The Cats of Ulthar

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Poet 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."
He began to keep a series of notebooks, full of both poetry and prose, and in one of the earliest he wrote,
"I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both will understand me alike."
Leaves of Grass came out on July 4th 1855.
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.

O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain, my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red!
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up — for you the flag is hung — for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

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

excerpts from Crossing Brookyn Ferry

It avails not, time nor place-distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever
so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.
—

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years
between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not-distance avails not, and place
avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk'd the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in
the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came
upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv'd identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I
knew I should be of my body.

Songs of Protest

Songs of Protest

Edith Wharton and Henry James

*Bell, Millicent. Edith Wharton and Henry James: A Story of their Friendship . New York: Peter Olsen, 1965.

*Robert K. Martin - Ages of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Henry James Review 21:1 The Henry James Review 21.1 (2000) 56-62 Ages of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne Robert K. Martin Papers from the James-Conrad-Ford Conference There has long been resistance to an examination of the literary relation between Henry James and Edith Wharton. Those feminists who helped to revive interest in Wharton were wary of offering the possibility for reasserting a unidirectional influence from the strong James to the weak Wharton. As Millicent Bell argues, the critical assumption of Wharton as "a faithful follower" of the Master prevented study of "the actual degree and nature of the artistic relationship" (216). Instead of this fixed pattern of indebtedness, Bell sees in Wharton a process in which "an early desire to emulate yields to an irritated sense of the need to assert her distinctiveness" (217). To pursue Bell's argument, one needs both a more complex feminism that can allow Wharton to engage with James as an equal as well as a revised view of influence, in which a subtle concept of response and rewriting can replace the kind of one-way street of powerful writers and weak readers proposed by Harold Bloom. This essay looks at such questions through an analysis of one particular relationship: Wharton's response in The Age of Innocence (1920) to James's The Europeans (1878). There are striking...

*Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters : 1900-1915 by Lyall Harris Powers (Hardcover - Jan 1990)

*Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton
By Jessica Levine
Published by Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415938600, 9780415938600
233 pages

Edith Wharton, 1862 - 1937

Author Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City (1862). She came from a distinguished New York family, and she grew up stifled under all the rigid social customs of high society. She said, "I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone facades." She decided she wanted to be a writer at an early age, but her parents did not encourage her. She said, "Authorship was considered something between a black art and a form of manual labor."
Wharton was grateful that her parents took her traveling in Europe for much of her childhood, because she got away from many of the New York debutante parties, and she was able to spend most of her time reading. It was in Europe, when she was about 20 years old, that she first met the writer Henry James, though she barely had the courage to speak to him at the time.
Her parents married her off to a man she didn't love when she was 23, and she had to spend the next decade in New York, living the life of a society matron, hosting parties, and leaving herself almost no time to write. Having lived in Europe, she now found New York City to be an awful place to live. She said, "New York is cursed with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried, cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness."
She eventually had a nervous breakdown, and it was while she rested at a sanitarium that she began to write seriously. One of her doctors suggested that writing might impair her recovery, but after The Greater Inclination (1899), her first book of short stories, got great reviews, she disregarded the doctor's advice.
A few years later, she met Henry James again, and the two became great friends. She had just published a few historical novels, which weren't every successful. His advice was that she write about contemporary New York City, the time and place she new best. He said, "Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."
Wharton took James's advice, and the result was her first great novel, The House of Mirth (1905), about the frustrated love affair between Lawrence Selden and a young woman named Lily Bart. Wharton wrote: "He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. ... She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty."
Wharton went on to write many more novels about frustrated love, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which was the first novel written by a woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.
In her lifetime, most of her novels were best-sellers, even though they had unhappy endings. But after the rise of modernist fiction by writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Wharton's novels began to seem dated. She never understood why stream-of-consciousness writing came into fashion. She said of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."
After her death, many critics considered Wharton a stuffy old woman who wrote novels about manners, and most of her books went out of print. Then in 1975, the biographer R.W.B. Lewis discovered that she had conducted a passionate affair during her marriage, and that she had been much more radical in her letters and her journals than her fiction. Suddenly, feminists and others began to reevaluate her work. Several of her novels were made into movies, most of her books came back into print, and she is now considered one of the great American novelists.
Edith Wharton said, "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."

When I am gone, recall my hair

When I am gone, recall my hair,
Not for the light it used to hold,
But that your touch, enmeshed there,
Has turned it to a younger gold.

Recall my hands, that were not soft
Or white or fine beyond expressing,
Till they had slept so long and oft,
So warm and close, in your possessing.

Recall my eyes, that used to lie
Blind pools with summer's wreckage strewn.
You cleared the drift, but in their sky
You hung no image but your own.

Recall my mouth, that knew not how
A kiss is cradled and takes wing,
Yet fluttered like a nest-hung bough
When you had touched it like the Spring.

Louis Armstrong, 1901 - 1971

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana (1901), in a poor section of town known as "The Battlefield." In 1907, Louis formed a vocal quartet with three other boys and performed on street corners for tips. The Karnofskys, a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, hired Louis to work on their junk wagon. Louis purchased his first cornet with money the family lent him.
In 1913, he was sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent, and that's where he learned to play the cornet. Armstrong listened to pioneers like New Orleans cornetist King Oliver, who gave Armstrong his big break by letting him play in the Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1922.
Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-1928) were among the first 50 items preserved by the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. His autobiographies include Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954).
He said, "Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them."
He also said, "If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out."


WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD

(George Weiss / Bob Thiele)

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"

I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world

Oh yeah

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep by Robert Frost

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

**

Quote of the week:

Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it comes and softly sits on your shoulder.

Tennessee Williams, 1911 - 1983

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


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

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

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

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

Security is a kind of death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azar Nafisi

The book is a memoir of the experience of the author who returned to Iran during the revolution (1978-1981) and lived and taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997. It narrates her teaching at the University of Tehran after 1979, her refusal to submit to the rule to wear the veil and her subsequent expulsion from the university, life during the Iran-Iraq war, her return to teaching at the University of Allameh Tabatabei (1981), her resignation (1987), the formation of her book club (1995-97), and her decision to emigrate. Events are interlaced with the stories of book club members consisting of seven of her female students, who met weekly at Nafisi's house to discuss controversial works of Western literature[2] and are interpreted through the books they read.

The book is divided into four sections: "Lolita", "Gatsby", "James", and "Austen".
"Lolita" deals with Nafisi as she resigns from The University of Tehran and starts her private literature class with students Mitra, Nassrin, Azin, Sanaz and Manna. They talk not just about Lolita, but One Thousand and One Nights and Invitation to a Beheading. The main themes are oppression, jailers as revolutionary guards try to assert their authority through certain events such as a vacation gone awry and a runaway convict.
"Gatsby" is set about eleven years before "Lolita" just as the Iranian revolution starts. The reader learns how some Iranians' dreams, including the author's, became shattered through the government's imposition of new rules. Nafisi's student Mr. Nyazi puts the novel on trial, claiming that it condones adultery. Chronologically this is the first part of Nafisi's story. The Great Gatsby and Mike Gold's works are discussed in this part. The reader meets Nassrin.
Nafisi states that the Gatsby chapter is about the American dream, the Iranian dream of revolution and the way it was shattered for her; the James chapter is about ambiguity and the way totalitarian mindsets hate ambiguity; and Austen is about the choice of women, a woman at the center of the novel saying no to the authority of her parents, society, and welcoming a life of dire poverty in order to make her own choice.
"James" takes place right after "Gatsby", when the Iran–Iraq War begins and Nafisi is expelled from the University of Tehran along with a few other professors. The veil becomes mandatory and she states that the government wants to control the liberal-minded professors. Nafisi meets the man she calls her "magician", seemingly a literary academician who had retired from public life at the time of the revolution. Daisy Miller and Washington Square are the main texts. Nassrin reappears after spending several years in prison.
"Austen" succeeds "Lolita" as Nafisi plans to leave Iran and the girls discuss the issue of marriages, men and sex. The only real flashback (not counting historical background) is into how the girls and Nafisi toyed with the idea of creating a Dear Jane society. While Azin deals with an abusive husband and Nassrin plans to leave for England, Nafisi's magician reminds her not to blame all of her problems on the Islamic Republic. Pride and Prejudice, while the main focus, is used more to reinforce themes about blindness and empathy.

literary theory

From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially semiotic, linguistic, and interpretive theory, then structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory. Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", i.e. philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.
Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from Marxian theory, post-structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of postmodern theory.
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