4 October 2007

Revelation

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

__________________________


Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). His novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) became the definitive literary novel about World War II, and it made Norman Mailer famous at the age of 25. His next two novels flopped, and critics said that he had failed to live up to his promise as a writer. He was depressed by the bad reviews he had gotten, and he decided that he would take a break from trying to write the great American novel. Instead he wrote one of the most confessional books that had been published up to that time, Advertisements for Myself (1959), about his own ambitions and fears.

Mailer became a regular and controversial guest on late-night talk shows, trying to stir people up against conformity. He also helped invent a new style of journalism, in which the journalist himself was a character in his own stories. He used that style in his book The Armies of the Night (1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

His most recent book is The Castle in the Forest, which just came out this month (2007). It's a fictionalized version of Adolf Hitler's childhood.

*A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

*America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

*Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

*Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

*Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

*Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

*God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

*I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

*If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

*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.

*In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

*Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

*Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.

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

*Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

*The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.

*The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

*The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

*The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.

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

*There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.

*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.

*We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

*With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

*Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

__________________________

Elizabeth Bishop was 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 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 she 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, the behavior of birds, and her memories of 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.




One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

27 September 2007

"Literature must spring from an impression pressing enough to have made the writer write... It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure."  Novelist Elizabeth Bowen,  1899 – 1973


_________________________________
The poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up at a time when people in New England were beginning to struggle with religion. Many had fallen away from the traditional Puritan faith, and so a religious revival movement was sweeping the area, bringing people back to the church. Dickinson remained agnostic, even after her father and sister experienced a conversion at a revival meeting in 1850, when Dickinson was 20 years old. She wrote in a letter, "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling [sister] believes she loves, and trusts [Jesus], and I am standing alone in rebellion."

Dickinson spent one year in seminary school at Mount Holyoke, and then she moved back in with her parents to take care of the family household while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. She was not happy about the arrangement. She enjoyed gardening, but she hated to clean and absolutely refused to dust. What she disliked most of all about her father's house was the many visitors. Her father was one of the most prominent men in town, and people stopped by every day to talk politics, to get legal advice, and just to pay tribute. Dickinson thought the visits extremely tedious.

As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends got married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. Many biographers have tried to find some reason why Dickinson withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there has never been any definite evidence for that theory.

What we do know is that she spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. When an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I ... am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself.

Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great American lyric poet, and one of the greatest American poets ever.


Emily Dickinson,  1830 – 1886


I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

__________________
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."



Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

A Time to Talk


When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

_________________________

Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, in Lowell Massachusetts (1922). He grew up speaking French, and couldn't speak English fluently until junior high. He was a football star in high school and got an athletic scholarship to Columbia University. It was there that he became friends with Allen Ginsberg.

In 1951 he sat at his kitchen table, taped sheets of Chinese art paper together to make a long roll, and wrote the story of the cross-country road trips he took with Neal Cassady. It had no paragraphs and very little punctuation and Allen Ginsberg called it ''a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself.'' And that became Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957).


____________________________
Ernest Hemingway

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He went off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He gave away chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. And just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

He was one of the first Americans to return from the war, and that made him a kind of celebrity in Oak Park. He gave talks to high school students. He hung around his parents' house until they decided they wanted him out of the house.

He started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. They moved into an apartment in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a poor bohemian, but he actually had plenty of money. He and his wife traveled around Europe and went to the horse races and ate in nice restaurants.

He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés. He wrote about one of those cafés, "It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story."

He wrote in a letter to his father, "I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.

His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, The Sun Also Rises. Three years later, A Farewell to Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive, and young American men tried to act like "Hemingway heroes," speaking in staccato sentences out of the sides of their mouths. By the time he died in 1961, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro

If you are looking for the story by Alice Munro assigned for your oral exam please go to the following site:


http://www.condenet.com/mags/newyorker/asme/categories/artwork/pdf/12_27_Munro_Fiction.pdf

William Carlos Williams - To A Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

*********

Walt Whitman
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 flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths--for you the shores accrowding,
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.

********

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.

Who Said this?

1) The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

2) But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

3) Courage is grace under pressure.

4) I hate phonies.

5) The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

6) The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

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

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

9) 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.

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

11) 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.

12) There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

13) I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

14) I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

15) Eighty percent of success is showing up.

16) His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

17) Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner

18) Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

19) I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

20) It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.

21) Live all you can - it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

22) Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

23) A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

24) A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

25) And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

26) Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

27) College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

28) Dying is a wild night and a new road.

Literature: a Sine qua non

I feel we had a very good year together. I would like to congratulate you on your hard work and your interest. Literature (to borrow from what Matthew Arnold said about culture) invites us "to know the best that has been said and thought in the world." It is not a matter of luxury but a necessity. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) who declared that "men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there" in poetry, was stressing this essential need. The best of American literature like the best literature of any other nation makes its appeal to mankind everywhere and forever. It is universal and immortal.

In our course we studied American literature from its inception to the present time. The aim of this course was not so much to impart information, but to come to grips with the imaginative wisdom and artistic vision of a nation fighting for its moral and existential survival. It was an attempt to reach out and greet the literary experience of a country that has made a tremendous impact in the modern era.

We covered authors such as Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Henry James (1843-1916), Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) Robert Frost (1874–1963), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), Jerome David Salinger, (1919-), Toni Morrison (1931-), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), William Faulkner (1897 –1962), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Woody Allen (1935-), Groucho Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), Hart Crane (1899-1932), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), Alice Walker (February 9, 1944-), Kate Chopin (1851-1904), Henry James (1843-1916), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), Bret Easton Ellis (1964-), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), William "Bill" McGuire Bryson (1951-), Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005), Truman Capote (1924-1984).

We started the year with a poem by William Carlos Williams. It will be apt to also end with another poem by Williams in praise of poetic imagination:

Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
It is imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole we escape...


Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination...

The Brain is wider than the sky

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)



The Brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up at a time when people in New England were beginning to struggle with religion. Many had fallen away from the traditional Puritan faith, and so a religious revival movement was sweeping the area, bringing people back to the church. Dickinson remained agnostic, even after her father and sister experienced a conversion at a revival meeting in 1850, when Dickinson was 20 years old. She wrote in a letter, "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling [sister] believes she loves, and trusts [Jesus], and I am standing alone in rebellion."

Dickinson spent one year in seminary school at Mount Holyoke, and then she moved back in with her parents to take care of the family household while her mother recovered from a nervous breakdown. She was not happy about the arrangement. She enjoyed gardening, but she hated to clean and absolutely refused to dust. What she disliked most of all about her father's house was the many visitors. Her father was one of the most prominent men in town, and people stopped by every day to talk politics, to get legal advice, and just to pay tribute. Dickinson thought the visits extremely tedious.

As Dickinson took care of her family household, she watched as her friends got married and moved away. She grew increasingly isolated from her community, in no small part because she didn't attend church. Many biographers have tried to find some reason why Dickinson withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there has never been any definite evidence for that theory.

What we do know is that she spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. When an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I ... am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself.

Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great American lyric poet, and one of the greatest American poets ever.

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Two poems by Robert Frost (1874–1963)

The Wood-pile


Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.


Away

Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town.
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don't think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park.

Forget the myth.
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm—bound—away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.



Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005)

Arthur Miller was born in New York City (1915). His father was the wealthy owner of a coat factory, and the family had a large Manhattan apartment, a chauffeur, and a summer home at the beach. Then, in 1928, his father's business collapsed. He watched his parents sell their most valuable possessions, one by one, to pay the bills, until finally the family had to move in with relatives in Brooklyn. Miller had to share a bedroom with his grandfather. He was thirteen years old. It was terrifying for him to watch his father go from being so powerful to being so helpless. He said, "It made you want to search for ultimate values, for things that would not fall apart under pressure." He paid his way through college with a job in a research laboratory, feeding hundreds of mice every night. He had never been interested in theater before, but he thought he would enter a play writing contest to make some extra money, and he won with the first play he'd ever written. He won the same contest the following year, and decided that he was born to write plays. Unfortunately, the first play he wrote out of college, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after four performances.

He considered giving up but decided to try writing one more play. His next play, All My Sons (1947), was about a man who has been selling faulty machinery to the army, and finds out that he has caused the death of twenty-one soldiers. The play ran on Broadway for 328 performances, and was made into a movie the following year. Miller used the money he made from All My Sons to buy four hundred acres of farmland in Connecticut. In 1948, he moved to Connecticut by himself, and spent several months building a ten by twelve foot cabin by hand. As he sawed the wood and pounded the nails, he thought about the main characters of his next play: a salesman, his wife, and his two sons. He knew how the play would begin, but he wouldn't let himself start writing until he had finished the cabin. When it was finally completed, he woke up one morning and started writing. He wrote all day, had dinner, and then wrote until he had finished the first act in the middle of the night. When he finally got in bed to go to sleep, he found that his cheeks were wet with tears, and his throat was sore from speaking and shouting the lines of dialogue as he wrote. The play was Death of a Salesman (1949), about a man named Willy Loman who loses his job and realizes that he doesn't have much to show for his life's work. Miller wrote, "For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." It has gone on to be the most widely produced play in the world, playing in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Argentina. It has been particularly popular in China and Japan. Miller has gone on to have an extremely long and productive career, publishing short fiction, essays, an autobiography, and many more plays. His most recent play, Resurrection Blues, premiered in 2002 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

*A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

*A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

*A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

*A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!

*All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

*Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

*Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.

*Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

*Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

*Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

*He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

*He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

*I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.

*I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

*I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

*I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.

*I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

*I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

*In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Arthur Miller

*Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

*Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

*Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

*Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

*That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

*The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

*The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

*The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

*The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

*The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

*The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

*The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

*Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

*What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

*Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

*Without alienation, there can be no politics.

*You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

*You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989)

Playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett was born in a rich suburb of Dublin, Ireland called Foxrock (1906). His mother was a tall, strict woman, famous in her neighborhood for her short temper. Beckett started rebelling against her at an early age by climbing trees and jumping out of them, spreading his arms to break his fall on the branches.

He moved to Paris and became one of James Joyce's assistants and disciples. He wanted badly to write like Joyce, but he had little success. He was struggling to support himself as a translator and miserable about his failures as a writer, when one day he was attacked and stabbed in the chest by a pimp, the knife barely missing his heart.

Word spread that he was in the hospital, and a surprising number of people came to visit him. He didn't know he had so many friends. James Joyce brought him yellow roses and Nora Joyce baked him a custard pudding. Even the Irish ambassador came. One of his visitors was a French woman named Suzanne who had seen him give a lecture. She later became his wife.

Beckett got involved in the French Resistance during World War II, and he helped transmit secret messages across the boarder in packs of cigarettes. He had been struggling for years to write a novel, and the effort had only made him miserable, so in the midst of the war he decided to try playwriting. He said, "Life at the time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought theatre would be a diversion."

Beckett never published the first play he wrote, but he began to use playwriting as a way to cheer himself up after he got blocked writing a novel. He was struggling with a new play just after the war was over, so he decided to write another play. As an exercise, he made it as simple as possible: it would be a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. He finished it in just a few months, faster than he'd ever finished anything he'd ever written. And that was Waiting For Godot (1952), the play in which Beckett wrote, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"

He didn't have much hope that it would ever be produced, but his wife thought it was a masterpiece, and she showed it to everyone involved with the theater that she could find. It was finally produced in 1953, and became an international sensation.

Samuel Beckett said, "I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end."

He also said, "All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."

He also wrote, "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion. It's all around us...the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess."

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor



* All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

*Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

*Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

*Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

*Habit is a great deadener.

*I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

*I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

*In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

*James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

*Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

*Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

*Make sense who may. I switch off.

*My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

*Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!

*Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

*Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

*Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

*That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.

*The bastard! He doesn't exist!

*There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

*They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

*To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

*We are all born mad. Some remain so.

*We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

*We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

*What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

*Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

*Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

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.

e. e. cummings, 1894 - 1962

Poet E. E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He was a man who wrote joyful, almost childlike poems about the beauty of nature and love, even though he was actually a conservative, irritable man who hated noisy modern inventions like vacuum cleaners and radios. He spent most of his life unhappy, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized for his unpopular political views.

He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), when he traveled to Russia in 1931, hoping to write about the superior society under the rule of communism. He was horrified at what he found. He saw no lovers, no one laughing, no one enjoying themselves. The theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to talk to each other in the street. Everyone was miserable.

When he got home, he wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno. Most of the publishers at the time were communists themselves, and they turned their backs on Cummings for criticizing communist Russia. Many magazines refused to publish his poetry or review his books. But the attacks only made him more stubborn. He said, "To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

He tried to write a script for a ballet, but it was never performed. He tried writing for the movies in Hollywood, but found that he spent all his time painting humming birds and sunsets instead of working on screenplays. He had to borrow money from his parents and his friends. He said, "I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." A few years later, he decided to make some extra money by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him.

The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. Even though he suffered from terrible back pains, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden," he began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country. By the end of the 1950s he had become the most popular poet in America. He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last few years of his life were the happiest. He died on September 2, 1962.

In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. ... You and I are human beings; most people are snobs."

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water


______________

o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-i
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue

with a swoop and a dart
out flew his wish
(it dived like a fish
but it climbed like a dream)
throbbing like a heart
singing like a flame

blue took it my
far beyond far
and high beyond high
bluer took it your
but bluest took it our
away beyond where

what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-i
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go

______________

*A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

*America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

*At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

*Be of love a little more careful than of anything.

*Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

*I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

*I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

*I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

*I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

*If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

*It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

*Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.

*Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

*Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

*Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
*Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

*The earth laughs in flowers.

*The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

*The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

*To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

*To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

*To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.

*Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

*Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Typhoon published: 1902 (begun 1899)

*Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace. It was, in truth, as impossible for him to take a flight of fancy as it would be for a watchmaker to put together a chronometer with nothing except a two-pound hammer and a whip-saw in the way of tools.

*CAPTAIN MACWHIRR, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind: it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled.

*He had been made wet, uncomfortable, tired in the usual way, felt at the time and presently forgotten. So that upon the whole he had been justified in reporting fine weather at home. But he had never been given a glimpse of immeasurable strength and of immoderate wrath, the wrath that passes exhausted but never appeased -- the wrath and fury of the passionate sea. He knew it existed, as we know that crime and abominations exist; he had heard of it as a peaceable citizen in a town hears of battles, famines, and floods, and yet knows nothing of what these things mean -- though, indeed, he may have been mixed up in a street row, have gone without his dinner once, or been soaked to the skin in a shower. Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate -- or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea.

Author's Note

Author's Note

THE main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.

The period is that which follows on my connection with Blackwood's Magazine. I had just finished writing "The End of the Tether" and was casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume of "Youth" when the instance of a steamship full of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in northern China occurred to my recollection. Years before I had heard it being talked about in the East as a recent occurrence. It was for us merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them. Life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary complication brought into the ship's life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck. Neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In that company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing was like. The financial difficulty of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle talk for which it was not adapted.

From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient subject for meditation. Yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all. I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.

What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could see that he was the man for the situation. I don't mean to say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. He is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. Conscious invention had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly authentic. I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the story, while I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of my actual experience.

At its first appearance "Typhoon," the story, was classed by some critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece. Others picked out MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention. Neither was exclusively my intention. Both the typhoon and Captain MacWhirr presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction with which I approached the subject of the story. It was their opportunity. It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for themselves.

This is a belated reflection. If it had occurred to me before it would have perhaps done away with the existence of this Author's Note; for, indeed, the same remark applies to every story in this volume. None of them are stories of experience in the absolute sense of the word. Experience in them is but the canvas of the attempted picture. Each of them has its more than one intention. With each the question is what the writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the question for itself in words which, if I may say so without undue solemnity, were written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations. And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own way to the conscience of each successive reader.

"Falk" -- the second story in the volume -- offended the delicacy of one critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject. But what is the subject of "Falk"? I personally do not feel so very certain about it. He who reads must find out for himself. My intention in writing "Falk" was not to shock anybody. As in most of my writings I insist not on the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of human emotions.

I may safely say that Falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy. Falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to his right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not condescend to dodge the truth. As he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject of the tale. If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk's attempt to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.

"Falk" shares with one other of my stories ("The Return" in the "Tales of Unrest" volume) the distinction of never having been serialized. I think the copy was shown to the editor of some magazine who rejected it indignantly on the sole ground that "the girl never says anything." This is perfectly true. From first to last Hermann's niece utters no word in the tale -- and it is not because she is dumb, but for the simple reason that whenever she happens to come under the observation of the narrator she has either no occasion or is too profoundly moved to speak. The editor, who obviously had read the story, might have perceived that for himself. Apparently he did not, and I refrained from pointing out the impossibility to him because, since he did not venture to say that "the girl" did not live, I felt no concern at his indignation.

All the other stories were serialized. The "Typhoon" appeared in the early numbers of the Pall Mall Magazine, then under the direction of the late Mr. Halkett. It was on that occasion, too, that I saw for the first time my conceptions rendered by an artist in another medium. Mr. Maurice Grieffenhagen knew how to combine in his illustrations the effect of his own most distinguished personal vision with an absolute fidelity to the inspiration of the writer. "Amy Foster" was published in The Illustrated London News with a fine drawing of Amy on her day out giving tea to the children at her home, in a hat with a big feather. "To-morrow" appeared first in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of that story I will only say that it struck many people by its adaptability to the stage and that I was induced to dramatize it under the title of "One Day More"; up to the present my only effort in that direction. I may also add that each of the four stories on their appearance in book form was picked out on various grounds as the "best of the lot" by different critics, who reviewed the volume with a warmth of appreciation and understanding, a sympathetic insight and a friendliness of expression for which I cannot be sufficiently grateful.

1919. J. C

The Jewbird - some vocabulary explained

1) Gevalt: Yiddish interjection expressing anxiety

2) Dovening: davening ( making the prescribed daily prayers of Jewish worship

3) Tallith: a shawl traditionally worn over the head or shoulders by Jewish men during morning prayers

4) Phylacteries: two small square leather boxes containing scriptural
passages and worn on the left arm and forehead by Jewish men

5) Dybbuk: in Jewish folklore, an evil spirit which enters the body of a living person

Robert Frost

Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Philip Roth, 1933 -

Novelist Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey (1933). He grew up in a crowded Jewish neighborhood, and he always loved listening to the conversations of his neighbors. He said, "In warm weather, people sat on the stoops and on beach chairs in the driveways. [At night] you'd be sweating, trying to sleep, and you'd hear them, you'd hear their conversation all the time, and it would be very comforting."

At an early age, he began to rebel against the expectations of his community, where all the parents demanded that their kids would become successful doctors and lawyers without losing touch with their cultural roots. He said, "Newark [was] the battleground ... between the European family of immigrants ... who clung to the rigorous orthodoxy and the [American] children who wanted to be rid of all that because they sensed immediately that it was useless in this society."

He went on to the University of Chicago to study English literature, and it was there that he began to write his first short stories. He published his first book, the collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus, in 1959, and it got good reviews and won several awards. He came out with his big best seller, Portnoy's Complaint, 10 years later in 1969. He has gone on to write many more novels, including American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). His most recent novel is Everyman (2006).

Philip Roth said, "I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists."


*History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

*I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

*Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

*A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

*It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

*Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

*Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

*Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

*When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

*My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets— no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Portnoy's Complaint

Bernard Malamud, 1914 - 1986

Novelist Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits."

In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.

It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own desires and obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success and he went on to publish many more novels.

Malamud said, "I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."

*The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

*Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.

*We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.

*Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

*There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through wall.

*Life is a tragedy full of joy."

*Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

*What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews"

*I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

*The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

Joseph Conrad, 1857 - 1924 - Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski

*A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

*A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

*Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

*All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

*An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

*Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

*As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

*As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

*Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

*Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

*Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.

*For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

*Going home must be like going to render an account.

*Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

*History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

*I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

*I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

*It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

*It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

*It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

*Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

*Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

*Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

*Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

*The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

*The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

*The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.
Joseph Conrad

*The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

*The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

*The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

*The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

*There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

*There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

*They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

*This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

*To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

*Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

*Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

*Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

*Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

*You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

*You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Marshall McLuhan

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, 1911, the writer and critic MARSHALL McLUHAN – said, "It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is indelible and lethal." In the mid-1960s came out with his books Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage. He believed that the way we acquire information affects us more than the information itself; since TV involves more of our senses than reading, he believed the printed book to be doomed.