Truman Capote, 1924 - 1984

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

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

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

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

*All literature is gossip.

*Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

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

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

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

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

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

*I can see every monster as they come in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uggie and Jean Dujardin - congratulations to both!

Word of the Day

Syb·a·rite   [sib-uh-rahyt]
noun
1.
( usually lowercase ) a person devoted to luxury and pleasure.
2.
an inhabitant of Sybaris.

Idiom of the Day

stand in good stead, to be useful to, especially in a critical situation: Your experience will stand you in good stead.


thrash out

— vb
( tr, adverb ) to discuss fully or vehemently, esp in order to come to a solution or agreement

Watch...

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

mammonism \ MAM-uh-niz-uhm \ , noun;

1.
The greedy pursuit of riches.
Quotes:
We will bring to mind a young man or young womanbitterly awakened from a fancy dream ofaccomplishment, action or glory, forced instead tocome to terms with a considerably reduced status, abetrayed love, and a hideously bourgeois world ofcrass mammonism and philistine taste.
-- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Claiming mutual “affection and confidence” with hiscollaborating reader whom he expects to agree,Dickens also indicts the false religion of Mammonism.
-- Linda M. Lewis, Dickens, His Parables, and HisReaders
Origin:
Mammonism is an odd combination of Aramaic andGreek. The word mammon meant wealth in Aramaic, and the suffix -ism forms a noun from a verb, asin criticism and plagiarism.

Sherwood Anderson, 1876 - 1941

Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio (1876). He's best known for a book of short stories about small town life, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). His father was a veteran of the Civil War and liked telling Civil War stories better than working. Anderson grew up resenting his father's laziness. He sympathized with his mother, who was miserable for most of his childhood. She died when he was a teenager, and he was so disgusted at his father's lack of grief that he left home and never saw his father again. He worked at a warehouse in Chicago and took business classes at night. He eventually got a job managing a mail-order paint company in Elyria, Ohio. He started writing fiction in 1909. One day at work, he stood up and walked out of the office and wandered off, ignoring everyone who asked where he was going. He was found four days later, wandering around in nearby Cleveland. He said later that he had pretended to be crazy so that the paint company wouldn't take him back. He moved to Chicago and became friends with writers like Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote every day at a desk watching people walk by his window. He said, "Sometimes it seemed to me ... that each person who passed along the street below, under the light, shouted his secret up to me." He was struggling to write what he called "a story of another human being, quite outside myself, truly told." One rainy night, Anderson got out of bed without any clothes on, and began to write. He said, "It was there ... sitting near an open window, the rain occasionally blowing in and wetting my bare back, that I wrote the first of the stories, afterwards to be known as the Winesburg stories." Anderson was 43 years old when he published Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and it made him famous. The book is a collection of short stories about people in a small town, and it was revolutionary, because he wrote about misery and sexual frustration and violent desires in a very simple prose style. He dedicated the book to his mother, saying, "[Her] keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives." Though he never wrote anything else as good as Winesburg, Ohio, the book was very influential for many writers, including Ernest Hemingway.

Emily Dickinson Quotes

*A wounded deer leaps the highest.

*Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

*Dying is a wild night and a new road.

*Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

*For love is immortality.

*Forever is composed of nows.

*Fortune befriends the bold.

*He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

*Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

I heard a fly buzz when I died I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm. The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power. I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable,-and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

A Few Figs from Thistles

My candle burns at both ends

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -

It gives a lovely light.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
___________________________________

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

Beg the question: Evade the issue

But many stacked turtles lie hidden beneath communism. To attribute contemporary authoritarianism simply to twentieth-century politics begs the question of why communism triumphed so thoroughly in Russia in the first place, as it did in China. There was, of course, a much older absolutist tradition at play. Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralised state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislature.

Francis Fukuyama

Zen Master said :“we shall see”

There once was a small village where a young child was bought a horse for his 9th birthday.. the villagers heard about this, and said that this was fantastic news… but when the Zen Master heard about this he simply said “we shall see”…

Three years later the boy fell of his horse and broke his legs, the villagers were distraught, “what terrible news” they said.. but the Zen Master simply said “we shall see”.

One year later the country went to war, and due to his injury the boy was able to stay at home instead of fighting, “what great news” said the villagers, and once again, the Zen Master simply said:

“we shall see”.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 - 1849

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Saul Bellow, 1915 - 2005

Novelist Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada (1915). He's been publishing fiction for over fifty years; he's written over 30 books, and he's published at least one novel each decade since the 1940s. His novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Humboldt's Gift (1975) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).

His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), sold fewer than 5,000 copies combined. He spent most of 1948 in France with his wife, hoping to gather material for a novel. But he grew depressed after a few months: His novel was going nowhere, he wasn't getting along with the French, and the weather was dreary. He decided to start writing a new novel, about a young man's adventures in Chicago just before the Great Depression. That novel became The Adventures of Augie March, and it was his first big success. The British writer Martin Amis recently called it "the Great American Novel" for its "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity .... Everything is in here."

Last year, The Library of America published Bellow's first three novels in a volume called Novels, 1944-53, making him the first living author to be published by Library of America.

Bellow said, "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."

*What is art but a way of seeing?

*A man is only as good as what he loves.

*When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

*I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.

*Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

*Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

*A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

*reality comes from giving an account of yourself. (Augie March)

*Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

*There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

*Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it -- they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

*Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

*Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.

*I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture

*A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

*A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

*A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

*I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we are all put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom—which is bordered on all sides by isolation—is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life’s banquet.

______________________________

"I've become aware of a conflict between the modern university education I received and those things that I really felt in my soul most deeply. I've trusted those more and more....I know how a modern man is supposed to think....I know that people live by something far deeper than head culture; they couldn't live if they didn't. They couldn't survive if they didn't. What a woman does for her children, what a man does for his family, what people most tenaciously cling to, these thing are not adequately explained by Oedipus complexes, libidos, class struggle, or existential individualism--whatever you like. Now, I know that psychanalysis has found a natural preserve for poets and artist called the unconscious. A writer is supposed to go there and dig around like a truffle hound. He comes back with a truffle, a delicacy for the cultural world....Well, I don't believe that. I don't believe that we go and dig in the unconscious and come back with new truffles from the libidinous unknown. That's not the way it really is" (58-59).

"I think that the university contains all that there is left in this country, or indeed in most countries, of a literary culture" (60).

"I do believe that I have something of importance to transmit....I think of myself as speaking to an inviolate part of other people, around which there is a sort of nearly sacred perimeter, a significant space...a place where the human being really has removed to, with all his most important spiritual possessions" (63).

"Herzog....I think of him as a man who, in the agony of suffering, finds himself to be his own most penetrating critic. And he reexamines his life...by reenacting all the roles he took seriously. And when he has gone through all the reenactments, he's back at the original point....the professor, the son, the brother, the lover, the father, the husband, the avenger, the intellectual--all of it. It's an attempt really to divest himself of the personae....and when he has dismissed these personae, there comes a pause..[grace]..it's better than his trying to invent everything for himself, or accepting human inventions, the collective errors, by which he's lived. He's decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening" (64).

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 - 1849

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

The poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston (1809). He was the son of two actors, but both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allan had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices, and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house.


He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting. Eventually, he began to contribute poems and journalism to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."


He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.


Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.


But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread and molasses, and sold most of their belongings to the pawn shop.


It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest gothic horror stories in English literature, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Near the end of his wife's illness, he published the poem that begins,


"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."


It became his most famous poem: "The Raven."


*As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy a limitless succession of Universes. Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.


*Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.


*Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.


*Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.


*I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.


*I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.


*I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.


*I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.


*I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
Edgar Allan Poe


*I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.


*I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.


*If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.


*In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.


*In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Edgar Allan Poe


*It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe


*It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.


*It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.


*Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe


*Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.


*Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.


*Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.


*Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.


*Stupidity is a talent for misconception.


*That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.


*That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.


*The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?


*The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe


*The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.


*The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.


*The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.


*The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.


*The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.


*There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.


*There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.


*There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.


*They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.


*Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.


*Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.


*To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.


*We loved with a love that was more than love.


*Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'


*With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.


*Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

"Winter Twilight" by Anne Porter

On a clear winter's evening
The crescent moon

And the round squirrels' nest
In the bare oak

Are equal planets.

"Winter Twilight" by Anne Porter

On a clear winter's evening
The crescent moon

And the round squirrels' nest
In the bare oak

Are equal planets.

, from Living Things

"Winter Is the Best Time" by David Budbill 1940-David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio

Winter is the best time
to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,
away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up
pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,
that place hidden and within.