Groucho Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977)

The comedian Julius Henry Marx, known as Groucho Marx was born in New York City (1890). In 1908 he began acting with his brothers, Harpo and Chico, and they became famous as the Marx Brothers. Groucho was known for his thick fake mustache, which he started using after he arrived late to a stage production and didn't have time to glue on his normal fake mustache. He used black grease paint as a substitute and liked it so much that he never switched. He was known as the most talkative Marx brother, and he's famous for his snappy insults. He said, "Marriage is a wonderful institution. That is, if you like living in an institution." And, "I never forget a face, but in your case, I'll make an exception."


I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought I'd rather dance with the cows until you come home.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

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.

Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.

My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.

She got her looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

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

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.

If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.

In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?

Marry me and I'll never look at another horse!

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

The Brooklyn Bridge

architect : John Augustus Roebling, completed by son, Washington Augustus Roebling

The Brooklyn Bridge is mentioned in several common expressions about the sale of the bridge by one person to another (the bridge is actually public property). A person who “could sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge” is persuasive; a person who “tries to sell the Brooklyn Bridge” is extremely dishonest; a person who “would buy the Brooklyn Bridge” is gullible.

The Brooklyn Bridge (originally the New York and Brooklyn Bridge), one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, stretches 5,989 feet (1825 m)[1] over the East River connecting the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. On completion, it was the largest suspension bridge in the world and the first steel-wire suspension bridge. Since its opening, it has become an iconic part of the New York Skyline.

Construction began in January 3, 1870. The Brooklyn Bridge was completed thirteen years later and was opened for use on May 24, 1883. On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 meters). The bridge cost $15.1 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction. A week after the opening, on May 30, a rumor that the Bridge was going to break down caused a stampede which crushed and then killed twelve people.

At the time it opened, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world — 50% longer than any previously built — and it has become a treasured landmark. Additionally, for several years the towers were the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The bridge is built from limestone, granite, and Rosendale natural cement. The architecture style is Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers.

Hart Crane, 1899 - 1932

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

To Brooklyn Bridge


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

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath, 1932 - 1963

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts (1932). She was virtually unknown for most of her life. And instead of living like a bohemian, she was a straight-A student, got into Smith on a scholarship and won all the prizes for writing contests. She was beautiful and outgoing, and she wrote cheerful letters home to her mother about all her successes.

She went to England on a Fulbright Scholarship, and it was there that she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes. She spent the years of their marriage helping support his career typing his manuscripts and writing letters to editors for him. He encouraged her to write her own poetry, but she didn't have much time after caring for the children and working part-time as a teacher. When she published her first book of poems, The Colossus (1960), it got mixed reviews, and she fell into despair at the idea that she would never amount to anything.

Plath's marriage with Hughes broke up in 1962. Living alone with her two children, she began to wake up every morning at 4:00 AM and write until the children woke up. She'd always been a slow, painstaking writer, but in the fall of 1962 she developed a kind of nursery rhyme style, finishing one or two poems every day.

At the end of October, during which she had finished thirty new poems, she wrote to her mother, "I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name." But when Plath sent her new poems out for publication, but the editors of various magazines rejected them as too strange and disturbing.

That winter in England was one of the coldest on record, and Plath spent the coldest days cooped up in the house with her children, suffering from a fever. On the morning of February 11, she committed suicide.

A collection of her late poems, including "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," was published as Ariel in 1965, and it became the model for a new kind of confessional poetry. When her Collected Poems was published in 1981, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Sylvia Plath said, "Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."



Stillborn


These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air --
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

Alice Walker born February 9, 1944 -

Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia (1944). She grew up the youngest of eight children. She grew up listening to the women in her family telling stories about lynching and adultery and struggling to survive. Her parents were sharecroppers who made about $300 a year. Walker would have been spent most of her time helping out in the fields, but when she was four years old a school teacher noticed her and got her new clothes and made sure she went to school every day.

When she was eight years old, her brother shot her in the eye with a BB gun, and a scar covered that eye for six years. She felt like an outcast, and began spending most of her free time alone, hiding in the farm fields, and she began writing in a journal. She said, "I think I started writing just to keep from being so lonely."

She graduated first in her class from high school, but it was because of her partial blindness that she was given a college scholarship for disabled students. Her friends and family helped pay for the $75 dollar bus ticket to Atlanta.

She transferred to Sara Lawrence College, and then took a trip to Africa. When she got back to college she was pregnant and seriously considering suicide. She chose to get an abortion, and then began writing dozens of poems over the course of a week, barely eating or sleeping, and she shoved all the poems under the door of her poetry teacher Muriel Rukeyser. Rukeyser showed the poems to her agent, and they were eventually published as Alice Walker's first book Once (1968).

Walker went on to write several more books of poetry and fiction, none of which got much attention, and then she decided to try writing a novel in the voice of a woman like one of the women she grew up listening to as a child. She started writing letters in that voice, addressed to God, and those letters eventually grew into her novel The Color Purple (1982), which spent more than 25 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and went on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Walker was the first black woman ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple begins, "Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me."

Walker has gone on to write many other novels. Her next novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, will come out this spring.

*All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

*Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

*Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

*Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

*For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

*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.

*How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

*I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

*I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

*I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

*I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.

*In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

*In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

*It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.

*It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

*It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.

*It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

*Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

*Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

*No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

*Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

*People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

*Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

*The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

*The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

*The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

*The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

*The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

*Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

*Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

*Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Kate Chopin, 1851 - 1904

"Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer; than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."

Today February 8 is birthday of the novelist Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri (1851). She married a wealthy owner of a cotton business and lived with him in New Orleans. But after her husband suddenly died of a fever, a rumor got out that she'd been having an affair with a married neighbor. The town turned against her and she eventually moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother.

It was there that Chopin first began to write. She had six children to take care of, so she wrote on a lapboard in the living room while her children played around her. Because she was so busy, she tried to write as quickly as she could. In less than ten years she produced three novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Chopin's early work was melodramatic and sentimental, but everything changed when she first read the French writer Guy de Maupassant. She wrote, "Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes ... [who wrote] without the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making."

Chopin began to write more explicitly about dissatisfied wives and marital infidelity. Then she published The Awakening (1899) about a woman (Edna Pontellier) who leaves her husband and her children to have an affair and become an artist and then eventually commits suicide by swimming out to sea. It was one of the first novels ever written by a woman about a woman committing adultery and it was almost universally attacked by critics. The St. Louis literary community refused to review the novel at all and libraries and bookstores in Chopin's hometown wouldn't stock the book. Chopin was unable to publish her next book of short stories and she died five years later, in 1904. Her work was forgotten for almost 50 years, and it was only revived because of a series of European critics who championed her work. A Norwegian literary scholar published the first biography of her and he also helped publish The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (1969). Today, The Awakening is now considered one of greatest novels of 19th century American literature.


*Mr. Pontellier wore eye-glasses. He was a man of forty, of medium height and rather slender build; he stooped a little. His hair was brown and straight, parted on one side. His beard was neatly and closely trimmed.

*But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!

*She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.

*He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain -- no matter what -- after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.

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

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

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

*You are burnt beyond recognition,' he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her fawn sleeves above the wrists.

*He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children.

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


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

*The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant...

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

*She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope.

*It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we would assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

"*Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism--a sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. It would require an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them. And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling. Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife, due to some cause or cause which you and I needn't try to fathom.

*Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse.

*There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.

*She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.

*The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.

Edna had found her old bathing suit still hanging, faded, upon its accustomed peg.

She put it on, leaving her clothing in the bath-house. But when she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her.

How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.

The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.

Her arms and legs were growing tired.

She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul. How Mademoiselle Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! "And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies."

Henry James, 1843 - 1916

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


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

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

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


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


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

He spent time in Geneva, London, Paris and Bologna, and his parents let him wander around the streets of the great European cities and soak up their language and culture. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to Europe and wrote for magazines like the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly, which is where his first novel, Watch and Ward was published in 1871.


Around this time he started running out of money, and he had to decide whether he wanted to go back to America, where he had a better chance of getting more books published, or stay in Europe. His brother William wrote to him, "It is a fork in the path of your life, and upon your decision hangs your whole future." Finally, in October 1875, Henry James wrote to his family, "Dear People All. I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!" He would live in Europe for the rest of his life. 



He started writing his most famous book, The Portrait of a Lady, in an apartment in Florence overlooking a waterway. It's about a woman named Isabel Archer who goes to England to live with her aunt and uncle and their son Ralph. Isabel inherits some money and goes to Italy, where she decides to marry a rich widower named Gilbert Osmond and spends the rest of the novel dealing with the horrible consequences of her decision. The novel begins, "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."


Henry James started feeling nostalgic for America at the beginning of the twentieth century. He hadn't seen his home country in twenty-five years, and he wanted to know how it had changed since he left. He dreamt about kicking through the leaves on Fifth Avenue and wanted to see if the trees he remembered were still there. He wrote to a friend that he wanted to "lie on the ground, on an American hillside, on the edge of the woods, in the manner of my youth." He had trouble raising the money, but he finally left for America in August 1904. He loved the big open spaces of the American West and the sunny weather in California, but he said the country was "too huge . . . for any human convenience."


James is known for writing big, challenging novels made up of long, complex sentences. He once said, "We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick." And he once called his books "invincibly unsalable." For a long time, he wasn't very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late '90s.

James said, "It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."


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


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

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


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

Source: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac

Elizabeth Bishop, 1911 - 1979

Sonnet

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.


Today February 7, is the birthday of poet Elizabeth Bishop, 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 up 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 Bishop said that every time she talked to Moore she felt, "uplifted, even inspired, determined to be good, to work harder, not to worry about what other people thought, never to try to publish anything until I thought I'd done my best with it, no matter how many years it took."

Moore 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, and the behavior of birds. Her poems rarely revealed her emotions. When other poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman began to write confessional poems, Bishop said, "[I] just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."

Bishop's first collection of poetry, North & South, came out in 1946. That same year she took a car trip to New Hampshire, but as she was driving, she impulsively decided to drive all the way to Nova Scotia, which she hadn't seen in more than 15 years. The trip brought back all kinds of memories from her childhood, and it inspired many of her best poems, including "First Death in Nova Scotia" and "The Moose." When she moved to Brazil a few years later, she found herself thinking about almost nothing but 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. But she was an obsessive letter writer. She once wrote 40 letters in a single day. She said, "I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here." One Art: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop was published in 1994.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote,

"I'd like to retire... and do nothing, or nothing much, forever... look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."

Source: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw was first published in 1898

For reading this book, please go to the following link:

http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/turn_screw/

Galway Kinnell

Today the first of February, It's the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). He became obsessed with the poetry of William Butler Yeats in college when his roommate, the poet W. S. Merwin, woke him up one night and read Yeats to him until dawn. After that night, Kinnell devoted himself to writing poetry.

He's the author of many books of poetry, including Body Rags (1968) and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). His Selected Poems (1980) won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He said, "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."

From the writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor

Jack Kerouac, 1922 - 1969

Original name Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac

*The beat generation.

*All of life is a foreign country.

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

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

Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk- real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
*What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

*No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.
*Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

*Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

° Beat Movement:

developed in the second half of the 1950's. It was launched by a group of poets and novelists who shared a set of attitudes-anti-establishment, anti-intellectual-opposed to the reigning political, moral and cultural values of the post-World War era and claiming self-expression and self-realization. "Beat" alludes to "beaten down" ( by the values of the time), to "beatitudes"
(reached in esoteric or Eastern religions, or drug-induced visionary experiences), or to the "beat" of jazz music. Main poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; main novelists: William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.