Ala Faco

Watch...

2012-02-17T22:16:00.000+01:00

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

mammonism \ MAM-uh-niz-uhm \ , noun;

2012-02-16T21:07:00.000+01:00

1.
The greedy pursuit of riches.
Quotes:
We will bring to mind a young man or young womanbitterly awakened from a fancy dream ofaccomplishment, action or glory, forced instead tocome to terms with a considerably reduced status, abetrayed love, and a hideously bourgeois world ofcrass mammonism and philistine taste.
-- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Claiming mutual “affection and confidence” with hiscollaborating reader whom he expects to agree,Dickens also indicts the false religion of Mammonism.
-- Linda M. Lewis, Dickens, His Parables, and HisReaders
Origin:
Mammonism is an odd combination of Aramaic andGreek. The word mammon meant wealth in Aramaic, and the suffix -ism forms a noun from a verb, asin criticism and plagiarism.

Sherwood Anderson 1876 – 1941

2012-02-16T09:33:00.002+01:00

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio (1876). He's best known for a book of short stories about small town life, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). His father was a veteran of the Civil War and liked telling Civil War stories better than working. Anderson grew up resenting his father's laziness. He sympathized with his mother, who was miserable for most of his childhood. She died when he was a teenager, and he was so disgusted at his father's lack of grief that he left home and never saw his father again. He worked at a warehouse in Chicago and took business classes at night. He eventually got a job managing a mail-order paint company in Elyria, Ohio. He started writing fiction in 1909. One day at work, he stood up and walked out of the office and wandered off, ignoring everyone who asked where he was going. He was found four days later, wandering around in nearby Cleveland. He said later that he had pretended to be crazy so that the paint company wouldn't take him back. He moved to Chicago and became friends with writers like Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote every day at a desk watching people walk by his window. He said, "Sometimes it seemed to me ... that each person who passed along the street below, under the light, shouted his secret up to me." He was struggling to write what he called "a story of another human being, quite outside myself, truly told." One rainy night, Anderson got out of bed without any clothes on, and began to write. He said, "It was there ... sitting near an open window, the rain occasionally blowing in and wetting my bare back, that I wrote the first of the stories, afterwards to be known as the Winesburg stories." Anderson was 43 years old when he published Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and it made him famous. The book is a collection of short stories about people in a small town, and it was revolutionary, because he wrote about misery and sexual frustration and violent desires in a very simple prose style. He dedicated the book to his mother, saying, "[Her] keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives." Though he never wrote anything else as good as Winesburg, Ohio, the book was very influential for many writers, including Ernest Hemingway.

Dickinson Quotes

2012-02-16T08:45:00.000+01:00

*A wounded deer leaps the highest.

*Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

*Dying is a wild night and a new road.

*Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

*For love is immortality.

*Forever is composed of nows.

*Fortune befriends the bold.

*He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

*Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

I heard a fly buzz when I died

2012-02-16T08:42:00.001+01:00

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,-and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, ""A Few Figs from Thistles", 1920 US poet (1892 - 1950)

2012-02-09T09:16:00.001+01:00

My candle burns at both ends

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -

It gives a lovely light.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson 1830-1886

2012-02-09T08:45:00.004+01:00

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

___________________________________

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

Beg the question: Evade the issue

2012-02-04T20:34:00.000+01:00

But many stacked turtles lie hidden beneath communism. To attribute contemporary authoritarianism simply to twentieth-century politics begs the question of why communism triumphed so thoroughly in Russia in the first place, as it did in China. There was, of course, a much older absolutist tradition at play. Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralised state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislature.

Francis Fukuyama

Zen Master said :“we shall see”

2012-02-02T22:30:00.001+01:00

There once was a small village where a young child was bought a horse for his 9th birthday.. the villagers heard about this, and said that this was fantastic news… but when the Zen Master heard about this he simply said “we shall see”…

Three years later the boy fell of his horse and broke his legs, the villagers were distraught, “what terrible news” they said.. but the Zen Master simply said “we shall see”.

One year later the country went to war, and due to his injury the boy was able to stay at home instead of fighting, “what great news” said the villagers, and once again, the Zen Master simply said:

“we shall see”.

2012-02-02T10:10:00.001+01:00

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Saul Bellow 1915 – 2005

2012-02-02T09:01:00.002+01:00

Novelist Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada (1915). He's been publishing fiction for over fifty years; he's written over 30 books, and he's published at least one novel each decade since the 1940s. His novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Humboldt's Gift (1975) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).

His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), sold fewer than 5,000 copies combined. He spent most of 1948 in France with his wife, hoping to gather material for a novel. But he grew depressed after a few months: His novel was going nowhere, he wasn't getting along with the French, and the weather was dreary. He decided to start writing a new novel, about a young man's adventures in Chicago just before the Great Depression. That novel became The Adventures of Augie March, and it was his first big success. The British writer Martin Amis recently called it "the Great American Novel" for its "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity .... Everything is in here."

Last year, The Library of America published Bellow's first three novels in a volume called Novels, 1944-53, making him the first living author to be published by Library of America.

Bellow said, "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."

*What is art but a way of seeing?

*A man is only as good as what he loves.

*When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

*I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.

*Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

*Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

*A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

*reality comes from giving an account of yourself. (Augie March)

*Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

*There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

*Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it -- they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

*Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

*Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

*I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture

*A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

*A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

*A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

*I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom—which is bordered on all sides by isolation—is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.

______________________________

"I've become aware of a conflict between the modern university education I received and those things that I really felt in my soul most deeply. I've trusted those more and more....I know how a modern man is supposed to think....I know that people live by something far deeper than head culture; they couldn't live if they didn't. They couldn't survive if they didn't. What a woman does for her children, what a man does for his family, what people most tenaciously cling to, these thing are not adequately explained by Oedipus complexes, libidos, class struggle, or existential individualism--whatever you like. Now, I know that psychanalysis has found a natural preserve for poets and artist called the unconscious. A writer is supposed to go there and dig around like a truffle hound. He comes back with a truffle, a delicacy for the cultural world....Well, I don't believe that. I don't believe that we go and dig in the unconscious and come back with new truffles from the libidinous unknown. That's not the way it really is" (58-59).

"I think that the university contains all that there is left in this country, or indeed in most countries, of a literary culture" (60).

"I do believe that I have something of importance to transmit....I think of myself as speaking to an inviolate part of other people, around which there is a sort of nearly sacred perimeter, a significant space...a place where the human being really has removed to, with all his most important spiritual possessions" (63).

"Herzog....I think of him as a man who, in the agony of suffering, finds himself to be his own most penetrating critic. And he reexamines his life...by reenacting all the roles he took seriously. And when he has gone through all the reenactments, he's back at the original point....the professor, the son, the brother, the lover, the father, the husband, the avenger, the intellectual--all of it. It's an attempt really to divest himself of the personae....and when he has dismissed these personae, there comes a pause..[grace]..it's better than his trying to invent everything for himself, or accepting human inventions, the collective errors, by which he's lived. He's decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening" (64).

"A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849

2012-02-01T21:55:00.003+01:00

The poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston (1809). He was the son of two actors, but both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allan had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices, and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house.

He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting. Eventually, he began to contribute poems and journalism to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."

He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.

But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread and molasses, and sold most of their belongings to the pawn shop.

It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest gothic horror stories in English literature, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Near the end of his wife's illness, he published the poem that begins,

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

It became his most famous poem: "The Raven."

*As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy a limitless succession of Universes. Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.

*Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

*Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

*Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

*I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

*I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

*I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.

*I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

*I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
Edgar Allan Poe

*I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

*I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

*If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

*In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

*In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Edgar Allan Poe

*It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe

*It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

*It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

*Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe

*Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

*Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

*Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

*Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

*Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

*That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

*That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

*The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

*The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe

*The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

*The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

*The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

*The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

*The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

*There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

*There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.

*There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

*They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

*Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.

*Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

*To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

*We loved with a love that was more than love.

*Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

*With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

*Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

"Winter Twilight" by Anne Porter

2012-02-01T21:50:00.002+01:00

On a clear winter's evening
The crescent moon

And the round squirrels' nest
In the bare oak

Are equal planets.

"Winter Twilight" by Anne Porter

2012-02-01T21:50:00.001+01:00

On a clear winter's evening
The crescent moon

And the round squirrels' nest
In the bare oak

Are equal planets.

, from Living Things

"Winter Is the Best Time" by David Budbill 1940-David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio

2012-02-01T21:40:00.001+01:00

Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.

Travelling

2012-01-25T20:30:00.000+01:00

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely in those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change. John Steinbeck

You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself

Buddha

Tourists don't know where they've been, I thought. Travelers don't know where they 're going.

Paul Theroux

Sightseeing was a way of passing time, but ... It was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in a stage sets from which all the actors had fled. Ibid

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by E. E. Cummings 1894–1962

2012-01-25T19:47:00.005+01:00

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Word of The Day

2012-01-19T17:14:00.000+01:00

noun

(in humans and other primates) any of the tendons thatbound the ham of the knee.

(in quadrupeds) the great tendon at the back of the hock.

verb (used with object)

to disable by cutting the hamstring or hamstrings; cripple.

to render powerless or useless; thwart: Their efforts werehamstrung by stubborn pride.

2012-01-19T17:05:00.000+01:00

Capital letter

2012-01-08T22:51:00.000+01:00

To start names of people, places, days and months with a capital letter

Matthew Arnold, 'Self-Dependence'

2012-01-05T22:38:00.001+01:00

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

"Judgement is forced upon us by experience. He that reads many books must compare one opinion or one style with another; and when he compares, must necessarily distinguish, reject, and prefer." ( Samuel Johnson) The end and aim of education through letters is to get this experience.

I was born when she kissed me

2012-01-02T22:14:00.001+01:00

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

Hart Crane

2011-12-14T14:48:00.003+01:00

The poet Hart Crane was born Harold Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio (1899). He's best known for his epic poem The Bridge (1930). His father was the wealthy owner of a candy company, and his parents didn't get along very well. His mother was a terrible hypochondriac, and Crane spent his childhood listening to her complain about imaginary illnesses. He never finished high school, but moved to New York City, hoping to attend Columbia University. They didn't take him. He tried to enlist in the Army, but they wouldn't take him either because he was a minor. He was a homosexual and a bohemian. He loved to drink and pick up sailors in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, though he often got beat up and robbed by the men he propositioned. His father constantly threatened to disown him unless he got a real job. In a letter to his father he wrote, "Try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful… then maybe you will see why I am not so foolish after all to have followed what seems sometimes only a faint star." He had begun writing publishable poems in his early teens, but he wanted to write an epic poem like Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" or T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." Every day, he spent hours looking out the window of his apartment at the Brooklyn Bridge, and it gave him an idea for a book-length poem about America called The Bridge (1930). It was his masterpiece, but it got mixed reviews when it was published in 1930. Crane spent his last few years traveling in Cuba and Mexico, drinking and struggling with writer's block. He once threw his typewriter out the window in frustration. In 1932, while sailing on a ship from Havana to New York, he came out on the deck wearing a topcoat over his pajamas. He took off his coat, folded it neatly over the rail, and jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never found.

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

seizin

2011-12-13T20:20:00.001+01:00

sei·zin [see-zin]
noun Law .
1.
(originally) possession of either land or chattel.
2.
the kind of possession or right to possession characteristic of estates of freehold.

dis·seize [dis-seez]
verb (used with object), -seized, -seiz·ing. Law .
to deprive (a person) of seizin, or of the possession, of a freehold interest in land, especially wrongfully or by force; oust.

Woody Allen 1935-

2011-12-07T18:20:00.006+01:00

Director and screenwriter Woody Allen was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn (1935). He hated school as a kid. He said, "I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school." Every day, when Allen got home from school, he immediately went into his bedroom and shut the door. He spent all his time reading, learning to play the saxophone, and teaching himself magic tricks.
He started writing jokes, and then directing movies. In the 1970s, he started working on an autobiographical movie. When Allen turned the rough cut of the movie into the studio, it was several hours long, with almost no plot, and he wanted to call it Anhedonia, which is the name of a psychological disorder in which a person is unable to experience pleasure. The studio helped him cut the movie down to a more reasonable length, and they found themselves cutting almost everything except for the scenes with Diane Keaton, who played Woody Allen's love interest. So they named the move after her character, and it became Annie Hall (1977). It went on to win the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best actress.

Everybody says that comedy is harder to do. That's become a truism by now, but it's wrong. Comedy is not harder.The hardest thing is to do good work, whatever it is.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action.They rented out my room.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

I am at two with nature.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.

My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

*Two elderly women are at a Catskill restaurant. One of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is just terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah I know. And such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life. Full of misery, loneliness and suffering and unhappiness – and it’s all over much too quickly”

*“I am plagued by doubts. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In which case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.”

*“You have no values. With you it’s all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.”
“Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan and win!”

A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken." The doctor says, "Why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "We would. But we need the eggs."

I was thrown out of NYU. On my metaphysics final, they caught me cheating. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

I'm very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.

In California, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into TV shows.

Some guy hit my fender, and I told him, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' but not in those words.

Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in my bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.

I don't think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

I'm short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own.

I'm so excited—I think today I'm going to brush all my teeth.

I'm very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.

In the event of war, I'm a hostage.

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

I'm astounded by people who want to know the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought -- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.

It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.

My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

Remember, if you smoke after sex you’re doing it too fast.

Some drink deeply from the river of knowledge. Others only gargle.

94.5% of all statistics are made up.

Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats," by Walt Whitman.

2011-12-07T18:16:00.000+01:00

Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats

Ah poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
(For what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes,
the old, the incessant war?)
You degredations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah wounds the
sharpest of all!)
You toil of painful and choked articulations, you meannesses,
You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of
any;)
You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother'd
ennuis!
Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come
forth,
It shall yet march forth o'ermastering, till all lies beneath me,
It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.

John Updike 1932 –2009

2011-11-30T21:42:00.003+01:00

American author John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). His family moved to a farm when he was thirteen, so he and his father -- who was a high-school math teacher -- had to commute daily into town for school. The isolation Updike felt on the farm fueled a desire to escape his life. He escaped first through cartoons and fiction in The New Yorker, and then by winning a scholarship to Harvard. He later joined the staff at The New Yorker, but left to concentrate on his writing. A prolific writer of poetry, short stories, and essays, Updike is best known for his novels, in particular the four Rabbit books, which began with the classic Rabbit Run (1961). Updike said, "The character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was for me a way in -- a ticket to the America all around me. [The four novels] became a running report on the state of my hero and his nation." Rabbit Run begins,
Boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him as a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

Updike said: "Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."

In Extremis
I saw my toes the other day.
I hadn't looked at them for months.
Indeed, they might have passed away.
And yet they were my best friends once.
When I was small, I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in my mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart.
Now, gnarled and pale, each said, j'accuse!--
I hid them quickly in my shoes.

Henry James 1843-1916

2011-11-30T20:05:00.006+01:00

Henry James was born in New York City (1843). His first memory was an image of a monument to Napoleon as his family traveled by carriage through Paris, and though he was an American, he always loved Europe and spent most of his life living there.

At some point in his childhood, he was injured, possibly in a fire. He never said much about it to his friends, except that the injury was "horrid," but some scholars have suggested that perhaps he was scarred in some way that would explain why he never had a single love affair with anyone. As far as we know, he died without ever having even received a romantic kiss.
But he wrote almost ten million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880),The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Much dismayed by the United States' determined isolationism in World War he became a British citizen near the end of his life as a show of support for Great Britain. One time, he said to a group of his English friends, "However British you may be, I am more British still."

For a long time, he wasn't very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late '90s.

The one literary art form James never mastered was the play. In his lifetime, plays were a much more popular form of entertainment than novels, and James spent years trying to write a successful play himself.
James finally produced a historical play called Guy Domville (1895), but on opening night, instead of going to his own play, he attended a play by his rival Oscar Wilde. He made it back to his own play just as it had finished, and went out on stage at the curtain call, and the audience booed him off the stage. After that embarrassment, he wrote in his notebook, "I take up my own old pen again—the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles." He gave up on theater after that and devoted his pen to novels.

Henry James wrote, "I'm that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility."
And, "Without [literature], for me, the world would be, indeed, a howling desert."

He spent time in Geneva, London, Paris and Bologna, and his parents let him wander around the streets of the great European cities and soak up their language and culture. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to Europe and wrote for magazines like the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly, which is where his first novel, Watch and Ward was published in 1871.  
Around this time he started running out of money, and he had to decide whether he wanted to go back to America, where he had a better chance of getting more books published, or stay in Europe. His brother William wrote to him, "It is a fork in the path of your life, and upon your decision hangs your whole future." Finally, in October 1875, Henry James wrote to his family, "Dear People All. I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!" He would live in Europe for the rest of his life.   

He started writing his most famous book, The Portrait of a Lady, in an apartment in Florence overlooking a waterway. It's about a woman named Isabel Archer who goes to England to live with her aunt and uncle and their son Ralph. Isabel inherits some money and goes to Italy, where she decides to marry a rich widower named Gilbert Osmond and spends the rest of the novel dealing with the horrible consequences of her decision. The novel begins, "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."  
Henry James started feeling nostalgic for America at the beginning of the twentieth century. He hadn't seen his home country in twenty-five years, and he wanted to know how it had changed since he left. He dreamt about kicking through the leaves on Fifth Avenue and wanted to see if the trees he remembered were still there. He wrote to a friend that he wanted to "lie on the ground, on an American hillside, on the edge of the woods, in the manner of my youth." He had trouble raising the money, but he finally left for America in August 1904. He loved the big open spaces of the American West and the sunny weather in California, but he said the country was "too huge . . . for any human convenience."  
James is known for writing big, challenging novels made up of long, complex sentences. He once said, "We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick." And he once called his books "invincibly unsalable." For a long time, he wasn't very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late '90s.  James said, "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

He's considered one of the greatest American writers of his generation, master of the "international novel," but he had an ambivalent attitude toward America throughout his life. He liked what he called the "denser, richer, warmer European spectacle" with its "complexity of manners and types." He said, to his niece, "I hate American simplicity."

In 1875 he moved to Paris, where he met important novelists of the day, including Zola, Flaubert, and Turgenev. His early novels, including The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), are about Americans living and traveling abroad. To his sister-in-law, James wrote, "Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried on a stretcher) to die -- but never, never to live." He lived the last two decades of his life in England. He was angry when the United States didn't enter World War I at its start, and so he became a British citizen in 1915. It cost him his reputation in America; he remained unread and out-of-print for years after he died in 1916, until the 30's, when his reputation was resurrected.

Most critics, and James himself, consider his masterpiece to be The Ambassadors (1903). Called by many the "master of the psychological novel," James developed the form of the modern novel's "point of view," which was, as explained by Joseph Beach in The Method of Henry James, "never to allow anything to enter the novel or story which was not represented as a perception or experience of one of the characters." Because of this, James was a major influence on twentieth century writing.

His grandfather was one of the first American millionaires, so James was raised in wealth. His father moved the family back and forth across the Atlantic and engaged tutors for his children. When James was seventeen, the family settled, more or less, in Newport, Rhode Island. He began a brief period of study at Harvard Law School, but he soon decided he wanted to be a writer. He moved to Europe in his early thirties, at first living in Paris, where he was close to Ivan Turgenev and Flaubert; then he moved to London and began writing about the contrast between America and Europe.

Source: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac

A few famous quotations from Henry James (1843-1916)

*The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million... but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher. The Portrait of a Lady (1908 ed.) preface

*It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

*To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

*Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

*Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

*Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

*******************************************************

Henry James
Brooksmith

(1892)

We are scattered now, the friends of the late Mr Oliver Offord; but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a certain esoteric respect for each other. ‘Yes, you too have been in Arcadia,’ we seem not too grumpily to allow. When I pass the house in Mansfield Street I remember that Arcadia was there. I don’t know who has it now, and I don’t want to know; it’s enough to be so sure that if I should ring the bell there would be no such luck for me as that Brooksmith should open the door. Mr Offord, the most agreeable, the most lovable of bachelors, was a retired diplomatist, living on his pension, confined by his infirmities to his fireside and delighted to be found there any afternoon in the year by such visitors as Brooksmith allowed to come up. Brooksmith was his butler and his most intimate friend, to whom we all stood, or I should say sat, in the same relation in which the subject of the sovereign finds himself to the prime minister. By having been for years, in foreign lands, the most delightful Englishman any one had ever known, Mr Offord had, in my opinion, rendered signal service to his country. But I suppose he had been too much liked – liked even by those who didn’t like it – so that as people of that sort never get titles or dotations for the horrid things they have not done, his principal reward was simply that we went to see him.

Oh, we went perpetually, and it was not our fault if he was not overwhelmed with this particular honour. Any visitor who came once came again – to come merely once was a slight which nobody, I am sure, had ever put upon him. His circle, therefore, was essentially composed of habitués, who were habitués for each other as well as for him, as those of a happy salon should be. I remember vividly every element of the place, down to the intensely Londonish look of the grey opposite houses, in the gap of the white curtains of the high windows, and the exact spot where, on a particular afternoon, I put down my tea-cup for Brooksmith, lingering an instant, to gather it up as if he were plucking a flower. Mr Offord’s drawing-room was indeed Brooksmith’s garden, his pruned and tended human parterre, and if we all flourished there and grew well in our places it was largely owing to his supervision.

Many persons have heard much, though most have doubtless seen little, of the famous institution of the salon, and many are born to the depression of knowing that this finest flower of social life refuses to bloom where the English tongue is spoken. The explanation is usually that our women have not the skill to cultivate it – the art to direct, between suggestive shores, the course of the stream of talk. My affectionate, my pious memory of Mr Offord contradicts this induction only, I fear, more insidiously to confirm it. The very sallow and slightly smoked drawing-room in which he spent so large a portion of the last years of his life certainly deserved the distinguished name; but on the other hand it could not be said at all to owe its stamp to the soft pressure of the indispensable sex. The dear man had indeed been capable of one of those sacrifices to which women are deemed peculiarly apt; he had recognised (under the influence, in some degree, it is true, of physical infirmity), that if you wished people to find you at home you must manage not to be out. He had in short accepted the fact which many dabblers in the social art are slow to learn, that you must really, as they say, take a line and that the only way to be at home is to stay at home. Finally his own fireside had become a summary of his habits. Why should he ever have left it? – since this would have been leaving what was notoriously pleasantest in London, the compact charmed cluster (thinning away indeed into casual couples), round the fine old last century chimney-piece which, with the exception of the remarkable collection of miniatures, was the best thing the place contained. Mr Offord was not rich; he had nothing but his pension and the use for life of the somewhat superannuated house.

When I am reminded by some uncomfortable contrast of to-day how perfectly we were all handled there I ask myself once more what had been the secret of such perfection. One had taken it for granted at the time, for anything that is supremely good produces more acceptance than surprise. I felt we were all happy, but I didn’t consider how our happiness was managed. And yet there were questions to be asked, questions that strike me as singularly obvious now that there is nobody to answer them. Mr Offord had solved the insoluble; he had, without feminine help (save in the sense that ladies were dying to come to him and he saved the lives of several), established a salon; but I might have guessed that there was a method in his madness – a law in his success. He had not hit it off by a mere fluke. There was an art in it all, and how was the art so hidden? Who, indeed, if it came to that, was the occult artist? Launching this inquiry the other day, I had already got hold of the tail of my reply. I was helped by the very wonder of some of the conditions that came back to me – those that used to seem as natural as sunshine in a fine climate.

How was it, for instance, that we never were a crowd, never either too many or too few, always the right people with the right people (there must really have been no wrong people at all), always coming and going, never sticking fast nor overstaying, yet never popping in or out with an indecorous familiarity? How was it that we all sat where we wanted and moved when we wanted and met whom we wanted and escaped whom we wanted; joining, according to the accident of inclination, the general circle or falling in with a single talker on a convenient sofa? Why were all the sofas so convenient, the accidents so happy, the talkers so ready, the listeners so willing, the subjects presented to you in a rotation as quickly fore-ordained as the courses at dinner? A dearth of topics would have been as unheard of as a lapse in the service. These speculations couldn’t fail to lead me to the fundamental truth that Brooksmith had been somehow at the bottom of the mystery. If he had not established the salon at least he had carried it on. Brooksmith, in short, was the artist!

We felt this, covertly, at the time, without formulating it, and were conscious, as an ordered and prosperous community, of his evenhanded justice, untainted with flunkeyism. He had none of that vulgarity – his touch was infinitely fine. The delicacy of it was clear to me on the first occasion my eyes rested, as they were so often to rest again, on the domestic revealed, in the turbid light of the street, by the opening of the house-door. I saw on the spot that though he had plenty of school he carried it without arrogance – he had remained articulate and human. L’Ecole Anglaise, Mr Offord used to call him, laughing, when, later, it happened more than once that we had some conversation about him. But I remember accusing Mr Offord of not doing him quite ideal justice. That he was not one of the giants of the school, however, my old friend, who really understood him perfectly and was devoted to him, as I shall show, quite admitted; which doubtless poor Brooksmith had himself felt, to his cost, when his value in the market was originally determined. The utility of his class in general is estimated by the foot and the inch, and poor Brooksmith had only about five feet two to put into circulation. He acknowledged the inadequacy of this provision, and I am sure was penetrated with the everlasting fitness of the relation between service and stature. If he had been Mr Offord he certainly would have found Brooksmith wanting, and indeed the laxity of his employer on this score was one of many things which he had had to condone and to which he had at last indulgently adapted himself.

I remember the old man’s saying to me: “Oh, my servants, if they can live with me a fortnight they can live with me for ever. But it’s the first fortnight that tries ’em.” It was in the first fortnight, for instance, that Brooksmith had had to learn that he was exposed to being addressed as ‘my dear fellow’ and ‘my poor child’. Strange and deep must such a probation have been to him, and he doubtless emerged from it tempered and purified. This was written to a certain extent in his appearance; in his spare, brisk little person, in his cloistered white face and extraordinarily polished hair, which told of responsibility, looked as if it were kept up to the same high standard as the plate; in his small, clear, anxious eyes, even in the permitted, though not exactly encouraged tuft on his chin. “He thinks me rather mad, but I’ve broken him in, and now he likes the place, he likes the company,” said the old man. I embraced this fully after I had become aware that Brooksmith’s main characteristic was a deep and shy refinement, though I remember I was rather puzzled when, on another occasion, Mr Offord remarked: “What he likes is the talk – mingling in the conversation.” I was conscious that I had never seen Brooksmith permit himself this freedom, but I guessed in a moment that what Mr Offord alluded to was a participation more intense than any speech could have represented – that of being perpetually present on a hundred legitimate pretexts, errands, necessities, and breathing the very atmosphere of criticism, the famous criticism of life. “Quite an education, sir, isn’t it, sir?” he said to me one day at the foot of the stairs, when he was letting me out; and I have always remembered the words and the tone as the first sign of the quickening drama of poor Brooksmith’s fate. It was indeed an education, but to what was this sensitive young man of thirty-five, of the servile class, being educated?

Practically and inevitably, for the time, to companionship, to the perpetual, the even exaggerated reference and appeal of a person brought to dependence by his time of life and his infirmities and always addicted moreover (this was the exaggeration) to the art of giving you pleasure by letting you do things for him. There were certain things Mr Offord was capable of pretending he liked you to do, even when he didn’t, if he thought you liked them. If it happened that you didn’t either (this was rare, but it might be), of course there were cross-purposes; but Brooksmith was there to prevent their going very far. This was precisely the way he acted as moderator: he averted misunderstandings or cleared them up. He had been capable, strange as it may appear, of acquiring for this purpose an insight into the French tongue, which was often used at Mr Offord’s; for besides being habitual to most of the foreigners, and they were many, who haunted the place or arrived with letters (letters often requiring a little worried consideration, of which Brooksmith always had cognisance), it had really become the primary language of the master of the house. I don’t know if all the malentendus were in French, but almost all the explanations were, and this didn’t a bit prevent Brooksmith from following them. I know Mr Offord used to read passages to him from Montaigne and Saint-Simon, for he read perpetually when he was alone – when they were alone, I should say – and Brooksmith was always about. Perhaps you’ll say no wonder Mr Offord’s butler regarded him as ‘rather mad’. However, if I’m not sure what he thought about Montaigne I’m convinced he admired Saint-Simon. A certain feeling for letters must have rubbed off on him from the mere handling of his master’s books, which he was always carrying to and fro and putting back in their places.

I often noticed that if an anecdote or a quotation, much more a lively discussion, was going forward, he would, if busy with the fire or the curtains, the lamp or the tea, find a pretext for remaining in the room till the point should be reached. If his purpose was to catch it you were not discreet to call him off, and I shall never forget the look, a hard, stony stare (I caught it in its passage), which, one day when there were a good many people in the room, he fastened upon the footman who was helping him in the service and who, in an undertone, had asked him some irrelevant question. It was the only manifestation of harshness that I ever observed on Brooksmith’s part, and at first I wondered what was the matter. Then I became conscious that Mr Offord was relating a very curious anecdote, never before perhaps made so public, and imparted to the narrator by an eye-witness of the fact, bearing upon Lord Byron’s life in Italy. Nothing would induce me to reproduce it here; but Brooksmith had been in danger of losing it. If I ever should venture to reproduce it I shall feel how much I lose in not having my fellow-auditor to refer to.

The first day Mr Offord’s door was closed was therefore a dark date in contemporary history. It was raining hard and my umbrella was wet, but Brooksmith took it from me exactly as if this were a preliminary for going upstairs. I observed however that instead of putting it away he held it poised and trickling over the rug, and then I became aware that he was looking at me with deep, acknowledging eyes – his air of universal responsibility. I immediately understood; there was scarcely need of the question and the answer that passed between us. When I did understand that the old man had given up, for the first time, though only for the occasion, I exclaimed dolefully: “What a difference it will make – and to how many people!”

“I shall be one of them, sir!” said Brooksmith; and that was the beginning of the end.

Mr Offord came down again, but the spell was broken, and the great sign of it was that the conversation was, for the first time, not directed. It wandered and stumbled, a little frightened, like a lost child – it had let go the nurse’s hand. “The worst of it is that now we shall talk about my health – c’est la fin du tout,” Mr Offord said, when he reappeared; and then I recognised what a sign of change that would be – for he had never tolerated anything so provincial. The talk became ours, in a word – not his; and as ours, even when he talked, it could only be inferior. In this form it was a distress to Brooksmith, whose attention now wandered from it altogether: he had so much closer a vision of his master’s intimate conditions than our superficialities represented. There were better hours, and he was more in and out of the room, but I could see that he was conscious that the great institution was falling to pieces. He seemed to wish to take counsel with me about it, to feel responsible for its going on in some form or other. When for the second period – the first had lasted several days – he had to tell me that our old friend didn’t receive, I half expected to hear him say after a moment: “Do you think I ought to, sir, in his place?” – as he might have asked me, with the return of autumn, if I thought he had better light the drawing-room fire.

He had a resigned philosophic sense of what his guests – our guests, as I came to regard them in our colloquies – would expect. His feeling was that he wouldn’t absolutely have approved of himself as a substitute for the host; but he was so saturated with the religion of habit that he would have made, for our friends, the necessary sacrifice to the divinity. He would take them on a little further, till they could look about them. I think I saw him also mentally confronted with the opportunity to deal – for once in his life – with some of his own dumb preferences, his limitations of sympathy, weeding a little, in prospect, and returning to a purer tradition. It was not unknown to me that he considered that toward the end of Mr Offord’s career a certain laxity of selection had crept in.

At last it came to be the case that we all found the closed door more often than the open one; but even when it was closed Brooksmith managed a crack for me to squeeze through; so that practically I never turned away without having paid a visit. The difference simply came to be that the visit was to Brooksmith. It took place in the hall, at the familiar foot of the stairs, and we didn’t sit down – at least Brooksmith didn’t; moreover it was devoted wholly to one topic and always had the air of being already over – beginning, as it were, at the end. But it was always interesting – it always gave me something to think about. It is true that the subject of my meditation was ever the same – ever ‘It’s all very well, but what will become of Brooksmith?’ Even my private answer to this question left me still unsatisfied. No doubt Mr Offord would provide for him, but what would he provide? that was the great point. He couldn’t provide society; and society had become a necessity of Brooksmith’s nature. I must add that he never showed a symptom of what I may call sordid solicitude – anxiety on his own account. He was rather livid and intensely grave, as befitted a man before whose eyes the ‘shade of that which once was great’ was passing away. He had the solemnity of a person winding up, under depressing circumstances, a long established and celebrated business; he was a kind of social executor or liquidator. But his manner seemed to testify exclusively to the uncertainty of our future. I couldn’t in those days have afforded it – I lived in two rooms in Jermyn Street and didn’t ‘keep a man’; but even if my income had permitted I shouldn’t have ventured to say to Brooksmith (emulating Mr Offord), ‘My dear fellow, I’ll take you on.’ The whole tone of our intercourse was so much more an implication that it was I who should now want a lift. Indeed there was a tacit assurance in Brooksmith’s whole attitude that he would have me on his mind.

One of the most assiduous members of our circle had been Lady Kenyon, and I remember his telling me one day that her ladyship had, in spite of her own infirmities, lately much aggravated, been in person to inquire. In answer to this I remarked that she would feel it more than any one. Brooksmith was silent a moment; at the end of which he said, in a certain tone (there is no reproducing some of his tones), “I’ll go and see her.” I went to see her myself, and I learned that he had waited upon her; but when I said to her, in the form of a joke but with a core of earnest, that when all was over some of us ought to combine, to club together to set Brooksmith up on his own account, she replied a trifle disappointingly: “Do you mean in a public-house?” I looked at her in a way that I think Brooksmith himself would have approved, and then I answered: “Yes, the Offord Arms.” What I had meant, of course, was that, for the love of art itself, we ought to look to it that such a peculiar faculty and so much acquired experience should not be wasted. I really think that if we had caused a few black-edged cards to be struck off and circulated – ‘Mr Brooksmith will continue to receive on the old premises from four to seven; business carried on as usual during the alterations’ – the majority of us would have rallied.

Several times he took me upstairs – always by his own proposal – and our dear old friend, in bed, in curious flowered and brocaded casaque which made him, especially as his head was tied up in a handkerchief to match, look, to my imagination, like the dying Voltaire, held for ten minutes a sadly shrunken little salon. I felt indeed each time, as if I were attending the last coucher of some social sovereign. He was royally whimsical about his sufferings and not at all concerned – quite as if the Constitution provided for the case – about his successor. He glided over our sufferings charmingly, and none of his jokes – it was a gallant abstention, some of them would have been so easy – were at our expense. Now and again, I confess, there was one at Brooksmith’s, but so pathetically sociable as to make the excellent man look at me in a way that seemed to say: ‘Do exchange a glance with me, or I sha’n’t be able to stand it.’ What he was not able to stand was not what Mr Offord said about him, but what he wasn’t able to say in return. His notion of conversation, for himself, was giving you the convenience of speaking to him; and when he went to ‘see’ Lady Kenyon, for instance, it was to carry her the tribute of his receptive silence. Where would the speech of his betters have been if proper service had been a manifestation of sound? In that case the fundamental difference would have had to be shown by their dumbness, and many of them, poor things, were dumb enough without that provision. Brooksmith took an unfailing interest in the preservation of the fundamental difference; it was the thing he had most on his conscience.

What had become of it, however, when Mr Offord passed away like any inferior person – was relegated to eternal stillness like a butler upstairs? His aspect for several days after the expected event may be imagined, and the multiplication by funereal observance of the things he didn’t say. When everything was over – it was late the same day – I knocked at the door of the house of mourning as I so often had done before. I could never call on Mr Offord again, but I had come, literally, to call on Brooksmith. I wanted to ask him if there was anything I could do for him, tainted with vagueness as this inquiry could only be. My wild dream of taking him into my own service had died away: my service was not worth his being taken into. My offer to him could only be to help him to find another place, and yet there was an indelicacy, as it were, in taking for granted that his thoughts would immediately be fixed on another. I had a hope that he would be able to give his life a different form – though certainly not the form, the frequent result of such bereavements, of his setting up a little shop. That would have been dreadful; for I should have wished to further any enterprise that he might embark in, yet how could I have brought myself to go and pay him shillings and take back coppers over a counter? My visit then was simply an intended compliment. He took it as such, gratefully and with all the tact in the world. He knew I really couldn’t help him and that I knew he knew I couldn’t, but we discussed the situation – with a good deal of elegant generality – at the foot of the stairs, in the hall already dismantled, where I had so often discussed other situations with him. The executors were in possession, as was still more apparent when he made me pass for a few minutes into the dining-room, where various objects were muffled up for removal.

Two definite facts, however, he had to communicate; one being that he was to leave the house for ever that night (servants, for some mysterious reason, seem always to depart by night), and the other – he mentioned it only at the last, with hesitation – that he had already been informed his late master had left him a legacy of eighty pounds. “I’m very glad.” I said, and Brooksmith rejoined: “It was so like him to think of me.” This was all that passed between us on the subject, and I know nothing of his judgement of Mr Offord’s memento. Eighty pounds are always eighty pounds, and no one has ever left me an equal sum; but, all the same, for Brooksmith, I was disappointed. I don’t know what I had expected – in short I was disappointed. Eighty pounds might stock a little shop – a very little shop; but, I repeat, I couldn’t bear to think of that. I asked my friend if he had been able to save a little, and he replied: “No, sir; I have had to do things.” I didn’t inquire what things he had had to do; they were his own affair, and I took his word for them as assentingly as if he had had the greatness of an ancient house to keep up; especially as there was something in his manner that seemed to convey a prospect of further sacrifice.

“I shall have to turn round a bit, sir – I shall have to look about me,” he said; and then he added, indulgently, magnanimously: “If you should happen to hear of anything for me—”

I couldn’t let him finish; this was, in its essence, too much in the really grand manner. It would be a help to my getting him off my mind to be able to pretend I could find the right place, and that help he wished to give me, for it was doubtless painful to him to see me in so false a position. I interposed with a few words to the effect that I was well aware that wherever he should go, whatever he should do, he would miss our old friend terribly – miss him even more than I should, having been with him so much more. This led him to make the speech that I have always remembered as the very text of the whole episode.

“Oh, sir, it’s sad for you, very sad, indeed, and for a great many gentlemen and ladies; that it is, sir. But for me, sir, it is, if I may say so, still graver even than that: it’s just the loss of something that was everything. For me, sir,” he went on, with rising tears, “he was just all, if you know what I mean, sir. You have others, sir, I daresay – not that I would have you understand me to speak of them as in any way tantamount. But you have the pleasures of society, sir; if it’s only in talking about him, sir, as I daresay you do freely – for all his blessed memory has to fear from it – with gentlemen and ladies who have had the same honour. That’s not for me, sir, and I have to keep my associations to myself. Mr Offord was my society, and now I have no more. You go back to conversation, sir, after all, and I go back to my place,” Brooksmith stammered, without exaggerated irony or dramatic bitterness, but with a flat, unstudied veracity and his hand on the knob of the street-door. He turned it to let me out and then he added: “I just go downstairs, sir, again, and I stay there.”

“My poor child,” I replied, in my emotion, quite as Mr Offord used to speak, “my dear fellow, leave it to me; we’ll look after you, we’ll all do something for you.”

“Ah, if you could give me some one like him! But there ain’t two in the world,” said Brooksmith as we parted.

He had given me his address – the place where he would be to be heard of. For a long time I had no occasion to make use of the information; for he proved indeed, on trial, a very difficult case. In a word the people who knew him and had known Mr Offord, didn’t want to take him, and yet I couldn’t bear to try to thrust him among people who didn’t know him. I spoke to many of our old friends about him, and I found them all governed by the odd mixture of feelings of which I myself was conscious, and disposed, further, to entertain a suspicion that he was ‘spoiled’, with which I then would have nothing to do. In plain terms a certain embarrassment, a sensible awkwardness, when they thought of it, attached to the idea of using him as a menial: they had met him so often in society. Many of them would have asked him, and did ask him, or rather did ask me to ask him, to come and see them; but a mere visiting-list was not what I wanted for him. He was too short for people who were very particular; nevertheless I heard of an opening in a diplomatic household which led me to write him a note, though I was looking much less for something grand than for something human. Five days later I heard from him. The secretary’s wife had decided, after keeping him waiting till then, that she couldn’t take a servant out of a house in which there had not been a lady. The note had a P.S.: ‘It’s a good job there wasn’t, sir, such a lady as some.’

A week later he came to see me and told me he was ‘suited’ – committed to some highly respectable people (they were something very large in the City), who lived on the Bayswater side of the Park. “I daresay it will be rather poor, sir,” he admitted; “but I’ve seen the fireworks, haven’t I, sir? – it can’t be fireworks every night. After Mansfield Street there ain’t much choice.” There was a certain amount, however, it seemed; for the following year, going one day to call on a country cousin, a lady of a certain age who was spending a fortnight in town with some friends of her own, a family unknown to me and resident in Chester Square, the door of the house was opened, to my surprise and gratification, by Brooksmith in person. When I came out I had some conversation with him, from which I gathered that he had found the large City people too dull for endurance, and I guessed, though he didn’t say it, that he had found them vulgar as well. I don’t know what judgement he would have passed on his actual patrons if my relative had not been their friend; but under the circumstances he abstained from comment.

None was necessary, however, for before the lady in question brought her visit to a close they honoured me with an invitation to dinner, which I accepted. There was a largeish party on the occasion, but I confess I thought of Brooksmith rather more than of the seated company. They required no depth of attention – they were all referable to usual, irredeemable, inevitable types. It was the world of cheerful commonplace and conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed, material, insular world, a world of hideous florid plate and ponderous order and thin conversation. There was not a word said about Byron. Nothing would have induced me to look at Brooksmith in the course of the repast, and I felt sure that not even my overturning the wine would have induced him to meet my eye. We were in intellectual sympathy – we felt, as regards each other, a kind of social responsibility. In short we had been in Arcadia together, and we had both come to this! No wonder we were ashamed to be confronted. When he helped on my overcoat, as I was going away, we parted, for the first time since the earliest days in Mansfield Street, in silence. I thought he looked lean and wasted, and I guessed that his new place was not more ‘human’ than his previous one. There was plenty of beef and beer, but there was no reciprocity. The question for him to have asked before accepting the position would have been not ‘How many footmen are kept?’ but ‘How much imagination?’

The next time I went to the house – I confess it was not very soon – I encountered his successor, a personage who evidently enjoyed the good fortune of never having quitted his natural level. Could any be higher? he seemed to ask – over the heads of three footmen and even of some visitors. He made me feel as if Brooksmith were dead; but I didn’t dare to inquire – I couldn’t have borne his ‘I haven’t the least idea, sir.’ I despatched a note to the address Brooksmith had given me after Mr Offord’s death, but I received no answer. Six months later, however, I was favoured with a visit from an elderly, dreary, dingy person, who introduced herself to me as Mr Brooksmith’s aunt and from whom I learned that he was out of place and out of health and had allowed her to come and say to me that if I could spare half-an-hour to look in at him he would take it as a rare honour.

I went the next day – his messenger had given me a new address – and found my friend lodged in a short sordid street in Marylebone, one of those corners of London that wear the last expression of sickly meanness. The room into which I was shown was above the small establishment of a dyer and cleaner who had inflated kid gloves and discoloured shawls in his shop-front. There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the place, and there was a hot, moist smell within, as of the ‘boiling’ of dirty linen. Brooksmith sat with a blanket over his legs at a clean little window, where, from behind stiff bluish-white curtains, he could look across at a huckster’s and a tinsmith’s and a small greasy public-house. He had passed through an illness and was convalescent, and his mother, as well as his aunt, was in attendance on him. I liked the mother, who was bland and intensely humble, but I didn’t much fancy the aunt, whom I connected, perhaps unjustly, with the opposite public-house (she seemed somehow to be greasy with the same grease), and whose furtive eye followed every movement of my hand, as if to see if it were not going into my pocket. It didn’t take this direction – I couldn’t, unsolicited, put myself at that sort of ease with Brooksmith. Several times the door of the room opened, and mysterious old women peeped in and shuffled back again. I don’t know who they were; poor Brooksmith seemed encompassed with vague, prying, beery females.

He was vague himself, and evidently weak, and much embarrassed, and not an allusion was made between us to Mansfield Street. The vision of the salon of which he had been an ornament hovered before me, however, by contrast, sufficiently. He assured me that he was really getting better, and his mother remarked that he would come round if he could only get his spirits up. The aunt echoed this opinion, and I became more sure that in her own case she knew where to go for such a purpose. I’m afraid I was rather weak with my old friend, for I neglected the opportunity, so exceptionally good, to rebuke the levity which had led him to throw up honourable positions – fine, stiff, steady berths, with morning prayers, as I knew, attached to one of them – in Bayswater and Belgravia. Very likely his reasons had been profane and sentimental; he didn’t want morning prayers, he wanted to be somebody’s dear fellow; but I couldn’t be the person to rebuke him. He shuffled these episodes out of sight – I saw that he had no wish to discuss them. I perceived further, strangely enough, that it would probably be a questionable pleasure for him to see me again: he doubted now even of my power to condone his aberrations. He didn’t wish to have to explain; and his behaviour, in future, was likely to need explanation. When I bade him farewell he looked at me a moment with eyes that said everything: ‘How can I talk about those exquisite years in this place, before these people, with the old women poking their heads in? It was very good of you to come to see me – it wasn’t my idea; she brought you. We’ve said everything; it’s over; you’ll lose all patience with me, and I’d rather you shouldn’t see the rest.’ I sent him some money, in a letter, the next day, but I saw the rest only in the light of a barren sequel.

A whole year after my visit to him I became aware once, in dining out, that Brooksmith was one of the several servants who hovered behind our chairs. He had not opened the door of the house to me, and I had not recognised him in the cluster of retainers in the hall. This time I tried to catch his eye, but he never gave me a chance, and when he handed me a dish I could only be careful to thank him audibly. Indeed I partook of two entrées of which I had my doubts, subsequently converted into certainties, in order not to snub him. He looked well enough in health, but much older, and wore, in an exceptionally marked degree, the glazed and expressionless mask of the British domestic de race. I saw with dismay that if I had not known him I should have taken him, on the showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of irresponsive servile gloom. I said to myself that he had become a reactionary, gone over to the Philistines, thrown himself into religion, the religion of his ‘place’, like a foreign lady sur le retour. I divined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening – he had become a mere waiter, had joined the band of the white-waistcoated who ‘go out’. There was something pathetic in this fact, and it was a terrible vulgarisation of Brooksmith. It was the mercenary prose of butlerhood; he had given up the struggle for the poetry. If reciprocity was what he had missed, where was the reciprocity now? Only in the bottoms of the wine-glasses and five shillings (or whatever they get), clapped into his hand by the permanent man. However, I supposed he had taken up a precarious branch of his profession because after all it sent him less downstairs. His relations with London society were more superficial, but they were of course more various. As I went away, on this occasion, I looked out for him eagerly among the four or five attendants whose perpendicular persons, fluting the walls of London passages, are supposed to lubricate the process of departure; but he was not on duty. I asked one of the others if he were not in the house, and received the prompt answer: “Just left, sir. Anything I can do for you, sir?” I wanted to say ‘Please give him my kind regards;’ but I abstained; I didn’t want to compromise him, and I never came across him again.

Often and often, in dining out, I looked for him, sometimes accepting invitations on purpose to multiply the chances of my meeting him. But always in vain; so that as I met many other members of the casual class over and over again, I at last adopted the theory that he always procured a list of expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned I was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one day, at the end of three years, I received another visit from his aunt. She was drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs Brooksmith, had been dead a year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had always looked after her a bit – since her troubles; I never knew what her troubles had been – and now she hadn’t so much as a petticoat to pawn. She had also a niece, to whom she had been everything, before her troubles, but the niece had treated her most shameful. These were details; the great and romantic fact was Brooksmith’s final evasion of his fate. He had gone out to wait one evening, as usual, in a white waistcoat she had done up for him with her own hands, being due at a large party up Kensington way. But he had never come home again, and had never arrived at the large party, or at any party that any one could make out. No trace of him had come to light – no gleam of the white waistcoat had pierced the obscurity of his doom. This news was a sharp shock to me, for I had my ideas about his real destination. His aged relative had promptly, as she said, guessed the worst. Somehow and somewhere he had got out of the way altogether, and now I trust that, with characteristic deliberation, he is changing the plates of the immortal gods. As my depressing visitant also said, he never had got his spirits up. I was fortunately able to dismiss her with her own somewhat improved. But the dim ghost of poor Brooksmith is one of those that I see. He had indeed been spoiled.

THE END

Charles De Gaulle 1890-1970

2011-11-28T13:32:00.004+01:00

De Gaulle was a French general and statesman, leader of the Free French during World War Two and the architect of the Fifth Republic. His political ideology, 'Gaullism', has become a major influence in French politics .

Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille on 22 November 1890 and grew up in Paris, where his father was a teacher. De Gaulle chose a military career and served with distinction in World War One.

During the 1930s he wrote books and articles on military subjects, criticising France's reliance on the Maginot Line for defence against Germany and advocating the formation of mechanised armoured columns. His advice went unheeded and, in June 1940, German forces easily overran France. As under-secretary of national defence and war, de Gaulle refused to accept the French government's truce with the Germans and escaped to London, where he announced the formation of a French government in exile. He became leader of the Free French.

After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, de Gaulle was given a hero's welcome in the French capital. As president of the provisional government, he guided France through the writing of the constitution on which the Fourth Republic was based. However, when his desires for a strong presidency were ignored, he resigned. An attempt to transform the political scene with a new party failed, and in 1953 he withdrew into retirement again.

In 1958, a revolt in French-held Algeria, combined with serious instability within France, destroyed the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle returned to lead France once more. The French people approved a new constitution and voted de Gaulle president of the Fifth Republic. Strongly nationalistic, de Gaulle sought to strengthen his country financially and militarily. He sanctioned the development of nuclear weapons, withdrew France from NATO and vetoed the entry of Britain into the Common Market. He also granted independence to Algeria in the face of strong opposition at home and from French settlers in Algeria.

In May 1968, violent demonstrations by university students shook de Gaulle's government. A general strike followed, paralysing France and jeopardising the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle held elections and the country rallied to him, ending the crisis. In April 1969, De Gaulle resigned the presidency after losing a referendum on a reform proposal. He retired to his estate at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises and died of a heart attack on 9 November 1970.

___

French leader Charles de Gaulle, born in Lille, France (1890). He served as a lieutenant in World War One, and when the Germans invaded France in 1940, de Gaulle led one of the few successful tank operations against the enemy. After the Nazi-backed Vichy government came to power in France, de Gaulle fled to London, where he organized a Free French resistance movement and a provisional French government. After the Normandy invasion and the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle’s provisional government became the government of France. De Gaulle resigned the presidency in 1946, and stayed in retirement until he was asked to form a new government in 1958, in response to the crisis precipitated by the Algerian War. When asked about the difficulties he faced as president of France, de Gaulle once quipped, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”

Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

2011-11-23T20:49:00.007+01:00

Not to Keep

THEY sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying … and she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Under the formal writing, he was in her sight—
Living.—They gave him back to her alive— 5
How else? They are not known to send the dead—
And not disfigured visibly. His face?—
His hands? She had to look—to ask,
“What was it, dear?” And she had given all
And still she had all—they had—they the lucky! 10
Was n’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,
And all the rest for them permissible ease.
She had to ask, “What was it, dear?”
“Enough,
Yet not enough. A bullet through and through, 15
High in the breast. Nothing but what good care
And medicine and rest—and you a week,
Can cure me of to go again.” The same
Grim giving to do over for them both.
She dared no more than ask him with her eyes 20
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.

George Herbert Clarke, ed. (1873–1953). A Treasury of War Poetry. 1917.

________
Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Robert Frost
Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

*A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

*A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

*A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

*A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

*A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

*A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

*A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

*Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

*And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

*But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

*Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

*Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

*Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

*"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."

*"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me."

*"Freedom lies in being bold."

*"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."

*"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."

*"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."

*"I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."

*"I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn."

*"I had a lovers quarrel with the world."

*"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

*"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."

*"I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power."

*"I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

*"If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving."

*"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

*"Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power."

Alain de Botton 1969-

2011-11-23T20:28:00.002+01:00

Alain de Botton is a writer and television producer who was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. He aims to make philosophy relevant to everyday life.

He is a writer of essayistic books, which refer both to his own experiences and ideas- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It's a style of writing that has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life.'

His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US], minutely analysed the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book was unusual, because it mixed elements of a novel together with reflections and analyses normally found in a piece of non-fiction.

Carl Sandburg 1878-1967

2011-11-23T16:30:00.003+01:00

READY TO KILL

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie

_____

Journalist, poet, novelist, and biographer Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). Although he wanted to be a writer from the age of six, Sandburg quit school following his graduation from the eighth grade in 1891 and spent a decade working at a variety of jobs. He delivered milk, harvested ice, laid bricks, threshed wheat in Kansas, and shined shoes in Galesburg's Union Hotel before traveling as a hobo in 1897. He moved to Chicago and worked for several years as a reporter, covering mostly labor issues. In 1914, he published several poems in Poetry magazine. Two years later, his book Chicago Poems was published and brought him national and international acclaim. He wrote two more volumes, Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920). He also collected folk songs, and in 1927 he brought together nearly 300 songs and ballads in a collection called The American Songbag.
In 1922, Sandburg published Rootabaga Stories, a book of fanciful children's tales. That prompted Sandburg's publisher to suggest a biography of Abraham Lincoln for children. Sandburg researched and wrote for three years, producing not a children's book, but a two-volume biography for adults. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) was his first financial success. He moved to a new home and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.

EDWARD THOMAS 1878 – 1917

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EDWARD THOMAS Anglo-Welsh Poet of the First World War

THIS IS NO CASE OF PETTY RIGHT OR WRONG

This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart1 the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance2
The phoenix3 broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

26 December, 1915

1 athwart - across
2 perchance - perhaps
3 phoenix - legendary bird that was able to grow again from its own ashes

Edward Thomas wrote THIS IS NO PETTY CASE OF RIGHT OR WRONG after a blazing row with his father who was a conventional patriot who demonised the Germans. The poem is truly patriotic, and is an interesting contrast with the patriotic war poems of Rupert Brooke.

John McCrae (1872-1918)

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by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Kate Chopin (1851-1904)

2011-11-16T17:46:00.003+01:00

The novelist Kate Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri (1851). Her father was one of the founders of the Pacific Railroad, and he died during the first trip on that railroad, when a railway bridge collapsed. Chopin was raised by her mother and her great-grandmother, and it was her grandmother who told her endless stories full of criminals and pioneers and other notorious characters from the early days of St. Louis.
When she was 11 years old, Chopin's older brother died while fighting in the Civil War. She was so distraught that she rarely left the attic of her house for the next two years, and spent almost all of her time reading. She finally began to leave the house again in her early teens, and she developed a reputation as a free spirit. When the Union army came through town, they tied up Union flags on people's houses. Young Kate took one of these flags down from her own house, an offense for which she could have been shot. The townspeople began calling her the town's "Littlest Rebel."
She married a wealthy owner of a cotton business, and lived with him in New Orleans. But after her husband suddenly died of a fever, a rumor got out that she'd been having an affair with a married neighbor. The town turned against her, and she eventually moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother.
It was there that she first began to write. She had six children to take care of, so she wrote on a lapboard in the living room while her children played around her. Because she was so busy, she tried to write as quickly as she could, and in less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories.
Chopin's early work was melodramatic and sentimental, but everything changed when she first read the French writer Guy de Maupassant. She wrote, "Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes... [who wrote] without the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making."
Chopin began to write more explicitly about dissatisfied wives and marital infidelity, and she found it harder and harder to get her work published. Then she published The Awakening (1899), about a woman who leaves her husband and her children to have an affair and become an artist and then eventually commits suicide by swimming out to sea until she is exhausted. It was one of the first novels ever written by a woman about a woman committing adultery, and it was almost universally attacked by critics as "moral poison," "sordid," "unhealthy," "repellent," and "vulgar." The St. Louis literary community refused to review the novel at all, and libraries and bookstores in Chopin's hometown wouldn't stock the book. Chopin was unable to publish her next book of short stories, and she died five years later, in 1904.
Her work was forgotten for almost 50 years, and it was only revived because of a series of European critics who championed her work. A Norwegian literary scholar published the first biography of her and he also helped publish The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (1969). Today, The Awakening is now considered one of greatest novels of 19th century American literature.
Kate Chopin said, "There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water."

*To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts--absolute gifts--which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul.

*The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.

*There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.

*Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of her secret great passion that she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and ardor which left nothing to be desired.

*That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect.

*I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.

e.e. cummings 1894-1962

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since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis
___________________________________

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

_______________________
Poet E. E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He was a man who wrote joyful, almost childlike poems about the beauty of nature and love, even though he was actually a conservative, irritable man who hated noisy modern inventions like vacuum cleaners and radios. He spent most of his life unhappy, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized for his unpopular political views.

He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), when he traveled to Russia in 1931, hoping to write about the superior society under the rule of communism. He was horrified at what he found. He saw no lovers, no one laughing, no one enjoying themselves. The theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to talk to each other in the street. Everyone was miserable.

When he got home, he wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno. Most of the publishers at the time were communists themselves, and they turned their backs on Cummings for criticizing communist Russia. Many magazines refused to publish his poetry or review his books. But the attacks only made him more stubborn. He said, "To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

He tried to write a script for a ballet, but it was never performed. He tried writing for the movies in Hollywood, but found that he spent all his time painting humming birds and sunsets instead of working on screenplays. He had to borrow money from his parents and his friends. He said, "I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." A few years later, he decided to make some extra money by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him.

The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. Even though he suffered from terrible back pains, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden," he began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country. By the end of the 1950s he had become the most popular poet in America. He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last few years of his life were the happiest. He died on September 2, 1962.

In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. ... You and I are human beings; most people are snobs."

Frank McCourt 1930 - 2009

2011-11-09T14:20:00.004+01:00

The memoirist Frank McCourt, was 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 ten 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.

Source: Writer's Almanac

*" 'You had that miserable childhood, so you have something to write about. What are we gonna write about? All we do is get born, go to school, go on vacation, go to college, fall in love or something, graduate and go into some kind of profession, get married, have the 2.3 kids you're always talking about, send the kids to school, get divorced like 50 percent of the population, get fat, get the first heart attack, retire, die.' "

" 'Jonathan,' " McCourt replied, " 'that is the most miserable scenario of American life I've heard in a high school classroom. But you've supplied the ingredients for the great American novel. You've encapsulated the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald.' "

*“There were positive things about the church, that is, in the European cultural sense, the architecture, the liturgy, the music, the art, such as it was, the stations of the cross in the church, the tradition, and the atmosphere of awe and mystery in the mass. The atmosphere of miracle, one of mainly mystery, that's what fascinates me.”

* “The poverty and the influence of the church were very damaging. It damaged all of us emotionally. To be poor deprives you of self-esteem.”

* “Happiness is hard to recall. Its just a glow.”

* “I was tormented. Fear and trembling. And a sense of doom. A literal belief in hell. Hell for eternity. With devils chasing you for eternity with pitchforks. I trembled. I couldn't go to sleep for fear I might die and wake up in hell. I was in agony.”

*“When I first came to New York and saw Italian families and their displays of affection, I was taken aback a bit because it was uninhibited.”

*“We were just slogging on from day to day and making the best of it. But with a light at the end of the tunnel... AMERICA!”

*“Before the famine, which was in the 1840s, that was an emotional turning point... There are various documents showing how the Elizabethan English, in particular, were shocked by Irish displays of affection, by the way women acted toward strangers, walking up and putting their arms around them and kissing them right full on the mouth.”

* “All those smells... and the kids, we were the great unwashed... nobody ever knew what a shower was... We washed maybe from eyebrow to chin, week after week after week. Our crotches were innocent of water.”

*“We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.”

Haunted Houses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 –1882

2011-11-02T18:48:00.002+01:00

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.
[...]

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine (1807). He was the most popular poet in America during the nineteenth century. A number of his phrases, such as "ships that pass in the night," "the patter of little feet," and "I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I know not where" have become common sayings. Longfellow was one of the first American writers to use native themes. He wrote about the American scene and landscape. He wrote about the American Indian in "Song of Hiawatha," and about American history and tradition in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," "Evangeline," and, of course, "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." He taught modern languages at Bowdoin College, his alma mater and then at Harvard where he was quite a romantic figure, with flowing hair and yellow gloves and flowered waistcoats. Eventually, the success of his poems allowed to him to make a living for himself and his family. He became one of America's first writers to support himself through his own work.

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 – 1950 Sonnet: Love Is Not All

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Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

SHADOW.--A PARABLE by Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849

2011-11-02T09:33:00.002+01:00

SHADOW.--A PARABLE.

Yea! though I walk through the valley of the _Shadow_.

'Psalm of David'.

Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

The year had been a year of terror, and of feeling more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is enjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.

Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies, likewise in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets--but the boding and the memory of Evil, they would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account--things material and spiritual-- heaviness in the atmosphere--a sense of suffocation--anxiety--and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs--upon the household furniture--upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby--all things save only the flames of the seven iron lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way--which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon--which are madness; and drank deeply--although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead and at full length he lay, enshrouded;--the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such an interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teos. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies, where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefiled shadow--a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor God--neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entablature of the door and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was, if I remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, having seen the shadow as it came out from among the draperies, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow answered, "I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal." And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston (1809). He was the son of two actors, but both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allan had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices, and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house.

He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting. Eventually, he began to contribute poems and journalism to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."

He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.

But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread and molasses, and sold most of their belongings to the pawn shop.

It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest gothic horror stories in English literature, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Near the end of his wife's illness, he published the poem that begins,

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

It became his most famous poem: "The Raven."

*Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

*I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

*I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

*I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

*I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

*If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

*In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

*It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

I'm Crazy by: J. D. Salinger 1919 – 2010

2011-10-30T21:53:00.002+01:00

Collier's CXVI, December 22 1945, pages 36, 48, 51

IT WAS about eight o'clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered. I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym—shining big and bright and dumb, like the windows of a gymnasium, and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school).

I just had on my reversible and no gloves. Somebody had swiped my camel's hair the week before, and my gloves were in the pocket. Boy, I was cold. Only a crazy guy would have stood there. That's me. Crazy. No kidding, I have a screw loose. But I had to stand there to feel the goodby to the youngness of the place, as though I were an old man. The whole school was down below in the gym for the basketball game with the Saxon Charter slobs, and I was standing there to feel the goodby.

I stood there—boy, I was freezing to death—and I kept saying goodby to myself, "Good-by, Caulfield. Goodby, you slob." I kept seeing myself throwing a football around, with Buhler and Jackson, just before it got dark on the September evenings, and I knew I'd never throw a football around ever again with the same guys at the same time. It was as though Buhler and Jackson and I had done something that had died and been buried, and only I knew about it, and no one was at the funeral but me. So I stood there, freezing.

The game with the Saxon Charter slobs was in the second half, and you could hear everybody yelling: deep and terrific on the Pentey side of the gym, and scrawny and faggoty on the Saxon Charter side, because the Saxon bunch never brought more than the team with them and a few substitutes and managers. You could tell all right when Schutz or Kinsella or Tuttle had sunk one on the slobs, because then the Pentey side of the gym went crazy. But I only half cared who was winning. I was freezing and I was only there anyway to feel the goodby, to be at the funeral of me and Buhler and Jackson throwing a football around in the September evenings—and finally on one of the cheers I felt the goodby like a real knife, I was strictly at the funeral.

So all of a sudden, after it happened, I started running down Thomsen Hill, with my suitcases banging the devil out of my legs. I ran all the way down to the Gate; then I stopped and got my breath; then I ran across Route 202—it was icy and I fell and nearly broke my knee—and then I disappeared into Hessey Avenue. Disappeared. You disappeared every time you crossed a street that night. No kidding.

When I got to old Spencer's house—that's where I was going—I put down my bags on the porch, rang the bell hard and fast and put my hands on my ears—boy, they hurt. I started talking to the door. "C'mon, c'mon!" I said. "Open up. I'm freezing." Finally Mrs. Spencer came.

"Holden!" she said. "Come in, dear!" She was a nice woman. Her hot chocolate on Sundays was strictly lousy, but you never minded.

I got inside the house fast.

"Are you frozen to death? You must be soaking wet," Mrs. Spencer said. She wasn't the kind of woman that you could just be a little wet around: you were either real dry or soaking. But she didn't ask me what I was doing out of bounds, so I figured old Spencer had told her what happened.

I put down my bags in the hall and took off my hat—boy, I could hardly work my fingers enough to grab my hat. I said, "How are you, Mrs. Spencer? How's Mr. Spencer's grippe? He over it okay?"

"Over it!" Mrs. Spencer said. "Let me take your coat, dear. Holden, he's behaving like a perfect I-don't-know-what. Go right in, dear. He's in his room."

Old Spencer had his own room next to the kitchen. He was about sixty years old, maybe even older, but he got a kick out of things in a half-shot way. If you thought about old Spencer you wondered what he was living for, everything about over for him and all. But if you thought about him that way, you were thinking about him the wrong way: you were thinking too much. If you thought about him just enough, not too much, you knew he was doing all right for himself. In a half-shot way he enjoyed almost everything all the time. I enjoy things terrifically, but just once in a while. Sometimes it makes you think maybe old people get a better deal. But I wouldn't trade places. I wouldn't want to enjoy almost everything all the time if it had to be in just a half-shot way.

Old Spencer was sitting in the big easy chair in his bedroom, all wrapped up in the Navajo blanket he and Mrs. Spencer bought in Yellowstone Park about eighty years ago. They probably got a big bang out of buying it off the Indians.

"Come in, Caulfield!" old Spencer yelled at me. "Come in, boy!"

I went in.

THERE was an opened copy of the Atlantic Monthly face down on his lap, and pills all over the place and bottles and a hot-water bottle. I hate seeing a hot-water bottle, especially an old guy's. That isn't nice, but that's the way I feel...Old Spencer certainly looked beat out. He certainly didn't look like a guy who ever behaved like a perfect I-don't-know-what. Probably Mrs. Spencer just liked to think he was acting that way, as if she wanted to think maybe the old guy was still full of beans.

"I got your note, sir," I told him. "I would have come over anyway before I left. How's your grippe?"

"If I felt any better, boy, I'd have to send for the doctor," old Spencer said. That really knocked him out. "Sit down, boy," he said, still laughing. "Why in the name of Jupiter aren't you down at the game?"

I sat down on the edge of the bed. It sort of looked like an old guy's bed. I said, "Well, I was at the game a while, sir. But I'm going home tonight instead of tomorrow. Dr. Thurmer said I could go tonight if I really wanted to. So I'm going."

"Well, you certainly picked a honey of a night," old Spencer said. He really thought that over. "Going home tonight, eh?" he said.

"Yes, sir," I said.

He said to me, "What did Dr. Thurmer say to you, boy?"

"Well, he was pretty nice in his way, sir," I said. "He said about life being a game. You know. How you should play it by the rules and all. Stuff like that. He wished me a lot of luck. In the future and all. That kind of stuff."

I guess Thurmer really was pretty nice to me in his slobby way, so I told old Spencer a few other things Thurmer had said to me. About applying myself in life if I wanted to get ahead and all. I even made up some stuff, old Spencer was listening so hard and nodding all the while.

Then old Spencer asked me, "Have you communicated with your parents yet?"

"No, sir," I said. "I haven't communicated with them because I'll see them tonight."

Old Spencer nodded again. He asked me, "How will they take the news?"

"Well," I said, "they hate this kind of stuff. This is the third school I've been kicked out of. Boy! No kidding." I told him.

Old Spencer didn't nod this time. I was bothering him, poor guy. He suddenly lifted the Atlantic Monthly off his lap, as though it had got too heavy for him, and chucked it towards the bed. He missed. I got up and picked it up and laid it on the bed. All of a sudden I wanted to get the heck out of there.

Old Spencer said, "What's the matter with you, boy? How many subjects did you carry this term?"

"Four," I said.

"And how many did you flunk?" he said.

"Four," I said.

Old Spencer started staring at the spot on the rug where the Atlantic Monthly had fallen when he tried to chuck it on the bed. He said, "I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing. You were never once prepared, either for examinations or for daily recitations. Not once. I doubt if you opened your textbook once during the term; did you?"

I told him I'd glanced through it a couple of times, so's not to hurt his feelings. He thought history was really hot. It was all right with me if he thought I was a real dumb guy, but I didn't want him to think I'd given his book the freeze.

"Your exam paper is on my chiffonier over there," he said. "Bring it over here."

I went over and got it and handed it to him and sat down on the edge of the bed again.

Old Spencer handled my exam paper as though it were something catching that he had to handle for the good of science or something, like Pasteur or one of those guys.

He said, "We studied the Egyptians from November 3d to December 4th. You chose to write about them for the essay question, from a selection of twenty-five topics. This is what you had to say:

" `The Egyptians were an ancient race of people living in one of the northernmost sections of North Africa, which is one of the largest continents in the Eastern Hemisphere as we all know. The Egyptians are also interesting to us today for numerous reasons. Also, you read about them frequently in the Bible. The Bible is full of amusing anecdotes about the old Pharaohs. They were all Egyptians, as we all know'."

Old Spencer looked up at me. "New paragraph," he said. " `What is most interesting about the Egyptians was their habits. The Egyptians had many interesting ways of doing things. Their religion was also very interesting. They buried their dead in tombs in a very interesting way. The dead Pharaohs had their faces wrapped up in specially treated cloths to prevent their features from rotting. Even to this day physicians don't know what that chemical formula was, thus all our faces rot when we are dead for a certain length of time.' " Old Spencer looked over the paper at me again. I stopped looking at him. If he was going to look up at me every time he hit the end of a paragraph, I wasn't going to look at him.

" `There are many things about the Egyptians that help us in our everyday life,' " old Spencer said. Then he said: "The End." He put down my paper and chucked it towards the bed. He missed. The bed was only about two feet from his chair. I got up and put my exam paper on top of the Atlantic Monthly.

"Do you blame me for flunking you, boy?" old Spencer asked me. "What would you have done in my place?"

"The same thing," I said. "Down with the morons." But I wasn't giving it much thought at the minute. I was sort of wondering if the lagoon in Central Park would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was frozen over would everybody be ice skating when you looked out the window in the morning, and where did the ducks go, what happened to the ducks when the lagoon was frozen over. But I couldn't have told all that to old Spencer.

He asked me, "How do you feel about all this, boy?"

"You mean my flunking out and all, sir?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

Well, I tried to give it some thought because he was a nice guy and because he kept missing the bed all the time when he chucked something at it.

"Well, I'm sorry I'm flunking out, for lots of reasons," I said. I knew I could never really get it over to him. Not about standing on Thomsen Hill and thinking about Buhler and Jackson and me. "Some of the reasons would be hard to explain right off, sir," I told him. "But tonight, for instance, "I said. "Tonight I had to pack my bags and put my ski boots in them. The ski boots made me sorry I'm leaving. I could see my mother chasing around stores, asking the salesmen a million dumb questions. Then she bought me the wrong kind anyway. Boy, she's nice, though. No kidding. That's mostly why I'm sorry I'm flunking out. On account of my mother and the wrong ski boots." That's all I said. I had to quit.

OLD Spencer was nodding the whole time, as though he understood it all, but you couldn't tell whether he was nodding because he was going to understand anything I might tell him, or if he was only nodding because he was just a nice old guy with the grippe and a screwball on his hands.

"You'll miss the school, boy," he said to me.

He was a nice guy. No kidding. I tried to tell him some more. I said, "Not exactly, sir. I'll miss some stuff. I'll miss going and coming to Pentey on the train; going back to the dining car and ordering a chicken sandwich and a Coke, and reading five new magazines with all the pages slick and new. And I'll miss the Pentey stickers on my bag. Once a lady saw them and asked me if I knew Andrew Warbach. She was Warbach's mother, and you know Warbach, sir. Strictly a louse. He's the kind of a guy, when you were a little kid, that twisted your wrist to get the marbles out of your hand. But his mother was all right. She should have been in a nut house, like most mothers, but she loved Warbach. You could see in her nutty eyes that she thought he was hot stuff. So I spent nearly an hour on the train telling her what a hot shot Warbach is at school, how none of the guys ever make a move and all without going to Warbach first. It knocked Mrs. Warbach out. She nearly rolled in the aisle. She probably half knew he was a louse in her heart, but I changed her mind. I like mothers. They give me a terrific kick."

I stopped. Old Spencer wasn't following. Maybe he was a little bit, but not enough to make me want to get into it deep. Anyway, I wasn't saying much that I wanted to say. I never do. I'm crazy. No kidding.

Old Spencer said: "Do you plan to go to college, boy?"

"I have no plans, sir," I said. "I live from one day to the next." It sounded phony, but I was beginning to feel phony. I was sitting there on the edge of that bed too long. I got up suddenly.

"I guess I better go, sir," I said. "I have to catch a train. You've been swell. No kidding."

Well, old Spencer asked me if I didn't want a cup of hot chocolate before I left, but I said no thanks. I shook hands with him. He was sweating pretty much. I told him I'd write him a letter sometime, that he shouldn't worry about me, that he oughtn't to let me get him down. I told him that I knew I was crazy. He asked me if I were sure I didn't want any hot chocolate, that it wouldn't take long.

"No," I said, "goodby, sir. Take it easy with your grippe now."

"Yes," he said, shaking hands with me again. "Goodby, boy."

He called something after me while I was leaving, but I couldn't hear him. I think it was good luck. I really felt sorry for him. I knew what he was thinking: how young I was, how I didn't know anything about the world and all, what happened to guys like me and all. I probably got him down for a while after I left, but I'll bet later on he talked me over with Mrs. Spencer and felt better, and he probably had Mrs. Spencer hand him his Atlantic Monthly before she left the room.

It was after one that night when I got home, because I shot the bull for around a half-hour with Pete, the elevator boy. He was telling me all about his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law is a cop, and he shot a guy; he didn't need to, but he did it to be a big shot, and now Pete's sister didn't like to be around Pete's brother-in-law any more. It was tough. I didn't feel so sorry for Pete's sister, but I felt sorry for Pete's brother-in-law, the poor slob.

JEANNETTE, our colored maid, let me in. I lost my key somewhere. She was wearing one of those aluminum jobs in her hair, guaranteed to remove the kink.

"What choo doin' home, boy?" she said. "What choo doin' home, boy?" She says everything twice.

I was pretty sick and tired of people calling me "boy," so I just said, "Where are the folks?"

"They playin' bridge," she said. "They playin' bridge. What choo doin' home, boy?"

"I came home for the race," I said.

"What race?" the dope said.

"The human race. Ha, ha, ha," I said. I dropped my bags and coat in the hall and got away from her. I shoved my hat on the back of my head, feeling pretty good for a change, and walked down the hall and opened Phoebe and Viola's door. It was pretty dark, even with the door open, and I nearly broke my neck getting over to Phoebe's bed.

I sat down on her bed. She was asleep, all right.

"Phoebe," I said. "Hey, Phoebe!"

She waked up pretty easily.

"Holden!" she said anxiously. "What are you doing home? What's the matter? What happened?"

"Aah, the same old stuff," I said. "What's new?"

"Holdie, what are you doing home?" she said. She's only ten, but when she wants an answer she wants an answer.

"What's the matter with your arm?" I asked her. I noticed a hunk of adhesive tape on her arm.

"I banged it on the wardrobe doors," she said. "Miss Keefe made me Monitor of the Wardrobe. I'm in charge of everybody's garments." But she got right back to it again. "Holdie," she said, "what are you doing home?"

She sounds like a goody-good, but it was only when it came to me. That's because she likes me. She's no goody-good, though. Phoebe's strictly one of us, for a kid.

"I'll be back in a minute," I told her, and I went back in the living room and got some cigarettes out of one of the boxes, put them in my pocket; then I went back. Phoebe was sitting up straight, looking fine. I sat down on her bed again.

"I got kicked out again," I told her.

"Holden!" she said, "Daddy'll kill you."

"I couldn't help it, Phoeb," I said. "They kept shoving stuff at me, exams and all, and study periods, and everything was compulsory all the time. I was going crazy. I just didn't like it."

"But, Holden," Phoebe said, "you don't like anything." She really looked worried.

"Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Don't say that, Phoeb," I said. "I like a heck of a lot of stuff."

Phoebe said, "What? Name one thing."

"I don't know. Gosh, I don't know," I told her. "I can't think any more today. I like girls I haven't met yet; girls that you can just see the backs of their heads, a few seats ahead of you on the train. I like a million things. I like sitting here with you. No kidding, Phoeb. I like just sitting her with you."

"Go to bed, Viola," Phoebe said. Viola was up. "She squeezes right out through the bars," Phoebe told me.

I picked up Viola and sat her on my lap. A crazy kid if ever there was one, but strictly one of us.

"Holdie," Viola said, "make Jeannette give me Donald Duck."

"Viola insulted Jeannette, and Jeannette took away her Donald Duck," Phoebe said.

"Her breath is always all the time bad," Viola told me.

"Her breath," Phoebe said. "She told Jeannette her breath was bad. When Jeannette was putting on her leggings."

"Jeannette breathes on me all the time," Viola said, standing on me.

I asked Viola if she had missed me, but she looked as though she weren't sure whether or not I'd been away.

"Go on back to bed now, Viola," Phoebe said. "She squeezes right out through the bars."

"Jeannette breathes on me all the time and she took away Donald Duck," Viola told me again.

"Holden'll get it back," Phoebe told her. Phoebe wasn't like other kids. She didn't take sides with the maid.

I GOT up and carried Viola back to her crib and put her in it. She asked me to bring her something, but I couldn't understand her.

"Ovvels," Phoebe said. "Olives. She's crazy about olives now. She wants to eat olives all the time. She rang the elevator bell when Jeannette was out this afternoon and had Pete open up a can of olives for her."

"Ovvels," Viola said. "Bring ovvels, Holdie."

"Okay," I said.

"With the red in them," Viola said.

I told her okay, and said to go to sleep. I tucked her in, then I started to go back where Phoebe was, only I stopped so short it almost hurt. I heard them come in.

"That's them!" Phoebe whispered. "I can hear Daddy!"

I nodded, and walked toward the door. I took off my hat.

"Holdie!" Phoebe whispered at me. "Tell `em how sorry you are. All that stuff. And how you'll do better next time!"

I just nodded.

"Come back!" Phoebe said. "I'll stay awake!"

I went out and shut the door. I wished I had hung up my coat and put away my bags. I knew they'd tell me how much the coat cost and how people tripped over bags and broke their necks.

When they were all done with me I went back to the kids' room. Phoebe was asleep, and I watched her awhile. Nice kid. Then I went over to Viola's crib. I lifted her blanket and put her Donald Duck in there with her; then I took some olives I had in my left hand and laid them on by one in a row along the railing of her crib. One of them fell on the floor. I picked it up, felt dust on it, and put it in my jacket pocket. Then I left the room.

I went into my own room, turned the radio on, but it was broken. So I went to bed.

I lay awake for a pretty long time, feeling lousy. I knew everybody was right and I was wrong. I knew that I wasn't going to be one of those successful guys, that I was never going to be like Edward Gonzales or Theodore Fisher or Lawrence Meyer. I knew that this time when Father said that I was going to work in that man's office that he meant it, that I wasn't going back to school again ever, that I wouldn't like working in an office. I started wondering again where the ducks in Central Park went when the lagoon was frozen over, and finally I went to sleep.

Metaphysics: A Poem by Allen Ginsberg

2011-10-27T07:29:00.000+02:00

This is the one and only

firmament; therefore

it is the absolute world.

There is no other world.

The circle is complete.

I am living in Eternity.

The ways of this world

are the ways of Heaven.

Your world is as big as you make it

2011-10-26T23:13:00.001+02:00

Your world is as big as you make it
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner
My wings pressing close to my side
But I sighted the distant horizon
Where the sky-line encircled the sea
And I throbbed with a burning desire
To travel this immensity
I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!"

~ Georgia Douglas Johnson, 1886-1966

Allen Ginsberg 1926 – 1997

2011-10-26T21:00:00.005+02:00

IN DEATH, CANNOT REACH
WHAT IS MOST NEAR

We know all about death that
we will ever know because
we have all experienced
the state before birth.
Life seems a passage between
two doors to the darkness.
Both are the same and truly
eternal, and perhaps it may
be said that we meet in
darkness. The nature of time
is illuminated by this
meeting of eternal ends.

It is amazing to think that
thought and personality
of man is perpetuated in
time after his passage
to eternity. And one time
is all Time if you look
at it out of the grave.

New York Mid- 1949

________
Allen Ginsberg, was born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His poem "Howl" is said to have turned America from the 1950s into the 1960s overnight. It begins:
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…"
He got a job in marketing in New York and then in San Francisco. He was working in advertising in San Francisco when in 1954, after getting his psychotherapist's approval, Ginsberg decided to cut loose, quit his job, and devote himself "to writing and contemplation, to Blake and smoking pot, and doing whatever I wanted."
Howl and Other Poems was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's newly established City Lights press in 1956. For publishing Ginsberg's poetry book, Ferlinghetti was put on trial, charged with obscenity. The publicity greatly boosted sales of Howl and made Ginsberg famous.
Many agree that Ginsberg's best poem is "Kaddish." He wrote most of it in one 40-hour sitting, an epic elegy for his mother who had suffered from mental illness all of Ginsberg's life and who died in a psychiatric hospital on Long Island in 1956. Ginsberg's mother had been a devoted Communist. In high school, he would ride the bus across town with his mother, going with her to her therapy appointments. Paranoia was one of her diagnosed illnesses. Shortly before she passed away, Ginsberg had signed the authorization for her lobotomy. Two days after she died, Ginsberg received a letter in the mail from her that said, "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window — I have the key — get married Allen don't take drugs. … Love, your mother."
The poem for his mother, fully entitled "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)," begins:
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after —"
He became a devout Buddhist. As Ginsberg got older, his poetry became less shocking and more toned down, and after decades of publishing with small independent publishers, he signed, in the early 1980s, a six-book contract with Harper & Row for $160,000. The first book to come out under that contract was an 800-page edition of his Collected Poems 1947–1980, published in 1984. In 1994, he sold his archives, made up of journals, various photographs, and personal letters, as well as some old articles of clothing and fresh trimmings of his beard, to Stanford University for a million dollars. Ginsberg gave readings up until a few months before he died in 1997, from liver cancer, at the age of 70.
Ginsberg said, "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

Source: The Writer's Almanac

Tennessee Williams 1911 – 1983

2011-10-26T19:23:00.005+02:00

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi (1914). He's the author of the plays The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). He was extremely close to his sister Rose; the siblings were rarely apart, and the family cook called them "the couple." When Tom was seven and Rose was nine, the family moved from the Mississippi Delta to a tenement apartment in St. Louis. The filth and noise of the city shocked them. Their mother forced Rose out into society, where she suffered a series of humiliations. After she had a mental breakdown she was institutionalized, and her parents forced her to undergo a lobotomy. Tennessee Williams once said, "I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further-for time is the longest distance between two places.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Security is a kind of death.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

Turn that off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare! A Streetcar Named Desire

Blanch: I don't want realism.
Mitch: Naw, I guess not.
Blanch: I'll tell you what I want. Magic! A Streetcar Named Desire

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?-I wish I knew...Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Make voyages! - Attempt them! - there's nothing else... Camino Real

Brick: Well, they say nature hates a vacuum, Big Daddy.
Big Daddy: That's what they say, but sometimes I think that a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

We have to distrust each other. It's our only defence against betrayal.Camino Real

2011-10-26T19:17:00.000+02:00

Walt Whitman

2011-10-26T11:41:00.002+02:00

This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman

2011-10-26T11:26:00.001+02:00

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
"This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass.

____________________________

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
from Song of Myself

46

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never
will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the
pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and
satisfied then?
And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes I kiss you with
a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of
your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly
dash with your hair.

Reverie and Invocation by William Carlos Williams1883 – 1963

2011-10-19T22:22:00.005+02:00

Whether the rain comes down
or there be sunny days
the sleets of January or the haze
of autumn afternoons, when
we dream of our youth our gaze
grows mellow, wise man or fool,
we were young, the future
beckoned us.

Now we grow old and grey
and all we knew is forgotten
there comes alive in
the ash of today, memory! a god
who revives us! the apple trees
we climbed as a boy
the caress on our necks of
a summer breeze.

Come back and give us
those days when passion drove us
to break every rule.
We weren't bad, but good!
May our preachers find us
the courage still to sin so
and win so! and win so!
a life everlasting.

_______________________________________________________________

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

____________

* “We sit and talk quietly,
with long lapses of silence,
and I am aware of the stream that has no language,
coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.”

*“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

*“As the rain falls
so does
your love

bathe every
open
object of the world”

*“Time is a storm in which we are all lost.”

*“Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.”

*“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”

*“Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.”

*“It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.”

*“The only realism in art is of the imagination.”

*“At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.”

*“There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.”

Mark Twain 1835–1910

2011-10-19T19:57:00.010+02:00

The man who wrote under the name Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri (1835). He's best known to us today for his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but in his own lifetime his best-selling books were his travel books, such as Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Life on the Mississippi (1883).

He spent most of his life traveling. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and he loved observing the people who flowed in from the river: the gamblers, confidence men, boat captains, pioneers, and slave traders. He traveled east to try to make a living as a printer, but eventually came back to Missouri and took a job as an apprentice pilot on a riverboat. He would later say that his years working on the Mississippi River were his happiest.

When Civil War broke out — and tied up traffic on the river — Clemens followed his brother west to Nevada. He rode out on a stagecoach. While his brother worked for the governor, Clemens loafed around, drinking and playing poker all night long. He tried his hand at mining, but it was hard work and he didn't like it. He was running out of money, so he started writing freelance stories for the Territorial Enterprise. They offered him a full-time job and he moved to Virginia City, Nevada.

He was supposed to cover the mining industry for the newspaper, but he found that he preferred writing about accidents, street fights, barroom shootings, and parties. Virginia City was a rough town. Clemens interrupted one of his letters to his mother to write, "I have just heard five pistol shots down the street. ... I will go and see about it." It turned out that two policemen had been murdered a few blocks away.

He had always written entertaining letters to his family, and he treated his newspaper work like those letters: humorous, exaggerated, entertaining, but always conversational. He took the name "Mark Twain" from his riverboat experience. The phrase "Mark Twain" means two fathoms deep, which for a riverboat captain is just deep enough water to navigate.

In 1867, Clemens persuaded a San Francisco newspaper to send him on a steamboat pleasure cruise to Europe, and he got paid 20 dollars for each letter he sent home. Those letters brought him significant recognition, and in 1868 he published them in a book called Innocents Abroad, and that was the book that made him famous.

Clemens wrote about his travels in Europe, his travels in the West, and his boating days on the Mississippi. But some of the most beautiful passages in his writing come from his descriptions of Huckleberry Finn traveling down the river with Jim. He wrote, "It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim said the moon could a LAID them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest."

It the middle of writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Clemens decided he needed to do some research on his hometown, so he traveled back to Hannibal, Missouri, for the first time since he was a teenager. It was the most depressing trip of his life, because all the romanticized ideas about the place where he'd grown up were shattered. He met old women who had been just young girls when he was a child. He saw how poverty-stricken the townspeople were.

Samuel Clemens said, "The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven."

*Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

*Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

*All generalizations are false, including this one.

*All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

*Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

*“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

*“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

*“Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”

*The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

*Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work.

*Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

*Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.

*Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Robert Frost ( 1874–1963)

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Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost ( 1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He cultivated the image of a rural New England poet with a pleasant disposition, but Frost's personal life was full of tragedy and he suffered from dark depressions.
He graduated from high school at the top of his class but dropped out of Dartmouth after a semester and tried to convince his high school co-valedictorian, Elinor White, to marry him immediately. She refused and insisted on finishing college first. They did marry after she graduated, and it was a union that would be filled with losses and feelings of alienation. Their first son died from cholera at age three; Frost blamed himself for not calling a doctor earlier and believed that God was punishing him for it. His health declined, and his wife became depressed. In 1907, they had a daughter who died three days after birth, and a few years later Elinor had a miscarriage. Within a couple years, his sister Jeanie died in a mental hospital, and his daughter Marjorie, of whom he was extremely fond, was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Marjorie died a slow death after getting married and giving birth, and a few years later, Frost's wife died from heart failure. His adult son, Carol, had become increasingly distraught, and Frost went to visit him and to talk him out of suicide. Thinking the crisis had passed, he returned home, and shortly afterward his son shot himself. He also had to commit his daughter Irma to a mental hospital.
And through all of this, Robert Frost still became one of the most famous poets in the United States. He said, "A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word."
And, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

Bob Dylan May 24, 1941

2011-10-12T21:55:00.002+02:00

Trust Yourself

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best.

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to do what's right and not be second-guessed.

Don't trust me to show you beauty

When beauty may only turn to rust.

If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to know the way that will prove true in the end.

Trust yourself,

Trust yourself to find the path where there is no if and when.

Don't trust me to show you the truth

When the truth may only be ashes and dust.

If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

Well, you're on your own, you always were,

In a land of wolves and thieves.

Don't put your hope in ungodly man

Or be a slave to what somebody else believes.

Trust yourself

And you won't be disappointed when vain people let you down.

Trust yourself

And look not for answers where no answers can be found.

Don't trust me to show you love

When my love may be only lust.

If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940

2011-10-12T21:40:00.001+02:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896). In April of 1920, at the age of 23, he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which made him an overnight sensation. A week later, he married his sweetheart, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre, in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. They were young and beautiful, and they were emblems of the Jazz Age, a name Fitzgerald himself had coined. Dorothy Parker said they looked "as though they had just stepped out of the sun." By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart—Zelda had her first nervous breakdown in 1930. The changes that came with the Great Depression made F. Scott Fitzgerald seem like ancient history, along with everything else from the "Roaring Twenties." He had written about the lives of the rich, and now he remained associated with them and had fallen out of favor. His books, including The Great Gatsby (1925), did not sell well. In 1929, the Saturday Evening Post paid him $4,000 per story, but his total royalties on seven books that year were only $31.77.

In 1932, as the Great Depression was approaching its worst point, Fitzgerald was living in New York, a city that he loved. He said, "New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." One evening he did what a lot of New Yorkers did that year—he went to the top of the newly built Empire State Building. He wrote about it in his essay "My Lost City": "Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

After The Great Gatsby, it took Fitzgerald nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night. When it came out in 1934, it got a mixed reaction. In the spring of 1936 he was broke, looking for advances from Esquire magazine, but the editor told him he'd have to write something, anything, just to show the accountants. So Fitzgerald looked at his problems, his situation as a writer, and wrote a series of personal essays called "The Crack-Up," about what it was like to hit bottom. The essays were shocking; it was a time when people didn't air their own dirty laundry in public. Fitzgerald's writer friends—Hemingway, Maxwell Perkins, John Dos Passos—didn't understand why he would expose himself in that way. But "The Crack-Up" not only put Fitzgerald's name back out in front of the public, it also paved the way for a new confessional style in American writing. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again." Fitzgerald 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 alone sells about 300,000 copies a year.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

That was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton ... . However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/diamond/diamond.html

“FOR YOU DEMOCRACY by WALT WHITMAN

2011-10-05T21:58:00.000+02:00

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of Amerca,
and along he shores of the great lakes, and all over the praries,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

What a nice word

2011-10-05T20:30:00.004+02:00

bandersnatch

\BAN-der-snach\ , noun;

An imaginary wild animal of fierce disposition.

A person of uncouth or unconventional habits, attitudes, etc., especially one considered a menace, nuisance, or the like.

druthers

\DRUHTH-erz\ , noun;

"You mean if I had my druthers? Why, if I had mydruthers I'd druther eat speckledly gravy," Dove assured him.

-- Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

"Like I say, I think George would go right on living in the house if he had his druthers," Judy Diment said.

-- Stephen King, Everything's Eventual

Origin:

Druthers comes from a jocular American English formation of the phrase "I'd ruther" meaning "I'd rather."

Game by Maxine Kumin

2011-10-05T12:13:00.003+02:00

Before he died

Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
gunned down in Sarajevo
to jump-start World War I,
bragged he had shot three
thousand stags and a miscellany
of foxes, geese, wolves, and boars
driven toward him by beaters,
stout men he ordered to flush
creatures from their cover
into his sights, a tradition
the British aristocracy
carried on, further aped
by rich Americans
from Teddy R. to Ernest H.,
something Supreme
Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, pudgy son of Sicilian
immigrants, indulged in
when, years later, he had
scores of farm-raised birds
beaten from their cages and scared
up for him to shoot down
which brought him an inner joy.
What happened
to him when he was a boy?

Maxine Kumin (born June 6, 1925) is an American poet and author.

Jack Kerouac March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969

2011-10-05T11:56:00.002+02:00

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the author of On the Road (1957), a book that brought him instant fame and labels like "King of the Beats" and "the voice of a generation." Writers Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing. And songwriter Bob Dylan said about On the Road: "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."

Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kirouac to French-Canadian immigrants, and he didn't learn to speak English until grade school. He was a star athlete; he ran the 100-meter hurdles and played running back on the football team at Columbia University. He ended up dropping out of Columbia but staying in New York, with his girlfriend Edie Parker, who years later said of him:

"He seemed immediately larger than life. He just didn't look like anyone in New York. He had a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair. He looked like he had just walked in from the woods. ... As he often was, Jack was dead broke the night I met him."

During that time in New York, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement. It was with Neal Cassady that he would take the momentous cross-country road trip in a Cadillac limousine in 1949, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke, the trip that would form the backbone of his book On the Road.

The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they'd fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn't have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.

But there's a bit more to the story. For almost a decade, Kerouac had been keeping careful, meticulously detailed journals — notebooks full of them — about his cross-country travels, and much of the material in his journals appear in his first manuscript. And though he did sit down and have a three-week marathon session in which much of the first draft was produced in 1951, it was not until 1957 that the book was published. In those intervening years, Kerouac was constantly revising the book, trying to please publishers, who kept rejecting his manuscript. One publisher who rejected the book wrote, "His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so."

Kerouac replaced the real names of his friends with pseudonyms (publishers feared libel suits) and he removed sexually explicit passages (publishers feared obscenity charges; this was beforeGinsberg's Howl trial), and Kerouac added various literary touches and rewrote sections of the book.

And scholars have recently discovered that Kerouac had in the early 1950s written another book about his travels on the road that had never been published. It was written in a French dialect called joual that Kerouac grew up speaking, and is called Sur le Chemin, which translates to "On the Road." An additional unpublished French-language novel written by Kerouac has been found. It's entitled La nuit est ma femme.

And just last year, the curator of the Kerouac Archives at the New York Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, published a 75-page book detailing Jack Kerouac's little-known obsession with fantasy baseball, called Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats(2009). Throughout his early life, Gewirtz explains, Kerouac created elaborate teams, players, and games. Kerouac gave his players names like Wino Love, Heinie Twiett, Warby Pepper, Phegus Cody, and his teams got names like the Cincinnati Blacks and the New York Chevvies. He meticulously recorded their exploits on index cards.

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote: "... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" (less)

Original name Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac

*The beat generation.

*All of life is a foreign country.

*This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

*The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957

*The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”

*I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

* I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

*My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

*Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.

*Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

*What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

*All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

*Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

*Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk- real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

*What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

*No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

*Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

*Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

*...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...

*Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

*Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

*Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

*We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

*...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...

*Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.

*It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Jack Kerouac quote

*Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”

*I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

° Beat Movement:

developed in the second half of the 1950's. It was launched by a group of poets and novelists who shared a set of attitudes-anti-establishment, anti-intellectual-opposed to the reigning political, moral and cultural values of the post-World War era and claiming self-expression and self-realization. "Beat" alludes to "beaten down" ( by the values of the time), to "beatitudes"

(reached in esoteric or Eastern religions, or drug-induced visionary experiences), or to the "beat" of jazz music. Main poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; main novelists: William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

Barter by Sara Teasdale 1884–1933

2011-09-28T20:25:00.003+02:00

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like the curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Sara was born in St. Louis (1884). She grew up in a wealthy family. Her mother was 40 when Sara came along, and her parents had not planned to have another child. They doted on their daughter, and were always anxious about her — if she had even a mild cold she was put in bed for days. So Sara grew up thinking of herself as sickly, even an invalid, when in reality she was probably no sicker than the average child. She didn't go to school until the age of nine because her parents thought she was too delicate. Her three brothers and sisters were all in their teens when she was born, and she wasn't allowed outside to play with other children. She was often lonely, and she made up stories and poems to amuse herself.

She attended a series of girls' schools, and eventually began to submit poems for publication. Her parents paid for the publication of her first book, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907).She received enough positive feedback to continue writing, and she eventually became a well-loved poet. Her collection Rivers to the Sea (1915) was a best-seller, and Love Songs (1917) won several major awards, including the award that would become known as the Pulitzer Prize.

Despite her success, Teasdale remained insecure and convinced that she was frail. Her marriage to a wealthy St. Louis businessman fell apart. In 1931, an old suitor, the poet Vachel Lindsay, killed himself. Teasdale was devastated. In 1933, she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills; later that year her collection Strange Victory was published.

William Henry Davies 1871- 1940 was a Welsh poet and writer

2011-09-28T12:17:00.002+02:00

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

A Farm-Picture

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Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.

THROUGH the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding;
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away

John Steinbeck 1902–1968

2011-09-28T11:34:00.002+02:00

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California (1902). He is the author of the epic novel The Grapes Of Wrath (1939), and also Of Mice and Men (1937).
Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford in 1919, but he did so only to please his parents. He dropped in and out of the university for six years, only taking classes he thought were interesting, and he never finished a degree. Then he worked construction and tried to make it as a reporter in New York City, but he disliked that job and returned to California. Then, Steinbeck became a caretaker for an estate near Lake Tahoe. The job lasted for three years, and it was during this time that he wrote many drafts of what would become his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
Steinbeck's most productive period as a writer was the 1930s. He wrote several books, including the two for which he is most famous today, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His wife edited his prose, typed his manuscripts and suggested titles, which may explain why Steinbeck was so productive and successful. When The Grapes of Wrath was first published, the first printing of nearly 20,000 copies sold out quickly, and by May the book was selling 10,000 copies per week. Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel the following year.
As he grew older, Steinbeck became increasingly jaded by what he saw as American greed and waste. So he traveled across the country in a camper truck and then wrote the book Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), where he celebrated what he found so admirable about his country: its individuals.
John Steinbeck said, "A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."

*I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

*It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, aquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and selfinterest are the traits of sucess. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.

*It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

*Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

*No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

*As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.

*Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

*A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

*I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

*This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

O·res·te·ia

2011-09-04T17:15:00.000+02:00

a trilogy of tragic dramas (458 b.c.) by Aeschylus, consisting ofthe Agamemnon, the Choëphori, and the Eumenides.

Time. Time. What is time?

2011-08-21T19:01:00.002+02:00

Time. Time. What is time?
The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it.
The Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is a crook.

From: Beat the Devil a 1953 film directed by John Huston and co-authored by Huston and Truman Capote

— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

2011-08-17T22:06:00.000+02:00

"I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights."

As time goes by

2011-07-31T23:18:00.001+02:00

You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is still (just) a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

And when two lovers woo
They still say: "i love you"
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

Moonlight and love songs - never out of date
Hearts full of passion - jealousy and hate
Woman needs man - and man must have his mate
That no one can deny

It’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

I cheated myself

2011-07-28T18:25:00.002+02:00

Meet you downstairs in the bar and heard your rolled up sleeves and your skull t-shirt You say why did you do it with him today? and sniff me out like I was Tanqueray cause you're my fella, my guy hand me your stella and fly by the time I'm out the door you tear men down like Roger Moore I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya, I was trouble you know that I'm no good Upstairs in bed, with my ex boy, he’s in the place, but I can't get joy, thinking on you in the final throes, this is when my buzzer goes run out to meet your chips and bitter you say when we married cause you're not bitter there'll be none of him no more I cried for you on the kitchen floor I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya, I was trouble you know that I'm no good sweet reunion, Jamaica and Spain we're like how we were again I'm in the tub, you on the seat lick your lips as I soak my feet then you notice little carpet burn my stomach drop and my guts churn you shrug and its the worst who truly stuck the knife in first I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya I was trouble, you know that I'm no good I cheated myself, like I knew I would I told ya I was trouble, yeah ya know that I'm no good

No,No,No!

2011-07-26T09:07:00.003+02:00

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been bad but when I come back you'll know know know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

I'd rather be at home with ray
I ain't got seventy days
Cuz there's nothing
There's nothing you can teach me
That I can't learn from mr hathaway

I didn't get a lot in class
But I know it don't come in a shot glass

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been black but when I come back you'll know know know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

The man said 'why do you think you here'
I said 'I got no idea'
'I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my baby
So I always keep a bottle near'
He said 'I just think your depressed,
This me "Yeah, baby, and the rest"

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know...

I don't never wanna drink again
I just ooooh I just need a friend
I'm not gonna spend ten weeks
Have everyone think I'm on the mend

It's not just my pride
It's just til these tears have dried

They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said 'no no no'
Yes I've been black, but when I come back you'll know know know
I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine
They tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Cuckoo Clock

2011-05-15T10:25:00.001+02:00

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

2011-05-05T09:41:00.001+02:00

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Dorothy Parker quotations

2011-04-07T10:29:00.002+02:00

*By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is infinite, undying-

Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

*I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
After four I'm under my host

*Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it;
What earthy good can come of it?

*Love is like quicksilver in the hand.
Leave the fingers open and it stays.
Clutch it, and it darts away

The Dismantled Ship by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

2011-04-07T08:46:00.000+02:00

In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor'd near the shore,
An old, dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled, done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up at last and
hawser'd tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.

Emily Dickinson Quotes

2011-04-06T23:16:00.004+02:00

iPoem by George Bilgere 1951-

2011-04-06T22:22:00.001+02:00

Someone's taken a bite
from my laptop's glowing apple,
the damaged fruit of our disobedience,
of which we must constantly be reminded.

There's the fatal crescent,
the dark smile
of Eve, who never dreamed of a laptop,
who, in fact, didn't even have clothes,
or anything else for that matter,

which was probably the nicest thing
about the Garden, I'm thinking,
as I sit here in the café
with my expensive computer,
afraid to get up even for a minute
in order to go to the bathroom
because someone might steal it

in this fallen world she invented
with a single bite
of an apple nobody, and I mean
nobody,
was going to tell her not to eat.

Bernard Malamud 1914 –1986

2011-04-06T22:12:00.004+02:00

Novelist Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and they struggled to survive on the income from a tiny grocery store. He fell in love with movies when he was a kid, especially Charlie Chaplin movies, and found that he enjoyed retelling the plots of those movies to his classmates. He wanted to write, but he graduated from college in the middle of the Depression, and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time.
Having discovered what he wanted to write about, Malamud decided to find a job that would give him more time for writing. So he applied for a position teaching freshman composition at Oregon State College. And it was there, thousands of miles away from his hometown in Brooklyn, that Malamud began to write stories mixing Jewish mysticism with his memories of people from his old neighborhood. They would eventually become the stories in his first collection, The Magic Barrel (1958). (less)

Essays of Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

2011-04-05T10:01:00.000+02:00

Of Studies

STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study 197 the lawyers’ cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.

Walt Whitman May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892

2011-03-31T10:52:00.003+02:00

*A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

*A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

*After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.

*All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

*And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

*And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.

*And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

*And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

*Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

*Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

*Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.

*Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.

*Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

*Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

*Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

*He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

*Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.

The Armful by Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

2011-03-28T22:00:00.002+02:00

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Robert Frost
Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Dorothy Parker 1893 – 1967

2011-03-28T20:54:00.003+02:00

What Have I Got to Complain About

2011-03-24T09:06:00.003+01:00

David Wolk Budbill 1940-

We've got enough money now not to worry every minute
about where the next dollar is coming from.
We even go to the movies once in a while.
We've got a nice collection of friends.
Our house is sturdy and well built.
It keeps us warm and stands well against the storms.
The larder is full of rice.
There are plenty of potatoes down cellar.
The freezer is full of vegetables I grew myself.

In the face of all that, slights to my vanity
seem frivolous and nonsensical.

What have I got to complain about?

E.B. White 1899 – 1985

2011-03-22T10:09:00.004+01:00

The essayist and children's writer E.B. White, was born Elwin Brooks White in Mount Vernon, New York (1899).
After college, he had a few gigs as a journalist, taking time in between to travel across the country with a friend in a Model T and to work on a cruise ship in Alaska. Then he moved back to New York, and he picked up The New Yorker the year it came out, liked it, and sent some pieces in. He was a regular contributor and a couple of years later became a staff member. He married Katharine Angell, an editor at the magazine.
After 11 years in the city, they moved to a farmhouse in rural Maine. White kept writing for The New Yorker, but he also started publishing a monthly essay in Harper's called "One Man's Meat," about his experience with rural life. He especially liked to write about the animals he kept on his farm.
E.B. White had 18 nephews and nieces, and they were always asking him to tell stories. He wasn't very good at thinking up stories on the spot, so he started working on a children's book so that he would always have a story on hand. He had gotten the idea years before — as he remembered it, "I took a train to Virginia, got out, walked up and down in the Shenandoah Valley in the beautiful springtime, then returned to New York by rail. While asleep in an upper berth, I dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing. When I woke up, being a journalist and thankful for small favors, I made a few notes about this mouse-child — the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep." So he slowly collected more and more stories about the mouse-child, and after about 15 years he had a real manuscript, and his wife suggested that he send it to a publisher. He did, and that book was Stuart Little (1945), which begins: "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse."
After a young pig he was raising got sick and he failed to save its life, he wrote one of his most famous essays, "Death of a Pig." Then he wrote a children's novel in which the pig doesn't have to die: Charlotte's Web (1952). It's the story of a runt pig named Wilbur who is saved the first time by a little girl and the second time by a wise spider, and it was inspired by White's observations of the animals on his farm, including the spiders. It is one of the best-selling children's books of all time.
E.B. White said, "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." (less)

Prayer for Our Daughters by: Mark Jarman 1952-

2011-03-17T10:29:00.006+01:00

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven't written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can't see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we've stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
(Except the last, which doesn't bear repeating)
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

_______
A Prayer for my Daughter William Butler Yeats 1865–1939

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Helpless

2011-03-17T10:21:00.001+01:00

by: Neil Young, 1945-

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless.

Was a Man by Philip Booth 1925- 2007

2011-03-16T20:01:00.005+01:00

Was a man, was a two-
faced man, pretended
he wasn't who he was,
who, in a men's room,
faced his hung-over
face in a mirror hung
over the towel rack.
The mirror was cracked.
Shaving close in that
looking glass, he nicked
his throat, bled blue
blood, grabbed a new
towel to patch the wrong
scratch, knocked off
the mirror and, facing
himself, almost intact,
in final terror hung
the wrong face back.

_________

Emily Dickinson 1830 –1886

Heart, we will forget him,
You and I, tonight!
You must forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.

When you have done pray tell me,
Then I, my thoughts, will dim.
Haste! ‘lest while you’re lagging
I may remember him!

Ernest Miller Hemingway 1899 – 1961

2011-03-16T19:46:00.003+01:00

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). As a young man, he wanted to fight in World War I, but he had bad eyesight so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Only one month after he started, he was passing out chocolates to Italian soldiers on the frontlines and got hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent several weeks in the hospital, where he started suffering from insomnia. He couldn't sleep without a light on for fear that he might die in the night. He traveled back to his parents' home, still recuperating from his injury. He walked around with a cane, read everything he could get his hands on, and taught his sisters Italian swear words. He was a small town war hero, and often spoke at schools and social clubs about his experience in the war. He always passed around his bloodstained, shrapnel-torn trousers. In a letter to a friend he wrote, "They've tried to make a hero out of me here. But you know and I know that all the real heroes are dead." Hemingway continued living with his parents for months, occasionally hunting and fishing with friends. He wrote a few adventure stories about the war and sent them to the Saturday Evening Post, but they were rejected. His parents accused him of "sponging," told him to get a real job, and his mother finally threw him out of the house when he was twenty-one. He got married, moved to Paris, and started hanging out with writers like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. He was forced to begin over again when he lost a suitcase that carried every manuscript and every copy of every manuscript he had written so far in Paris. Hemingway tried to write as simply and objectively as possible, using very few adjectives or adverbs. After he published For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, he began to struggle with his writing, worrying that he was repeating himself. He worked for years on a huge manuscript, and finally published just a small part of it as The Old Man and the Sea (1953), about a fisherman who catches a huge fish, only to have it eaten by sharks before he can get home. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, and a year later Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ernest Hemingway said, "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

Blowing In The Wind

2011-03-10T10:56:00.000+01:00

How many roads must a man walk down,
before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove fly,
before she sleeps in the sand?
And how many times must a cannon ball fly,
before they're forever banned?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist,
before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist,
before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head,
and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many times must a man look up,
before he sees the sky?
And how many ears must one man have,
before he can hear people cry ?
And how many deaths will it take till we know,
that too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

Three Perfect Days by Linda Pastan 1932-

2011-03-09T20:34:00.003+01:00

In the middle seat of an airplane,
between an overweight woman
whose arm takes over the armrest
and a man immersed in his computer game,

I am reading the inflight magazine
about three perfect days somewhere: Kyoto
this time, but it could be anywhere—
Madagascar or one of the Virgin Islands.

There is always the perfect hotel
where at breakfast the waiter smiles
as he serves an egg as perfectly coddled
as a Spanish Infanta.

There are walks over perfect bridges—their spans
defying physics—and visits to zoos
where rain is forbidden,
and no small child is ever bored or crying.

I would settle now for just one perfect day
anywhere at all, a day without
mosquitoes, or traffic, or newspapers
with their headlines.

A day without any kind of turbulence—
certainly not this kind, as the pilot tells us
to fasten our seatbelts, and even
the flight attendants look nervous.

____

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

Frank Tibolt

Personal by Irene McKinney (1939 - )

2011-03-09T20:21:00.002+01:00

None of this is personal, not the way you'd think.
The moon keeps on traveling and I can see it
from my balcony each night and each night
different but it's not my own, not like we want

things to be our very own. But it sways me
nevertheless and stands in for certain losses
and gains and for even that much I'm grateful.
I stand at the back door and stare.

Norman Mailer 1923–2007

2011-03-09T20:12:00.004+01:00

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), considered one of the best novels about World War II, and helped found The Village Voice, an independent weekly newspaper in New York City. He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.

Mailer was considered very bright as a young boy, and he had so much energy that it was necessary to keep him occupied at all times. According to a story, one summer Mailer's mother handed her son a pad and paper and said, "Here, write something." He wrote his first story at 10 years old. It was called "The Martian Invasion" and reached 35,000 words in length.

Mailer entered Harvard University when he was just sixteen, where he studied aeronautical engineering. He also wrote a short story called "The Greatest Thing in the World," which won Story magazine's undergraduate prize, and he also wrote a lot of fiction in the style of Ernest Hemingway.

Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 and found himself in the Army, fighting in World War II, less than a year later. He served as a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains and, while there, got the idea for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. He wrote that novel after he was discharged, and it made him famous.

Norman Mailer said, "The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."

Mailer was also interested in journalism, and in 1954 he helped foundThe Village Voice, and wrote a weekly column for a short time. Mailer was also one of the first to write in the style of "new journalism," which mixes autobiography with journalism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his "new journalism" book The Armies of the Night (1968), a personalized account of the 1967 march on Washington, D.C., which Mailer participated in and was arrested for. Mailer has also written "interpretive biographies" of such people as Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Pablo Picasso.

And he said, "Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

*A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

*Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

*America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

*Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

*Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

*Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

*Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

*God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

*Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.

*Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

*I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

*I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.

*I hate everything which is not in myself.

*If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

*In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

*It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.

The Golden Speech was delivered by Queen Elizabeth I of England to 141 Members of the Commons, on November 30th, 1601

2011-03-07T07:22:00.001+01:00

"Mr Speaker, We have heard your declaration and perceive your care of our estate. I do assure you there is no prince that loves his subjects better, or whose love can countervail our love. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel: I mean your love. For I do esteem it more than any treasure or riches; for that we know how to prize, but love and thanks I count invaluable. And, though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my Crown, that I have reigned with your loves. This makes me that I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people. Therefore I have cause to wish nothing more than to content the subject and that is a duty which I owe. Neither do I desire to live longer days than I may see your prosperity and that is my only desire. And as I am that person still yet, under God, hath delivered you and so I trust by the almighty power of God that I shall be His instrument to preserve you from every peril, dishonour, shame, tyranny and oppression, partly by means of your intended helps which we take very acceptably because it manifesteth the largeness of your good loves and loyalties unto your sovereign.

Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strait fast-holding Prince, nor yet a waster. My heart was never set on any worldly goods. What you bestow on me, I will not hoard it up, but receive it to bestow on you again. Therefore render unto them I beseech you Mr Speaker, such thanks as you imagine my heart yieldeth, but my tongue cannot express. Mr Speaker, I would wish you and the rest to stand up for I shall yet trouble you with longer speech. Mr Speaker, you give me thanks but I doubt me I have greater cause to give you thanks, than you me, and I charge you to thank them of the Lower House from me. For had I not received a knowledge from you, I might have fallen into the lapse of an error, only for lack of true information.

Since I was Queen, yet did I never put my pen to any grant, but that upon pretext and semblance made unto me, it was both good and beneficial to the subject in general though a private profit to some of my ancient servants, who had deserved well at my hands. But the contrary being found by experience, I am exceedingly beholden to such subjects as would move the same at first. And I am not so simple to suppose but that there be some of the Lower House whom these grievances never touched. I think they spake out of zeal to their countries and not out of spleen or malevolent affection as being parties grieved. That my grants should be grievous to my people and oppressions to be privileged under colour of our patents, our kingly dignity shall not suffer it. Yea, when I heard it, I could give no rest unto my thoughts until I had reformed it. Shall they, think you, escape unpunished that have oppressed you, and have been respectless of their duty and regardless our honour? No, I assure you, Mr Speaker, were it not more for conscience' sake than for any glory or increase of love that I desire, these errors, troubles, vexations and oppressions done by these varlets and lewd persons not worthy of the name of subjects should not escape without condign punishment. But I perceive they dealt with me like physicians who, ministering a drug, make it more acceptable by giving it a good aromatical savour, or when they give pills do gild them all over.

I have ever used to set the Last Judgement Day before mine eyes and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher judge, and now if my kingly bounties have been abused and my grants turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning, and if any in authority under me have neglected or perverted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offenses in my charge. I know the title of a King is a glorious title, but assure yourself that the shining glory of princely authority hath not so dazzled the eyes of our understanding, but that we well know and remember that we also are to yield an account of our actions before the great judge. To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. For myself I was never so much enticed with the glorious name of a King or royal authority of a Queen as delighted that God hath made me his instrument to maintain his truth and glory and to defend his kingdom as I said from peril, dishonour, tyranny and oppression. There will never Queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety than myself. For it is my desire to live nor reign no longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many princes more mighty and wise sitting in this seat, yet you never had nor shall have, any that will be more careful and loving.

'For I, oh Lord, what am I, whom practices and perils past should not fear? Or what can I do? That I should speak for any glory, God forbid.' And turning to the Speaker and her councilors she said, 'And I pray to you Mr Comptroller, Mr Secretary and you of my Council, that before these gentlemen go into their countries, you bring them all to kiss my hand.' "

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Gettysburg Address

2011-03-06T17:41:00.001+01:00

The only confirmed photo of Abraham Lincoln (circled) at Gettysburg, taken about noon, just after Lincoln arrived and some three hours before the speech. To Lincoln's right is his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon.

The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and is one of the best-known speeches in United States history.[1] It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg.

Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant.

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the American Revolution of 1776, Lincoln examined the founding principles of the United States in the context of the Civil War, and used the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to consecrate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to exhort the listeners to ensure the survival of America's representative democracy, that the "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording of the speech is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address differ in a number of details and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech.

Sir Thomas More

2011-03-06T11:47:00.001+01:00

Sir Thomas More (pronounced /ˈmɔr/; February 7, 1478[1] – July 6, 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important counsellor to Henry VIII of England and for three years toward the end of his life he was Lord Chancellor. He is recognised as a saint within the Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion.[2] He was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and of Martin Luther, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII.

More coined the word "utopia" - a name he gave to the ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in Utopia, published in 1516. He opposed the king's separation from the papal church and denied that the king was the Supreme Head of the Church of England, a status the king had been given by a compliant parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath required by the First Succession Act, because the act disparaged the power of the Pope and Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1535 he was tried and executed for treason by beheading. More was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1886 and canonised, with John Fisher, in 1935. In 1980, he was added to the Church of England's calendar of saints

William Shakespeare's Famous Short Speeches

2011-03-04T09:38:00.001+01:00

The Bard has left behind his legacy in ways more than one. Most of the non-political famous short speeches have been written by William Shakespeare. While there are many, like Hamlet's "To be or not to be...", and Portia's speech in Merchant of Venice "The quality of mercy is not strain'd..." to name a few, the Bard's most famous speech till date by far is the speech by Jaques in 'As you like it', which goes as...

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. "

_____-

9. Apology – Socrates

4th century B.C. Athens, Ancient Greece

Socrates, a great scholar and teacher in Athens, was facing the charges of corruption and misleading the people. People, especially youngsters were greatly influenced by his words and ideas. The rulers found him threatening to their throne. Socrates was arrested and put on trial. Court was set and he was asked to say something in his defense. ‘The Apology’ is what Socrates said in his defense. Instead of pleading for guilty, he chose to die with dignity.

Notable Excerpt:

Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth -- that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; and therefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason also, I am not angry with my accusers, or my condemners; they have done me no harm, although neither of them meant to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them.

Ala Faco

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mammonism \ MAM-uh-niz-uhm \ , noun;

Sherwood Anderson 1876 – 1941

Dickinson Quotes

I heard a fly buzz when I died

Edna St. Vincent Millay, ""A Few Figs from Thistles", 1920 US poet (1892 - 1950)

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson 1830-1886

Beg the question: Evade the issue

Zen Master said :“we shall see”

Saul Bellow 1915 – 2005

"A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849

"Winter Twilight" by Anne Porter

"Winter Twilight" by Anne Porter

"Winter Is the Best Time" by David Budbill 1940-David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio

Travelling

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by E. E. Cummings 1894–1962

Word of The Day

ham·string

Capital letter

Matthew Arnold, 'Self-Dependence'

I was born when she kissed me

Hart Crane

seizin

Woody Allen 1935-

Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats," by Walt Whitman.

John Updike 1932 –2009

Henry James 1843-1916

Charles De Gaulle 1890-1970

Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

Alain de Botton 1969-

Carl Sandburg 1878-1967

EDWARD THOMAS 1878 – 1917

John McCrae (1872-1918)

Kate Chopin (1851-1904)

e.e. cummings 1894-1962

Frank McCourt 1930 - 2009

Haunted Houses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 –1882

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 – 1950 Sonnet: Love Is Not All

SHADOW.--A PARABLE by Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849

I'm Crazy by: J. D. Salinger 1919 – 2010

Metaphysics: A Poem by Allen Ginsberg

Your world is as big as you make it

Allen Ginsberg 1926 – 1997

Tennessee Williams 1911 – 1983

Walt Whitman

This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman

Reverie and Invocation by William Carlos Williams1883 – 1963

Mark Twain 1835–1910

Robert Frost ( 1874–1963)

Bob Dylan May 24, 1941

F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940

“FOR YOU DEMOCRACY by WALT WHITMAN

What a nice word

bandersnatch

druthers

Game by Maxine Kumin

Jack Kerouac March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969

Barter by Sara Teasdale 1884–1933

William Henry Davies 1871- 1940 was a Welsh poet and writer

A Farm-Picture

John Steinbeck 1902–1968

O·res·te·ia

Time. Time. What is time?

— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

As time goes by

I cheated myself

No,No,No!

Cuckoo Clock

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

Dorothy Parker quotations

The Dismantled Ship by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Emily Dickinson Quotes

iPoem by George Bilgere 1951-

Bernard Malamud 1914 –1986

Essays of Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Walt Whitman May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892

The Armful by Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

Dorothy Parker 1893 – 1967

What Have I Got to Complain About