hm. my folks had this book on the shelf when i was growing up; i never read it.anyone here who has?
hm. my folks had this book on the shelf when i was growing up; i never read it.
shh!!!
the air and water have been here a long time, and they are telling stories.
On this day in 1669, Samuel Pepys regretfully made the final entry in his nine and a half-year diary, citing his deteriorating eyes as cause. Begun when he was a struggling young civil servant, Pepys's diary covers the beginnings of his rise to wealth and influence in Restoration England. It is praised not just as a priceless historical document but for a range of character, anecdote and detail that is Dickensian in scope, and just as readable. FULL STORY
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1898 George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Both were in their early forties and both professed a distaste for matrimony; how they came to tie a knot that would last for forty-five years -- albeit celibate ones, apparently -- is a story that has intrigued all Shaw's biographers, as it seems to have intrigued Shaw himself.
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On this day in 1962 Vita Sackville-West died, at the age of seventy. Easy to lose in the glare of one so filmed, written and gossiped about is the fact that Sackville-West was a prolific, prize-winning and commercially successful author. She won the 1927 Hawthorne Prize for poetry with "The Land," rose to best-seller status in the 1930s for novels such as The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and wrote some fifty books in all - not just novels and poetry but travel books, biography (fittingly, on Aphra Benn and Joan of Arc), and eight books on gardening. Nonetheless, it is Sackville-West's personal life which continues to claim attention -- the jodhpurs-and-pearls Vita, the bedmate of Virginia Woolf and others, the cross-dressing master gardener of Sissinghurst Castle.
FULL STORY
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that a car would be at waiting at the Savoy to pick "you and Mrs. Groucho" up for dinner. Eliot also noted that Groucho's announcement of having "come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the green grocer across the street." Eliot began corresponding with Marx several years earlier, having first sent a fan letter saying how much he enjoyed his movies.
FULL STORY
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1924, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India was published. It was a commercial and critical success, and it would confirm Forster's status as one of the 20th century's most important writers, but it was his last novel. Various reasons are given to explain why, at just forty-five years of age, and with another forty-five to go, Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing.
FULL STORY
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1910, O. Henry died in New York City at the age of forty-seven. His death from alcoholism-related illnesses was the farthest thing from a surprise ending, but his last months and hours were in other ways characteristic of the fiction: the down-on-his-luck hero, the small-detail-revealing-all style, the polished-perfect irony.
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1832 the radical British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham died. Bentham's Complete Works run to thirty-six volumes, but his most famous connection to literature may be through Charles Dickens. The two shared several enthusiasms -- prison reform, a minimum wage -- but in Hard Times Dickens enjoyed targeting all Gradgrinds and Utilitarians.
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I remember, while studying utilitarianism and Hedonic calculus, in a philosophy course, my instructor brought in a picture of Jeremy Bentham, as he still remains preserved at his former university, and, apparently, continues to attend all board meetings. Truly a brilliant man, but he seemed to merely have some odd post-mortem requests.Originally Posted by Jay
On this day in 1977, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus was posthumously published; also on this day in 1980, Henry Miller died. Delta of Venus was originally written as Nin's contribution to the dollar-a-page pornography that she, Miller and others contracted to write for an anonymous client in the 1940s, although Miller soon gave the job up. His Venus came later -- less posthumous, and about as real.
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On this day in 1880 Fyodor Dostoevsky delivered his historic speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow. The speech, or rather the enthusiastic reaction to it, is regarded as the high mark of Dostoevsky's public fame and, coming just six months before his death, as an event representing as much a memorial to him as to Pushkin.
FULL STORY
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight. Family and friends report that Dickens was beset by increasing debility and depression throughout his last months, appearing suddenly much older than his years when he had for so long looked so much younger.
FULL STORY
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy donned his peasant coat and homemade bark shoes, gathered his walking staff and two bodyguards, and set out from his estate for the Optina Pustyn monastery. Tolstoy was a national hero for his novels but already in the grip of the religious-political mania which would dominate his writing and trouble his life over the last three decades.
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Last edited by Jay; 06-10-2005 at 05:16 AM.
I have a plan: attack!
On this day in 1184 BC, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned. The precise date is now regarded as pretty much a wild guess, although no less substantiated than the legendary events of the Trojan War. The city itself, long thought to be as legendary, has been identified – or rather, ten distinct Trojan settlements have been identified at Hissarlik, in present-day Turkey, each built upon the ruins of the others. The Troy of Homer and Virgil, if it existed, is most likely "Troy VIIA," a settlement that appears to have been destroyed by fire at about the time calculated by Eratosthenes.
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On this day in 1381, preacher John Ball spoke at Blackheath to those assembled for the Peasants' Revolt, inciting them with perhaps the most provocative rhymed couplet in history: "When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?" The rebels apparently took up this chant as they marched to London to demand a life of more than digging and spinning from fourteen-year-old Richard II.
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