Tag Archives: Books

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 27th-31st October

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  • Enid Bagnold was born on 10/27/1889. “The pleasure of one’s effect on other people still exists in age-what’s called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.”
  • Dylan Thomas was born on 10/27/1914. “When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
  • Sylvia Plath was born on 10/27/1932. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
  • Rex Stout died on 10/27/1975. “I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.”
  • Ted Hughes died on 10/28/1998. “Most writers of verse have several different personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.”
  • James Boswell was born on 10/29/1740. “A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.”
  • Jean Giraudoux was born on 10/29/1882. “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born on 10/30/1751. “The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.”
  • Ezra Pound was born on 10/30/1885. “A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”
  • Ella Wheeler Wilcox died on 10/30/1919. “All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.”
  • Rose Macaulay died on 10/30/1958. “Love’s a disease. But curable.”
  • John Evelyn died on 10/31/1620. “Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world.”
  • John Keats was born on 10/31/1795. “A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it.”
  • Natalie Clifford Barney was born on 10/31/1876. “Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”

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[All photographs are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and are in the Public Domain.]

A Reading List a Mile Long: Daedalus Books Fall Shorts 2012

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Let’s get straight to the good stuff, no filler or fluff.

  1. Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections by Czeslaw Milosz
  2. Convertible Houses by Amanda Lam & Amy Thomas
  3. EYEWITNESS American Originals from the National Archives Gripping Eyewitness Accounts of Moments in U.S. History by Stacey Bredhoff
  4. Brilliant Women 18th Century Bluestockings by Elizabeth Eger & Lucy Peltz
  5. Matthew Boulton Selling What the World Desires by Shena Mason
  6. The Last Explorer Hubert Wilkins: Hero of the Great Age of Polar Exploration by Simon Nasht Continue reading →

[Intermezzo] I bought this mug because it reminded me of Sylvia Plath

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Cold, mossy gravestones whisper laments as I stroll past them in the shadowy pathways on an autumn morning. The tree swaying outside my apartment shouts poetry through the window. The pavement beneath my mobile feet croons a love song to the beauty of the late afternoon sunlight that dances across its craggy surface. Squirrels leaping across wires recite snippets of stories. I experience words everywhere I go: sometimes they are new combinations, asking or demanding to be written down. Stories waiting to be told. Sometimes they belong to other people. Stories waiting to be retold.

The bus stop across from the gallery would like permission to transform into flash fiction./The memory of a creepy photograph, seen briefly weeks ago, wants to be reborn as a horror story.

Chilly October evenings evoke the landscape of Hardy, so I’ve been reading The Return of the Native after the sun sets./ The Roebling Bridge, which connects Ohio to Kentucky, brings to mind Hart Crane./Then there’s my Sylvia Plath mug.

The trees of the mind are black.*

The trees of the mind are black.*

*From The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 21st-25th October

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  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 10/21/1772. “Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
  • Jack Kerouac died on 10/21/1969. “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
  • Kingsley Amis died on 10/22/1995. “If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” (Lucky Jim)
  • Sarah Josepha Hale was born on 10/24/1788. “There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.”
  • Denise Levertov was born on 10/24/1923. “Images/split the truth/in fractions.”
  • Geoffrey Chaucer died on 10/25/1400. “There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.”
  • Frank Norris died on 10/25/1902. “The function of the novelist…is to comment upon life as he sees it.”
  • John Berryman was born on 10/25/1914. “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”
  • Mary McCarthy died on 10/25/1989. “We are the hero of our own story.”

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[All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and are in the Public Domain.]

 

A Year in Books/Day 216: Wild Irish Women

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  • Title: Wild Irish Women Extraordinary Lives from History
  • Author: Marian Broderick
  • Year Published: 2001/This Edition: 2002 (The O’Brien Press)
  • Year Purchased: September 2012
  • Source: My momma.
  • About: Besides hailing from the fair island of Ireland (or, in some cases, having Irish parentage), all of the women profiled in this book have one thing in common: they are all dead. Just my cup of tea! I love historical ladies, whatever their professional or social province or claim to immortality, however slight. The more eccentric, the better. The 75 women included in this volume, for good or ill, do our complicated place in history justice. The stories of their often oppressive lives are stimulating, maddening, thought-provoking, and inspiring. They were artists, writers, intellectuals, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, republicans, actresses, scientists, and activists. One thing they never were, was boring. Since my curiosity about the women who smoothed my path is unapologetically insatiable, I couldn’t flip the pages fast enough. It’s a wonderful tease into the fascinating subject of forgotten women. Distilling-or gutting-the essence of a life, human and flawed and fertile, into a few pages comprised of paper and ink could be, and often is, problematic. Lives aren’t edited, but history is; what is left out is as important as what remains. Take this book as a nice starting point, then go forth and learn more.
  • Motivation: My love of feisty, original, gutsy women is well-known. Naturally, this book reminded my mom of me.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 49: “However, there was something that lifted the spirits of Peig (Sayers) and the other islanders on the long, dark winter nights: storytelling. This important form of entertainment was part of the old Irish oral tradition. A dail, or assembly, would meet at night in a house, and a comedy, mystery or tragedy would slowly unfold. Peig, with her pure Irish and her beautiful embellishments and turns of phrase, was an acknowledged master of the art. She kept hundreds of stories in her phenomenal memory, and she was able to memorize a story that would take a week in the telling after hearing it just once.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9 1/2