Tag Archives: Writers

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 11th-16th December

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  • Colley Cibber died on 12/11/1757. “You know, one had as good be out of the world, as out of the fashion.” (An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber)
  • Gustave Flaubert was born on 12/12/1821. “Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.” (Madame Bovary)
  • Robert Browning died on 12/12/1889. “Take away love and our earth is a tomb.” (Paracelsus; Sordello; Love Among the Ruins)
  • Samuel Johnson died on 12/13/1784. “Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.” (A Dictionary of the English Language; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; London)
  • Heinrich Heine was born on 12/13/1797. “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” (The North Sea; The Salon)
  • Shirley Jackson was born on 12/14/1916 (or 1919). “I delight in what I fear.” (The Haunting of Hill House)
  • Maxwell Anderson was born on 12/15/1888. “This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it.” (What Price Glory; Saturday’s Children; Both Your Houses; Winterset; Knickerbocker Holiday; Key Largo; Anne of the Thousand Days)
  • Betty Smith was born on 12/15/1896. “I wrote about people who liked fake fireplaces in their parlor, who thought a brass horse with a clock imbedded in its flank was wonderful.” (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
  • Jane Austen was born on 12/16/1775. “There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.” (Sense and Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice; Mansfield Park; Emma; Northanger Abbey; Persuasion)
  • George Santayana was born on 12/16/1863. “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” (The Sense of Beauty; The Life of Reason; The Realms of Being)
  • Sir Noël Coward was born on 12/16/1899. “I love criticism just so long as it’s unqualified praise.” (Hay Fever; Private Lives; Cavalcade; Design for Living; Tonight at 8:30; Blithe Spirit)
  • W. Somerset Maugham died on 12/16/1965. “Only a mediocre person is always at his best.” (Of Human Bondage; The Moon and Sixpence; The Painted Veil; Cakes and Ale; The Razor’s Edge)

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

 

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

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Heading into this holiday season, we have so much to be thankful for: health, love, happiness, good friends, and our wonderful blog readers. Books at Middlemay Farm nominated us for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award, and we couldn’t be more honored.

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

The rules of this award are:

1. Display the award logo on your blog.
2. Link back to the person who nominated you.
3. State seven things about yourself.
4. Nominate fifteen other bloggers for this award and link to them.
5. Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award’s requirements.

I’m answering the seven things this time, so here you are:

  1. My second wedding anniversary is on Tuesday, and I am so excited.
  2. I have Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes my life extra interesting.
  3. Since May 2007, The Chef and I have lived in 3 apartments (all on the first floor) in the same renovated loft building. We love change, but are also really lazy.
  4. I have no sense of direction.
  5. I’ve had 8 or 9 hairstyles and 5 different colours in the last 16 months.
  6. I have my first 5 tattoos mapped out.
  7.  I watch Miracle on 34th Street (1947) at least 10 times between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. Every single year. I repeat, every single year.

My nominees are:

ALL of you lovelies. During this peaceful holiday season, I cannot and will not choose favourites. I love every blog I read and follow. You know who you are, so congrats on being so awesome! I will leave you with this anticipatory ditty:

 

 

Why I’m Blowing Off Writing Tonight to Watch Old Movies and Trim the Tree

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The essay I wrote yesterday in honor of my friend Frank really took a lot out of me. I’m drained. I’ve decided that I deserve a break from wading through my creativity. Tonight’s entertainment?

Top Hat Poster (1935)

Top Hat poster (1935)

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 7th-10th December

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  • Cicero died on 12/7/43 BC. “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” (On the Laws; Brutus; On Duties)
  • Willa Cather was born on 12/7/1873. “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” (O Pioneers!; My Antonia; The Song of the Lark; One of Ours)
  • Thornton Wilder died on 12/7/1975. “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.” (The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Our Town; The Skin of Our Teeth; The Matchmaker)
  • Robert Graves died on 12/7/1985. “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” (Good-bye to All That; The White Goddess; I, Claudius; The Greek Myths)
  • Thomas De Quincey died on 12/8/1859. “The public is a bad guesser.” (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
  • James Thurber was born on 12/8/1894. “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.” (The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities; My Life and Hard Times; My World and Welcome to It; The Male Animal (with Elliot Nugent); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)
  • John Milton was born on 12/9/1608. “A Mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell , a Hell of Heaven.” (Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained)
  • Dame Edith Sitwell died on 12/9/1964. “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” (Clowns’ Houses; Alexander Pope; I Live Under a Black Sun)
  • Emily Dickinson was born on 12/10/1830. “I’m nobody, who are you?”
  • Luigi Pirandello died on 12/10/1936. “Drama is action, sir, drama and not confounded philosophy.” (Six Characters in Search of an Author; The Rules of the Game)
  • Damon Runyon died on 12/10/1946. “I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.” (Guys and Dolls; The Damon Runyon Omnibus)
  • Mark Van Doren died on 12/10/1972. “Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.” (Spring Thunder; Winter Diary; Collected Poems 1922-1938; The Transients)

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

[Intermezzo] Wherein I Offer You a Few Disjointed but Heartfelt Memories of My Dead Friend Frank on Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

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Dear World,

Frank died at 87 1/2 years old. Picture this: When he was a tow-headed little boy, just a toddler, his parents dressed him in short pants and a striped shirt and posed him on the hood of the family Model T, grinning. Feisty. He was named after a prominent ancestor, Benjamin Franklin, and they shared more than a name: both were brilliant, larger-than-life, charismatic. Actually, he came from a long line of characters: a grandfather who died, in his 90s, as the result of a bar fight, a father who was an early aviator. That family bred their men big, bold, and memorable. Frank, my Frank, my friend, came of age during the Great Depression. He had an older brother, equally brilliant; when it came time for Frank to attend college in ’37 or ’38, there was no money left. None. His brother had the degree that Frank would never get. He didn’t sweat it, moved on with life. Somewhere along the way he met a beautiful lady and they got married. Everything changed on 7 December 1941. Continue reading →