Oscar Wilde
(In memoriam
C. T. W.
Sometime trooper of the Royal Horse Guards
obiit H.M. prison, Reading, Berkshire
July 7, 1896)
I
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
'THAT FELLOW'S GOT TO SWING.'
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die .....
Source: www.bbc.co.uk/history
Pit Of Shame: The Real Ballad Of Reading Gaol
October 17 It's the birthday of Shinichi Suzuki, born in Nagoya, Japan (1898).
He's the man who developed the Suzuki Violin Method, a way of teaching very young children to play classical music by listening and imitating, the way they learn to speak. His father had a violin factory, and he and his brothers and sisters thought that violins were like boxes, that they were just toys; they never heard anybody play them. When Suzuki was 17, he heard a recording of Mischa Elman and was flabbergasted. He took a violin home and started to teach himself to play it by listening to other recordings and trying to imitate them. He began to feel that it ought to be possible to teach anyone to play that way, and the little children he taught became proficient enough to make some listeners suspect he had gathered a bunch of prodigies together like a circus act. He felt strongly that he was not just tutoring musicians, but nurturing souls, and he encouraged his students to listen to other people as carefully as they listened to the notes on their violins.
Source: Suzuki Association (https://bit.ly/2CMtxZP)
Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education
October 18, 2018 - Today in HistoryMeditation upon this "Today in History" thread. How do you choose the best/proper topic for the day? After more than five hundred posts published, I'm asking fellow readers lovers of History on GR to answer this question and help me in searching the wide array of historical facts which take place in a single day of World History. I usually try to choose items that give proper answers to canonical questions like "who-what-where-when-why?" How to build the message is a different job. Please give a hand and share your ideas. Thank you very much to all.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 18th of October.1785: Thomas Love Peacock is born. He was the author of several satirical novels such as Headlong Hall (1815) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), and was also the father-in-law of the fascinating Victorian writer, George Meredith. Peacock also provides us with the first recorded use of the word ‘kakistocracy’, which means ‘government by the worst citizens’.
1851: Moby-Dick is first published in London. Herman Melville’s best-known novel actually spelled the start of a decline in his writing career: the book sold badly in his lifetime and, after several more attempts at writing, he gave up fiction in his later years. The novel is now regarded as an American classic – and, of course, it inspired the name for the Starbucks coffee chain.
1859: Henri Bergson, French philosopher, is born. His philosophical writings will influence a number of key modernist writers, including T. E. Hulme, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot. Particularly influential is his idea of ‘duration’, which concerns the psychological experience of time as opposed to objective and regulated ‘clock time’.
1865: Logan Pearsall Smith, an American-born British critic, is born. He coined the lovely word ‘milver’ for ‘a person with whom one shares a strong interest in a particular topic; esp. wordplay’. He also penned the wise words: ‘People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.’
1967: Disney’s The Jungle Book, based on Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 book, is released. It was the last film Walt Disney produced – he died during its production, a year earlier.
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
October 19We remember today an author who was born and died on the same day October 19: Sir Thomas Browne.
Responsible for coining the word ‘misconception’ providing the dictionary with its earliest known use in print, Browne took the seventeenth-century world to task in his “Pseudodoxia Epidemica”, which examined and endeavoured to correct many misconceptions and ‘vulgar errors’ of the day. He was, if you like, a sort of early modern version of “QI” or “Mythbusters”. He would also die on this day, in 1682 – his 77th birthday. A cornerstone of the “Quite Interesting philosophy” is the notion of debunking misconceptions, examining and then, where necessary, correcting the ‘truths’ we hold so dear.
After studying at Winchester and Oxford, Browne probably was an assistant to a doctor near Oxford. After taking his M.D. at Leiden in 1633, he practiced at Shibden Hall near Halifax, in Yorkshire, from 1634, until he was admitted as an M.D. at Oxford; he settled in Norwich in 1637. At Shibden Hall Browne had begun his parallel career as a writer with Religio Medici, a journal largely about the mysteries of God, nature, and man, which he himself described as “a private exercise directed to myself.” It circulated at first only in manuscript among his friends. In 1642, however, it was printed without his permission in London and so had to be acknowledged, an authorized version being published in 1643.
An immediate success in England, the book soon circulated widely in Europe in a Latin translation and was also translated into Dutch and French. Browne began early to compile notebooks of miscellaneous jottings and, using these as a quarry, he compiled his second and larger work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenets, and commonly presumed truths (1646), often known as Browne’s Vulgar Errors. In it he tried to correct many popular beliefs and superstitions.
In 1658 he published his third book, two treatises on antiquarian subjects, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk, and The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients. Around the theme of the urns he wove a tissue of solemn reflections on death and the transience of human fame in his most luxuriant style; in The Garden, in which he traces the history of horticulture from the garden of Eden to the Persian gardens in the reign of Cyrus, he is especially fascinated by the quincunx. A smaller work of great beauty and subtlety, entitled A Letter to a Friend, Upon occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend, was published posthumously in 1690.
Browne had always been a Royalist, and his fame both as doctor and as writer gained him a knighthood when Charles II visited Norwich in 1671. He seldom left the city but corresponded with such men of learning as John Evelyn, Sir William Dugdale, and John Aubrey. Most of his surviving letters, however, were written to his eldest son, Edward Browne, and these give an intimate picture of his medical practice and his relations with his family. Browne has been criticized for the part he played in 1664 as a witness in the condemnation of two women as witches. Here follows a short, deep and still modern poem:
If thou could'st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, 'This is not dead',
And fill thee with Himself instead.
But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, 'This is enow
Unto itself - 'twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.'
Source: www.britannica.com
Selected Writings: Sir Thomas Browne
The most significant events in the history of books on the 20th of October1822: Thomas Hughes, author of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”, is born. The character of school bully Flashman would prove so popular with generations of readers that George Macdonald Fraser would make him the antihero of a whole series of novels, beginning with Flashman in 1969.
1833: Alfred, Lord Tennyson completes his poem ‘Ulysses’, just over a month after he had learnt of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem is often interpreted as a response to news of Hallam’s untimely death, with Ulysses’ determination to face the odds and carry on in the face of adversity mirroring Tennyson’s own resolve to overcome the paralysing grief he felt for his friend. Hallam’s death – and life – would more famously be commemorated by Tennyson’s long elegy, In Memoriam (1850), but Tennyson himself felt that ‘Ulysses’ contained ‘more about myself’ than In Memoriam. ‘Ulysses’ would not be published until 1842.
1854: Arthur Rimbaud is born. The French poet was something of a teen prodigy, writing nearly all of his poetry as an adolescent and giving up creative writing more or less altogether aged 19.
1890: Richard Francis Burton dies. The translator of the Kama Sutra and the unexpurgated Arabian Nights, he was a flamboyant figure who shocked and fascinated the Victorians in equal measure.
1921: T. S. Eliot‘s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ is published in the Times Literary Supplement. In the essay Eliot champions the style of Metaphysical Poets of the seventeenth century such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, arguing that shortly afterwards – at around the time of John Milton in the mid-seventeenth century – a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ set in, which resulted in thought and emotion becoming two different things to the poet. The Metaphysical Poets, for Eliot, thus represented the last gasp of a dying tradition in which emotion and thought were experienced as one thing.
1928: Dorothy Parker publishes her scathing review of The House at Pooh Corner in the New Yorker. Writing under the name ‘Constant Reader’, Parker memorably ridiculed what she saw as the infantile nature of the book, famously concluding: ‘And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner.’
1955: The Return of the King, the concluding volume of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is published. Tolkien saw The Lord of the Rings as one novel, but the book is so vast that it is also often reprinted as three volumes.
2004: Anthony Hecht dies. One of his most acclaimed poems is ‘More Light! More Light!’ (adapted from Goethe’s final words), though we warn that it’s a harrowing read (but a brilliant poem).
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
1923-2004, New York born Anthony Hecht attended Bard College and served in the army in Japan and Europe. He authored seven poetry collections, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. “‘More Light! More Light!’” is a poem rich in ironies, not least of which is its title. Taken from the dying words of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the phrase reminds the reader that a culture capable of producing great and enlightened artists could also produce the architects of the death camps. Light, in the poem, represents both God and humanity, but in the darkness of the Holocaust...
More Light! More Light!
For Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime."
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of he worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
Selected Poems
October 21, 1772: Samuel Taylor Coleridge is born. He is credited with coining the words bipolar, bisexual, psychosomatic, and selfless. His most enduringly popular poems are probably ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and ‘Kubla Khan’. He was once described as the last person to have read everything, so steeped in literature, philosophy, and learning was he. Certainly, he gave us a very useful phrase concerning good fiction: the expression ‘suspension of disbelief’ is a coinage of his, and describes the unofficial contract we all enter into when we read, or watch, fictional narratives.
But he also gave us a few other useful words, notably ‘psychosomatic’ and ‘selfless’, and the first recorded use of ‘bisexual’ (although Coleridge used it to mean ‘androgynous’ or ‘containing both sexes’, rather than being attracted to persons of both sexes). In fact, he also led an eventful life including a spell in the Royal Dragoons, joining up under the name ‘Cumberbatch’. Coleridge’s most famous poem appeared in the important 1798 collection “Lyrical Ballads”, co-written with William Wordsworth.
Despite its later significance, the book initially sold badly, and Wordsworth’s celebrated preface (containing the famous ’emotion recollected in tranquillity’ line, to describe poetic composition) didn’t appear until the second edition, in 1800. Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is among the most familiar in all of English literature.
Critic William Empson suggested in an article of 1964 (reprinted in Argufying, 1987) that the slave trade informed the poem: although it isn’t mentioned explicitly anywhere in the poem, the themes of maritime expansion and collective guilt which the poem articulates feed directly into the contemporary context of discussion and debate about the slave trade (which was abolished in 1807, nine years after the poem appeared).
Although Coleridge later altered his views on the slave trade, he was opposed to it when he wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The idea of killing an albatross bringing bad luck upon the crew of a ship appears to have been invented in the poem, as there is no precedent for it, and the albatross idea was probably Wordsworth’s, not Coleridge’s. Despite their successful working partnership, and friendship, during the years of the “Lyrical Ballads”, the two poets later became estranged from each other, especially as Wordsworth became more conservative in his later years.
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
Delphi Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An honourable act, or a snub?October 22, 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre turns down the Nobel Prize for Literature; he writes about his refusal of the award on Le Figaro. His reasons were several, but he tended to decline offers of honours (he turned down the Legion of Honour after WWII), and thought the writer must ‘refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution’. But what is most interesting about this is that he had warned the Nobel Prize committee that, if they offered him the prize, he would turn it down. They went ahead and awarded him it anyway, knowing it would be refused. In many ways, the committee felt that his refusing it was an honourable act, not a snub but a declaration of Sartre’s sincere beliefs and commitment to various causes he held dear. Readers of Today in History and of the Third Millennium have the right to think what they decide to think. What do you?
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Jean-Paul Sartre explained his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in a statement made to the Swedish Press on October 22, which appeared in Le Monde in a French translation approved by Sartre. The following translation into English was made by Richard Howard.
I deeply regret the fact that the incident has become something of a scandal: a prize was awarded, and I refused it. It happened entirely because I was not informed soon enough of what was under way. When I read in the October 15 Figaro littéraire, in the Swedish correspondent’s column, that the choice of the Swedish Academy was tending toward me, but that it had not yet been determined, I supposed that by writing a letter to the Academy, which I sent off the following day, I could make matters clear and that there would be no further discussion.
I was not aware at the time that the Nobel Prize is awarded without consulting the opinion of the recipient, and I believed there was time to prevent this from happening. But I now understand that when the Swedish Academy has made a decision it cannot subsequently revoke it. My reasons for refusing the prize concern neither the Swedish Academy nor the Nobel Prize in itself, as I explained in my letter to the Academy. In it, I alluded to two kinds of reasons: personal and objective.
The personal reasons are these: my refusal is not an impulsive gesture, I have always declined official honors. In 1945, after the war, when I was offered the Legion of Honor, I refused it, although I was sympathetic to the government. Similarly, I have never sought to enter the Collège de France, as several of my friends suggested.
This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.
The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him. My sympathies for the Venezuelan revolutionists commit only myself, while if Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel laureate champions the Venezuelan resistance, he also commits the entire Nobel Prize as an institution. The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case. This attitude is of course entirely my own, and contains no criticism of those who have already been awarded the prize. I have a great deal of respect and admiration for several of the laureates whom I have the honor to know.
My objective reasons are as follows: The only battle possible today on the cultural front is the battle for the peaceful coexistence of the two cultures, that of the East and that of the West. I do not mean that they must embrace each other—I know that the confrontation of these two cultures must necessarily take the form of a conflict—but this confrontation must occur between men and between cultures, without the intervention of institutions.
I myself am deeply affected by the contradiction between the two cultures: I am made up of such contradictions. My sympathies undeniably go to socialism and to what is called the Eastern bloc, but I was born and brought up in a bourgeois family and a bourgeois culture. This permits me to collaborate with all those who seek to bring the two cultures closer together. I nonetheless hope, of course, that “the best man wins.” That is, socialism.
This is why I cannot accept an honor awarded by cultural authorities, those of the West any more than those of the East, even if I am sympathetic to their existence. Although all my sympathies are on the socialist side. I should thus be quite as unable to accept, for example, the Lenin Prize, if someone wanted to give it to me, which is not the case.
I know that the Nobel Prize in itself is not a literary prize of the Western bloc, but it is what is made of it, and events may occur which are outside the province of the members of the Swedish Academy. This is why, in the present situation, the Nobel Prize stands objectively as a distinction reserved for the writers of the West or the rebels of the East. It has not been awarded, for example, to Neruda, who is one of the greatest South American poets. There has never been serious question of giving it to Louis Aragon, though he certainly deserves it. It is regrettable that the prize was given to Pasternak and not to Sholokhov, and that the only Soviet work thus honored should be one published abroad and banned in its own country. A balance might have been established by a similar gesture in the other direction.
During the war in Algeria, when we had signed the “declaration of the 121,” I should have gratefully accepted the prize, because it would have honored not only me, but also the freedom for which we were fighting. But matters did not turn out that way, and it is only after the battle is over that the prize has been awarded me.
In discussing the motives of the Swedish Academy, mention has been made of freedom, a word that suggests many interpretations. In the West, only a general freedom is meant: personally, I mean a more concrete freedom which consists of the right to have more than one pair of shoes and to eat one’s fill. It seems to me less dangerous to decline the prize than to accept it. If I accept it, I offer myself to what I shall call “an objective rehabilitation.” According to the Figaro littéraire article, “a controversial political past would not be held against me.” I know that this article does not express the opinion of the Academy, but it clearly shows how my acceptance would be interpreted by certain rightist circles. I consider this “controversial political past” as still valid, even if I am quite prepared to acknowledge to my comrades certain past errors. I do not thereby mean that the Nobel Prize is a “bourgeois” prize, but such is the bourgeois interpretation which would inevitably be given by certain circles with which I am very familiar.
Lastly, I come to the question of the money: it is a very heavy burden that the Academy imposes upon the laureate by accompanying its homage with an enormous sum, and this problem has tortured me. Either one accepts the prize and with the prize money can support organizations or movements one considers important—my own thoughts went to the Apartheid committee in London. Or else one declines the prize on generous principles, and thereby deprives such a movement of badly needed support. But I believe this to be a false problem. I obviously renounce the 250,000 crowns because I do not wish to be institutionalized in either East or West. But one cannot be asked on the other hand to renounce, for 250,000 crowns, principles which are not only one’s own, but are shared by all one’s comrades. That is what has made so painful for me both the awarding of the prize and the refusal of it I am obliged to make. I wish to end this declaration with a message of fellow-feeling for the Swedish public.
Source: The New York Review of Books ( https://bit.ly/2JeUB4B)
Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre
The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige
Do you know what are “buttonhole books”?On this date October 23 in 1978, “The Stories of John Cheever” was first published by Alfred Knopf; the book won the Pulitzer Prize. John Cheever said: "For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle .... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably." And: "Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos ... to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."
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“Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby. All readers have them -- and so do writers … In the fall of 1973, I was a member of John Cheever's writing class at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. John was then 61 years old, which seemed to me preposterously old at the time (as you can imagine, I've since modified my view), and he seemed rather frail and diminished into the bargain. I had read his stories -- most of them -- in a desultory way, but in that era of scintillating narrative experimentation they struck me as being somewhat antiquated, solid stories of a bygone era. The term "experimental" was my mantra, but John was having none of it. His own stories were experimental, he insisted, as was all good fiction, but I didn't believe him. In the blind and arrogant way of the young, I felt I knew better.
But oh, how wrong I was! That came home to me in force five years later, when he published his collected stories (The Stories of John Cheever, 1978, winner of that year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction), a volume of 61 short stories I have re-read for its comfort and enduring beauty every few years since.
There is a great, questing soul alive everywhere in these stories, a soul trying to come to grips with the parameters of human experience amid the ravishing beauty of nature. Few prose writers can touch Cheever for the painterly precision of his descriptions, and the reward of them too -- his characters, locked in the struggles of suburban and familial angst, regularly experience moments of transcendence and rebirth in nature.
My recommendation? Read the entire book through, the stories unfolding in chronological order, and you will feel the deep calm of immersion in Cheever's universe, even as you see the world of his society, our society, unfolding in all its fads and obsessions from the end of World War II through the late 1970s. The first story, "Goodbye, My Brother," remains one of my favorites, an exercise in point of view that contrasts the optimistic and pessimistic poles of human nature in the characters of two brothers, the sunny (and, as we gradually see, prejudicial) narrator and his saturnine brother.
It ends in a golden, life-affirming moment in nature, with some of Cheever's best-known and most lyrical lines: "Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming -- Diana and Helen -- and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea."
The language here is powerful, rhetorical, enriched by Cheever's familiarity with the King James Bible and Shakespeare, and it is this precise diction and ringing syntax that informs all the stories and makes reading them such a comfort. There is a comfort too in the settings of the stories -- most of them take place in the Westchester suburbs or in vacation houses in New England or Italy -- and in the array of characters, typically male and typically befuddled or perplexed by the strictures of upper middle class society.
These are familiar people, and many of these stories will be familiar to you, too: echoes from the past, a sleepy classroom, the window open onto a larger world where everything has its place in an immemorial order, and somewhere a panting retriever lopes across an eternal lawn while the clouds gather and the sun struggles through.”
Source: National Public Radio (https://n.pr/2Ale0O8)
The Stories of John Cheever
Another great presentation Antonio. Indeed, how could these things have happened. Yet, look at what's happening here, today!
Norton wrote: "Another great presentation Antonio. Indeed, how could these things have happened. Yet, look at what's happening here, today!"One of my preferred books is the book of the Bible, not just as religious literature but as literary documents of the past. The Ecclesiastes says that there's a time for everything and nothing ever changes. As a matter of fact, life is full of changes. The French have a proverb which expresses the same paradox: "Plus ça va, plus c'est pareil." - "The more things change, the more they stay the same". Life can have many meanings, but in the end we discover that it has got only one. Take care, dear friend.
October 24, 79 ADPompeii: Vesuvius eruption may have been later than thought: October 24, 79 AD. Archaeologists in Italy have uncovered an inscription they say may show that the history books have been wrong for centuries. Historians have long believed that Mount Vesuvius erupted on 24 August 79 AD, destroying the nearby Roman city of Pompeii. But now, an inscription has been uncovered dated to mid-October - almost two months later.
Italy's culture minister labelled it "an extraordinary discovery." "The new excavations demonstrate the exceptional skill of our country," Alberto Bonisoli said. Historians have been able to date the eruption of Vesuvius with apparent certainty thanks to ancient writings that purported to share first-hand accounts.
They came from Pliny the Younger, an elite lawyer and author of ancient Rome, who wrote about the death of his even more famous uncle, Pliny the Elder. "On the 24th of August, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him to observe a cloud..." he wrote in a letter to Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian, about the events of that day. According to his account, Pliny the Elder was then a fleet commander at Misenum - modern day Miseno - across the bay from Pompeii. He took a ship to stage a rescue for those in danger from the volcano. Flying rock crushed Pompeii victim's head. Pompeii's not-so-ancient Roman remains. But he did not return from the venture.
Pliny the Younger, meanwhile, watched the destruction unfold from the other side of the bay. "I have faithfully related to you what I was either an eye-witness of myself or received immediately after the accident happened, and before there was time to vary the truth," he wrote.
But the latest discovery calls such certainty into question. The inscription discovered in the new excavations is nothing more than a scrawl in charcoal, likely made by a worker renovating a home. But it is dated to 16 days before the "calends" of November in the old Roman calendar style - which is 17 October in our modern dating method. "Since it was done in fragile and evanescent charcoal, which could not have been able to last long, it is highly probable that it can be dated to the October of AD 79," the archaeology team said in a statement.
They believe the most likely date for the eruption was, in fact, 24 October. There has long been some speculation that the eruption happened later than August, particularly centred around evidence of autumnal fruits and heating braziers discovered in the ruins. The charcoal inscription supports that theory, the Pompeii archaeology team said. So did Pliny the Younger record things incorrectly? His letter to Tacitus was written some 20 years after the eruption in 79 AD. And the original copies have not survived the intervening 1,939 years.
Instead, our modern reading of the text is based on translations and transcriptions made over the centuries. In fact, various copies of the letters have contained dates ranging anywhere from August to November - though 24 August has long been accepted. The differences between the texts could easily have been influenced by confusion over the ancient and modern systems of counting days. The discovery was made in the new Regio V excavation, uncovering previously untouched areas of the ancient city. In addition to the simple inscription, grand houses have been unveiled this week with elaborate frescoes and mosaics.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe...
Pompeii: The History, Life and Art of the Buried City
Mod
LauraT wrote: "Pompei is really worth a visit, it you come by!"I live only few miles away from Pompei ...
Today October 25 is St. Crispin's Day, dedicated to the patron saint of shoemakers, who was martyred by the Roman Emperor Maximian on this date in 287 A.D. St. Crispin and his brother, St. Crispinian, lived at Soisson in France, where they preached during the day and supported themselves by making shoes at night. It was on St. Crispin's Day in 1415 that English troops, commanded by King Henry V, engaged the French army near the village of Agincourt in France. Despite being outnumbered nearly six to one, the English pulled off one of the most brilliant victories in English military history. In Shakespeare's “Henry V”, King Henry addresses his troops on the eve of battle:
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Speeches, Soliloquies, and Songs from the Plays
October 26, 1883: Napoleon Hill is born. He is best remembered for his mega-bestseller, “Think and Grow Rich” (1937), which has sold an estimated 20 million copies worldwide. (Wikipedia ranks it as the 11th bestselling book of all time.) An account of how Hill became rich and famous, the book became a success story in its own right.Foreword - What Do You Want Most?
WHAT DO YOU WANT MOST? Is It Money, Fame, Power, Contentment, Personality, Peace of Mind, Happiness? The Thirteen Steps to Riches described in this book offer the shortest dependable philosophy of individual achievement ever presented for the benefit of the man or woman who is searching for a definite goal in life.
Before beginning the book you will profit greatly if you recognize the fact that the book was not written to entertain. You cannot digest the contents properly in a week or a month. After reading the book thoroughly, Dr. Miller Reese Hutchison, nationally known Consulting Engineer and long-time associate of Thomas A. Edison.
This is not a novel. It is a textbook on individual achievement that came directly from the experiences of hundreds of America's most successful men. It should be studied, digested, and meditated upon. No more than one chapter should be read in a single night. The reader should underline the sentences which impress him most. Later, he should go back to these marked lines and read them again. A real student will not merely read this book, he will absorb its contents and make them his own.
This book should be adopted by all high schools and no boy or girl should be permitted to graduate without having satisfactorily passed an examination on it. This philosophy will not take the place of the subjects taught in schools, but it will enable one to organize and apply the knowledge acquired, and convert it into useful service and adequate compensation without waste of time …
(You can read the book here for free: https://bit.ly/2yxh5JP or on KindleUnlimited)
Think and Grow Rich
The most significant events in the history of books on the 27th of October.October the 27th was a historic day for English poetry, because two poets who would leave a lasting mark on English literature, neither of whom was English, came into the world on this day. The course of twentieth-century literary history would be shaped by these two births…
1914: Dylan Thomas is born in Swansea, Wales. Thomas’s middle name was Marlais, after his great-uncle, William Thomas, who was also a poet. As well as his poetry he would also write a classic ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, which was recorded for the radio with Welsh actor Richard Burton providing the voices, among others.
1932: Sylvia Plath is born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts. As well as the confessional poetry for which she is best known, Plath also wrote a novel, The Bell Jar, and, more surprisingly, a book of nonsense poems for children. The Bed Book contains a number of poems about different kinds of beds; it was only published posthumously, in 1976. As with most classic children’s books, The Bed Book was written for the amusement of the author’s own children. The original British edition was illustrated by Quentin Blake, best known for providing the distinctive illustrations to many of Roald Dahl’s books for children.
But a birthday isn’t all that these two poets share: both poets would die in their thirties, and they both also wrote poems with ‘in October’ in their titles. Here is Thomas reading his ‘Poem in October’, about turning 30, and here is Plath reading her ‘Poppies in October’. Aptly, they also both wrote poems for their birthdays.
Poem in October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
----
Poppies In October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly ----
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
O my ***, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
Source: www.interestingliterature.com
The Poems of Dylan Thomas
Sylvia Plath: A Biography
Today October 28. It's the birthday of convicted murderer and best-selling detective novelist Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme in London (1938). She had tuberculosis, and her doctor said she wouldn't survive another winter in England, so she was sent away to live in the Bahamas, and then South Africa. She rejoined her family when she was 13, after her father, a well-known physicist, got a job as a president of a university in Christchurch, New Zealand. She became close friends with a classmate, Pauline Parker, who also struggled with health issues. When Juliet was confined to a sanatorium for several months, she exchanged daily letters with Pauline.
They created an elaborate fantasy world together; they were both working on novels, which they were convinced were brilliant. They planned to run away to New York together, find publishers for their novels, and then make them into Hollywood movies, they would be actresses and they would handpick famous actors to star in their films.
Then Juliet's parents decided to leave the country and take their daughter to South Africa. The two girls were absolutely devastated and begged for Pauline to move to South Africa too. Juliet's parents thought the girls needed to be separated, but they said all right, as long as it was OK with the Parkers, knowing full well they would never consent. Sure enough, Pauline Parker's mother refused.
The teenage girls decided that Pauline's mother was the only thing ruining their lives, and that the only way to solve everything would be to kill her. So they did, inviting her to go on a walk in the park and then bashing her head with a brick tied in a stocking. When the girls returned to the teahouse where they had eaten lunch, they were covered in blood, and quickly arrested. Juliet was 15 years old, and Pauline 16.
The brutal murder shocked the country, and the two girls were given a high-profile trial. The prosecution read extracts of Pauline's diary, in which the girls coldly planned the murder. They were each sentenced to an indefinite prison sentence, and were released separately about five years later under the condition they never contact each other.
The girl who had been Juliet Hulme changed her name to Anne Perry. She converted to Mormonism, and settled in a remote Scottish village with her mother. In 1978, she published a murder mystery called The Cater Street Hangman, set in Victorian England. She expanded the book into a series, and then wrote another detective series. For decades, no one knew that Anne Perry and Juliet Hulme were one in the same. Then, in 1994, the Parker-Hulme murder case became the inspiration for the film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet as Juliet.
A reporter was writing a story about the film and discovered that not only was Juliet Hulme still alive, she was a best-selling, world-famous writer named Anne Perry. She writes for 12 hours a day, and she has written more than 50 novels, which have sold more than 25 million copies. Perry said of her writing: "It is vital for me to go on exploring moral matters."
Source: www.writersalmanac.org
Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century
Antonio wrote: "Today October 28. It's the birthday of convicted murderer and best-selling detective novelist Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme in London (1938). She had tuberculosis, and her doctor said she wouldn'..."
Yes, and the murder is why I never have read any of her books, nor do I plan to.
Karin wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Today October 28. It's the birthday of convicted murderer and best-selling detective novelist Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme in London (1938). She had tuberculosis, and her doctor ..."
Well done! I wonder why her books have sold more than 25 million copies. Perry also said of her writing: "It is vital for me to go on exploring moral matters." I also wonder what she means when she says "It is vital for me to go on exploring moral matters."
Today October 29, 1618: Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded. An English Renaissance Man.He had been imprisoned in the Tower of London not by Elizabeth I, as is widely believed, but her successor, the Stuart king James I. It was while locked up in the Tower that he wrote his History of the World. He was released briefly but was eventually executed by beheading. Raleigh’s name is spelled some 70 different ways in documents from his lifetime. According to Jokinen (2011), "Ralegh's name can be found spelled in over 70 different ways in contemporary documents. Ralegh himself signed it variously, finally settling on 'Ralegh', it is to be noted, however, that Ralegh himself never spelled it with an 'i,' as 'Raleigh.'" It was common for words and names to be spelled different ways during the time Raleigh was alive because spelling was not standardized.
WHAT is our life? The play of passion.
Our mirth? The music of division:
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for life’s short comedy.
The earth the stage; Heaven the spectator is,
Who sits and views whosoe’er doth act amiss.
The graves which hide us from the scorching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus playing post we to our latest rest,
And then we die in earnest, not in jest.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Source: www.ncpedia.org
Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend
October 30, 1938Orson Welles broadcasts “The War of the Worlds”. The ‘panic’ which the radio broadcast supposedly caused was exaggerated, to say the least. The story goes that many Americans mistook the fictional broadcast for a real news bulletin about a Martian invasion, but this appears to have been largely propaganda spun by the press, which wished to portray the relatively new radio as an untrustworthy disseminator of news.
The story that mass panic broke out because of an Orson Welles radio show became part of modern folklore. The idea that hysteria swept America on October 30, 1938, when a 62-minute radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds, remained unchallenged for nearly eight decades. Even those who had never heard Welles reading the HG Wells story about invading Martians wielding deadly heat-rays later claimed to have been terrified. Welles, who was born on May 6, 1915, used simulated on-the-scene radio reports about aliens advancing on New York City to pep up the story by Wells, who died on August 13 1946. But what is the truth about that historic Halloween eve CBS Radio show from the Mercury Theatre in New York?
According to popular myth, thousands of New Yorkers fled their homes in panic, with swarms of terrified citizens crowding the streets in different American cities to catch a glimpse of a “real space battle”. In 1954, Ben Gross, radio editor for the New York Daily News, wrote in his memoir that New York's streets were "nearly deserted" that October night in 1938 …. (read on)
Source: The Telegraph (https://bit.ly/2LgV1Y6)
Orson Welles' WAR OF THE WORLDS
Two most significant events in the history of books on the 31st of OctoberHalloween and also John Keats is born. The Romantic poet would fittingly write a poem that is particularly suitable for Halloween, his birthday, which begins ‘‘Tis “the witching time of night”‘, playing on a line from William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet.
'Tis " the witching time of night",
Orbed is the moon and bright,
And the stars they glisten, glisten,
Seeming with bright eyes to listen —
For what listen they?
For a song and for a charm,
See they glisten in alarm,
And the moon is waxing warm
To hear what I shall say.
Moon! keep wide thy golden ears —
Hearken, stars! and hearken, spheres!
Hearken, thou eternal sky!
I sing an infant's lullaby,
A pretty lullaby.
Listen, listen, listen, listen,
Glisten, glisten, glisten, glisten,
And hear my lullaby!
Though the rushes that will make
Its cradle still are in the lake;
Though the linen then that will be
Its swathe, is on the cotton tree;
Though the woollen that will keep
It warm is on the silly sheep —
Listen, stars' light, listen, listen,
Glisten, glisten, glisten, glisten,
And hear my lullaby!
Child, I see thee! Child, I've found thee
Midst of the quiet all around thee!
Child, I see thee! Child, I spy thee!
And thy mother sweet is nigh thee!
Child, I know thee! Child no more,
But a Poet evermore!
See, see, the lyre, the lyre,
In a flame of fire,
Upon the little cradle's top
Flaring, flaring, flaring,
Past the eyesight's bearing.
Awake it from its sleep,
And see if it can keep
Its eyes upon the blaze —
Amaze, amaze!
It stares, it stares, it stares,
It dares what no one dares!
It lifts its little hand into the flame
Unharmed, and on the strings
Paddles a little tune, and sings,
With dumb endeavour sweetly —
Bard art thou completely!
Little child
O' th' western wild,
Bard art thou completely!
Sweetly with dumb endeavour,
A Poet now or never,
Little child
O' the western wild,
A Poet now or never!
“Tis the witching hour of night.” Is there any other phrase in the paranormal that gets your blood pumping as fast as the witching hour? But what exactly does it mean? According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the witching hour is “regarded as the time when witches are supposedly active.” In a search of the Internet, the phrase “Witching Hour” will produce over a half million hits. Around 1601, William Shakespeare penned, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”. In this play, Hamlet expresses: “Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business, as the day would quake to look on.” (Hamlet, Scene II)
Could this be the source of the Witching Time (Hour)? Hamlet was written over 400 years ago. This is a time of transformation and change and the height of witches’ spell-casting powers. The roots of this notion go back to ancient times, to the worship of goddesses associated with the Moon, fertility, and witchcraft. As the Moon waxes in its phases, so do the powers associated with it and its deities, until the culminate at the full moon. In any case, today is Halloween day and John Keats was born …
October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween
John Keats: A New Life
Anyonio, 5 stars. I really enjoy your writing and your selections.
Norton wrote: "Anyonio, 5 stars. I really enjoy your writing and your selections."Thank you. You're very kind. I confess, dear friend Norton, that I was very happy when I discovered this coincidence between Halloween and John Keats: the Mystery of Poetry and of Mystery of Time ...
November 1, 1907: Alfred Jarry dies.Alfred Jarry (8 September 1873 – 1 November 1907) was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play “Ubu Roi” (1896). He also coined the term and philosophical concept of “pataphysics”. Jarry was born in Laval, Mayenne, France, and his mother was from Brittany.
Jarry wrote in a variety of hybrid genres and styles, prefiguring the postmodern. He wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. His texts are considered examples of absurdist literature and postmodern philosophy.
The plays of Alfred Jarry are considered by many to be the first dramatic works of the theatre of the absurd. They are credited with a great number of literary innovations and are seen as major influences of the dada and symbolist movements in art. “Ubu Roi” (translated as "King Ubu and King Turd") is Jarry’s most famous work. “Ubu Roi” eliminates the dramatic action from its Shakespearean antecedents and uses scatological humor and farce to present Jarry’s views on art, literature, politics, the ruling classes, and current events.
“Ubu Roi” first saw life as schoolboy farce, a parody of Felix Hebert, one of Jarry’s teachers. Co-authored with his friend, Henri Morin, the skit was transformed into a marionette play through several versions. In 1891, Jarry published a story, ‘‘Guignol,’’ reminiscent of the Punch and Judy performances popular throughout Europe, which showcased a vile and murderous "Pere Ubu". A two-act version of "Ubu Roi" with songs for marionettes, "Ubu sur la Batte", appeared in print in 1906.
The opening night of December 11, 1896, caused quite a stir according to Roger Shattuck in his work “The Banquet Years”. Actor Firmin Gernier stepped forward to speak the opening line—‘‘Merdre!’’ (translated as ‘‘Shitter!’’). The audience erupted in pandemonium. It took nearly fifteen minutes to silence the house and continue the play. Several people walked out without hearing any more. Fist fights broke out in the orchestra. Jarry supporters shouted, "You wouldn't understand Shakespeare either!’’ Those who did not appreciate Jarry’s attack on theatrical realism replied with variations of le mot Ubu.
The stage manager startled the audience into silence by turning up the house lights and catching several screaming patrons standing on their seats and shaking their upraised fists. Gernier improvised a dance and the audience settled back down long enough for the action to proceed to the next ‘‘merdre,’’ when the audience exploded once again. The interruptions continued throughout the play until the curtain fell. One audience member, a stunned and saddened William Butler Yeats remarked ‘‘[W]hat more is possible? After us the Savage God.’’
In his book Jarry: Ubu Roi, Keith Beaumont detailed three accusations that were made against “Ubu Roi” by spectators and critics in the aftermath of the outrageous performance. The first focused on the play’s ‘‘alleged’’ vulgarity and obscenity. Secondly, perhaps in view of the political atmosphere of the time, critics condemned the play and its performance as the theatrical equivalent of an ‘‘anarchist’’ bomb attack and as an act of political subversion. The third accusation leveled against the play and its performance was that they in no way constituted a ‘‘serious’’ piece of literature or of theater but rather a gigantic hoax.
Absurdity is a major theme in "Ubu Roi", and is represented time and again by "Pere Ubu" ’s actions and character. Woefully unaware of his surroundings, his distorted sense of logic leads him to kill everyone around him. Another important theme is that of art and experience. For Jarry, the goal of theater was to create a new type of character while transcending common events. Jarry himself was known for behaving like Pere Ubu—though he did not go so far as committing murder. Though Dadaism wasn’t officially founded until ten years after Ubu Roi was written, they share many of the same philosophical ideals, such as the need for deliberate madness to replace logic to create chaos that would upset harmony, specifically in the arts.
Source: www.enotes.com
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
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Denis Diderot (other topics)
Birth of comedian and film actor Groucho Marx. He was one of the Marx Brothers. He spent nearly seven decades making people laugh with his snappy one-liners and sharp wit. Groucho Marx was born on October 2, 1890, in born New York City. The Marx Brothers had a career breakthrough in 1914, as Groucho's quick-witted quips won over crowds. By the 1920s, the Marx Brothers had become a hugely popular theatrical act. They made films before splitting up in 1949, at which point Groucho performed solo on radio and television. He died on August 19, 1977.
Comedian, actor, singer and writer Groucho Marx was born Julius Henry Marx on October 2, 1890, in New York City. Groucho Marx spent nearly seven decades making people laugh with his snappy one-liners and sharp wit. He once described his comedy as "the type of humor that made people laugh at themselves." While he originally aspired to be a doctor, Marx started his career as a singer. One of his earliest efforts proved to be disastrous, however. As part of the Le May Trio, Marx got stuck in Colorado for a while after another group member took off with his pay. He had to work at a grocery store to earn enough money to make it back to New York.
Marx's father Samuel never had much success as a tailor, and the family struggled financially. His mother Minnie hoped that she might find prosperity through her five children. She became the quintessential "stage mother," guiding her children's theatrical acts and even performing herself. The act eventually featured Groucho and his brothers Leonard, Adolph and Milton.
Groucho received his colorful nickname from fellow vaudeville performer Art Fisher because of his personality. Fisher also coined amusing names for Marx's brothers, renaming Leonard "Chico," Adolph "Harpo" and Milton "Gummo." Milton left the act to fight in World War I and was replaced by youngest brother Herbert, known as "Zeppo." Both Herbert and Milton later became theatrical agents.
The Marx Brothers had a career breakthrough in 1914 while performing in Texas. During a show, some of the audience left to go see a runaway mule. When they returned, the Marx Brothers put aside their usual routines to make fun of the audience. Groucho's quick-witted quips won over the crowd. The switch to comedy proved to be their ticket to success.
Source: www.biography.com
Quotes
Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
A man's only as old as the woman he feels.
A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke.
Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.
Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
Before I speak, I have something important to say.
Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
Go, and never darken my towels again.
Humor is reason gone mad.
I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.