It's the birthday of novelist Dan Brown, born in Exeter, New
Hampshire (1964). He's the author of one of the best-selling books of
all time: The Da Vinci Code (2003). It's estimated that there are
about sixty million copies of The Da Vinci Code in print worldwide.
Brown's first three novels have all become paperback best-sellers.
Even books that Brown used as sources for The Da Vinci Code are
seeing their sales increase thanks to all the publicity. A movie of
the novel came out last month (2006).
THANKS for stopping by, I do my best to acknowledge when someone leaves a comment,you do not have to be a member here & everyone is welcome. Ps: This site is monitored but not actively posting on a regular basis. Mostly these are stories & some photos saved from a defunct site known as Verdun Connections which was on MSN Groups initially then on a social network called Multiply.
251 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 251 of 251Bill, The interesting part to me is that after the event you mention the new Anglican Church as they called it and the Roman Catholic Church carried on the same service in Latin for many years. When King James had the Bible translated to English (1652 or thereabout) the service was changed to English and the R.C. continued in Latin. After Vatican II Roman Catholics changed to English but also the service was changed dramatically. The Anglican Church followed suit. The Priest no longer faced the Altar. The beautiful language of the King James Bible was gone. The Prayer Book now reads like an Archie comic and people shake hands in the middle of the service.
Our Church left the Anglican Community because of this and along with 65 other Churches across Canada we maintain the old service. In Quebec, we are the only Church where people can hear the words they spoke and sang as children.
Every Sunday, I feel carried back to St.John the Divine on Moffat where I grew in Christianity. Ed
It was on this day in 1918 that Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) was wounded while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I. It was only one month after he'd arrived. Hemingway was passing out chocolates to Italian soldiers on the front line when he heard the sound of a trench mortar flying through the air. He later said that the explosion felt like a furnace door bursting open.He later had 228 pieces of shrapnel removed from his leg and spent the next several weeks in the hospital. The wound he received would go on to become the central event of his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), which he considered his best book, and his experiences in Italy appeared in many short stories as well. He later said, "In Italy, when I was at the war there... my own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password."
It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau (books by this author), who was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). We know him as the author of Walden, and the essay "Civil Disobedience." He became the first member of his family to go to college. He went to Harvard, but didn't much care for the place. He didn't much care for school teaching either. He went to live with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord and did odd jobs around the house and took care of the children. It was Emerson who encouraged Thoreau to write poetry and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do for the rest of his life.He was 27 years old when he built that little cabin on the edge of Walden Pond and moved in, in an attempt, he said, to "Simplify, simplify, simplify ... to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."
It was on this day in 1954, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was the sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which came out in 1937. Tolkien had written The Hobbit for his own amusement and didn't expect it to sell well. It's the story of a small, human-like creature with hairy feet named Bilbo, who goes on an adventure through Middle Earth and comes back with a magical ring.J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands. I smoke a pipe, like good, plain food, detest French cooking ... I am fond of mushrooms, have a very simple sense of humor ... go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much."The Hobbit sold pretty well, partly because C.S. Lewis gave it a big review when it came out. And so Tolkien's publisher asked for a sequel. Tolkien decided the new book would be about Bilbo's nephew Frodo, but for a long time he had no idea what sort of adventure. Finally, he decided it would be about the magical ring, though the ring had not been such an important part of The Hobbit.Tolkien spent the next 17 years working on The Lord of the Rings. He was a professor at Oxford. He had to write in his spare time, usually at night, sitting by the stove in the study in his house.He was well into his first draft by the time World War II broke out in 1939. He hadn't set out to write an allegory, but once the war began, he started to draw parallels between the war and the events in his novel: the land of evil in The Lord of the Rings, Mordor, was set east of Middle Earth, just as the enemies of England were to the east.The book became more and more complicated as he went along. It was taking much longer to finish than he'd planned. He went through long stretches where he didn't write anything. He thought about giving up the whole thing. He wanted to make sure all the details were right, the geography, the language, the mythology of Middle Earth. He made elaborate charts to keep track of the events of the story. His son Christopher also drew a detailed map of Middle Earth.Finally, in the fall of 1949, he finished writing The Lord of the Rings. He typed the final copy himself sitting on a bed in his attic, typewriter on his lap, tapping it out with two fingers. It turned out to be more than a half million words long, and the publisher agreed to bring it out in three volumes. The first came out on this day in 1954. The publisher printed just 3,500 copies, but it turned out to be incredibly popular. It went into a second printing in just six weeks. Today more than 30 million copies have been sold around the world.
And today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway (books by this author), born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He went off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He gave away chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. And just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.He was one of the first Americans to return from the war, and that made him a kind of celebrity in Oak Park. He gave talks to high school students. He hung around his parents' house until they decided they wanted him out of the house.He started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. They moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a poor bohemian, but he actually had plenty of money. He and his wife traveled around Europe and went to the horse races and ate in nice restaurants.He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in caf챕s. He wrote about one of those caf챕s, "It was a pleasant caf챕, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a caf챕 au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story."He wrote in a letter to his father, "I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, The Sun Also Rises. Three years later, A Farewell to Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive, and young American men tried to act like "Hemingway heroes," speaking in staccato sentences out of the sides of their mouths. By the time he died in 1961, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.
For you Verdunite book worms. Who love to take to the sea in spirit. Arrrrrrrgh!Bill,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,It was on this day in 1842 that Herman Melville left the Marquesas Islands and hopped a whale ship back home, an experience that became the subject of his first book. He had signed onto a whaling ship in 1841, he was in need a job. It was a great adventure at first. He got to see sperm whales, sailed along the coast of South America, and saw the Galapagos Islands. He was looking forward to the Pacific Islands. He had heard it was like a paradise. The weather was perfect, and the women were beautiful and scantily clad. But by the time the ship reached there, the captain had grown sick and he was treating his men worse and worse. And so Herman Melville jumped ship and went off on his own. He snuck over the side of the ship in a downpour, swam to shore, and headed into the jungle, knowing only a few of the native words and phrases.He came upon a village of friendly people and lived with them for four months. He came to believe they were far more civilized than any Europeans or Americans. Men and women wore the same clothing. Both went bare-chested, a skirt of cloth, wore jewelry, loved to dance, and were free with their sexuality.And he noticed that though they were forced to live off the land and build their own homes, there were no poor people. Nobody went hungry. He wrote, "There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations... There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no bills payable...or to sum it all up in one word—no money."He found his life luxurious, but he was worried if he stayed too long he'd never leave. So on this day in 1842, he found an Australian ship in need of crew, and he hopped aboard. It took him more than a year to get back to the U.S., and when he got home, he told his sister a sanitized version of what had happened to him in the Marquesas. She urged him to write it down, and that became his first book, Narrative of a Four Months' Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands, which was a huge success, but it plagued Melville for the rest of his life—his readers always expected him to write more tales of exotic adventures in the Pacific.
I read every one of this high school teacher's books, including books written by his brother Malachy. Hope he writes a novel next -- I'll buy it no doubt.It's the birthday of the memoirist Frank McCourt, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1930). He was the first of seven children born to two Irish immigrants. He lived for a few years in New York City, as his father struggled to hold onto a job, but after his younger sister died, the family decided to return to Ireland. They settled in a tiny Irish town called Limerick.McCourt's father was an alcoholic, who got fired from his jobs again and again, and managed to spend all of his meager income at the pub. McCourt grew up wearing tattered clothing and shoes that had been resoled with scraps of old tires. His family's home had neither a bathroom nor electricity. He and his siblings slept every night in bed with their parents on a flea-infested mattress. For most meals, all they had was tea and bread. McCourt's mother said that tea and bread was a balanced meal, because it contained a liquid and a solid.Two of McCourt's brothers died of disease and malnutrition. McCourt was 10 years old when he caught typhoid fever. He had to spend a week in the hospital, and he was shocked to find that the hospital was a kind of paradise. It was the first time he could remember that he got three square meals a day, the first time he had slept between real bed sheets, and it was also the first time that he had free access to books. He read Shakespeare in the hospital, and fell in love with literature. From that day forward, he would borrow books wherever he could find them, and since his house had no electricity, he would read at night on the street, standing under a streetlamp.McCourt eventually saved enough money to buy a ticket on a boat to New York City. He served in the Korean War and went to college on the GI Bill. He became a high school English teacher and taught in the New York City public schools for 18 years.For years he tried to write about his experiences growing up in Ireland, but he found he was too angry to write anything worth reading. Then, one day, he was listening to the way his granddaughter used language, and he suddenly realized that the key to writing his book would be to write it in the voice of a child. A few days later, McCourt opened up a notebook and wrote the words, "I'm in a playground on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy. He's two, I'm three. We're on the seesaw." It was his earliest memory, and it became one of the first scenes in what would become his memoir, Angela's Ashes.The book came out in 1996. The publisher printed a modest run of 27,000 copies, and McCourt himself said he was just pleased to have published a book at all. But the book caught on through word of mouth, and McCourt's public readings were immensely popular. And then the book won the Pulitzer Prize. It eventually spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list, becoming one of the most popular memoirs ever written.
Sacred Feminine
http://www.spiritbreak.com/Videos/FeaturedVideo/tabid/64/ItemID/265/View/Details/Default.aspx
It's the birthday of Jacqueline Susann (books by this author), born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1918). She was 44 years old and a failed Broadway actress when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1962. So she went to a wishing hill in Central Park and made a deal with God. If He gave her 10 more years, she would become a success.
Four years later, Susann published her novel Valley of the Dolls (1966). It's the story of a woman struggling to become an actress, and it describes the sex lives, drug abuse, and catfights of starlets. When her publisher first read it, he thought it was awful. But then he gave it to his wife, and she loved it. The book went on to become the best-selling novel ever published at that time, selling more than 28 million copies.
Susann developed a system for promoting Valley of the Dolls that helped to revolutionize the way books are marketed. She went on coast-to-coast tours, appeared on local radio and television stations, and made personal appearances in bookstores to read and sign autographs, becoming one of the first modern celebrity authors.
It's the birthday of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (books by this author) born in St. Paul (1896), who was a student at Princeton University when he fell in love with a beautiful rich girl named Ginevra King. She got engaged to somebody else because Fitzgerald didn't have many prospects. He later said, "She was the first girl I ever loved ... [and] she ended up by throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference."But that experience gave Fitzgerald an idea for a novel about a young man named Amory Blaine, who falls in love with a beautiful blond debutante named Rosalind Connage and then loses her because she doesn't want to marry someone with so little money. Fitzgerald struggled to write the book in his parents' home in St. Paul, pinning revision notes to his curtains and eating all his meals in his bedroom. He called the novel This Side of Paradise, sent it out for publication in early September of 1919, and a couple of weeks later got word that it would be published. Fitzgerald was so excited that he ran outside his house and shouted the news to passing cars and people in the street. He later wrote, "That week, the postman rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning into a world of ineffable toploftiness and promise."The publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920 made Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and it won him the heart of a woman named Zelda Sayre, whom he'd met while he was in the military. He finally got the girl, he got to be a star, and he got to be rich. He went off to Paris to write his great masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), about a wealthy bootlegger who wears pink suits and throws extravagant parties and is obsessed with winning back the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald was never entirely satisfied with the main character, Jay Gatsby. He said, "I never at any one time saw him clear myself — for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself." The novel got good reviews, but it flopped with readers and never even sold out its first printing. By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald's marriage was falling apart and his books weren't selling anymore.When Fitzgerald's last complete novel, Tender is the Night, came out in 1934, it got mixed reviews. He died in 1940 at the age of 44. That year, all of his books sold a total of 72 copies, with royalties of $13. Today, The Great Gatsby sells about 300,000 copies a year.F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
It's the birthday of Edward L. Stratemeyer, (books by this author) born in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1862), one of the first American writers to capitalize on the new market in children's literature created by universal primary school. At the time, most children's books taught moral lessons, but Stratemeyer said, "A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby. ... He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something." Stratemeyer also figured that his books would sell better if they had recurring characters, so he created one series after another, the Motor Boys, the Outdoor Girls, the Bobbsey Twins. His work was so popular that he couldn't keep up with the demand, so he created the Stratemeyer Syndicate, incorporated in 1910, a kind of fiction factory with dozens of writers banging out dozens of novels under numerous pseudonyms. Stratemeyer wrote the outline for each book and made sure that each had exactly 25 chapters and that every chapter ended with a good cliffhanger.When detective fiction took off in the 1920s, Stratemeyer created a detective series for kids called the Hardy Boys, and it was his most popular series yet. He followed the Hardy Boys with a series about a girl detective named Nancy Drew. Publishers believed that books for boys always sold more than books for girls, but the Nancy Drew books were the most popular books that Stratemeyer ever published. Nancy Drew was also the last character Stratemeyer created himself. He died of a heart attack in 1930, the same year that the first Nancy Drew mystery came out. The title of the book was The Secret of the Old Clock. His syndicate ultimately published more than 700 titles, and it still sells about 6 million books a year.
Norman Rush said, "The main effort of arranging your life should be
to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently
maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for
reading."
Good morning, SecondAve, As a bibliophile, I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your writeups on authors and/or writers. Thanks, Jack
It is interesting to know that Jack Kirouac is of French American extraction and has roots in Quebec through his parents. He spoke french although with difficulty as I remember him being interviewed on french TV here in Montreal, I guess that would be about the 1960s. Although not a common Quebecois name, the family name Kirouac shows up now and then in the province. Since I am interested in genealogy, I will try and find the origins of the name at the SHGV. Guy
Guy, sometimes the egos of writers exceeds their own work. I remember hearing that Truman Capote dismissed Kerouac as a "mere typist." Jack
I had a lit teacher who knew Robert frost and said he was an a.h.
With all the beautiful poetry the man wasn't a nice person. In regards to Capote he had an enormous I.Q. of 225 -- off the chart. I can understand how he could look down on mere mortals but cannot understand why.
Bill
Hi Jack
Capote was a fairly regular guest on Johnny Carson's show in the late 60's, early 70's. I was an avid fan at the time and watched every night.
I remember Carson asking Truman how he knew when he was finished a book. Truman looked at him and in that classic voice said "I don't know Johnny, they just come and take it away from me."
BobB
Hi, Guys! Bob, what did you think of Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote in Capote? I think he was superb! Apparently, Hoffman stayed in character even during breaks. Bill, I have a book of Frost's poetry here that I picked up at a flea market and still haven't gone through it yet, along with so many other books that are gracing my shelves. Maybe I'll get around to reading them all when I retire. Well, that's certainly news of Frost's personality. Thanks for the info. But it's hard to imagine, eh? ... which is sooo Canadian. Regards, Jack
JACK KIROUAK, author: I found this information at the SHGV yesterday. We happen to have the following Kirouak family genealogy: KIROUAK (KIROUACK-KEROAK): Three K챕rouack brothers left K챕rien in Bretagne, France in 1730. One died during the Atlantic crossing. Fran챌ois Kirouac establised Warwick and others took residence in Cap St Ignace and L`Islet. Some decendents established residence across Canada and the North Eastern part of the United States. Guy
Hi Jack
I must confess that I haven't seen Capote yet. A bit late I know. It is on my backlog list. In fact I have the DVD at home. I am looking forward to it. The trailers I saw looked like the real thing.
BobB
On this day in 1851, Harper & Brothers published Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, (more books by this author) his first really ambitious novel. Unfortunately, his British publisher had hired someone to go through the book and edit out anything too obscure or possibly obscene, and the result was that the language was changed in numerous places. But worst of all, the epilogue had been left out entirely. This confused a lot of British readers, because it didn't make sense how Ishmael, the narrator, had lived to tell the tale. The reviews were harsh, and the book flopped, partly because of those British reviews. As a writer, Melville never recovered from the disappointment. These days, college students buy 20,000 copies of Moby-Dick every yea
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, (books by this author) born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939), who as far as anyone can tell, has had an extremely happy life, a happy childhood, a happy marriage, but who has written a series of very disturbing books, including The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who stops eating after her boyfriend proposes marriage; The Handmaid's Tale (1985), about an imaginary America where most women have lost the ability to have babies, and the few fertile women left are forced to become surrogate mothers for the upper class; and Cat's Eye (1988), about an artist whose retrospective forces her to return to her hometown and relive the memories of being tortured by her closest childhood friend, Cordelia.Critics started calling Atwood "the high priestess of pain," but Atwood said, "All that means is that I'm good at describing certain kinds of emotions. ... I'm also good at writing fake newspaper reports. [I could be the] high priestess of fake newspaper reports." She also said, "Women see me as living proof that you don't have to come to a sticky end — put your head in an oven, stay silent for 30 years, not have children — to be a good and serious writer." Her most recent book is The Tent (2006), a collection of stories and poems.
I'm reading Hollywood Station by Joseph Wambaugh. Great Book, it's hard to put down-Fresco
Fresco is this about the LAPD and if so what era?
Bill Cooper
It's the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson, (books by this author) born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1850), who was a sickly, moderately successful essayist and travel writer, living in France, when one evening he walked to a friend's house, looked in through the window, and fell instantly in love with a woman sitting there at the table. To make a grand entrance, he opened the window, leapt inside, and took a bow. The woman was Fanny Osbourne and she was both American and unhappily married. She had come to Europe to get away from her husband, but after spending months getting to know Stevenson, she decided to go back to California.Stevenson got a telegram from her a few weeks after she'd returned to the United States, and he decided on the spot to drop everything and go persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him. His health, as always, was terrible, and the trip to the United States almost killed him. He collapsed on Fanny Osbourne's doorstep, but she nursed him back to health. She did divorce her husband, and they got married in San Francisco and spent their honeymoon in a cabin near an abandoned silver mine.
They moved back to Scotland with her son from her previous marriage, and one rainy afternoon the following summer Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson. The map gave him and idea for a story and in a single month he had written his first great novel, Treasure Island (1883), about the young Jim Hawkins, who finds a treasure map and goes on a journey to find the treasure. He meets pirates, survives a mutiny, and gets to know a one-legged cook named Long John Silver. The book has been in print for 124 years now.
Around the same time that Treasure Island was published, Stevenson woke up one morning and told his family that he did not want to be disturbed until he had finished writing a story that had come to him in a dream. It took him three days to write it, but when he read the story aloud to his wife, she said it was too sensationalistic. So he sat down and rewrote the whole thing. By the end of the week he was fairly happy with the result, which he called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), about a scientist who invents a chemical that changes his personality from a mild-mannered gentleman to a savage criminal.
Those two books made Stevenson rich and famous. He spent the rest of his life traveling from one place to the next, producing about 400 pages of published work a year. He finally settled on the island of Samoa, where his health improved greatly, and in the last five years of his life, he wrote 10 more books. He died at the age of 44, not from his respiratory illness, but from a stroke. His contemporaries saw him as one of the greatest writers of his generation, but he's now remembered mainly as a writer of adventure stories. Critics wish he had finished the last novel he had been working on, about colonial life in Samoa, because the fragments that survive are among his best work.Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, "Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
Way to go Bill. Learned something again today. Needless to say, I think we all know the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And we probably remember Spencer Tracy playing that role in the movies. But I for one was not aware that RLS wrote that book. Thanks for the info. Makes me feel good to learn something new. Much Aloha.
It's the birthday of novelist J.D. Salinger (Jerome David Salinger), (books by this author) born in New York City in 1919, author of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). He was in the ground force invasion of Normandy on D-Day, and for months he saw some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II, including the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he wrote the novel The Catcher in the Rye. It was an immediate best-seller. J.D. Salinger now lives in seclusion in New Hampshire, and though he hasn't published anything new in 40 years, his friends and neighbors claim that he still continues to
It's the birthday of Father Damien, born Joseph de Veuster in Belgium (1840), the priest who served the leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Kaluapapa. At that time, victims were dumped off the boat in the shallows because the captains were terrified to go ashore. Doctors left medicine on the beach and fled. Damien, however, dressed the wounds of his patients himself, ate with them, and buried them when they died. Eventually he developed the illness himself, and he died on the island, having roofed its buildings and made its hospital beds with his own hands. He said, "I would not be cured if the price of the cure was that I must leave the island and give up my work... I am perfectly resigned to my lot. Do not feel sorry for me."
It was on this day in 1941 that the novelist Virginia Woolf drowned herself in a river near her house (books by this author). She had long suffered from periods of depression, and modern scholars believe these depressions may have been symptoms of manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder.In early March of 1941, she wrote in her diary that she had fallen into "a trough of despair." She wasn't satisfied with her most recent book, and she felt as though World War II was making writing insignificant. She wrote three letters in the weeks before she committed suicide, explaining her reasons for wanting to end her life. In the longest of the three, she wrote to her husband, "I feel certain that I am going mad again. ... I shant recover this time. ... I cant fight it any longer. ... What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you. ... I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."Woolf left the letters where her husband would find them, and then on this day in 1938, she walked a half mile to a nearby river and put a heavy rock in the pocket of her fur coat before jumping into the water.
According to this documentary she died in 1941.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_VCgPgsEY0&feature=related
Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, (books by this author) born in Stratford-on-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Hamlet (1600), Othello(1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605).Only a few scattered facts are known about his life. He was born and raised in the picturesque market town of Stratford-on-Avon, surrounded by woodlands. His father was a glover and a leather merchant; he and his wife had eight children including William, but three of them died in childbirth. William probably left grammar school when he was 13 years old, but continued to study on his own.He went to London around 1588 to pursue his career in drama and by 1592 he was a well-known actor. He joined an acting troupe in 1594 and wrote many plays for the group while continuing to act. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, but that in Hamlet, he played the ghost.Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him because he had no formal education. A group of scientists recently plugged all his plays into a computer and tried to compare his work to other writers of his day, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford. The only writer they found who frequently used words and phrases similar to Shakespeare's was Queen Elizabeth I, and she was eventually ruled out as well.Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including "foul play," "as luck would have it," "your own flesh and blood," "too much of a good thing," "good riddance," "in one fell swoop," "cruel to be kind," "play fast and loose," "vanish into thin air," "the game is up," "truth will out" and "in the twinkling of an eye."Shakespeare has always been popular in America, and many colonists kept copies of his complete works along with their Bibles. Pioneers performed his work out West. Many of the mines and canyons across the West are named after Shakespeare or one of his characters. Three mines in Colorado are called Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona.Shakespeare continues to be the most produced playwright in the world.
It's the birthday of expatriate writer and literary confidantAlice B. Toklas— (books by this author) the partner of Gertrude Stein—born in San Francisco (1877). In 1907, she went to Paris and there she met Stein, whom Toklas described as wearing "a large, round coral brooch, and when she talked &$8230; I thought her voice came from her brooch. It was unlike any other else's voice — a deep, full velvety contralto's, like two voices." She immediately thought Stein was a genius.The two became lovers and on a trip to Tuscany a few years later, Stein proposed to Toklas. They returned to Paris and moved into 27 rue de Fleurus, dislodging from the apartment Stein's older brother. The place became a social center for various artists and young writers, and Toklas regularly prepared elaborate meals for Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, and Fitzgerald. She later included some of her recipes and stories in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), in which she wrote, "In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice."Stein proposed that Toklas write an autobiography and suggested that it be called "My Life with the Great" or "My Twenty-Five Years with Gertrude Stein." But instead, Stein herself wrote the book she called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). In the book, Stein writes in the voice of Alice:
"I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author."
Another good one Bill. Thanks again for keeping us updated. I does not go unappreciated. Winston
Thanks Winston. I'm a huge Hemingway fan and Gertrude Stein was his comtemporary in Paris. 'The lost generation'.
http://www.essortment.com/all/whatlostgenera_nkj.htm
Bill
Today is the birthday of the man who wrote the most famous inspirational poem about aviation — a sonnet about aviation — John Gillespie Magee Jr., born in Shanghai, China, in 1922, the son of missionaries. He was an American, but like thousands of other young Americans he served with the Royal Canadian Air Force before the United States officially entered WWII. He had a scholarship to Yale, but after high school he enlisted in the air force, and he was sent to combat duty in England. A month or maybe two months later, he wrote a sonnet, "High Flight," and sent it to his parents on the back of a letter, saying "I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed." Three months later, the U.S. entered the war, and just three days after that Magee died in a plane crash. The sonnet was widely copied and distributed, and it is still referenced in novels, television shows, and political speeches. All first-year cadets at the United States Air Force Academy are required to memorize and recite it.
High Flight (An Airman's Ecstasy)by John Gillespie Magee Jr.Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew 窶箱
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
"High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., Public Domain.
Bill. High Flight never stops from causing a lump in my throat. What a wonderful poem that has been given to us. Thanks again for your rememberances. Winston
It's the birthday of the novelist and Nobel Prize Laureate Saul Bellow, (books by this author) born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915. He was born in Canada but raised in Chicago, and he wrote two novels that didn't do very well. But then he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to Paris to write. And while he was there, he realized that he loved Chicago and really didn't like Paris very much. So he started a new novel and set it in Chicago. It was called The Adventures of Augie March (1954), and this novel became his first real success and won the National Book Award for fiction. He continued writing plays, nonfiction, and more novels, including Henderson The Rain King (1959) and Herzog (1964). He served as a war correspondent for Newsday during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, and he taught for many years in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.He said, "A man is only as good as what he loves. "
It's the birthday of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, (books by this author) born in Sandymount, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin (1865). Yeats was Anglo-Irish, meaning his family belonged to the ruling minority in Ireland. The Anglo-Irish were a Protestant upper class that still felt strong ties to England, unlike the largely Catholic and often disenfranchised lower classes. But Yeats always felt a strong connection to Ireland. He was especially captivated by the landscape of County Sligo in northwestern Ireland, where his mother's relatives lived.His father, John B. Yeats, was a painter, and he moved the family to London when William was three. Yeats hated London and didn't do well in school. He was half-blind in one eye and far more interested in daydreaming than learning to read. He always felt spiritually at home in Sligo. The family moved back to Ireland, to Howth on Dublin Bay, in 1880. Five years later, the Dublin University Review published his first two poems.Yeats became interested in Eastern philosophy and formed the Hermetic Society in Dublin. Mysticism and occultism held a strong attraction for the young poet. Yeats also joined Irish nationalist circles at this time; he believed the Irish and Anglo-Irish could be united under a rich, mystical Celtic heritage. "We might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism, [a] European pose."Yeats' first published volume of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), brought a young woman to his door named Maud Gonne. His yearning for Maud and his inability of attaining her would haunt him almost all his life. He proposed in 1891 and again in 1916 and was refused both times.Because Yeats strove for simplicity and lack of abstraction in form but mysticism and a good deal of abstraction in content, his art was constantly struggling against itself. He embraced this tension and opposition: "We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy." Yeats founded the National Literary Society and what would become the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. J.M. Synge and Ezra Pound were close friends. Yeats received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923. He also served as an Irish Free State senator for six years.William Butler Yeats, who wrote, "We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy."The Easter Rising in Dublin prompted Yeats' poem "Easter 1916." Some of his most famous works, including "Sailing to Byzantium," "Among School Children," and "Leda and the Swan," were published in The Tower (1928). The visionary poem "The Second Coming" was published in 1921.Yeats said, "I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self."His famous epitaph reads, "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass
LISTENA Drinking Songby William Butler YeatsHe Wishes for the Cloths of Heavenby William Butler YeatsNever give all the heartby William Butler YeatsA Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Never give all the heart
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
It's the birthday of Franz Kafka, (books by this author) born in Prague (1883). Many of his novels and short stories are about strange and terrible things happening to innocent people. The Trial (1925) begins, "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." And The Metamorphosis (1915) begins, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."Kafka thought that a mindless bureaucratic job would be the perfect way to support his writing, but the job he took at an insurance company exhausted him. He had to work 60 hours a week on endless boring tasks. His health began to suffer, and for the rest of his life he was in and out of sanitariums.Kafka's best friend was a sickly, hunchbacked man named Max Brod, who worshiped the ground he walked on. He and Brod hung out at cafes, went to brothels, and attended s챕ances together. Even before anyone had heard of Kafka, Brod wrote articles about him for literary journals, saying that he was a genius and the greatest writer of all time. Kafka didn't entirely agree, and sometimes Brod's enthusiasm made him nervous. Brod kept copies of all of Kafka's writings that he could get his hands on. Near the end of his life, Kafka asked Brod to burn all of his unpublished work. Brod refused to do so, and we have him to thank for preserving Kafka's novels.Franz Kafka wrote, "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us."
The book "The Trial" by Franz Kafka has my curiosity. Can you submit a paragraph of this book? I've been looking for a new and interesting book to pick up at the library and this book and the author sounds interesting.
Have any of you read "What is the What?" or "The Book of Negroes" both are worthwhile reads.
Chapter One
Arrest - Conversation with Mrs. Grubach - Then Miss B쨍rstner
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had
done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Every day at
eight in the morning he was brought his breakfast by Mrs. Grubach's
cook - Mrs. Grubach was his landlady - but today she didn't come. That
had never happened before. K. waited a little while, looked from his
pillow at the old woman who lived opposite and who was watching him with
an inquisitiveness quite unusual for her, and finally, both hungry and
disconcerted, rang the bell. There was immediately a knock at the door
and a man entered. He had never seen the man in this house before. He
was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting,
with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of
which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it
very clear what they were actually for. "Who are you?" asked K.,
sitting half upright in his bed. The man, however, ignored the question
as if his arrival simply had to be accepted, and merely replied, "You
rang?"
I haven't tried this site but apparently you can download the entire book free.Bill
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849
thanks Bill
For posting a paragraph and for sending the website. I will give it a try.
Sandra
It's the birthday of Zelda Fitzgerald, (books by this author) born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama (1900). She was the wife and muse of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda wrote some fiction too, including the novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), but some of her best writing was in her letters, which were quoted by her husband. He also quoted things that she had said in his writing. And most of his major female characters were based on her, including Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925). Zelda wrote a letter to his family in White Bear, Minnesota after F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. She wrote: "So many years have passed since summers lost themselves in the green valley of White Bear and time floated immutable and eternal above the blue sleek surface of the lake. ... Always we hoped to some day be able to offer testimonial to the courtesies that were extended us; from so many kind hearts, in so many lonesome places. ... Now that [Scott] won't be coming east again with his pockets full of promises and his notebooks full of schemes and new refurbished hope, life doesn't offer as happy a vista. ... Life has a way of closing its books as soon as one's category is fulfilled; and I suppose the time has come. ... If when things have resolved themselves more tangibly, I want to know how to find my way about the bread-line, I will write you — Don't forget me."
Here is an online book club from Australia (The First Tuesday Book Club) that I have podcasted monthly to my itunes apl. In episode 11 they discuss the newest James Bond novel and the Canadian novelist Saul Bellow. It might appeal to my fellow worms.Bill (Second Avenue)
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/video/download.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/
Thank's Bill. Looks good. I'll give it a try.
BobB
In Praise of Joeby Marge PiercyI love you hot
I love you iced and in a pinch
I will even consume you tepid.
Dark brown as wet bark of an apple tree,
dark as the waters flowing out of a spooky swamp
rich with tannin and smelling of thick life—
but you have your own scent that even
rising as steam kicks my brain into gear.
I drink you rancid out of vending machines,
I drink you at coffee bars for $6 a hit,
I drink you dribbling down my chin from a thermos
in cars, in stadiums, on the moonwashed beach.
Mornings you go off in my mouth like an electric
siren, radiating to my fingertips and toes.
You rattle my spine and buzz in my brain.
Whether latte, cappuccino, black or Greek
you keep me cooking, you keep me on line.
Without you, I would never get out of bed
but spend my life pressing the snooze
button. I would creep through wan days
in the form of a large shiny slug.
You waken in me the gift of speech when I
am dumb as a rock buried in damp earth.
It is you who make me human every dawn.
All my books are written with your ink.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Hg0jKHsj6DMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=John+Kennedy+Toole&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPP1,M1
It's the birthday of Dylan Thomas, born in 1914 in Swansea, Wales. People loved his deep voice with its Welsh accent. He traveled through America reading his work, and helped popularize poetry readings. People flocked to see Dylan Thomas — he was extremely theatrical and often drunk.He said, "I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression."And he said, "An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do."
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5gaSHG0qHjnGM3t-RGUhDkNj-qxZw
Post a Comment