Ogden Nash, 1902 - 1971

Goody For Our Side
And For Your Side, Too

Foreigners are people somewhere else,
Natives are people at home;
If the place you’re at
Is your habitat,
You’re a foreigner, say in Rome.
But the scales of Justice balance true,
And tit leads into tat,
So the man who’s at home
When he stays in Rome
Is abroad when he’s where you’re at.

When we leave the limits of the land in which
Our birth certificates sat us,
It does not mean
Just a change of scene,
But also a change of status.
The Frenchman with his fetching beard,
The Scot with his kilt and sporran,
One moment he
May a native be,
And the next may find him foreign.

There’s many a difference quickly found
Between the different races,
But the only essential
Differential
Is living different places.
Yet such is the pride of prideful man,
From Austrians to Australians,
That wherever he is,
He regards as his,
And the natives there, as aliens.

Oh, I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends,
The foreigner tells the native,
And we’ll work together for our common ends
Like a preposition and a dative.
If our common ends seem mostly mine,
Why not, you ignorant foreigner?
And the native replies
Contrariwise;
And hence, my dears, the coroner.

So mind your manners when a native, please,
And doubly when you visit
And between us all
A rapport may fall
Ecstatically exquisite.
One simple thought, if you have it pat,
Will eliminate the coroner:
You may be a native in your habitat,
But to foreigners you’re just a foreigner.

Interior Landscape

One of my favorite books is Man's Search for Meaning, penned by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Victor Frankl. His thesis, formed from observations acculmulated during his time in Nazi death camps, was that man has little if any control over circumstances. But—and this is a big but—you do have control over your attitude toward what is happening to you. This observation about one’s attitude became Frankl’s means of survival. Attitude and mindset are a part of one’s interior landscape, safe from intrusion.

"The Garden" by Lee Robinson from Hearsay

Now that the teenagers
have taken the house -
long legs, loud shoes, sarcastic
tongues, their paraphernalia
winding from chair
to floor to stair
like some perverse
unstoppable vine - I retire
to the garden.

Nothing here
talks back. I learn
a language the children
don't speak: lantana,
hosta, portulaca. I have gloves
but seldom use them.
I like the dirt
under my fingernails,
the roughness that comes
from pulling weeds,
churning the soil for new beds.

It's time
to pitch the rusty swing set,
to rid the shed of punctured
volleyballs, old bicycles,
a decade of water guns,
time to fill it with peat moss
and new tools:

spade, trowel, rake,
all shiny, all mine.

_______

The Rules of Evidence

What you want to say most
is inadmissible.
Say it anyway.
Say it again.
What they tell you is irrelevant
can’t be denied and will
eventually be heard.
Every question
is a leading question.
Ask it anyway, then expect
what you won’t get.
There is no such thing
as the original
so you’ll have to make do
with a reasonable facsimile.
The history of the world
is hearsay. Hear it.
The whole truth
is unspeakable
and nothing but the truth
is a lie.
I swear this.
My oath is a kiss.
I swear
by everything
incredible.

__________

Deliverance

There’s no such thing
as the necessary poem;
that’s what saves poetry
from a life like ours,
from desire and striving.
That is not to say a poem
can’t yearn for something
it isn’t yet, can’t crave
a meal of only apricots
or want a one-way ticket
to another country.
It can. We know
how a poem can need so much
it turns to mush, and how
sometimes even out of mud
and mildew rise the most
fantastic flowers. No,
what I mean is different.
That the poem is redeemed
by indifference, that before
it’s written, the world
does very well without it.
Therefore it is free
to be what it wants to be
or not to be at all.
That’s its deliverance,
its saving grace, and why
when it decides to speak
we listen to a language
that is ours, but so unlike us.

Suzy Gershman

The Prophet's Hair

"The Prophet's Hair," contains mystery, magic, and more significantly, morality, as an overt theme carried throughout the story.

The Prophet's Hair," is more like a moralistic fairy tale using religious elements: a silver vial containing a famous relic brings catastrophe upon the greedy.

'The Prophet's Hair', extends Rushdie's range into the magical realism he exploited so effectively in Midnight's Children. The form is that of a folk tale, the tone crisp, swift and pointed. But for those who read the story years ago in the London Review of Books, extra-textual considerations may loom largest. Which of us, as we revelled in what seemed like story-telling at its purest and most sovereign, could have guessed that the fundamentalist madness which destroys the lives of all the protagonists would one day be visited on the author himself?

The Prophet's Hair," a charming, folkloric story, is Rushdie at his best. In the opening paragraph, a "rich idiot" from Srinigar goes looking for a dependable professional burglar in the seediest part of town, and is promptly robbed. It turns out that a moneylender has found the eponymous relic and, despite the hue and cry raised by its loss, declines to hand it to the authorities, justifying himself with the thought: "the Prophet would have disapproved mightily of this relic-worship." The unforeseen consequences of the relic's presence lead to the search for a burglar to take it away.

Salman Rushdie guides the reader through a tale of greed, betrayal, and the testing of human relationships. In many ways, the story reads like a fable, with the exception of Rushdie's typical English vernacular and ancedotes. Most of us can remember Aesop's Fables tales of moral dilemmas. A fable or parable, to some, have moral guidlines and lessons to learn from. In Rushdie's short story, his character's are in constant moral dilemma's when faced with the relic of the Prophet's Hair. The hair, supposedly belonged to the prophet Mohammed, and its significance to the community was undoubtedly important.

The theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque at Srinagar, seems more fantastic but even this is apparently based on an actual occurence. In this story, a wealthy Indian moneylender finds the missing relic one of the Prophet Muhammad's hairs and forsakes liberal self-indulgence for pious self-denial. His fanaticism is such that it eventually brings about not only his own death, but that of his family, through madness, suicide and murder. For a writer in [Salman Rushdie]'s situation to attempt even this kind of veiled satire when the object of the satire is the state of Islam seems brave to the point of foolhardiness. Perhaps he feels he has nothing more to lose by remaining silent on such themes.

Rushdie depicts the brutality of certain Indian traditions with wonderful irony: With a parent's absolutist love, Sheikh Sin, had made sure they were all provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.

Answer: Rushdie also recasts the relic from holy relic to secular icon by removing it from its religious framework (it had been removed from the mosque, where it was worshiped as a religious relic, placed into the hands of a moneylender (a profession that Mohammed forbade), where it was viewed as a prized possession for its rarity and monetary value but not its religious significance, then it was stolen by the thief, Sin, who viewed it as a means to retire – again monetary value - and avoid an ignominious death). How does this recasting of the Prophet's hair from holy to profane affect Rushdie's view of Islam and
the Prophet?

Despite being reframed from holy relic to secular icon, the Prophet's hair continues to work miracles. Discuss

Dramatic monologue in poetry, also known as a persona poem, shares many characteristics with a theatrical monologue: an audience is implied; there is no dialogue; and the poet speaks through an assumed voice—a character, a fictional identity, or a persona. Because a dramatic monologue is by definition one person’s speech, it is offered without overt analysis or commentary, placing emphasis on subjective qualities that are left to the audience to interpret.

Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of Eliot's career as an influential poet. With its weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, sense of decay, and awareness of mortality, Prufrock has become one of the most recognized voices in 20th-century literature,[1] and is the quintessential urban zeitgeist of the 20th century.

Ray Douglas Bradbury, August 22 1920 -

Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois (1920). When he was 12 years old, a traveling carnival came to town, and Bradbury met a magician named Mr. Electrico, who talked to him about reincarnation and immortality, and those ideas excited Bradbury so much that he withdrew from his friends and devoted himself to his imagination. He said, "I don't know if I believe in previous lives, I'm not sure I can live forever. But that young boy believed in both, and I have let him have his [way]. He has written all my stories and books for me."
One night, Bradbury was out for a walk when a policeman pulled up on the side of the road to ask what he was doing. He said, "I was so irritated the police would bother to ask me what I was doing — when I wasn't doing anything — that I went home and wrote [a] story." That story became a novella called "The Fireman" and eventually grew into his first and best-known novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a man named Guy Montag who lives in a future world in which books are outlawed and burned wherever they're found. Montag is one of the firemen whose job it is to burn the books. One night he takes a book home that he was supposed to destroy and reads it. The act of reading persuades him to join an underground revolutionary group that is keeping literature alive.
Ray Bradbury said, "I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri (1888). His poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the most anthologized poems in the English language. It begins:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only 22 years old. While it was a work in progress, he subtitled the poem "Prufrock among the women." The part "The Love Song of" came from a Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Love Song of Har Dyal." At the time, T.S. Eliot went by "T. Sterns Eliot." a formulation that he emulated in the title "J. Alfred Prufrock." When he was growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, there was a furniture store there named "Prufrock-Littau Company" — but decades after the poem was published, Eliot wrote to a friend: "I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated."
The poem was published a few years after it was written, with the encouragement of Ezra Pound, who was serving as Poetry magazine's overseas editor. He wrote in 1915 to Harriet Monroe about T.S. Eliot: "He has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both." Aside from stuff that had appeared in school newspapers and magazines, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was T.S. Eliot's first published poem. In 1917, it appeared in book form, the first of 12 Eliot poems in Prufrock and Other Observations.
Other famous poems by T.S. Eliot include "The Wasteland," which begins "April is the cruellest month" — and "The Hollow Men," which concludes:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare 45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while, 100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . . 110
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use, 115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old … 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. 125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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.

Jerome David Salinger, 1919 - 2010

Jerome David Salinger, the novelist J.D. Salinger, was born in New York City in 1919. He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse.

“You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.”

"I hate phonies."

"She is the queen of the phonies."

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."


"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."


"What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."


"I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.... If they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy."


"I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody most of them, and maybe they’re all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me."

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."

"Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."

William Maxwell Hetherington, 1803 - 1865

Oh! ! beautiful is God’s green earth I

When in the gentle Spring
Its flowery beauties leap to birth,

And wild-wood echoes ring.
Instructive with melodious joy,
Glad Nature’s anthem pure and high,
To Him whose goodness gave them birth
Oh ! beautiful ia God’s green earth!

Armistead Maupin, 1944 -

American writer Armistead Maupin was born Armistead Jones, in Washington, D.C. (1944). After he graduated from college in 1966, he worked for a while at a North Carolina television station managed by the future Senator Jesse Helms. From there, he joined the Navy, served in Vietnam, then returned to the United States to launch a career in journalism. In 1975, he moved from South Carolina to San Francisco, where he landed a job as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the pages of the Chronicle that he ran his popular serial "Tales of the City." The stories were later published as a series of six books, beginning with Tales of the City in 1978. The tales follow the adventures and relationships of a group of gay and straight characters living in a boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane. He said: "When you're a gay person, it's much easier to observe the gulf between truth and illusion, because you're often a part of creating it. You learn at a very early age to wear disguises. My work is about taking off those disguises."

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

The poet Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His father was a lawyer with a strong interest in literature. Wallace went to Harvard and then got a law degree from New York University. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Although he wrote highly imaginative poems, he led a simple, uneventful life as an executive at a Hartford, Connecticut insurance company. Stevens kept his life as a poet separate from his life as an executive. He would wake up at six o'clock to read for two hours before going to work, and he wrote many of his poems while walking home from the office in the evening. He wrote some of his best poetry after he reached the age of sixty, including the collections Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).

One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.

Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds." The following poem is called The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Song of the Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

David Henry Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau, was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He's the author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849).

He became the first member of his family to go to college when he enrolled at Harvard in 1833 at age sixteen. He wasn't especially happy with the teaching methods used at Harvard. Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have remarked that most of the branches of learning were taught at Harvard and Thoreau to have replied, "Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots." He graduated in 1837, ninth in his class, and refused a diploma, thinking there were better ways to spend five dollars.

He changed his name to Henry David and became a teacher. When criticized by the supervisor of the local public school for not using corporal punishment on his students, Thoreau thrashed a random group of his pupils to illustrate the senselessness of it all and resigned from the school.

When Emerson moved to Concord, Thoreau lived with him and did odd jobs around the house. Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write poetry, and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do his entire life.

In 1845, when Thoreau was twenty-seven, he built a small cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, and moved there. His motto was "Simplify, simplify, simplify." He said that his goal was "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." And he said, "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." Walden was published in 1854.

Thoreau said, "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

Prayer

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

Walden (1854). Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Salman Rushdie, 1947 -

The novelist Salman Rushdie, was born in Bombay, India (1947). His parents sent him to school in England, where he didn't get along with his classmates, and he missed India terribly. And then, while he was in school, his parents were forced to leave Bombay and move to Pakistan because they were Muslims. Rushdie was crushed. He didn't want to stay in England, but now he no longer had a home in India. So he enrolled at Cambridge and then got a job writing copy for an advertising company.
Working at the advertising company just two days a week, he took five years to produce Midnight's Children (1981), about the India that he missed so much. It's the story of a group of 1,001 children all born in the hour after midnight on the day that India gained independence. In the novel, each of those children gains magical powers. The novel is told from the point of view of a boy who receives the power to read minds, and who attempts to draw together all the other midnight's children, even as India and Pakistan are sliding toward war.
The book won the Booker Prize and became a huge success, among both Westerners and Indians. Only Rushdie's family hated the book, because he had incorporated a lot of family secrets into the storyline.
Rushdie published his third novel, Shame, in 1983, and then in 1987, he came out with a book called The Satanic Verses, which got mixed reviews. Most Western critics didn't notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. But turned out that Rushdie had made a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion in the book, and one section of The Satanic Verses seemed to suggest that the Quran is not the direct word of God. A month after the book came out, it was banned in India and book burnings throughout the Muslim world followed. The Ayatollah Khomeini eventually announced that Rushdie should be sentenced to death for blasphemy, and he placed a $1.5 million bounty on Rushdie's head.
Rushdie had to go into hiding. His Italian translator was threatened and stabbed. His Japanese translator was murdered. His Norwegian publisher was attacked and left for dead. Rushdie spent the next nine years moving from place to place. He lived in more than 30 houses. He found it difficult to write, so he helped set up an international organization for the protection of persecuted writers. The death sentence was finally lifted in 1998.
Rushdie later said, "The experience taught me ... a lot about the human capacity for hatred. But it also taught me the opposite: the capacity for solidarity and friendship. ... My Norwegian publisher was shot three times in the back and ... his first reaction, upon recovering from the bullet wounds, was to reprint the book. That's courage."
Back when he was still in hiding, a group of writers and literary critics distributed a series of buttons that said, "I am Salman Rushdie," to express their solidarity with him. Rushdie has since acquired a few of those buttons, and he said, "I still wear them sometimes, because, after all, I am Salman Rushdie."
Salman Rushdie said, "A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 - 1950

American poet Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1868. Masters grew up in the small town of Lewiston, Illinois, in the Spoon River valley. His father was a lawyer who didn't approve of his son's ambition to write, so Masters became a lawyer in Chicago. While he practiced law, he started to write and publish poetry and plays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace, including A Book of Verses (1898) and Maximilian (1902), but he didn't write anything particularly successful. He dreamed of writing a novel about the small-town Illinois of his childhood.
Then in 1909, he got a gift from Marion Reedy, the editor of Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis. Masters had been submitting poems to the journal, and Reedy rejected all his poems, but he liked corresponding with Masters, and he sent him a copy of Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, a book of poems from the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of these poems are in the form of epigrams. After Masters read the Greek Anthology, he decided to change the form of his novel and make it into a series of monologues. These monologues would be set in a graveyard, and they would be anecdotes spoken by more than 200 dead citizens of a small town. He based the small town on a combination of Lewiston, where he grew up, and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents had their farm, but he named it after the river that ran by these towns, and these monologues became Spoon River Anthology (1915). It was an immediate commercial success, one of the most popular books of poetry in American history. But the monologues were often cynical and showed the hypocrisies of small-town life, and so Spoon River Anthology wasn't popular with everyone. It made Masters an outcast from the small towns where he grew up — he had based many of his characters directly on people there, hadn't even changed their last names, and many of them were horrified by his unflattering depictions of them. And even beyond these towns, lots of people were scandalized by Masters's cynical view of small-town America and considered him unpatriotic. He continued writing but he never achieved the same level of success that he had with Spoon River Anthology.
Edgar Lee Masters said, "How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?"
And he wrote in Spoon River Anthology:
"Mickey M'Grew"
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower —
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged
Through bellowing darkness!

Touched by an Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

Maya Angelou

Dorothy Parker, August 22 1893 - June 7 1967

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey (1893). She's remembered as one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, even though she only wrote a few books of poetry and short stories. She started her career just after World War I, in an era when slick magazines were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The writers for these magazines wrote in a jaded, wisecracking tone of voice, and it was Dorothy Parker who proved that women could wisecrack just as well as any man.

Parker was four feet and eleven inches tall, and she loved to swear. The drama critic Alexander Woollcott described her as, "A blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." She said, "[I'm] just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute."

She was the only woman who belonged to the famous group of New York writers who met every day at the Round Table of the Algonquin Hotel to trade wit and gossip. That circle included Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker, and he said he borrowed the tone of voice for his magazine from those Algonquin meetings. He later hired Parker as a columnist.

Much of her writing was collected in the Portable Dorothy Parker, which has been in print since 1944. Of the first ten Portables published by Viking, only the Portable Shakespeare and the Portable Bible sold as well and as steadily as the Portable Parker.

Dorothy Parker said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."

And, "People are more fun than anybody."

I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

• I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

• Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

• I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

• You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

• Women and elephants never forget.

• I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.

• Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

• Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

• A girl's best friend is her mutter.

• I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

• Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

• Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

• Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

• The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'

• If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

• The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

• It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.

• All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

• Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

• Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

• Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.

• That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

• People are more fun than anybody.

• I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.

• I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

• You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

• Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

• The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.

• Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

• She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

• The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.