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On this day in 1901 Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Having been turned down by a half-dozen publishers, Potter financed this first edition herself -- 250 copies with her own black and white illustrations, given away or sold at a half-penny each because, as she put it, "little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings."
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'Goblin Market' is brilliant. What can I say? Read it.
December 18
On this day in 1946 Damon Runyon's ashes were scattered over Broadway by his son, in a plane flown by Eddie Rickenbacker. Runyon was born in Manhattan, Kansas; he arrived at the bigger apple at the age of thirty, to be a sportswriter and to try out at Mindy's and the Stork Club and any betting window available his crap-shoot worldview: "All of life is six to five against." Broadway became his special beat, and in story collections like Guys and Dolls he developed the colorful characters -- Harry the Horse, the Lemon Drop Kid, Last Card Louie -- and the gangster patois that would swept America throughout the thirties and forties.
Stories like "Social Error" even poked fun at the "underworld complex" that was making him so famous. Socialite Miss Harriet Mackyle is a Doll-wannabe, the kind who "thinks it smart to tell her swell friends she dances with a safe blower." Guy-wannabes like Basil Valentine get "all pleasured up by this attention ... because Miss Harriet Mackyle may not look a million, but she has a couple, and you can see enough of her in her evening clothes to know that nothing about her is phony." Nothing that Basil will ever see, anyway. When Handsome Jack takes out his equalizer and accidentally plugs Miss Harriet's favorite parrot, and Basil puts up two grand to make like he's shot Handsome Jack in order to impress Miss Harriet, and Red Henry for revenge on Jack works a quick change to replace the blanks for real slugs, and Midgie Muldoon jumps in front of her Jack just as Basil raises his rod and turns it on . . . well, Miss Harriet and Basil can't wait to escape to Italy and get married, just as they deserve.
The ending to the real life was not so happy, romantically or otherwise. Runyon's wife of fourteen years had left him -- she formerly a Spanish dancer at the Silver Slipper, first met at a Mexican racetrack when she was a kid running messages for Pancho Villa, Runyon a reporter running Villa to ground. Throat cancer, probably caused by a lifetime of Turkish Ovals, made things worse, and forced all communication to be via notepad. This could produce some pretty funny barroom one-liners -- Walter Winchell: "Damon, this is a kid from San Francisco who imitates me better than anybody in the business." Runyon, on his notepad: "Faint Praise." -- but it could also produce this letter to Damon Runyon Jr., which expresses more 'stacked deck' than 'six-to-five against':
I notice you do a lot of thinking about yourself and your problems. Sometimes when you are in a mood for thought give one to your old man who in two years was stricken by the most terrible malady known to mankind and left voiceless with a death sentence hanging over his head, who had a big career stopped cold, and had his domestic life shattered by divorce and his savings largely dissipated through the combination of evil circumstances.... Try that on your zither some day, my boy, especially when those low moods you mention strike you.
Runyon's very last note to Damon Jr. was the regards-to-Broadway request about his ashes.
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. Her "powerful and peculiar" character, said Charlotte, inspired "an anguish of wonder and love."
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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 1937 Don Marquis died. Although also a playwright and a novelist, Marquis is most famous for the "Archy and Mehitabel" poetry he wrote for his newspaper column -- Archy being the soul of a "vers libre bard" in the body of a cockroach, Mehitabel being an alley cat on her ninth life and "bound / for a journey down the sound / in the midst of a refuse mound / but wotthehell wotthehell."
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January 4
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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January 5
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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January 6
On this day in 1840 Fanny Burney died. Burney's four novels have earned her favorable comparisons to other giants of the genre-Austen, Richardson, Dickens-and Virginia Woolf's declaration that she is "the mother of English fiction." If a best-seller and a celebrity in her own day, it is as a diarist that Burney is now best known-one who was eye-witness to The Madness of King George, and who enlivened the later years of Samuel Johnson.
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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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January 08
On this day in 1824 the mystery novelist Wilkie Collins was born. Collins's "gaslight thrillers" were as popular among Victorian readers as the books of his friend, Charles Dickens; two of them, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) have not only stayed in print but grown in reputation. Crime historians say much is owed to characters such as Sergeant Cuff, and to his stylish back-of-my-hand.
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January 09
On this day in 1923 Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four. Near the end Mansfield scoffed at "my little stories like birds bred in cages," and admitted to having had a lifelong "chaos within." Her biographers have agreed with the chaos, and the literary historians are unequivocal about the accomplishment: "A symbol of liberation, innovation and unconventionality. Her life was new, her manners and dress was new, her art was new."
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Amy Lowell deserves more of a place here, so I am adding this prose-poem I wrote yesterday.
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THE DOME
While 'Abdu'l-Baha was on his western tour, Amy Lowell(1874-1925) was promoting poetry in the USA. Her first book of published poetry appeared during 'Abdu'l-Baha's trip in 1912. Poetry had become the consuming passion of Amy Lowell’s life. When she was not writing poetry, she was promoting it—both her own and that of her contemporaries whose projects complemented hers. In magazine reviews, short articles, two prose volumes of poetry criticism, and most especially on the lecture circuit, Lowell preached the gospel of the new poetry. Almost from the street corner, she cried aloud, ‘Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry.’ When she died in 1925 interest in her poetry died with her because her poems needed her flamboyant personality and vigor, her demonstrative theatricality to give them life. She aggressively marketed herself and her poetry as high culture. She was the Liberace of modern poetry. She made of poetry, itself an intimidating art form for most people, accessible, popularized. She repackaged it for a middle-class audience. In recent years there has been a recrudescence of interest in her work.-Ron Price with thanks to Melissa Bradshaw, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification," Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No.1, 2000.
You converted them left and right
by the relief of hearing verse they
could enjoy without getting into
any special-suspect state of mind.
You surprised audiences by being
clear, sincere, direct, intelligible.
Your extravagant persona, theatrical,
fit for stages all over the country was
not your poet stereotype. The poet,
you argued, should have a passionate
desire for truth and a dispassionate
attitude toward whatever his search
for truth may bring him. He records
you said. He does not moralize. He is
the champion of our everyday speech.1
And you socked-it to 'em when that
tremendous figure, that mysterious
and magnetic personality, that unique
branch grown from that sacred root
with His styles and titles--you knew
Him not. That Dome of Many Coloured
Glass2 had just begun to colour the world.
1 Melissa Bradshaw, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No.1, 2000; 2 The name of her 1912 book. For me this Dome serves as an allusion to the new Administrative Order that had just begun to take form in the last two decades of Lowell's life.
Ron Price
11 January 2007
1st February
Today in 1851 died Mary Wollstencraft Shelley
26th February 1802, Victor Hugo was borned
Weighing Whitman
On this day in 1892 Walt Whitman died. The high and controversial emotions which surrounded Whitman in life attended his death: in the same issue that carried his obituary, the New York Times declared that he could not be called "a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art," while one funeral speech declared that "He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god."
may i add if am not mistaken that Robert Frost and Tennessee Williams were born on this day .
this day in 1909 J.M.Synge died of hodgekins disease.
*edit* oh no i mixed up the date. He died on the 24th of march 1909, not the 26th.
April 18, 1394
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Chaucer's Pilgrims
by Steve King
On this day (or possibly the next) in 1394, Geoffrey Chaucer's twenty-nine pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to prepare for their departure to Canterbury. Chaucer's poem condenses the four to five day trip into one, and scholars have used various textual references and astrological calculations to establish that day as the day before Easter, thus allowing the pilgrims to arrive at Canterbury Easter morning, after a fifty-five-mile hike through a pleasant English springtime:
When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire with flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury wend. . . .
(trans. J.U. Nicolson)
Weather and good company aside, the game established at the Tabard the night before is a competition for the tale "of best sentence and moost solaas," the prize being "a soper at oure aller cost." Chaucer leaves no doubt that some of his pilgrims would rank the prospect of a free meal more highly than the feast promised at the Cathedral: a view of not only the St. Thomas a Becket relics, but the whole arms of eleven saints, the bed of the Blessed Virgin, fragments of the rock at Calvary and of rock from the Holy Sepulchre, Aaron's Rod, a piece of the clay from which Adam was made, and more. As Chaucer does not get all his tales told, or his pilgrims to their destination, neither earthly nor spiritual nourishment is realized.
In the eyes of one enterprising 15th century writer, the incompleteness of Chaucer's journey presented the opportunity for a sequel. "The Tale of Beryn" purports to be told by the Merchant as Chaucer's pilgrims make their way back to the Tabard. In the Prologue to this tale we learn that while the others were busy with their own amusements during the one night layover in Canterbury -- Knight and Squire to see the battlements, Prioress and Wife of Bath a tour of the gardens, etc. -- the Pardoner attempted to romance and rob a barmaid. Perhaps appropriately for a dealer in sham relics, he not only fails but is beaten up, and spends the night in a dog's kennel.
http://todayinliterature.com/today.a...Date=4/18/2007
The Birth of O. Henry
On this day in 1898 William S. Porter -- the drug store clerk, cowboy, fugitive, bank teller, cartoonist and future "O. Henry" -- began a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement. Porter had published several stories prior to his prison term, but the fourteen written behind bars represented a new style and quality, and began his rise to fame.
http://todayinliterature.com/today.a...Date=4/25/2007
i always thought the multivitamin detail in "slaughterhouse" was just an absurdist touch. in all those obits i recently checked out it was really true about being under the slaughterhouse making the multivitamins for his captors. the thought still hasn't really left my mind. i'm a big fan of vonnegut, did you see the interview on "real time" he did not long before his death? he seemed a little cynical, like anyone, better when typing than when talking
1810 -- Lord Byron swims the Hellespont, emulating the legendary Greek Leander. Crossing wuth Lt. Ekenhead of the Royal Navy, Byron does the four miles in an hour and ten minutes.
June 16.
It is on this day in 1904 that "Ulysses" takes place. I think I shall celebrate by finally buying/starting it!
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Originally Posted by likeminded
He was very cynical...especially towards the end of his life. I think he was just tired of seeing the world the way it was. It is hard seeing something that you love so much be hurt and especially since he felt that the world could change, if people tried. He was amazing...so funny!
I will miss you dear Vonnegut.:bawling:
June 16, 2007
Author Salman Rushdie receives British knighthood
On this day, yes THIS one (no matter which day you are reading this) I am certain, many potential, Byrons, Hardys, Newtons, Turners, will first see the light of day. Some will grow and be with us but a short while, others will permit their talent to wither on the vine, some will die fighting someone else's 'noble cause' in a foreign field, a few will flourish, fulfil their potential, and take their place with the great and 'live' long after their earthly bodies have crumbled to dust.
And there will be those who represent the other side of the coin and to which I will not give undue honour to their forebears, or their contemporaries who are still with us, by listing names, and possibly spark emotionally inspired controversy that will digress the theme.
Nothing really changes, yet we are surrounded by constant, endless change.It's an eternal paradox.
When we read the writers of the past, we find that the main worries and concerns which plagued life then, are with us today.
As long as this earth turns and sustains human life, I am certain there will be the drama, comedy, tragedy, happiness and all the mix of ingredients to keep any budding Shakespeares occupied until the final chapter dictates - enough, and the curtains close for Earth's final performance.
As the French put it so succinctly - C'est la vie.
Erich Maria Remarque was born today! Author of All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the greatest anti-war novels ever written.
I am amazed when I see the book shops in the shopping malls, high streets, airports and rail stations, and the online book stores, all advertising and displaying the vast amount, and variety, of books - classics and the works of the plethora of new authors, that today, in spite of the many attractions, and demands for our time, indicate that reading is alive and well.
When travelling by rail, underground, or air, I see people with heads buried in a book.
I know that now, we can access some books by downloading on the internet - especially the classics. But, I don't believe anything will ever replace the feel of a book
I don't know about other countries, but in the UK so called 'charity' shops abound. Here people take their unwanted as a means of donating to charity.
Here you will find a great variety of books many in almost 'the day they were published' condition for a fraction of the original price.
I am convinced that tomorrow, as today, no matter how Television progresses. or what other innovations come to the market, there will be a place, and demand, for 'a book' and a comfortable sofa to curl up on, bed to snuggle in, river bank, or beach to lie on, or.....yes I have seen it often on the London 'tube' at peak hour, something to hold on to with one hand while standing, holding the book in another as the train sways along under the busy streets above.
Long live 'the book'.
Nov 1
1604, Othello by Shakespeare is presented for the first time.
1611, The Tempest by Shakespeare is presented for the first time.
1871, American writer Stephen Crane is born.
1903, German Writer Theodor Mommsen Dies
1923, American Writer Gorden R. Dickson is born.
1972, American Poet Ezra Pound dies
2006, American Writer William Styron dies
Nov. 2
1960 - Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case
1911 -Born, Odysseus Elytis, Greek writer, Nobel laureate
1950 -Died, George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer, Nobel Prize laureate
1951 -Born ,Thomas Mallon, American novelist and critic
1961 -Died, James Thurber, American humorist
5 January
1932 - born : Umberto Eco
1883 - born : Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi
1951 - died : Sinclair Lewis
1622 : Born - Molière, French playwright
1933 - Born : Susan Sontag, American writer
Rudyard Kipling died - 18th Jan 1936
"Gie her a Haggis!"
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. . . . Read more here...
May 5:
Karl Marx's birthday
Cinco de Mayo
June 2nd:
Thomas Hardy, born 1840
Barbara Pym, born 1913
Carol Shields, born 1935
June 5th:
Richard Scarry, born 1919
Matthew Lesko, born 1943
Stephen Crane, died 1900
O. Henry, died 1910
June 9th:
Bertha von Suttner, born 1843
June 10th, 2008 - death of Chingiz Aitmatov
Chingiz Aitmatov was Kyrgyz writer. He belonged to the post-war generation of Soviet authors and his works were translated into more than 150 languages.
His best known works are:
Jamilia
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
The Scaffold (I'm not sure if this one was translated into English)
I was so sad when I heard that yesterday. I remember having read in the newspaper some weeks ago that he was hospitalised, but I didn't pay much attention to it then. Last year I saw him on a reading for his Когда падают горы (Вечная невеста) - (When the Mountains fall (The eternal Bride), probably not translated to English yet), and he seemed younger than he was and spoke of new projects... :(Quote:
Originally Posted by Aiculík
My favourite works by him are Jamilia and Farewell, Gülsary!.