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?