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I have read only two of Bellow's books: Dangling Man and Seize the Day. I read both books with interest but enjoyed the latter more - probably because I was at the 'right' age to read it and could find some of myself in the book and in the protagonist's dilemmas and troubles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died, at the age of seventy-five. The details of Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) or Mrs. Thrale or Fanny Burney or Boswell or later biographer-critics, but his large personality seems to escape, or confound, any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, 1994), Johnson may be beyond reach in all ways: "There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson, who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree."
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On this day in 1640 Aphra Behn was baptized. The details of her birth and much of her "shady and amorous" life are unclear, but her place in literary history is certain: first epistolary novel, first philosophical novel, and a fifteen-play career which made her the first woman to earn her living by writing. "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," wrote Virginia Woolf, "for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
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On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (originally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices") was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: "He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. . . ."
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Didn't realize this had occured on my birthday. I love The Waste Land.
On this day in 1848 Emily Bronte died at the age of thirty. Of all the death and drama in the Bronte household over the surrounding eight months -- events which now stand as famous and poignant as any in the Bronte novels -- none seems to impress or import more than Emily's. In September, thirty-one-year-old Branwell had died in his exuberant manner, the last stages of his dissolution and tuberculosis expressed in delirium tremens cursing and despair. The following May, twenty-nine-year-old Anne would die in her co-operative, affirmative manner, also of tuberculosis. Squeezed between the two, also tuberculosis but typically as if on her own mysterious terms, came Emily's death.
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On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a string of bannings from the book's first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began "Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP. . . ."
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On this day in 1879 Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House opened in Copenhagen. One critic compared the play to the dropping of "a bomb into contemporary life," and "a death sentence on accepted social ethics"; another described Nora's exit from her house and her gender-roles at the end of Act V as "a door slam heard 'round the world."
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On this day in 1849 twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was at the last moment granted pardon from a mock-execution orchestrated by Czar Nicholas I. Instead, Dostoevsky received four years in Siberia and indefinite military service for his crime of belonging to an underground group which championed "communism and new ideas." This exchange left him "reborn for the better," and eventually found him a wife.
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On this day in 1914, the "Christmas Truce" of WWI, tentatively and spontaneously begun the previous evening at many places along the Front, held. The "outbreak of peace" has been commemorated by play and poem (and by Blackadder: "Both sides advanced more during one Christmas piss-up than they managed in the next two-and-a-half years of war") but nothing captures its spirit as well as the first-person accounts. These include those of the Khaki Chums who reenacted the event in 1999.
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His political shift had little to do with finding a wife. He was only a half-hearted utopian in the first place and ther were plenty of available young women in the revolutionary movement.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
As for Czar Nicholas' grim charades like the one he pulled on Dostoevsky, they were part of what earned his grandson a death sentence when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917.
On or about this day in 1909 Marcel Proust dipped his madeleine in tea and tumbled into the childhood memory that triggered the seven-volume, fourteen-year, Remembrance of Things Past (or, as some now prefer, In Search of Lost Time). Those who have read it, or who want an alternative to doing so, might try Monty Python's fifteen-second, Summarize Proust Competition. . . .
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On this day in 1885 Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge began serialization. This was the first novel Hardy had written for weekly rather than monthly serialization; some early reviewers balked at its steady stream of drama and its "improbabilities of incident." When Virginia Woolf visited Hardy forty years later, shortly before his death, she told hm that she could not put his novel down.
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On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris, at the age of forty-seven. The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, the autobiographical novel that Camus was working on at his death, was found in the mud at the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics think it is, even unfinished.
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On this day in 1825, twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) embarked on his self-proclaimed "career as a romantic" by fighting his first duel, and having his pants fall down. Dumas's memoirs are about as reliable as his mountain of historical fiction and drama, but they tell the pants story in glorious, comedy-of-errors, Three Musketeers detail.
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On this day in 1883 the painter-writer-mystic Kahlil Gibran was born in Lebanon. The Prophet, first published in 1923, remains near the top of the all-time best-seller lists in both the Arab world and the West, apparently still providing the intended inspiration: "The whole Prophet is saying one thing," he summarized, "'you are far greater than you know -- and all is well.'"
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On this day in 1972 the American poet John Berryman committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1964 Pulitzer, and the writing of some 300 more over the subsequent years earned Berryman international fame, but his personal problems kept pace; by the end, his hopes for religion, writing, teaching, marriage and change all seemed out of reach.
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On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. Barred from politics, and from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine -- barred even from living within ten miles of London -- Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and plagued by various secondary ailments ...
On this day in 1324 Marco Polo died in Venice, at the age of seventy. The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated by Polo around 1300, several years after his return from decades in the land of Kublai Khan, became an influential book in Renaissance Europe. So dubious were some contemporaries of a vast and grandiose empire to the East that they published Polo's account as Il Milione, meaning "The Million Lies." Some modern scholars, suspicious of what isn't in the book -- any mention of tea, or foot-binding, or the Great Wall -- also wonder how reliable the Travels is, or if it is based on first-hand observation.
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Scheherazade - I must post that although I can't remember the title or author there is a novel about Marco Polo that I have read - all about his meeting Ghengis Khan etc... will try and remember
On this day in 1941 James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce's last years were beset with difficulties -- the schizophrenia of his daughter, the breakdown of his son's career and marriage, his own poor health, ongoing battles over Ulysses and new worries about Finnegans Wake. "Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante," writes biographer Richard Ellmann, "he had reached his life's nadir."
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On this day in 1886 Hugh Lofting, writer of the Doctor Dolittle series of children's books, was born. While growing up in Berkshire, Lofting kept "a combination zoo and natural history museum" in his mother's linen closet, but Dab-Dab, Gub-Gub, Too-Too, Jip, Polynesia, et al. of Puddlesby-by-the-Marsh were born more from Lofting's desire to forget adulthood than recall his childhood. As an officer in WWI, Lofting was horrified by the suffering of the horses and other animals at the Front; to escape this reality, and to entertain his children, he sent home illustrated letters about "an eccentric country physician with a bent for natural history and a great love of pets, who finally decides to give up his human practice for the more difficult, more sincere and, for him, more attractive therapy of the animal kingdom." The letters, accompanied by his own illustrations, eventually became The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), a book so popular that Lofting went on to write almost a dozen more.
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On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although one of England's most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man's-burden racism; to the modernist writers and the literati he was a mere tale-teller, a balladeer, a journalist. Few critics questioned Kim and The Jungle Book as children's classics, but many saw Kipling as a child himself, incapable of moving beyond themes of chin-up resolve, or poems that rhymed:
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This is the Eve of St. Agnes, on which young virgins obedient to various bedtime rituals -- having eaten only a salt-filled egg, or having put sprigs of thyme and rosemary in their shoes-are granted a vision of their future lovers. Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, martyred at the age of twelve (ca. 305) for choosing to die rather than become the wife of a Roman prefect. In Keats's famous "The Eve of St. Agnes," Madeline retires dressed in white, pledged to look only heavenward for her vision of the forbidden Porphyro; this allows Porphyro, who has hidden himself in her bedroom closet, to have full view of her:
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On this day in 1950 George Orwell (Eric Blair) died. Many of Orwell's contemporaries viewed him as over-earnest or foolishly idealistic, and even his friends made jokes about their "Knight of the Woeful Countenance." In "Why I Write," an essay from his last years, Orwell said that he would have been a different man and writer, had the times not been what they were: "...I wasn't born for an age like this; / Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"
for more: http://www.todayinliterature.com
On this day, fifteen years apart, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) premiered. Although both were poorly reviewed to start, The Crucible would win a Tony and Our Town a Pulitzer; and both would become not only classics of American theater, but classic, opposite statements on the idea of community living.
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On this day in 1759 Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, and on this night lovers of Burns or Scotland or conviviality will gather around the world to celebrate the fact. Burns was elevated to national hero in his lifetime and cult figure soon afterwards, the first Burns Night celebration occurring almost immediately upon his death. If the haggis has changed, the Night has not...
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Jan 26
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On this day in 1823 died Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, and oft at loggerheads with the Romantic poets.
On this day in 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip brought the first British convict ships to anchor in Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Over the next eighty years 825 such ships would bring 160,000 men and women to serve their "transportation" sentence; from this history has come a range of literature, most recently Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang.
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On this day in 1722 Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders -- or, more exactly, "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c who was born at Newgate, and during a Life of continued Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five time a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent."
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And what's wrong with chin-up resolve? I happen to think that Kim is a great novel about more than chin-up resolve.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
Virgil, was that a rhetoric question?
Jan 28
On this day in 1873 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was born outside Paris. Although much about her is blurred by her mythologizing and her autobiographical fiction, Colette was one of the most popular writers and provocative personalities in the first half of the twentieth century. On the basis of her fifty books and her full, frank life, she is credited and blamed with much...
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Jan 29
On this day in 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opened in London. Its satire and singability made it a first-run sell-out, a cultural craze across England, the most produced play of the 18th century, and the original "ballad opera," first in the Gilbert and Sullivan line. As one first-week review reported, "it hath made Rich [the theater manager] very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich."
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Yes, unless someone disputes it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay
Not me, haven't read much of Kipling, actually I am still to read The Jungle Book (other than a children's comic that is ;)), I was just making sure before I went balistic :)
If you are going to read the Jungle Book, start with "Quiquern," just to clear your mind of any preconceptions you may have about Kipling.
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January 30th
On this day in 1649, died Charles Stuart, writer of "Eikon Basilike." :angel:
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On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound's personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry -- the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason.
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Now there's a coincidence. I post a poem from Pound and he turns up here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
I would love to have the book of the month one month be Kim. It's set in India, and I was curious how those on the forum from India would find it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay
On this day in 1948, J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" was published in the New Yorker; in the same magazine, on the same day in 1953, Salinger's "Teddy" also appeared. These are the first and last selections in Nine Stories (1953), Salinger's only collection apart from various bootlegged editions of the other, forty-odd stories.
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