June 15, 1888 -- Maria Dermout, Dutch novelist, was born in Java.
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June 15, 1888 -- Maria Dermout, Dutch novelist, was born in Java.
June 16th 1487 - Battle of Stoke, the last battle of the War of the Roses. Literary connection? er, R.L. Stevenson's "Black Arrow" was set in that period, and, um, John Buchan's "Blanket of the Dark" has, as one of its themes, the fate of Francis Lovel, leader of the defeated Yorkist army, who disappeared, never to be seen again live or dead, after the battle.
Rats - it's gone midnight, so
Today 17th June, in 1719, died Joseph Addison. (same day in 1775 - Bunker Hill, but I won't mention that.)
17 June 1719 Joseph Addison died, as noted by Whifflingpin above -- but maybe a separate entry is warranted? (From Wikipedia: Joseph Addison (May 1, 1672 – June 17, 1719) was an English politician and writer. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded _The Spectator_ magazine.)
On this day in 1938, T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone was published. This was the first volume in the eventual quartet of books published as The Once and Future King, White's version of Sir Thomas Malory's version of the King Arthur legends. The book was very popular, and when Lerner and Lowe purchased the last three books of the series to make their version -- Camelot (1960) -- White became, for a time, a wealthy man. The success of Camelot motivated Walt Disney to finally make his cartoon version of The Sword in the Stone, the rights to which he had purchased back in 1939; this came out in 1964, the year before White died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven.
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Coincidentally, I am reading The Once and Future King at the moment and it is boring me to tears at times.
18 June 1896 birthday of Philip Barry, US dramatist, Philadelphia Story -- the book on which the movie High Society was based.
Thomas Fuller born 19 June 1608 wrote some great stuff:
A gift, with a kind countenance, is a double present.
An ounce of cheerfulness is worth a pound of sadness to serve God with.
Anger is one of the sinners of the soul.
Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.
Be not extravagantly high in expression of thy commendations of men thou likest, it may make the hearer's stomach rise.
Enquire not what boils in another's pot.
If it were not for hope, the heart would break.
If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.
If we are bound to forgive an enemy, we are not bound to trust him.
It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf.
Judge of thine improvement, not by what thou speakest or writest, but by the firmness of thy mind, and the government of thy passions and affections.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.
Purchase not friends by gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love.
Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
Trust thyself only, and another shall not betray thee.
Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof.
He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.
20 June 1907 birthday of Lillian Hellman, playwright (deceased 30 June 1984). Author of Toys in the Attic and Little Foxes, as well as many other fine plays. A few quotations:
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
Crane's New Red Badge of Courage
On this day in 1982 Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was published by Norton and Company in "the only complete edition from the original manuscript." Previous editions had incorporated cuts and changes that had been made in 1895 -- changes which distorted or muddied Crane's theme, and which were perhaps forced upon him by his first editor.
June 24
Brief, Bitter, Bierce
On this day in 1842, the writer-reporter-wit Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. Those familiar with Bierce usually approach him through his Civil War stories and then stay to enjoy, or at least marvel at, his celebrated aphorisms and definitions. These offer a scoff for every situation, and are so thoroughly, happily bitter that even H. L. Mencken recoiled in horror. Almost any sampling from The Devil's Dictionary will demonstrate what Bierce was capable of feeling about human relationships:
HUSBAND: One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.
BRIDE: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
MARRIAGE: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
HOMICIDE: The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy.
BORE: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
ONCE: Enough.
Bierce's early years and what he wrote about them are as dark and odd as the rest of him. He was the tenth of thirteen children, each and every one given a name beginning with 'A': Abigail, Amelia, Ann Maria, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, and the twins, Adelia and Aurelia. Perhaps the early death of the youngest three robbed Ambrose of victims, though he did not want. His poor, bible-thumping parents, apparently inspired his Parenticide stories. One begins, "Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father -- an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." In another, a boy hypnotizes his parents into thinking they are wild stallions, and then watches in a clinical fashion as they stomp each other to death. When brother Aurelius, a carpenter, was killed for real, and while on the job, the eulogy from Ambrose included this thought: "If he had not been cut off by a circular saw at the age of thirty-two, there is no telling how long he might have weathered it through." Bierce so loathed the evangelism in his community that he tied straw onto a horse's back, set the animal alight, and drove it through a revival meeting. Nor did his ancestors -- Puritan stock, some of whom came on the Mayflower -- get much respect:
... My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of felony,
Of thee I sing --
Land where my fathers fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring. . . .
Nonetheless, Bierce's father had the largest library in the county, and when Bierce dropped out of high school -- he was not one for groups -- he spent much time there. It is hard to disagree with a recent biographer who sees the library as having saved Bierce from being the serial killer type, or having turned him into the prose version of it.
The cap to Bierce's legendary life is the drama of his mysterious death: at age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa's army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon. Either theory might convey the impression that the cynicism by which Bierce won fame also killed him.
June 25
Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal
On this day in 1857 Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal was published. Critics now regard it as the one of the most important and influential collections of 19th century poetry, but the newspapers of the day thought it full of "all the putresence of the human heart," and the courts excised six poems found to be "in contempt of the laws which safeguard religion and morality."
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George Orwell
Also, Eric Arthur Blair (better known by his pen name George Orwell), author of Animal Farm and 1984, was born on this day.
On this day in 1928 Sylvia Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who "worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him," might do so. In her Shakespeare and Company memoir Beach delicately avoids describing what happened, although she perhaps suggests an explanation: "Poor Scott was earning so much from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it." According to Herbert Gorman, another guest and Joyce's first biographer, Fitzgerald sank down on one knee before Joyce, kissed his hand, and declared: "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep." As the evening progressed, Fitzgerald "enlarged upon Nora Joyce's beauty, and, finally, darted through an open window to the stone balcony outside, jumped on to the eighteen-inch-wide parapet and threatened to fling himself to the cobbled thoroughfare below unless Nora declared that she loved him."
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June 28
Henry James on War and Empire
On this day in 1915 Henry James wrote to the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, to inform him of a "desire to offer myself for naturalisation in this country." James was 72 years old, and 40 years a resident in England; this grand gesture in the early days of WWI was his way of "throwing into the scale of [England's] fortune my all but imponderable moral weight -- 'a poor thing but mine own.''"
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June 29
As The Globe Burns
On this day in 1613 The Globe playhouse, of which Shakespeare was part-owner, burned down, the fire ignited by cannon sparks during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth. Today's Globe was reconstructed 200 yards from the 1613 Globe, and is as close in design and materials as scholars and building codes could manage — though some want it re-reconstructed based on new research.
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July 3
The Kafkas in Prague
On this day in 1883, Franz Kafka was born in Prague. Few writers have been so closely linked to their home and city, or made so much from it, as Kafka. But for the months spent in sanitariums and a half-year with a girlfriend, and despite the psychological torture it inflicted, he lived at home with his parents all his life.
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July 5
"Let not my body be hacked...."
On this day in 1824, Byron's body arrived in London, returned home for burial from Missolonghi, Greece. Though his last days were confused and feverish. Byron was clear on several points: "Let not my body be hacked, or be sent to England. . . . Lay me in the first corner without pomp or nonsense." Neither hacking, nor shipping, nor pomp and nonsense proved escapable.
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