Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

Author Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. At seventeen, she moved to New York to study piano at the Julliard School of Music, but she lost her wallet with all her tuition money somewhere along the way. She worked in menial jobs to make ends meet and took writing classes at Columbia University to satisfy her urge to create. She got married, got divorced, and moved into a brownstone in Greenwich Village, where her housemates included W.H. Auden, Paul Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee. Here she finished her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), at the age of 22. Critics praised the book and were amazed at the young age of its author. One day in 1946, a fire engine's siren sounded loudly outside the house. McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee ran out the door to investigate, and as she stepped into the street, McCullers was oddly inspired to shout, "Frankie is in love with her brother and his bride and wants to become a member of the wedding!" McCullers had been meditating on ideas for a novel she was writing, and The Member of the Wedding (1946) became her most well-known work. It is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl named Frankie who is jealous of her brother's upcoming wedding. After its publication, she ran into a patch of ill health. She had a stroke, a heart attack and suffered from breast cancer. She did very little writing during that part of her life. She died in 1967 at the age of fifty. Several of her books have been made into films: The Member of the Wedding (1952; directed by Fred Zinnemann, 1997; directed by Fielder Cook), Reflections of a Golden Eye (1967; directed by John Huston), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968; directed by Ellis Miller), and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991; directed by Simon Callow). The dramatized version of The Member of the Wedding has also seen perennial success in community theaters and continues to be produced today.

*The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.


*The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.
*All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

*There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

*I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

*While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

*It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

*The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without life and the struggle that goes with love?

William Safire, December 17 1929 -

The problem with 'articulable'
By William Safire
Sunday, October 21, 2007

LANGUAGE

Have you ever heard anyone articulate the adjective articulable? It's a surefire stumble-over word, to be read and not spoken, concocted by lawyers in the past few decades to fit into the narrow space between clear and specific. Though it hasn't made it into many dictionaries, articulable may turn out to be a word that helps bridge the divide between civil liberty and national security.

On the side of liberty, there's a need to preserve the ability of the free press, when exposing corruption or abuses, to protect confidential sources without getting slammed into jail by leak-plugging, publicity-hungry prosecutors. On security's side, there's a need to preserve the government's power to thwart dangerous terrorist plots.

Though partisanship is in the saddle these days, a bill in the judiciary committees of Congress is making progress toward striking a balance of these two central values with their passage of the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007. (Disclosure: I testified - first time in 33 years as an opinionmonger - for this bill giving reporters the same ability to protect confidential sources as the privilege not to testify already held by doctors, lawyers, the clergy, psychologists and every spouse in the country. )

The sticking point in this legislation was the key exception to the journalist's right to protect a whistle-blower. The House committee said that testimony of a reporter could be compelled "to prevent imminent and actual harm to national security." That makes sense in striking the balance, but the Justice Department wanted a fuzzier standard.

In the markup of the Senate bill, the phrase "preventing a specific case of terrorism against the United States" was watered down at Justice's behest to "preventing an act of terrorism"; the loss of the hard, understandable "specific," however, was rebalanced somewhat by modifying the following "or significant harm" to "other significant and articulable harm."

I have seen the crossing-out and handwritten added word on the draft bill but will not reveal my sources. (Cagney or Bogart: "Come and get me, coppers!") They tell me that with specific deleted and with concrete too strong, they were "looking for a justiciable standard"; asked what the word pronounced jus-TISH-able meant, the answer was "a word that judges can pour meaning into."

Now we're in my etymological-semantic bailiwick. Articulable is a favorite in Fourth Amendment cases, dealing with the permissibility of warrantless police searches. In Terry v. Ohio, decided in 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Supreme Court: ". . . in justifying the particular intrusion, the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which . . . reasonably warrant that intrusion."

It's also an FBI favorite phrase: Even before passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, The Boston Globe noted this year, the FBI could issue national security letters "to get data on persons it had 'specific and articulable' reasons to believe were terrorists." And only last month, The Times of London reported that "the American government says it has 'specific and articulable' proof" that U.S. companies were legally supplying Arab countries with components for advanced roadside bombs, which were then purchased by Iran for shipment to Iraq.

What does the word mean?

Anatomists know that the Latin root, articulare, means "to divide into joints"; from that we get the joining of words into clear, understandable speech. As a verb, to articulate means "to enunciate clearly" or "to express well in words"; as an adjective, articulate is "well spoken," sometimes even "glib."

Most of us have no trouble with articulate, verb and modifier. The problem is with articulable.

Although it is well defined in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law as "capable of being expressed, explained or justified," in some usages above it is treated as a synonym for "specific"; in others, it is a softer substitute for that hard-edged word that better protects civil liberty.

In the bill I'm rooting for the House and Senate to pass and the president to sign, I take articulable to mean: "You have to explain in words on the judicial record exactly why you're insisting that the reporter burn his source. Then a judge will decide if that possible harm is significant enough to outweigh the public interest in not weakening the First Amendment."

As a word maven, I'd rather use articulatable, rhyming with "debatable"; it's a syllable longer but a lot easier to say. To public speakers, as well as to the free flow of information, its benefit would be incalculable.

safireonlanguage@nytimes.com

THURSDAY, 25 OCTOBER, 2007

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch -
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

_________




Ralph Waldo Emerson

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts (1803). He started out as a Unitarian minister, but when his wife died in 1831 he questioned his faith and eventually he left his position. He had liked giving sermons, and he was a great public speaker, so he started giving lectures in the Boston area.

Public lectures were becoming more and more common in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Emerson was one of the first people to make his living off of them. Many of his first lectures were on natural history. In November of 1833, he gave a lecture for the Natural History Society. The lecture, "The Uses of Natural History," was so successful that Emerson was invited to give more lectures on science by many other organizations in the winter of 1834.

In 1836, his first great essay, "Nature," was published in Boston, and it got a lot of attention in America and England. That winter, Emerson was invited to give a series of twelve lectures in the Masonic Temple in Boston. The subjects ranged from "Philosophy of History" to "Trades and Professions."

By this time, lecturing had become his main source of income, and Emerson needed the money to take care of his family. In order to make as much money as he could from the lectures, he wrote his own advertising and oversaw ticket sales himself. Tickets cost two dollars for twelve lectures, and they could be bought at Boston bookstores. Emerson considered the lectures a success: each lecture drew about 350 people, which was pretty good considering he was competing against many other lecturers in Boston at the time.

He often scheduled three or four lectures a week, each in a different city. His reputation grew quickly, and by the winter of 1840, more people went to his lectures in New York than those of all the other speakers combined.

Emerson began giving lectures outside of New England, as far west as St. Louis, and also in England and France. By the end of his life he was making about a hundred dollars per lecture, and he had become a celebrity in America and Europe.

Emerson said, "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books."

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

As we grow old…the beauty steals inward.

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think.

Children are all foreigners.

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.

Give all to love; obey thy heart.

God enters by a private door into every individual.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

Harold Bloom, 1930 -

The literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom born in New York City (1930) to Jewish immigrants. His first language was Yiddish, and he started reading poetry in English before he'd ever heard English spoken. He didn't do well in high school but took the statewide Regents exams, got the highest score in the state, and that won him a scholarship to Cornell.

He went on to study literature at Yale in the 1950s at a time when there was a dress code. The students wore jackets and ties. Harold Bloom wore an old Russian leather coat and a pair of fisherman's trousers. He became famous at Yale for his great love of poetry. He memorized everything that he read. He could recite enormous, long poems.

As a professor at Yale and as a critic, Bloom has moved further and further away from the mainstream of literary criticism in this country. Most other critics look at literature as a product of history, politics, and society. Whereas Harold Bloom is one of the last who believes that great literature is a product of pure genius, and who believes that we should read not to learn about history or politics but to learn about the human soul.

In the last few years, he's begun writing books for general readers, believing that scholars have forgotten how to read for pleasure, and many of his recent books have become best-sellers, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and How to Read and Why and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

*In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

*We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

*What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

*I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike , and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two , are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.

*We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

*Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

*But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

*Perhaps you learn this more fully as you get older, but in the end you choose between books, or you choose between poems, the way you choose between people. You can't become friends with every acquaintance you make, and I would not think that it is any different with what you read.

*I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

*Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.






The poet William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). He went to medical school and then moved back to Rutherford and opened a doctor's office at his house at number 9 Ridge Road. His clientele was Italian and Polish and German immigrant families. In his spare time, he kept up with all the avant-garde movements in poetry and art, and he wrote many books of his own poetry. He said, "The goal of writing is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest."

Smell


Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedreggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?

Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho (1885). Early in his life he resolved to "know more about poetry than any man living." He went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met one of the many writers he would befriend and help in his life, William Carlos Williams. He settled in London in 1908, where he began to explore the poetry of Greece, China, America, and contemporary England. Pound was set on supporting innovations in all kinds of literature. He critically and financially supported writers like James Joyce, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. He said he had "to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization." The poet whom Pound helped the most was T.S. Eliot. In 1914, he convinced a publisher to print Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Seven years later, he edited Eliot's work, "The Waste Land" (1922), considered one of the twentieth century's best poems. Eliot dedicated the book to Pound, whom he called "il miglior fabbro," or the better craftsman. Pound wrote to Eliot, "You let me throw the bricks through the front window. You go in at the back and take the swag."

One of Pound's most direct contributions to poetry was the founding of the Imagist movement. Imagist poetry is based on close observation of one image, using dialect instead of poetic diction, and using, in Pound's words, "the sequence of the musical phrase, not the sequence of a metronome." One of Pound's most famous Imagist poems is "In a Station of the Metro," published in Poetry magazine in 1913:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough .

In 1917 Pound wrote, in a letter to James Joyce, "I have begun an endless poem, of no known category . . . all about everything." The collection of poems that resulted, The Cantos, occupied him nearly the rest of his life, and became his most famous work. The Cantos are appreciated and criticized for being obscure and very difficult to read. Pound intended the poems to create an epic, to dramatize "the acquisition of cultural knowledge."

During World War II, Pound moved to Italy, where he began doing radio broadcasts for the Italian government under Mussolini. He seemed to endorse fascism, and many of his comments were anti-Semitic. For these reasons, Pound was arrested by the United States army for treason. He was kept in a small, outdoor cage in an army base outside of Pisa, Italy, where he suffered mental and physical exhaustion. But he managed to write a few more poems for his Cantos, and in 1949 Pound won the prestigious Bollingen Award, to much controversy. Pound was taken to America, and was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. He moved to a mental institution in Washington D.C., where he lived until 1958. He said, "I can get along with the crazy people, it's only the fools I can't stand." Many people never believed he was insane, and his friends and admirers came to visit him often. He told them, "I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them." When he was released, he moved to his beloved Italy, where he fell into despair over much of the work he'd done. He told Allen Ginsberg, "the worst mistake I made was the stupid, suburban prejudice of Anti-Semitism." He died in 1972.

*Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

*When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.”

*Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

*If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.

*There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.

*Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

*Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

*All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.

*Either move or be moved.

*If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.




A VIRGINAL

by: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

O, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.

4 October 2007

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

__________________________


Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). His novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) became the definitive literary novel about World War II, and it made Norman Mailer famous at the age of 25. His next two novels flopped, and critics said that he had failed to live up to his promise as a writer. He was depressed by the bad reviews he had gotten, and he decided that he would take a break from trying to write the great American novel. Instead he wrote one of the most confessional books that had been published up to that time, Advertisements for Myself (1959), about his own ambitions and fears.

Mailer became a regular and controversial guest on late-night talk shows, trying to stir people up against conformity. He also helped invent a new style of journalism, in which the journalist himself was a character in his own stories. He used that style in his book The Armies of the Night (1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

His most recent book is The Castle in the Forest, which just came out this month (2007). It's a fictionalized version of Adolf Hitler's childhood.

*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.

*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.

*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.

*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.

*In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

*Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

*Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

*Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

*Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

*The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

*The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

*The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

*The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

*The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

*There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

*Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

*We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

*With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

*Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

__________________________

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1911). Her father died when she was a little girl. Her mother had an emotional breakdown from grief and spent the rest of her life in various mental institutions. Elizabeth spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents in Nova Scotia and her father's family in Massachusetts. For the rest of her life, she was obsessed with travel, and she never felt at home anywhere.

She was painfully shy and quiet in college, but during her senior year she mustered all her courage and introduced herself to her idol, the elder poet Marianne Moore. The meeting was awkward at first, but then Bishop offered to take Moore to the circus. It turned out they both loved going to the circus, and they both also loved snakes, tattoos, exotic flowers, birds, dressmaking, and recipes. Moore became Bishop's mentor and friend, and she persuaded Bishop that poems didn't have to be about big ideas, that they could be precise descriptions of ordinary objects and places. Bishop began to write poems about filling stations, fish, the behavior of birds, and her memories of Nova Scotia.

She was an extremely slow writer, and published only 101 poems in her lifetime. She worked on her poem "One Art" for more than 15 years, keeping it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines again and again until she got it right.




One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

27 September 2007

"Literature must spring from an impression pressing enough to have made the writer write... It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure."  Novelist Elizabeth Bowen,  1899 – 1973


_________________________________
The poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up at a time when people in New England were beginning to struggle with religion. Many had fallen away from the traditional Puritan faith, and so a religious revival movement was sweeping the area, bringing people back to the church. Dickinson remained agnostic, even after her father and sister experienced a conversion at a revival meeting in 1850, when Dickinson was 20 years old. She wrote in a letter, "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling [sister] believes she loves, and trusts [Jesus], and I am standing alone in rebellion."

Dickinson spent one year in seminary school at Mount Holyoke, and then she moved back in with her parents to take care of the family household while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. She was not happy about the arrangement. She enjoyed gardening, but she hated to clean and absolutely refused to dust. What she disliked most of all about her father's house was the many visitors. Her father was one of the most prominent men in town, and people stopped by every day to talk politics, to get legal advice, and just to pay tribute. Dickinson thought the visits extremely tedious.

As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends got married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. Many biographers have tried to find some reason why Dickinson withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there has never been any definite evidence for that theory.

What we do know is that she spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. When an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I ... am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself.

Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great American lyric poet, and one of the greatest American poets ever.


Emily Dickinson,  1830 – 1886


I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

__________________
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."



Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

A Time to Talk


When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

_________________________

Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, in Lowell Massachusetts (1922). He grew up speaking French, and couldn't speak English fluently until junior high. He was a football star in high school and got an athletic scholarship to Columbia University. It was there that he became friends with Allen Ginsberg.

In 1951 he sat at his kitchen table, taped sheets of Chinese art paper together to make a long roll, and wrote the story of the cross-country road trips he took with Neal Cassady. It had no paragraphs and very little punctuation and Allen Ginsberg called it ''a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself.'' And that became Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957).


____________________________
Ernest Hemingway

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He went off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He gave away chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. And just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

He was one of the first Americans to return from the war, and that made him a kind of celebrity in Oak Park. He gave talks to high school students. He hung around his parents' house until they decided they wanted him out of the house.

He started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. They moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a poor bohemian, but he actually had plenty of money. He and his wife traveled around Europe and went to the horse races and ate in nice restaurants.

He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés. He wrote about one of those cafés, "It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story."

He wrote in a letter to his father, "I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.

His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, The Sun Also Rises. Three years later, A Farewell to Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive, and young American men tried to act like "Hemingway heroes," speaking in staccato sentences out of the sides of their mouths. By the time he died in 1961, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro

If you are looking for the story by Alice Munro assigned for your oral exam please go to the following site:


http://www.condenet.com/mags/newyorker/asme/categories/artwork/pdf/12_27_Munro_Fiction.pdf

William Carlos Williams - To A Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

*********

Walt Whitman
O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths--for you the shores accrowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

********

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Who Said this?

1) The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

2) But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

3) Courage is grace under pressure.

4) I hate phonies.

5) 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.

6) 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.

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

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

9) I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.

10) I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

11) Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

12) There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

13) I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

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

15) Eighty percent of success is showing up.

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

17) Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner

18) Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

19) I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

20) It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.

21) 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?

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

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

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

25) 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.

26) Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

27) College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

28) Dying is a wild night and a new road.

Literature: a Sine qua non

I feel we had a very good year together. I would like to congratulate you on your hard work and your interest. Literature (to borrow from what Matthew Arnold said about culture) invites us "to know the best that has been said and thought in the world." It is not a matter of luxury but a necessity. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) who declared that "men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there" in poetry, was stressing this essential need. The best of American literature like the best literature of any other nation makes its appeal to mankind everywhere and forever. It is universal and immortal.

In our course we studied American literature from its inception to the present time. The aim of this course was not so much to impart information, but to come to grips with the imaginative wisdom and artistic vision of a nation fighting for its moral and existential survival. It was an attempt to reach out and greet the literary experience of a country that has made a tremendous impact in the modern era.

We covered authors such as Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Henry James (1843-1916), Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) Robert Frost (1874–1963), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), Jerome David Salinger, (1919-), Toni Morrison (1931-), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), William Faulkner (1897 –1962), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Woody Allen (1935-), Groucho Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), Hart Crane (1899-1932), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), Alice Walker (February 9, 1944-), Kate Chopin (1851-1904), Henry James (1843-1916), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), Bret Easton Ellis (1964-), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), William "Bill" McGuire Bryson (1951-), Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005), Truman Capote (1924-1984).

We started the year with a poem by William Carlos Williams. It will be apt to also end with another poem by Williams in praise of poetic imagination:

Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
It is imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole we escape...


Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination...

The Brain is wider than the sky

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)



The Brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up at a time when people in New England were beginning to struggle with religion. Many had fallen away from the traditional Puritan faith, and so a religious revival movement was sweeping the area, bringing people back to the church. Dickinson remained agnostic, even after her father and sister experienced a conversion at a revival meeting in 1850, when Dickinson was 20 years old. She wrote in a letter, "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling [sister] believes she loves, and trusts [Jesus], and I am standing alone in rebellion."

Dickinson spent one year in seminary school at Mount Holyoke, and then she moved back in with her parents to take care of the family household while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. She was not happy about the arrangement. She enjoyed gardening, but she hated to clean and absolutely refused to dust. What she disliked most of all about her father's house was the many visitors. Her father was one of the most prominent men in town, and people stopped by every day to talk politics, to get legal advice, and just to pay tribute. Dickinson thought the visits extremely tedious.

As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends got married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. Many biographers have tried to find some reason why Dickinson withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there has never been any definite evidence for that theory.

What we do know is that she spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. When an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I ... am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself.

Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great American lyric poet, and one of the greatest American poets ever.

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Two poems by Robert Frost (1874–1963)

The Wood-pile


Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.


Away

Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town.
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don't think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park.

Forget the myth.
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm—bound—away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.



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

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005)

Arthur Miller was born in New York City (1915). His father was the wealthy owner of a coat factory, and the family had a large Manhattan apartment, a chauffeur, and a summer home at the beach. Then, in 1928, his father's business collapsed. He watched his parents sell their most valuable possessions, one by one, to pay the bills, until finally the family had to move in with relatives in Brooklyn. Miller had to share a bedroom with his grandfather. He was thirteen years old. It was terrifying for him to watch his father go from being so powerful to being so helpless. He said, "It made you want to search for ultimate values, for things that would not fall apart under pressure." He paid his way through college with a job in a research laboratory, feeding hundreds of mice every night. He had never been interested in theater before, but he thought he would enter a play writing contest to make some extra money, and he won with the first play he'd ever written. He won the same contest the following year, and decided that he was born to write plays. Unfortunately, the first play he wrote out of college, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after four performances.

He considered giving up but decided to try writing one more play. His next play, All My Sons (1947), was about a man who has been selling faulty machinery to the army, and finds out that he has caused the death of twenty-one soldiers. The play ran on Broadway for 328 performances, and was made into a movie the following year. Miller used the money he made from All My Sons to buy four hundred acres of farmland in Connecticut. In 1948, he moved to Connecticut by himself, and spent several months building a ten by twelve foot cabin by hand. As he sawed the wood and pounded the nails, he thought about the main characters of his next play: a salesman, his wife, and his two sons. He knew how the play would begin, but he wouldn't let himself start writing until he had finished the cabin. When it was finally completed, he woke up one morning and started writing. He wrote all day, had dinner, and then wrote until he had finished the first act in the middle of the night. When he finally got in bed to go to sleep, he found that his cheeks were wet with tears, and his throat was sore from speaking and shouting the lines of dialogue as he wrote. The play was Death of a Salesman (1949), about a man named Willy Loman who loses his job and realizes that he doesn't have much to show for his life's work. Miller wrote, "For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." It has gone on to be the most widely produced play in the world, playing in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Argentina. It has been particularly popular in China and Japan. Miller has gone on to have an extremely long and productive career, publishing short fiction, essays, an autobiography, and many more plays. His most recent play, Resurrection Blues, premiered in 2002 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

*A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

*A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

*A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

*A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!

*All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

*Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

*Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.

*Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

*Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

*Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

*He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

*He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

*I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.

*I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

*I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

*I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.

*I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

*I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

*In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Arthur Miller

*Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

*Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

*Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

*Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

*That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

*The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

*The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

*The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

*The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

*The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

*The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

*The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

*Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

*What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

*Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

*Without alienation, there can be no politics.

*You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

*You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989)

Playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett was born in a rich suburb of Dublin, Ireland called Foxrock (1906). His mother was a tall, strict woman, famous in her neighborhood for her short temper. Beckett started rebelling against her at an early age by climbing trees and jumping out of them, spreading his arms to break his fall on the branches.

He moved to Paris and became one of James Joyce's assistants and disciples. He wanted badly to write like Joyce, but he had little success. He was struggling to support himself as a translator and miserable about his failures as a writer, when one day he was attacked and stabbed in the chest by a pimp, the knife barely missing his heart.

Word spread that he was in the hospital, and a surprising number of people came to visit him. He didn't know he had so many friends. James Joyce brought him yellow roses and Nora Joyce baked him a custard pudding. Even the Irish ambassador came. One of his visitors was a French woman named Suzanne who had seen him give a lecture. She later became his wife.

Beckett got involved in the French Resistance during World War II, and he helped transmit secret messages across the boarder in packs of cigarettes. He had been struggling for years to write a novel, and the effort had only made him miserable, so in the midst of the war he decided to try playwriting. He said, "Life at the time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought theatre would be a diversion."

Beckett never published the first play he wrote, but he began to use playwriting as a way to cheer himself up after he got blocked writing a novel. He was struggling with a new play just after the war was over, so he decided to write another play. As an exercise, he made it as simple as possible: it would be a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. He finished it in just a few months, faster than he'd ever finished anything he'd ever written. And that was Waiting For Godot (1952), the play in which Beckett wrote, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"

He didn't have much hope that it would ever be produced, but his wife thought it was a masterpiece, and she showed it to everyone involved with the theater that she could find. It was finally produced in 1953, and became an international sensation.

Samuel Beckett said, "I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end."

He also said, "All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."

He also wrote, "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion. It's all around us...the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess."

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor



* All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

*Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

*Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

*Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

*Habit is a great deadener.

*I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

*I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

*In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

*James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

*Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

*Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

*Make sense who may. I switch off.

*My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

*Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!

*Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

*Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

*Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

*That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.

*The bastard! He doesn't exist!

*There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

*They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

*To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

*We are all born mad. Some remain so.

*We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

*We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

*What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

*Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

*Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Truman Capote, 1924 - 1984

American writer Truman Capote was born in New Orleans (1924). Even as a child, Capote wanted to become famous. He moved with his mother to New York City and applied to the prestigious Trinity School. He was given an IQ test as an entrance exam, and he scored 215, the highest in the school's history. Capote said, "I was having 50 perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing." One day he read a news release about the murder of a family in western Kansas, and he decided to write about it. He moved to Holcomb, Kansas with his friend Harper Lee, and became attached to the community as it recovered from the crime. Capote compiled over 6,000 pages of notes on the crime, 80% of which he threw away. Eventually, he wrote his most famous work, In Cold Blood (1966), about the murders. He got to know the two murderers well and worked for many years to have their death sentences reduced. When the two men were hanged, Capote became physically ill. In Cold Blood introduced a new genre, the "non-fiction novel." Capote received nearly two million dollars for text and movie rights.

Capote craved fame and spent much of his life socializing. He was an unassuming figure—small and with a high lisping voice. But he was a lively storyteller, and an expert charmer. George Plimpton said, "He knew he had to sing for his supper but, my God, what a song it was!"

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

*A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

*All literature is gossip.

*Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

*Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

*Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

*Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

*Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there."

*I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

*I can see every monster as they come in.

*I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

*I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

*It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.

*Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

*Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

*Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; they're enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

*My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

*Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

*That's not writing, that's typing.

*The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

*To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

*Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

*When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

*Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

*Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

*People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

*No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

e. e. cummings, 1894 - 1962

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."

“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


______________

o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-i
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue

with a swoop and a dart
out flew his wish
(it dived like a fish
but it climbed like a dream)
throbbing like a heart
singing like a flame

blue took it my
far beyond far
and high beyond high
bluer took it your
but bluest took it our
away beyond where

what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-i
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go

______________

*A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

*America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

*At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

*Be of love a little more careful than of anything.

*Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

*I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

*I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

*I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

*I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

*If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

*It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

*Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

*Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

*Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

*Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
*Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

*The earth laughs in flowers.

*The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

*The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

*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.

*To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

*To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.

*Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

*Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Typhoon published: 1902 (begun 1899)

*Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace. It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools.

*CAPTAIN MACWHIRR, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled.

*He had been made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the usual way, felt at the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the whole he had been justified in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never been given a glimpse of immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the wrath that passes exhausted but never appeased -- the wrath and fury of the passionate sea. He knew it existed, as we know that crime and abominations exist; he had heard of it as a peaceable citizen in a town hears of battles, famines, and floods, and yet knows nothing of what these things mean -- though, indeed, he may have been mixed up in a street row, have gone without his dinner once, or been soaked to the skin in a shower. Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate -- or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea.

Author's Note

Author's Note

THE main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.

The period is that which follows on my connection with Blackwood's Magazine. I had just finished writing "The End of the Tether" and was casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume of "Youth" when the instance of a steamship full of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in northern China occurred to my recollection. Years before I had heard it being talked about in the East as a recent occurrence. It was for us merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them. Life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary complication brought into the ship's life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck. Neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In that company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing was like. The financial difficulty of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle talk for which it was not adapted.

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient subject for meditation. Yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all. I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.

What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could see that he was the man for the situation. I don't mean to say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. He is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. Conscious invention had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly authentic. I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the story, while I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of my actual experience.

At its first appearance "Typhoon," the story, was classed by some critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece. Others picked out MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention. Neither was exclusively my intention. Both the typhoon and Captain MacWhirr presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction with which I approached the subject of the story. It was their opportunity. It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for themselves.

This is a belated reflection. If it had occurred to me before it would have perhaps done away with the existence of this Author's Note; for, indeed, the same remark applies to every story in this volume. None of them are stories of experience in the absolute sense of the word. Experience in them is but the canvas of the attempted picture. Each of them has its more than one intention. With each the question is what the writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the question for itself in words which, if I may say so without undue solemnity, were written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations. And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own way to the conscience of each successive reader.

"Falk" -- the second story in the volume -- offended the delicacy of one critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject. But what is the subject of "Falk"? I personally do not feel so very certain about it. He who reads must find out for himself. My intention in writing "Falk" was not to shock anybody. As in most of my writings I insist not on the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of human emotions.

I may safely say that Falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy. Falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to his right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not condescend to dodge the truth. As he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject of the tale. If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk's attempt to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.

"Falk" shares with one other of my stories ("The Return" in the "Tales of Unrest" volume) the distinction of never having been serialized. I think the copy was shown to the editor of some magazine who rejected it indignantly on the sole ground that "the girl never says anything." This is perfectly true. From first to last Hermann's niece utters no word in the tale -- and it is not because she is dumb, but for the simple reason that whenever she happens to come under the observation of the narrator she has either no occasion or is too profoundly moved to speak. The editor, who obviously had read the story, might have perceived that for himself. Apparently he did not, and I refrained from pointing out the impossibility to him because, since he did not venture to say that "the girl" did not live, I felt no concern at his indignation.

All the other stories were serialized. The "Typhoon" appeared in the early numbers of the Pall Mall Magazine, then under the direction of the late Mr. Halkett. It was on that occasion, too, that I saw for the first time my conceptions rendered by an artist in another medium. Mr. Maurice Grieffenhagen knew how to combine in his illustrations the effect of his own most distinguished personal vision with an absolute fidelity to the inspiration of the writer. "Amy Foster" was published in The Illustrated London News with a fine drawing of Amy on her day out giving tea to the children at her home, in a hat with a big feather. "To-morrow" appeared first in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of that story I will only say that it struck many people by its adaptability to the stage and that I was induced to dramatize it under the title of "One Day More"; up to the present my only effort in that direction. I may also add that each of the four stories on their appearance in book form was picked out on various grounds as the "best of the lot" by different critics, who reviewed the volume with a warmth of appreciation and understanding, a sympathetic insight and a friendliness of expression for which I cannot be sufficiently grateful.

1919. J. C