Edgar Allan Poe

The Raven

[First published in 1845]

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.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Bob Dylan, May 24 1941 -

Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota (1941). He grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a mining town on the decline. Dylan later said, "It was a very itinerant place — no interstate highways yet, just country roads everywhere. There was an innocence about it all, and I don't recall anything bad ever happening." At school, his classmates said he was a quiet kid who didn't call much attention to himself. But then, in 1955, the movie Rebel Without a Cause came out, and Dylan went to see it at least four times. After that, he began wearing a red leather jacket to school, and he put grease in his hair. He set about forming the first rock and roll band in the history of Hibbing, Minnesota, and he called his band The Golden Chords.

It was only after he enrolled in the University of Minnesota that Dylan became interested in folk music. He heard a record by the folk singer Odetta in 1958 and immediately went out and traded his electric guitar for an acoustic. He soon dropped out of college to focus on learning as many folk songs as he could. At some point, he stumbled upon the work of Woody Guthrie and became a kind of Guthrie disciple. He bought a harmonica and a metal neck brace so that he could sing, play guitar, and play the harmonica at the same time, just like Woody, and he began performing at local coffeehouses. It was at one of these coffeehouses that he first called himself Bob Dylan. He took the name Dylan from the poet Dylan Thomas.

After a few years in Minneapolis, Dylan decided to take off for New York City in January of 1961. He arrived in the middle of a snowstorm. It was one of the worst winters in decades, and he had no place to stay. He spent several days just riding the subways, because it was the only place he could keep warm. He found a place to stay by the end of the week, and then he took a trip down to Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where he'd heard that Woody Guthrie was slowly dying of Huntington's disease.

Guthrie was staying in the psychiatric part of the hospital, and he was already suffering spasms and having difficulty talking. But Dylan brought along his guitar and he sang songs to Guthrie, which Guthrie loved. Dylan went back to visit Guthrie many times, and the first song he wrote after his arrival in New York was called "Song to Woody." It included the lines, "Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind."

Within a year, Dylan had his first record contract, and he recorded his first album when he was just 19. He went on to become one of the most prolific songwriters in American history, writing and recording songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," and "Like a Rolling Stone." Dylan also published his first memoir a few years ago, Chronicles, Volume One (2004), which got great reviews and was even nominated for a National Book Award.

Bob Dylan was once asked if he thought of himself more as a singer or a poet. He said, "I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man."





Blowing In The Wind

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.

___________

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son ?
And where have you been my darling young one ?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, what did you see, my blue eyed son ?
And what did you see, my darling young one ?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand takers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son ?
And what did you hear, my darling young one ?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'
I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'
I heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Oh, who did you meet my blue-eyed son ?
Who did you meet, my darling young one ?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded and hatred
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son ?
And what'll you do now my darling young one ?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the deepths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are a many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my songs well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

___________

Mr. Tambourine Man

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin'
I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it.

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Though you might hear laughin', spinnin' swingin' madly across the sun
It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin'
And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're
Seein' that he's chasing.

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.

_______

Like A Rolling Stone

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but know you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?
You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you'd better take your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?

__________

Song To Woody

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I'm seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that's coming along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born.

Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I'm saying and a many times more
I'm singing you the song but I can't you sing enough
'Cause there's not many men that've done the things that you've done.

Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I'm leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I've been hitting some hard travelling too.

_______________

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's somethin' you did
God knows when
But you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skip cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills
You only got ten.

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the DA
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try, 'No Doz'
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows.

Get sick, get well
Hang around an ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin' to sell
Try hard, get barred
Get back, write Braille
Get jailed, jump bail Join the army, if you failed
Look out kid
You're gonna get hit
But losers, cheaters
Six-time users
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin' for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters.

Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don't work
'Cause the vandals took the handles.

________

*He not busy being born is busy dying.

*I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

*If the point is sharp, and the arrow is swift, it can pierce through the dust no matter how thick.

*Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

*What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

*When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.

*...You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

*Everything passes. Everything changes. Just do what you think you should do.

*The picture you have in your mind of what you're about will come true.

*When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose.

*You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.

*Swallow your pride, you will not die, it's not poison.

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849)

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.

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999)

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York (1923). He's best known for his novel Catch-22 (1961), about a World War II bomber pilot, Yossarian, who believes that the world is out to get him killed. The entire German army wants to shoot him down, and the men that are supposedly his countrymen keep sending him out on bombing missions, where he is likely to get shot down by those Germans. He spends all his time trying to get himself declared insane so he can stop flying bombing missions, but there is a regulation called Catch-22, which says that if you want out of combat duty you can't be crazy.

Heller wrote, "[A pilot] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

*Every writer I know has trouble writing.

*Procastination is the thief of time.

*I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

*Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

*He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.

*The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.”

*When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as "Catch-22" I'm tempted to reply, "Who has?"”

*There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

*When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
Joseph Heller quote

*Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them.”

Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

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."

More Norman Mailer Quotations

I usually need a can of beer to prime me.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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.
Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvellous and awful, good and evil.

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

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business

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

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

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.
I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the

creative act. It discharges the tension

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

Poet Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His father was a lawyer with a strong interest in literature. Wallace went to Harvard and then got a law degree from New York University. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Although he wrote highly imaginative poems, he led a simple, uneventful life as an executive at a Hartford, Connecticut insurance company. Stevens kept his life as a poet separate from his life as an executive. He would wake up at six o'clock to read for two hours before going to work, and he wrote many of his poems while walking home from the office in the evening. He wrote some of his best poetry after he reached the age of sixty, including the collections Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).

One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.

Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."


The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). Williams fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman in high school, and began keeping a series of notebooks full of his own Whitman-esque poems. He wanted to devote his life to writing after graduation, but his parents persuaded him to study medicine. So he became a doctor in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey. He set up a patients' room off the kitchen of his house at number 9 Ridge Road, and began to treat the poor immigrants who had begun moving into the neighborhood: Italians and Poles and Germans.

He came to believe that the greatest poetry was produced by devotion to the poet's local culture. He paid close attention to the language used by gas station attendants and nurses and shopkeepers, and he began to incorporate that more simple, spoken language into his poetry. And he wrote about ordinary things: plums, wheelbarrows, hospitals, and the New Jersey landscape, with its polluted rivers and suburban lawns.

Pastoral

WHEN I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.


_____________________


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

*It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

*There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.

*It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.”

*It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.


*In summer, the song sings itself.

*Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

*I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them. . . .

*What power has love but forgiveness?

Norman Mailer January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007

Advertisements for himself
By Thomas Gagen
Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Norman Mailer, who died Saturday at age 84, was a novelist of distinction and a pioneer in the New Journalism.

I was so impressed by him in the early '70s that I read about everything he had written up to that time. Then I came upon one of his lesser essays, "The White Negro," from 1957, which forced me to adjust my opinion.

Based on the awful experience of World War II, Mailer reasoned, one could easily be condemned to death in an atomic explosion or a concentration camp, or to "a slow death by conformity." The only viable choice was to live existentially - "to accept the terms of death . . . the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself."

He continued; "Psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro . . . hated from outside and therefore hating himself." It was understandable if this psychopathic hatred turned criminal, Mailer contended. Even if it resulted in the murder of a hypothetical candy-store owner.

"Courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man, but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one's life."

The essay veers into the pleasures of sex and, aside from the racial stereotype, sounds like something Mailer picked up in the cafés of Paris.

But it was published just as a wave of violent crime was about to engulf the United States. I was living in Baltimore, a city devastated by riots and murder. Encouraging the inner psychopath didn't seem advisable.

As the crime rate soared, Mailer applied a novelist's tools to nonfiction, in "The Armies of the Night" (about Vietnam protests), "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (the 1968 political conventions), and "Of a Fire on the Moon" (the Apollo II landing). And in 1969 he found time to run for mayor of New York.

It was left to Tom Wolfe, another of the New Journalists, to lay bare an infatuation for criminals by people who should have known better.

Mailer wasn't there when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers (chronicled in Wolfe's "Radical Chic" in 1970), but he would have felt at home as wealthy New Yorkers entertained gunmen who showed a veneer of radical politics.

As the years passed, Mailer didn't lose his sympathy for criminals. He helped Jack Abbott, a gifted writer and convicted killer, gain parole in 1981. Abbott killed a waiter at a New York restaurant a few weeks later.

Ideas have consequences, as Mailer should have known. Arguments similar to Mailer's, though less sophisticated, delayed an effective response to the crime wave - and created a backlash that conservatives readily exploited.

Mailer deserves to be read for his nonfiction and his early novels, especially "The Naked and the Dead." New Yorkers can be thankful, however, that he never got a chance to appoint the police commissioner.

Thomas Gagen is an editorial writer for The Boston Globe.

___________________




The New Yorker

Norman Mailer

by Louis Menand November 10, 2007

No one would say of Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th, a the age of eighty-four, that he hoarded his gift. He was a slugger He swung at everything, and when he missed he missed by a mile an sometimes ended up on his tush, but when he connected he usuall knocked it out of the park. He was immodest about his failures an modest about his successes, which is a healthy trait for a writer an probably a healthy trait for life. He left a huge footprint on America letters
Mailer was a performer. He went on television talk shows and engaged in public debates and held press conferences; he directed movies and acted in them; he hosted wild parties and wrecked a few; he ran for mayor of New York City and did not finish last. It is important to acknowledge, though, that he was a singularly bad performer. He entertained and he instructed, but he also irritated, alienated, baffled, and appalled. He told dirty jokes that were not funny, and he tried on outfits and accents that were preposterous—a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he sometimes dressed like a sea captain and affected a Texas drawl—and he had a few moments, deservedly notorious, of disastrous misjudgment. Even people who wished him well, and who loved the fact that, good, bad, or ugly, he was always in the game, were obliged to cope with a lot of moral and intellectual klutziness.
It is a decorum of modern criticism that there is the writer and then there is “the work”—that all that matters is the books, considered as stand-alone verbal artifacts. To apply this decorum to Mailer is to miss the point. Beginning with his comeback book, “Advertisements for Myself,” in 1959, he bled his life and his personality into his writing. He had enjoyed a precocious success eleven years before, with “The Naked and the Dead,” the first of the major Second World War novels, and written in the third-person naturalist style of James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos. Mailer was twenty-five when it came out, and was duly lionized. But then he produced two books that attracted few admirers, “Barbary Shore,” which is sort of about politics, and “The Deer Park,” which is sort of about Hollywood, and he was desperate to have a second act. His solution was to make himself—his opinions, his grievances against the publishing industry, his ambitions—part of his subject. He did this sometimes by inventing outsized fictional alter egos—the bullfighting instructor and Village cocksman Sergius O’Shaughnessy, the wife killer Stephen Rojak—but mostly by making himself a character in his nonfiction writing: “The Armies of the Night” (about the 1967 march on the Pentagon), “The Prisoner of Sex” (about the women’s movement, a phenomenon not readily assimilable to the Mailer cosmological system, at no time a flexible instrument of analysis), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (about the Apollo space mission), “The Fight” (about the Ali-Foreman championship bout in Zaire, and one of Mailer’s finest books).
Some readers found all these Normans obnoxious, a display of egotism. But Mailer was simply making apparent something that modern literature and, in particular, modern journalism preferred to disguise, which is that a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not. It was not important for readers to like this person; it was important to know him. Mailer did not put the first person into journalism; he took it out of the closet.
This was so even in what is, stylistically, his least Maileresque—and, for many people, most successful—book, “The Executioner’s Song,” about the execution, in Utah, of the murderer Gary Gilmore, in 1977. Half of that book is Gilmore’s story; half is about the unseemly scramble by publishers and television producers to buy the rights to tell it. People made money off Gilmore’s death, and Mailer lets you know that he was one of them.
Mailer liked to think of his books as his children, and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated—“Ancient Evenings” and “Harlot’s Ghost,” great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer. He did not pretend that those books did not exist. He put himself, with all his talents and imperfections, before his audience. Not many writers have been so brave with themselves. ♦




Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007
Why Norman Mailer Mattered
By Richard Lacayo

"His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style."
— Armies of the Night

You can't say he didn't live up to his own expectations. In ten novels and almost two dozen other books, Norman Mailer not only did it with boom. He did it with brains and wit and nerve. He became what you might call the foremost pronouncer of his time.

He was, of course, a great conundrum. There was paradox even in his voice, which hovered in some undisclosed location between the Brooklyn of his youth and the Harvard of his student years. He saw himself, in all his complexities, as some essential figure of his epoch, so that the arc of his own career was one of his perennial subjects. This was not just a measure of his egotism — which was boundless — but also of his certainty that the judgment upon him of public opinion was, itself, an important sign of the times. He could never stop measuring his reputation against every other writer's; he spent years waving his Brooklyn matador's cape at Hemingway, boxing with Tolstoy (and anybody else who got in his way) and always licking his own wounds. Mailer's forte was intricate readings of his own inner conditions. His mistake, sometimes, was to believe in them too much as a guide to the wider world. But as Mailer would have asked: What else do we have to go on?

He was just 25 when he became abruptly and unmanageably famous for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. It was 1948, America was looking for its Great War Novel and there was Mailer with his jug handle ears and his curly hair and a teeming book based on his experiences as an infantryman in the South Pacific.

It became a huge bestseller. But fame turned fickle on him, or maybe vice versa. He turned out to be too flighty, too impious and vainglorious to fill the role of anointed American writer, the thinking man's thinking man. Various literary and media establishments turned against him. As the '50s wore on, Mailer published Barbary Shore, a middling novel about an amnesiac writer and some despairing Trotskyists in Brooklyn, and a better but still underrated Hollywood novel, The Deer Park. He helped found the Village Voice, the model for all subsequent alternative weeklies, or at least the good ones. But his standing kept falling.

When it appeared that his comet had stalled badly, Mailer took decisive action. He fashioned a collection of short pieces into Advertisements for Myself, a triumph of swaggering literary sales talk. It contained a couple of his best short stories, including "The Man Who Studied Yoga," and a choice selection of essays, including "The White Negro," which epitomized the headlong intellectual bravado, even to the point of absurdity, that we would eventually think of as Maileresque. (It was "The White Negro" that included the notorious proposal that a hoodlum who mugged a candy store owner might be thought of as "daring the unknown.") Advertisements for Myself wasn't a bestseller of the magnitude of The Naked and the Dead. But it got talked about in all the right places, and remains a treasure house of contrarian thinking. Mailer had now re-established himself.

And wouldn't you know it, the rich kingdom of 1960s was about to open before him. Its new standards of misbehavior, its ferocities, its treacheries, its Kennedys — all of it answered to Mailer's disposition. For Esquire and other publications he began producing peerless meditations on the sensibilities (and the treacheries and the Kennedys) of his time. In 1968, he found his stride with Armies of the Night, his brilliant "non-fiction novel" about the October 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon. The first of two Pulitzers came his way. These were the years of Mailer at his most visible, when he took up every kind of public intellectual battle, and even ran a boisterous, quixotic and very entertaining campaign for mayor of New York.

All through his career Mailer would carry with him a few persistent preoccupations. One was that technology was the devil's instrument, the means by which everything that made us human would be gradually leached away. It wasn't just the atomic bomb that Mailer detested. He could write about "the scent of the void that comes off the pages of a Xerox copy." (You felt sometimes that there was no prose too purple for him not to attempt it.) He hated the telephone so much he wouldn't give phone interviews.

His other great topic was manhood, and the problem of how to achieve it in a culture subsiding into room temperature. Like Papa Hemingway, Mailer was fascinated by boxers and liked their company. He was also prone to drunken fistfights. As for women, he had something close to a mystical view of sex, of the female body as a mystery that a man must enter and possess. And his hatred of the emerging order of techno-rationalism extended to a distaste even for birth control. All that, plus the fact that in 1960 he had stabbed his second wife Adele — though badly injured, afterwards she refused to sign a complaint against him — made it inevitable that he would become one of the main targets of feminist writers in the late '60s and early '70s. His reply was The Prisoner of Sex, a defense of some of his favorite writers — D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller — and of his own embattled notion of relations between the sexes as a perennial test of strength.

For a long time another of Mailer's fixed ideas was borrowed from Wilhelm Reich, the apostate Freudian who was prosecuted in the '50s in connection with his claim that he could treat cancer with his magical "orgone" box, which he believed collected life energies. (Mailer actually built one for himself.) Reich believed that cancer was an outgrowth of sexual repression, the body's lethal reply to the denial of primal needs. Mailer could see that America was a repressed society, and couldn't resist joining in the conclusion that self-denial was literally malignant. It was an idea that effectively blamed the patient for the illness. In 1978, Susan Sontag would strike back with Illness as Metaphor, a book that demolished the habit of discussing cancer or tuberculosis in any such terms. Sontag had none of Mailer's percussive lyricism, but on cancer she was right, he was wrong.

But by that time Mailer was on to much bigger things. Gary Gilmore was a convicted killer who insisted that the state of Utah carry out its intention to execute him. The magnificent, haunting (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) book that came out of the Gilmore execution and the attendant media circus, The Executioner's Song, turned out to be the high-water mark of Mailer's career. There were many titles after that, but none with anything like the same power. The spare immensities of The Executioner's Song turned into the sheer endlessness of Ancient Evenings, his grand blunder into the Egypt of the pharaohs. (That book is also as a close as he got to producing the long promised but never delivered cycle of novels tracing the story of one Jewish family from ancient times to the present, which may be just as well.) There was Tough Guys Don't Dance, a detective novel that also became a movie, with Ryan O'Neal, one of four films that Mailer directed. There was Harlot's Ghost, a long novel about the CIA.

With all those ex-wives and children to feed, there was also no end of non-fiction literary shopwork — a dozen or more books on grafitti, Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a long one on Marilyn Monroe that borrowed heavily from other bios, at least for the bare bones of her story. The strenuous speculations on the meaning of Marilyn were entirely his.

There was worse. Mailer had always had the hipster's fascination with outlaws, including himself. What was The American Dream after all but an extrapolation from the interior life of Mailer after he had stabbed Adele in 1960? But after the great success of the Executioner's Song, it was Mailer's bad luck to run across another charismatic hoodlum. Jack Henry Abbott had spent most of his adult life in prison. In the '70s he started writing to Mailer, who was impressed enough by his furious and defiant letters about prison life to help him turn them into a book, In the Belly of the Beast. In 1981, with Mailer's help, Abbott was released on parole. Six weeks later he got into an argument with a young waiter at a restaurant in lower Manhattan, pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death.

The Mailer who romanticized violence — he hated that description, but it's the unavoidable one — was now the man who had aided and abetted it, however unintentionally. It had been one thing to take risks with his own dignity. This time someone else had paid with his life.

But make no mistake, when he died on Saturday, something important was lost. Even at his most exasperating and contrarian — especially at his most contradictory and contrarian — he was an indispensable cultural voice. And there is no one now even bidding to take his place with anything like the same force and originality of mind. My favorite Mailer quote will always be this one: "How dare you scorn the explosive I employ?"

Norman come back. Nothing is forgiven.

Walt Whitman May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892

Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). He grew up in Brooklyn, and lived in New York City for most of his life. He began working as a printer's assistant from a very young age, and in the '40s and '50s he worked for a series of newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He always loved New York. In one editorial, he wrote that New York City was "the great place of the western continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond of the New World."

It was in New York City, in 1855, that Whitman published the first edition of his poetry collection Leaves of Grass. He couldn't find anyone to publish it for him so he sold a house and used the money to publish it himself. There was no publisher's name or author's name on the cover, just a picture of Whitman himself. He wrote the poems in a new style, a kind of free verse without rhyme or meter. He said in one preface to the book, "Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves."

Leaves of Grass got mostly bad reviews, but Ralph Waldo Emerson called it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Whitman printed Emerson's comment on the second edition of the book, and he wrote an anonymous review of it himself, hoping to spark sales.

Whitman continued to add poems to Leaves of Grass and publish it in different editions throughout his life. It eventually went through nine different editions; Whitman compared the finished book to a cathedral that took years to build, or a tree with visible circles of growth. In the 1880s the Society for the Suppression of Vice called it immoral in a Boston newspaper, and that's when it finally started to sell. Whitman used the money to buy a cottage in Camden, where he spent the rest of his life.



A Noiseless Patient Spider


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.

Samuel Hazo Born July 19, 1928

The Necessary Brevity of Pleasures

Prolonged, they slacken into pain
or sadness in accordance with the law
of apples.
One apple satisfies.
Two apples cloy.
Three apples
glut.
Call it a tug-of-war between enough and more
than enough, between sufficiency
and greed, between the stay-at-homers
and globe-trotting see-the-worlders.
Like lovers seeking heaven in excess,
the hopelessly insatiable forget
how passion sharpens appetites
that gross indulgence numbs.
Result?
The haves have not
what all the have-nots have
since much of having is the need
to have.
Even my dog
knows that - and more than that.
He slumbers in a moon of sunlight,
scratches his twitches and itches
in measure, savors every bite
of grub with equal gratitude
and stays determinedly in place
unless what's suddenly exciting
happens.
Viewing mere change
as threatening, he relishes a few
undoubtable and proven pleasures
to enjoy each day in sequence
and with canine moderation.
They're there for him in waiting,
and he never wears them out.

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.