happybirthday3

Larry Joe Bird, Tom Waits, Joyce Carey, Johnny Bench, Mary Queen of Scots, Willa Cather.

Died: Thornton Wilder (1975), Robert Graves (1985)

R.I.P. Don Meredith

Turn out the lights
The party's over ...

Who can ever forget Dandy Don to Bullet Bob Hayes for 95 yards, most of it in the air. Hayes was so wide open the nearest defender was completely out of the screen. Hayes was the first true sprinter to play in the NFL.

Who can indeed. Dandy Don to Jerry Jeff Wobble, Dandy Don to Jerry Jeff Wobble.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3xsDv6yCnY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fg3y_PvUxM

8 December
Mary Gordon, Gregg Allman, James Galway, Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr., Lucian Freud, Delmore Scwartz, Lee J. Cobb, James Thurber, Padraic Colum, Paul Klee, Jean Sibelius, Camille Claudel, John Banville.

Died: Thomas De Quincey, Roger Shattuck, John Lennon. It's been 30 years since John Lennon's murder by that blighter Chapman. He made a big impression on my 14 year old person. At 61, almost 62 I still enjoy his musick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx0di2_rWUI&feature=related

Lloyd 'World Be' Free, Tom Kite, Rick Danko, Dick Butkus, Dan Hicks, Al Kaline, Judi Dench, Redd Foxx, Dalton Trumbo, Margaret Hamilton, Joseph Needham, George Grossmith, JOHN MILTON, Edwin Sandys, Joanna Trollope.

Died: Clarice Lispector.

Dan Blocker, Professor Longhair, Emily Dickinson, George Mac Donald.

Died: Luigi Pirandello, Algernon Blackwood, Thomas Merton, Karl Barth.

George Mac Donald
http://homeopathy.wildfalcon.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/200px-george-macdona...
Algernon Blackwood
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/dliterature/authors/blackwood/gallery/ab...

I have struggled with my weight over the years. I read an interview with Dan Blocker probably in TV Guide maybe 50 years ago in which he said that he didn't weigh himself every day, or somesuch; at his weight he lost five pounds walking down to the corner store so weight just wasn't informative. I loved him for that.

Robert

We love old Hoss Cartwright.

Grace Paley, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alfred de Musset.

Grace Paley's stories pack a wallop in more ways than one, do they not, Por-Mawn? Philip Roth once wrote that she "wrote like a man" and meant it as a compliment. It was a blurb on a 1959 collection of hers, The Little Disturbances of Man.

Old Philip Roth. A pfunny cat, no? I wonder how the scribblersdistaff would take such a evaluation today, Roth's compliment notwithstanding? While not being a Paley expert I can recall a few jabs to the chin that registered, certainly.

I "discovered" Paley this summer. I have no idea what Roth meant, but of what I've read so far, I think she's terrific. Read her last book of poetry, too. Less impressive, though enjoyable.

My "wrote like a man" paraphrase-misremembrance, isn't quite accurate. Once I grabbed Paley's Collected Stories (she's a phenomenal short-storyist, I agree, Thea), I banished her individual volumes (solely for space reasons) into the garage. Went huntin' for my copy of The Little Disturbances of Man this morning and finally located it. Below is Philip Roth's complete quote from the back of this 1960 Meridian ed.:

"At last a woman writer who isn't bitchy or precious or honey-and-roses, or all recollections of a gay fetching girlhood. What a pleasure to read Grace Paley! She has deep feelings, a wild imagination, and a style whose toughness and bumpiness arise not out of exasperation with the language, but the daring and heart of a genuine writer of prose. Though no blood-sister, she is as funny as Jane Austen. And at her best -- as in "An Interest in Life" -- she displays an understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness, and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike."

Good work EF, Roth doesn't sugarcoat it, does he?

Dicky Betts, Bob Pettit, Doug Ford, Heinrich Boll, Gustave Flaubert.

Died: Robert Browning, and JOSEPH HELLER.

Christopher Plummer, Lary Doby, Laurens jan van der Post, John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, Heinrich Heine, William Drummond.

On this December day it saddens me to say that the great Cham of Literature, SAMUEL JOHNSON gave up the ghost.
http://travellinghistorian.com/samp1e.jpg

A favorite Johnson quote:

'Nothing is more useless than a scheme of merriment.'

Lester Bangs, Stanley Crouch, Spike Jones, Roger Fry, Tycho Brahe

I've long wanted a silver nose, but never so much that I would sacrifice the one I have.

Robert

What would you sacrifice to acquire your silver nose? Tycho's silvernose came at a stiff price, no?

Well dueling was common among the German students back upon a time. Graduates were expected to have facial scars. According to Cecil, he could afford whatever price, if it is a monetary one that matters.

Robert

Dave Clark (of DC5), Edna O'Brien, Freeman Dyson, Charles Cowden Clarke.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/05/24/books/bookad3.jpg

Died in 1947, ARTHUR MACHEN, born Arthur Llewellyn Jones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Machen

Liv Ullman, Artur C. Clark, Victor Sawdon Pritchett, Noel Coward, Ludwig von Beethoven, Catherine of Aragon, Jane Austen, Penelope Fitzgerald, Phillip K. Dick.

Died: W. Somerset Maugham, Quentin Bell, Laurens van der Poste, William Gaddis.

Hu Shiu, Ford Maddox Ford, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Jules de Goncourt, Samuel Greenleaf Whittier, John Kennedy Toole.

Died: Jalal al-Din Rumi & Dorothy L. Sayers.

Keith Richards, Michael Moorcock, Anita O'Day, Tyrus Raymond Cobb, Paul Klee, D.T. Suzuki, Joseph Grimaldi (Clown).

Died: Louis Untermeyer (1977).

Are you sure that's not Tyrant R. Cobb?

Happy B-Day to A.M. Homes. Twisted as they come. A demented diamond of a writer. A real doll. Love her. Here's an old blog piece on her first collection of short stories, Safety of Objects ... http://enriquefreequesreads.blogspot.com/2010/02/safety-of-objects-by-am-homes.h...

Al Kaline, Bobby Lane, Jean Genet, Ralph Richardson, Italo Svevo.

Died: Emily Bronte (1848), Stella Gibbons (1989).

here's a scene from Fassbinder's film of Genet's last novel: Querelle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TBuCNvVPI4

lyrics courtesy of Oscar Wilde, of course. from one saint to another.

Fassbinder!

Patti Smith, Uri Geller, 'Bullet' Bob Hayes, DAVID LEVINE, Hortense Calliisher, THEODORE FRANCIS POWYS, Maude Gonne, Pieter de Hoogh.

Died: Carl Sagan, John Steinbeck.

Frank Zappa, Joe Paterno, Anthony Powell, Rebecca West, Walter Hagen, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Beckett.

Died: Giovanni Boccaccio, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Christopher Hibbert.

In late 1966 a friend woke me in the BOQ at the Pensacola Naval Air Station and said, "Get up. There's an album I want you to buy at the exchange." I got up and went and bought it. It was Freak Out by the Mothers of Invention. They were special. Frank Zappa was special.

Rebecca West wrote perhaps the longest book I have ever read, and she did a mighty good job of it.

Robert

Steve Garvey, Peter Hall, Benjamin Britten, Peggy Ashcroft, Andre Gide, Cecil Sharpe, Connie Mack, J.J.Bachhoven, GEORGE GISSING, Jean Racine.

Died: George Eliot, Nathaniel West, Samuel Beckett.

Jack Ham, Jerry Koosman, Paul Hornung, Dick Weber, Robert Bly, Gene Sarazen, JEAN-FRANCOIS CHAMPOLLION, Samuel Smiles, W.E.B. Du Bois.

Died: Abbe Prevost.

Ava Gardner, I.F. Stone, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Rush, John Lackland.

Died: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, John Muir, Harold Pinter.

What about Joseph Smith, Por-Mon, he was born today?

Jezus ?

You're a couple days ahead of schedule there, Mac. Jezus was born on Dec. 25th, not the 23rd or 24th.

you mean the NBA forward? Or the Mormon. Too bad I'm not a Mormon. I'd be Por-man the Mormon.

Por Mon the Moor Man

ok one day wrong, it is already 24 over here. It might be 25 already at Tomcat's place

Dorothy Wordsworth, Cab Calloway, Nellie Fox, Francois Durr, Sissy Spacek, Annie Lennox, Cosima Liszt (Wagner), Tony Martin (married to the exquisite Cyd Charisse , Quentin Crisp, Orlando Gibbons, Carlos Castenada, Humphrey Bogart.

Died: W. Somerset Maugham & Robert Walser.

Cab Calloway. Hot jazz and a hot reefer.

JANE LAPOTAIRE, Ozzie Smith, Carleton 'Pudge' Fisk, Alan King, Steve Allen, Henry Miller, Arnold Ludwig Mendelssohn, Dion Boucicault, Charles Babbage, Thomas Gray

Died: H.W. Fowler.

Jane L. playing Lady Mc Beth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zyuB7JnHGs

Bill Goldberg, David Knophler, Gerard Depardieu, Wilfred Sheed, Oscar Levant, Marlene Dietrich, Sydney Greenstreet, Johannes Kepler.

Died: CHARLES LAMB (1834), Dumas Malone (biographer of Th: Jefferson).

For those who, reading today's entries, were as curious as I:

William Scott "Bill" Goldberg is a former professional wrestler famous for holding the record for the longest undefeated winning streak: 173 wins and zero losses, although some have disputed the legitimacy of that total. Goldberg is also famed for his catch phrase, "Who's next?"

HB to Sarah Vowell. Love her.

Mel Stottelmyre, Maggie Smith, Terry Sawchuk, Earl 'Fatha' Hines, Arthur Eddington, John Molson.

Died: Theodore Dreiser & Susan Sonntag & William Shirer.

The founder of Arts and Letters Daily has died:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/founder-of-arts-letters-daily-dies/29349

Robert

WTF, PW gets sincere fan letters from hippie wannabees and I get to type in a few birthdays. I can't help it if I'm lucky.

Here goes less than nothing:
Gelsey Kirkland, Laffit Pincay Jr., Marianne Faithfull, Ray Nitschke, William Gaddis, Mary Tyler Moore, Pablo Casals, Albert Pike, William Gladstone, Madame De Pompadour, Charles Macintosh (wasn't the man in the brown mac, but invented it, if that's the right word).

Died: Carson McCullers, Ranier Maria Rilke, Christina Rossetti.

M.F.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_zOXRgD3N-_A/SsMVTzPWpRI/AAAAAAAAAdM/LzoTBpQzBqE/s400/m...
A.P. Free and Accepted M.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4mq0F-e3hk8/TA9BEgVtvpI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/bpz13Y8MoMI/s1600/...
G.K.
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/files/2008/11/21/img-dance-off-1_173044577230.j...

Someone write the old curmudgeon a fan letter; please. Preferably someone with loose synaptic ganglia. Tani?

The letter from Italy was lovely, indeed. Of course I was just having some pfun. I am not so benighted that I can't feel good about the good fortune of another. I am a basketball coach and am quite used to keeping my infantile feelings in check. Well maybe they leak out in the company of referees.
Well done Peter, my friend.

congratulations indeed!

I just finished reading Madame de Pompadour's biography by Nancy Mitford. She (la Pompadour) was a great patroness of the arts, and protectress of Diderot, D'Allembert and Voltaire. For that she deserves our eternal thanks. Here she is:

My kind of patroness

Read Johnson's letter to his patron so-called Lord Chesterfield. It's enough to give you goose flesh.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/johnsons/patron.htm

The dread Phillip Dormer Stanhope

Tracey Ullman, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, JOHN HARTFORD, Sandy Koufax, Del Shannon, Skeeter Davis, Bo Diddley, Paul Bowles, Lester Patrick, STEPHEN LEACOCK, RUDYARD KIPLING.

Died: Alfred North Whitehead

Michael Nesmith
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pu6V6_BEA

John Hartford
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_heX9IawYE&feature=related

Stephen Leacock wrote a fine Dickens biography.

52> As a companion volume you might consider Voltaire in love. I actually found both books next to each other on a book market eons ago.

Brent Barry. Patti Smith, Ben Kingsley, Andy Summers, Anthony Hopkins.

Died: Miguel de Unamuno, Marshall McCluhan

>56 PimPhilipse:
I'm looking out for it, and also her bio of Frederick the Great.

Country Joe MacDonald, Joe Orton, HANK GREENBERG, Xavier Cugat, Ernest Jones, E.M. Forster, James G. Frazer, Arthur Hugh Clough, Maria Edgeworth, Mad Anthony Wayne, Edmund Burke, Paul Revere, Lorenzo de Medici, J.D. Salinger (who died in 2010).

Junot Diaz.

Noidonotknowjunodeazz.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Junot Diaz's claim to fame, Por-Mon! Also, Drown. I'm not suggesting the title of the latter is something you should attempt at home ... ah hahahahahahaha ... no.

Another sort of drowning. Elizabeth Parrott Drowning.

hahahaha! Delicious, Por! My sentiments exactly!

Can we have a Fish Cheer to celebrate the new year?

Gimme an F...

Robert

P

Roger Miller, Dabney Coleman, Gino Marchetti, Christy Turlington, Issac Asimov, Gilbert Murray, Henry Kingsley, TONY JUDT.

Are you calling Isaac Asimov an Ass, Por-Mon?!

Just a slip of the finger, E.

Cheryl Miller, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Stills, Bobby Hull (The Golden Jet), George Martin, Hank Stram, Victor Borge, Ray Milland, Marion Davies, Za Su Pitts, J.R.R. Tolkien, Osip P. Mandelstam, Arthur Mailey, Clement Atlee, Piggy Logan,

Osip Mandelstam, one of the writers most admired by Bruce Chatwin !

I regret not biting on an Osip Mandelstam volume I held in my hands not too long ago at one of my favorite second hand haunts ... won't make that same mistake twice should I encounter him again ...

I thought this song, my favorite of Crosby, Stills and Nash, was from the early 70s, and not the early 80s, I see it first came to light. Oh well. Still sublime ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-qvIvBhSX8

Only a week or so ago I saw Helena Bonham Carter in The King's Speech. She is a beautiful woman. I hope she has a happy birthday. Also the movie was pretty excellent.

Robert

Pete Postlethwaite is gone. I most recently saw him in The Town wherein, as a testament to his compelling acting, SPOILER I was happy to see him get his comeuppance.

Robert

Alison Weir also born today. I copyedited her last three books, mainly unanglicizing them for an American audience. But I screwed up the last one; overlooked the opening epigraphs, which were not right. Got a scolding, and no doubt will not be editing any of Ms. Weir's books in the future.

>74 Mr.Durick: RIP PP. A great actor.

Floyd Patterson, Barbara Rush, Max Eastman, Issac Newton, Jacob Grimm.

Died: Albert Camus, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Isherwood.

Eliot died in 1965. I was a Catholick Schoolboy in the 10th grade. Here is a portrait of TSE by the great writer/painter Wyndham Lewis. He was teaching at the University of Windsor a little time before. He gave lectures at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where they have hidden away a few exquisite Lewis pastels. I tried to convince some of the directors that the pastels should be displayed somewhere, but they were not convinced. Truth is they had precious little knowledge of Lewis. It's shocking how little these know about their subject. They hadn't any familiarity with Augustus John's Autibiographys, and didn't know that Gwen was his sister. They did know much about raising lucre, and could swill wine and gobble cheese, not very good cheese, at openings.

Charlie Rose, Umberto Eco, Alvin Ailey, Robert Duvall, Jebulon Pike, STELLA GIBBONS (1902).

Died: Ernest Shackleton (who read Shakespeare to his men when stranded on the icy wastelands of the Antarctic).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/2/28/20060517085906!Ernest...

Pepe Le Pew, Capucine (Germaine Lefebure), John De Lorean, Earl Scruggs, Early Wynn, Alan Watts, John Lilly, Loretta Young, Danny Thomas, Kahlil Gibran, Tom Mix, Carl Sandburg, Gustave Dore, Heinrich Schliemann.

Died: (Horribly) Fanny Burney (1752-1840)
http://www.jimandellen.org/BurneyHatted.jpg

Jean-Pierre Rampal, Zora Neale Hurston, Ouida, actually, Maria Louisa de la Ramee had her birthday on 1 Jan 1839, and died 25 Jan 1908 - Virginia Woolf turned 26 on that date.

HB: E.L. Doctorow. Get yer hands on Drinks Before Dinner. Reading plays rarely does it for me. That one did it for me.

Graham Chapman (1941), David Bowie, Stephen Hawking, Elvis, Larry Storch, Wilkie Collins, ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, Robert Schumann.

Died: VIOLET FIRTH (DION FORTUNE), Paul Verlaine, ROBERT BURTON (The 19th C, explorer, linguist, etc,).

Muggsy Bogues, Jimmy Page, Susannah York, Les Paul, Simone de Beavoir, George Balanchine, Thomas Wharton.

Died: Marco Polo, Katherine Mansfield.

George Foreman,Donald Fagan, Rod Stewart, Frank Mahovlich, RAY BOLGER(1904), Sergei Eisenstein, Dumas Malone, Dumas Blood, Robinson Jeffers, Carolus Linnaeus (went nuts because too many species to catagorize), Aubrey de Vere.

Died: Sinclair Lewis, and Dashiell Hammett.

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't it?, Por-Mon.

Donit. Here's my favorite R.S. song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edbFVGrTG-c

Beautiful. Never heard it before. I guess that means I lack appropriate passion for Rod Stewart. Sigh. "once in love, you're never out of danger! One hot night, spent w/a stranger; all you needed, was somebody to hold on to ....

The only Rod Stewart song I ever much cared for. Mostly because it reminded me of the friends I grew up with in Gasoline Alley, Wallet, Skeezix, and Bill.

Clarence Clemons, Slim Harpo, Thomas "Schoolboy" Rowe, Lord Curzon, William James, Alexander Hamilton, William Curtis, Ezra Cornell, Bertha van Ation, Zelda Zoeller, Morgan Murdoch, Sissy Jupe, Evonne Hughes, Claire Claremont (not Byron's friend), Annabelle Christopher.

Died: THOMAS HARDY (1928), Barbara Pym, ROBERT ANTON WILSON
(2007).

T.H. http://neal.oxborrow.net/Thomas_Hardy/thomas_hardy_bike.jpg
R.A.W. http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Td135UrGaOU/Se1G5Hx9U-I/AAAAAAAAAbE/KADEjvZ1qK8/Robert%20A...
Do we play dice with the Universe?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZtw1yt8Kc

Really? Ezra Cornell? He was so ethereal I thought he was above birthdays.

Robert

He has precious little say here Mistah D.

Fantastic clip of RAW. I never heard of him, but now I'm hooked. to those LT members who snigger at the 'What is reality?' question on my profile (and there are some, not in le salon of course), R.A.W, sums it up nicely. Thanks por.

I think I might become an adherent of Discordia.

Robert Anton Wilson. Murr must read The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Dominique Wilkins, Christiane Amanpour, Walter Mosley, Haruki Murakami, 'Smokin' Joe Frszier, Hanny Youngman, Joe E. Lewis, Tex Ritter, Jack London, John Singer Sargent, Edmund Burke,

Sargent: http://emptyeasel.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/ladyagnewoflochnawbyjohnsingers...

Tex Ritter sings the theme from High Noon. One of the other stars in the movie is Sheb Wooley, the fellow on horseback riding to meet Lee Van Cleef in the opening credits, the man who gave us this.

Nikolai Khabibulin, Clark Ashton Smith, Sophie Tucker, G.I. Gurdjieff

G.I.G. http://www.creativeguide.com/Resources/G%20portrait.jpg
Sacred Dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmRIkw2Iifo&feature=related
From Peter Brook's MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23HFQcEFYO8&feature=related

Died: JAMES AUGUSTINE ALOYSIUS JOYCE (2Feb. 1882 - 13 Jan 1941) Sigurd F. Olson, Edmund Spenser.

J.A.A.J. http://messmerhonors.wikispaces.com/file/view/james-joyce.jpg/153473649/james-jo...
http://danmihalache.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/james-joyce2.gif
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/literary/full/M_Joyce.jp...
Wellpfuckinghurryupabouttit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8

Faye Dunaway, Jack Jones, Trevor Nunn, Yukio Mishima, William Bendix, John dos Passos, Hendrik Willem van Loon, Thornton Waldo Burgess, Mrs Sparsit, Silas Wegg, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622 - 17 Feb. 1673)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Moliere2.jpg

Died: Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) 27 Jan 1832 - 14 Jan. 1898
http://lcsna.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Dodgson-photograph-by-Reijlander.jpg

Mary Pierce, Norm Crosby, MLK Jr., Maria Schell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lloyd Bridges, Gene Krupa, Osip Mandelstam, Lord Fredrick Stanley, Pierre Joseph Proudhon

A.J. Foyt, Susan Sontag, Dian Fossey, Clement Greenberg, Kate Moss, Eric Liddell, Robert Service, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, RICHARD SAVAGE (1697), Dizzy Dean.

Died: EDWARD GIBBON & JOHN MORTIMER.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_OAc61kW10MM/SXDMYXpti0I/AAAAAAAACdg/PhJOLglZW3A/s400/J...

Maria Schell as Grushenka:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHtzZ1l5WaI

Une blonde !

And William Shatner as Alyosha, exploring strange new worlds...

RONALD FIRBANK, Mohammed Ali (Cassius Clay), Jaques Plante, Mack Sinnett, David Lloyd George, Anne Bronte, Charles Brockton Brown, Benjamin Franklin, ROBERT FLUDD

Died: T.H. White

And today we in America celebrate the birthday two days (and a few years) ago of MLK Jr. Happy MLK day everyone!

Jane Horrocks, David Ruffin, Joe Scmidt, Danny Kaye, Jacob Bronowski, Cary Grant, OLIVER HARDY, ARTHUR RANSOME, Peter Roget, Baron Montesquieu

Died: RUDYARD KIPLING & BRUCE CHATWIN.

Katharina Thalbach, Julian Barnes, Richard Leakey, Richard Lester, Lester Flatt, Ish Kabbible, Gustav Meyrink, PAUL CEZANNE, Lysander Spooner, Robert E. Lee, Auguste Compte, Dogen Zenzii, EDGAR ALLAN POE.

Died: Osho, and James Dickey.

Theobold Wolfe Tone, Jalin Rose, Ozzie Guillen, Slim Whitman, PATRICIA NEAL, Frederico Fellini.

Died: John Ruskin, R.D. Blackmore, Robinson Jeffers.

Detlef Schremph, Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon, Peter Fleming, Billy Ocean, Edwin Starr, Jack Nicklaus, Richie Havens, Wolfman Jack (Bob Smith), Benny Hill, PAUL SCOFIELD, Richard P.Blackmuir, J. Carrol Nash, Louis Menand.

Died: V.I. Lenin (1924), Lytton Strachey (1932), George Orwell (1950), Blaise Cendrears (1961), James Beard (1985).

John Hurt, Sam Cooke, GRAHAM KERR, George Ballanchine, D.W. Griffith, Lord Byron, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Richard Blackmore, Francis Bacon (1561)

John Hurt getting "hurt" in Alien (DVD). Hurts me to post it, but I must.

Tyrone Power, Sergei Belov, Derek Walcott, Paddy Chayevsky, Django Reinhardt, Edouard Manet, Marie-Henri Beyle, Norman Mailer.

Died: Northrop Frye, Keith Laumer.

Nastassja Kinsky, Warren Zevon, Ray Stevens, Edith Wharton, John Van Brugh, Desmond Morris.

Died: Jack LaLanne, at 96!

Their all you can stand give em a hand, Gitarzan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdbktulCOFw&feature=related

Read in the L.A. Times that Reynolds Price died recently. Never read him. The name sounds vaguely familiar to me, but could be I've never heard of him before. Anybody read him; like him?

He won the '86 Nat'l Book Critics Circle Award for Kate Vaiden. Eudora Welty raved about him and sent an early story of his to her agent, who then represented him. The Times calls two of his novels "epics," -- The Surface of Earth ('75) & The Source of Light ('81).

Dorothy Parker, even, raved about his first novel, A Long and Happy Life ('62).

I read a book by Price last year, called Roxanna Slade. I picked up for a dollar at the library. I loved it. I was a story of the not-so-ordinary life of a seemingly ordinary woman born in rural North Carolina in 1900. It is told by her when she is in her nineties. She tells us, w/o sentiment but with profound feeling about her family, falling in love, marriage and motherhood. The prose, Roxanna''s voice, the storytelling are all very strong. An extraordinary character, really.

I intend to read Kate Vaiden at some point.

Thanks for that citygirl. He didn't like being called a "southern writer," because he said he wrote more than about just hillbillies, and didn't want to get stuck with that stereotype. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for him on my rounds.

Chris Chelios, Leigh-Taylor Young, Don Maynard, Kathleen Tynan, Lou 'The Toe' Groza, Harold Lloyd Jr., VIRGINIA WOOLF, William Somerset Maugham, ROBERT BURNS, Edmund Campion, Robert Boyle, Lope de Vega,

AVS
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_MXBMK7NQtLk/TJCak414wuI/AAAAAAAAAvw/EkPe9ZzpBHc/s320/v...
With Leslie Stephen
http://blg.mktg.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Virginia-Woolf.jpg

Died: Lewis Mumford, A.E. Van Vogt.

Happy Birthday to Jack Youngblood, Corky Laing, Angela Davis, Eartha Kitt, Joan Leslie, Stephane Grappelli.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, Brigid Fonda, Nick Mason, Mordecai Richler, Bobby "Blue' Bland, INGRID THULIN, Donna Reed, Lawrence Durrell, Elmore James, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, CHARLES DODGSON, WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART.

Died: Louis Auchincloss, John Updike, Howard Zinn, J.D. Salinger.

Ingrid Thulin
http://www.uv.es/capelo/Ingrid_Fresas.jpg

An auspicious date for the arts is January 27.

Haleyah.

David Lodge, Jackson Pollock, Arthur Rubinstein, Henry Stanley, Peter the Great (Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov)
http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/local/massri/images/Peter-the-Great_1.jp

Died: WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1939), Zora Neale Hurston.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/images/20thc/Wbyeats.jpg

And here is Arthur Rubinstein playing Grieg's piano concerto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxzpy1b1_BY

I remember seeing an interview with Rubinstein, saying he had a snobby anti-Grieg attitude until he picked up this concerto, fell in love with it and, I think, learned it three days.

rather subdued performance there, I think, don't you choco?

I prefer my Grieg with w bit more pzzzazzz!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL3dBJ94UMI&feature=related

Gorgeous, Murrushka.

Would you say that Rubinstein was known for his subdued performances? I got the impression from somewhere that it was kind of a reaction to the extravagant virtuosity around him in his time. He played Chopin with considerably less pzzzazzzz than most others do too.

Well, if it must be so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIYT-MrVaI&feature=related
Fred in the morning tailors take warning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVbq-7o84jU&feature=related

Dominick Hasek, Katherine Ross, Germaine Greer, Professor Irwin Corey, William Claude Dukenfield, Romain Rolland, ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, Henry Morton Stanley, TOM PAINE, HUBERT K. POOT, Emanuel Swedenborg.

Died: Henry Louis Mencken, Edward Lear, Alexander Pushkin

I met "Professor" Corey's son many years ago, went to his apartment on a classy street in Gramercy Park, didn't like him much. I thought his father was hilarious at the time, and then I didn't.

Edwin de Kruyf, Payne Stewart, Boris Spassky, Vanessa Redgrave (1937), Richard Brautigan, Barbara Tuchmann, F.H. Bradley, WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, George Villiers

My own birthday 30 Jan. 1949

Por, Many happy returns of this day to you my friend! Long may you continue to delight and edify us with your wit and erudition!

Who birthdays the birthdayman? (What?) Many returns, sir.

Thanks and many thanks TCM & MM.

O the Mystery of the Paradox! That we are Richer-Men & Women, because of one Por-Man.

Many thanks to you oh merciful leader.

My dear Por! Happy birthday!

Well blimey, Peter, the same day as Noreen, my former metawife. Happy Boitday, my friend.

Oh! Happy Birthday! I hope you are celebrating!

What the hell is a metawife? Should I be jealous? (I must admit to a special fondness for you, pdub ;-)

When you read Piero's metamemoir, Digging Deeper: A Memoir of the Seventies you'll know what a metawife is.

Robert

er, Enrique.

It's a sales ploy, CG. People are so jaded nowadays, we talk about superstars instead of stars, the legendary instead of the merely famous, and so on. So maybe if I entice you with the notion of a metawife instead of a mere wife, you'll run out and buy my metanonfiction novel. If that don't work I'll change it to megawife and megamemoir.

Three Megawives in One Blockbuster Volume! With Behind The Scenes Interviews!

I'll be interviewed extensively in March, they tell me. One long behind-the-scenes interview.

139> starting March 15th: Group read/badgering interviewing Piero, not only about his "metawife" but his "metalife". Mark it on your calendars.

Looking forward to digging deeper into DIGGING DEEPER. Thanks PW for birthday wishes. And thanks and many many thanks to the Elizabet for the birthday wishes. I had a quiet birthday. Birthday dinner at my brother's house and thankfully no gifts and trappings, etc. I was taken to the Belly Up to hear my favorite entertainer David Lindley. He was fabulous playing all sorts of guitar-like instruments from the world round. The Turkish instrument was the best, sorry I can't recall the name of the thing. I wanted to request PACKINGTON'S POUND but I am averse to that sort of thing, so I remained silent - not easy for me, certain.

What else but more birthdays, and that other celebration, muted though it may be.
Virginia Ruzici, Nolan Ryan, Jean Simmons (1928), Jackie Robinson, Thomas Merton (speaking of a talkative keeping silence), Tallulah Bankhead, FRANZ SCHUBERT, JOHN LUKACS, Norman Mailer.
Died: John Galsworthy

PIANO TRIO e flat Op 100
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ixGAOwCiQ

Schuuuuubert ♥ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRGy-pzurPw

(first movement here) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJRO-yljRn0

Mike Campbell, Terry Jones (1942), Don Everly, Garrett Morris, Galway Kinnell, Murial Spark, John Canaday, S.J. Perelman, Langston Hughes, Edward Coke.

Died: Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, Werner Heisenberg.

Don is the heavier one with the curly hair Till I kissed You.

Stan Getz, Elaine Stritch, Al 'Red' Shoendienst, James Dickey, Abba Eban, Clarence 'Buster' Crabbe, Jascha Heifetz, Jane Wilde, George Halas, Suzy Walton, JAMES JOYCE, James Stephens, Havelock Ellis, Hannah More.

Died: Baldassare Castiglione (can Pietro Bembo be far behind?), Bertrand Russell.

http://stu19.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/james_joyce.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8
JAAJ reading from Finnegans Wake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOQi7xspRc&feature=related

H.B. Langston Hughes.

Island

Wave of sorrow
do not drown me now
I see the island
still ahead somehow

I see the island
and its sands are fair
Wave of sorrow
take me there

When I was four years old, I am told I visited an aunt who lived in St. Cloud, Mn. and she took my mother and me to see Jascha Heifetz in concert.

You do get around, Gene.

Vlade Divac, Fred Lynn, Blythe Danner, Fran Tarkenton, Shelley Berman, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Joey Bishop, Simon Weil, Norman Rockwell, Marquess of Salisbury (Robert Cecil), WALTER BAGEHOT, Horace Greeley, Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina

Norman Rockwell The Gossips:



If ever a picture told a story...

What about Ayn Rand, Por-Mon? She'd of been 106 today.

Vlade Divac!!! I almost missed that! Not a bad center by a long shot.

Lovely Schubert. Oh Schubert. Swooooon.

Oscar de la Hoya, Lawrence Taylor, Alice Cooper, Robert Coover, Cheryl Miller, Russell Hoban, Ida Lupino, Betty Friedan, WOODROW WILSON HAYES, Rosa Parks, Byron Nelson, Eddie Foy Jr., Raymond Dart, Fernand Leger, William Harrison Ainsworth

Have you read any Robert Coover, Por-Mon? I'd be curious to hear your spin on The Public Burning if you have read it. I enjoyed his first one about the mining disaster and the cultists, The Origin of the Brunists and the Baseball Statistics one, but haven't read much else by him.

I'll get to it later EF. So little time during the stretch run.

Elizabeth Swados, Nigel Olsson, Barbara Hershey, Christopher Guest, Charlotte Rampling, Al Kooper, Hammerin Henry Aaron, Zsa Zsa Gabor, William S. Burroughs, Belle Starr, JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS

'KIT' MARLOWE, AARON BURR, Henry Irving, George Hermann 'Babe' Ruth, Mary Leakey, Ann Stuart, Rip Torn, Patrick Mac Nee, 'Smokey' Burgess, Francois Truffaut, Frank Rich, Bob Marley.

Died: Barbara W. Tuchman and James Merrill.

James Augustus Henry Murray (1857), Steve Nash, Gay Talese, Buster Crabbe, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Quinet, HENRY FUSELI, Thomas Killebrew, Thomas More, William Boyce, John Deere, William Higgins (for nebulous reasons), Kate Chopin

CHARLES JOHN HUFFAM DICKENS (1812-1870)
http://biographydvd.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Charles_Dickens.jpg

Died: Anne Radcliffe

happiest of birthdays to The Indefatigable! long may he live!

Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon. This is the kind of Saturday morning fare I grew up with.

Me too.

I'll bet you remember this, too.

Well, I know it was on the tiny TV we had, but Captain Video was more my speed. I even had one of those decoder rings you get when you send in the cereal box top. And I remember, of course, Ming--Flash's nemesis--with his fu manchu mustache.

I raise a glass to Mr. Dickens. Next year it'll be his 200th bday.

Peter, You mean this guy?

I'm thinking about a thread for fifties music, teevee, radio, and cultural stuff in general. I don't know if even three of us would be interested. It would give me an opportunity to work on a project for smartini I promised him back in the early days of automusicography. I'm no cultural maven of the fifties, I just happened to pass through.

Yes, that's the Captain, and here's an ad for the decoder ring:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvKlqMjfk1Y&feature=related

>165 geneg: at least two of us would be interested!

Mad magazine. Diving under schoolroom desks to protect ourselves from nuclear holocaust. The Brooklyn Dodgers. Sputnik. Captain Video!!!!!!!

gahed Gene. The thred could meander along.

Jim Capaldi, Robert Klein, Tom Rush, Neal Cassady, Audrey Meadows, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Lemmon, Henry Roth, King Vidor, Edith Evans, Martin Buber, Kate O'Flaherty Chopin, ELIPHAS LEVI, Jules Verne, JOHN RUSKIN, SAMUEL BUTLER (1612), ROBERT BURTON (1577).

Died: Iris Murdoch

But it always comes back together with posts like #170. If my comments and thread jacks are unwelcome, just tell me and I'll stop.

Always welcome G. Don't you ever stop.

"Don't stop till you get enough" ~ Michael Jackson

Vince Neil turns 50 today, author of Tattoos and Tequila. What's your favorite Motley Crue tune, Por-Mon?

God Bless the Children of the Beast/Helter Skelter

Sandy Lyle, Mia Farrow, Joe Peschi, Carol King, Smoky Robinson, Vic Wertz, Brendon Behan, Bill Veeck, Gypsy Rose Lee, Amy Lowell, Patrick Cambell.

Died: FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0140442529.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Mark Spitz, Donovan P. Leach, Lon Chaney Jr., Bert Brecht (1898), Alister Hardy, Jimmy Durante, Big Bill Tilden (1893), CHARLES LAMB (1775), WILLIAM CONGREVE (1670), John Suckling (1609)

Charles Lamb
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_K7c7xyUVRxI/S0017rej0GI/AAAAAAAAAU4/C-hxCx96-cQ/s320/i...

Ooh, strong jaw, determined brow. Quite the Young Hero. Rather different from the kindly old man I've been picturing.

The tails of Shake-speare
http://s2.macrolibrarsi.it/data/autori/charles-e-mary-lamb_16897.jpg?1285835894

Sheryl Crow, Eva Gabor, Joseph L. Manckiewicz, Josh White, E.W. Swanton, MATT DENNIS.

Died: Rene Descartes, and Sylvia Plath.

Angel Eyes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6QjV8UU1-4

Let's wish a special happy birthday today to Sarah Palin, the author of Going Rogue.

I edited the addendum to the paperback of that lierary masterpiece, if you recall.

let's not.

Fine then. Be like that! Let's wish her an unhappy birthday!

Happy now?

Lorne Greene, Lou Salome, GEORGE MEREDITH, Abe Lincoln, Charles Darwin.

Died: Immanuel Kant

Gary Moore died a few days ago, 58, found dead in a hotel in Spain.

He played on a couple of Thin Lizzy albums. Session Guitarist. Lots of solo albums -- Victims of the Future is excellent. I remember his cover of The Yardbirds, Shapes of Things, getting a lot of FM airplay in '83/'84 on local hard rock radio stations in SoCal.

Carol Lynley, Oliver Reed, Kim Novak, Eddie Robinson, Georges Simenon, Grant Wood, Tallyrand, Elaine Pagels, Simon Schama.

Schama's Rembrandt book is first-rate.
http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/18/schama

Bernie 'Boom Boom' Geoffrion, Benjamin Kubelski (Jack Benny), Robert Shea.

Died: at 93 in 1975, Southampton, NY, PELHAM GRENVILLE (PLUM) WODEHOUSE
http://johngushue.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/20/pg_wodehouse_with_...

BOOM BOOM

Boom Boom.

Brief snippet of Wodehouse - the scene is Clapham Common on a Sunday afternoon:

When Mr Waller got up to speak on platform number three, his audience consisted at first only of Psmith, Mike, and a fox-terrier. Gradually however, he attracted others. After wavering for a while, the crowd finally decided that he was worth hearing. He had a method of his own. Lacking the natural gifts which marked Comrade Prebble out as an entertainer, he made up for this by his activity. Where his colleagues stood comparatively still, Mr Waller behaved with the vivacity generally supposed to belong only to peas on shovels and cats on hot bricks. He crouched to denounce the House of Lords. He bounded from side to side while dissecting the methods of the plutocrats. During an impassioned onslaught on the monarchical system he stood on one leg and hopped. This was more the sort of thing the crowd had come to see. Comrade Wotherspoon found himself deserted, and even Comrade Prebble's shortcomings in the way of palate were insufficient to keep his flock together. The entire strength of the audience gathered in front of the third platform.

(from Psmith in the City)

Plum is without equal.

Claire Bloom, Marisa Berenson, Christmas Humphreys, Sax Rohmer, ERNEST SHACKLETON, Alfred North Whitehead, Frank Harris, Claud Prosper, Gallileo Galilei.

Died: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Richard Feynman, Martha Gellhorn.

MG & the dread Hem:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbkrtv9EBY1qzn0deo1_500.jpg

I read a book by a fellow named Frank Harris a couple of decades ago. The two things I remember about it was that it was thick and it contained enough well-drawn, but very erotic sex to fuel an adolescent's wet dreams for years. It might have been a picaresque, I don't remember. It was titled The
Autobiography, or something very like that. I hadn't given this book a second thought until I saw Porius mention Frank Harris above.

Judging from what LT has attributed to him, I should be a lot more familiar with him.

My Life and Loves. He was a literary figure - bigshot editor or something, I forget.

Mark Price, John McEnroe, Iain Banks, Edgar Bergen, Van Wyck Brooks, George Macauley Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby, Johann Strauss, Henry B. Adams, Ernest Heinrich Haeckel, Arnold Boonen, Fredrick William (Prussia), Phillip Melancthon, SAMUEL PEPYS.

S.P.
http://echostains.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/samuel_pepys_700.jpg

Oscar Wilde said that Frank Harris was invited to every great house in Europe at least once. And Harris was one of the many to try his hand at a Shakespeare biography.

no mean bookman Frank Harris, one of the key (but historically ephemeral) figures of the fin de siecle literary scene.

I read his life and loves with great delight when I was a wee kitten.

One of the book groups at church read The Education of Henry Adams for discussion largely because it was the number on book on Modern Library's 100 Best Non-Fiction list. Several of the members of that group were also participants in a regular pot luck and game night.

The fairly literate resident caretaker (the other caretaker was the artful resident caretaker) came through the pot luck waving paper and saying, "Can you believe this? Who ever heard of this?" It was that list. Several of us replied that we had read Adams's book. The caretaker asked whether it was the best non-fiction we had ever read. A couple of us allowed as how it might have been.

Robert

OhowitmighthavebeenMistahD.

Drew Barry, Ambrose 'Rowdy' Gaines, Guillermo Vilas, Gene Pitney, Jim Brown, Alan Bates, Bobby Lewis, Chaim Potok, Walter L. 'Red' Barber, William Cadbury (one Choc would like)

And of course passings to The Next Whorl of the Spiral: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere), Ann Radcliffe, Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Ahhhhhhhh.

Muse, I hope you have enough for everybody.

Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Molly Ringwald, Sinead Cusack, Milos Foreman, JACK PALANCE, WALLACE STEGNER, Andre Breton, George Gipp, Andres Segovia, Adolfe Menjou, Edddie Arnold, Gladys Cooper, Nikos Kazantzakis, Sholem Aleichem, August Belmont Jr., Swami Ramakrishnan, Henri Leys, Issac Casaubon, 'Bloody' Mary

Sam, I have enough chocolate if you have enough A_

Molly Ringwald, the unannounced star of Tempest

Robert

Wow. In the abstract that looks promising enough based on the cast and the Shakespeare/Mazursky team of writers. Did you see it?

In the theater back in '82 or whenever. I may also have it on tape around here somewhere. I should watch it again.

Robert

Margaux Hemingway, Lou Cristie, William 'Smokey' Robinson, Carson McCullers, Eddie Arcaro, Stan Kenton, John Bubbles, LOUIS CALHERN, Luigi Boccehrini, Nicholas Copernicus.

Died: Knut Hamsun, and Andre Gide.

I would not likely have read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter if Oprah hadn't got it featured in all of the book stores. So, all of you readers ashamed to be seen with one of her books, I'll carry that burden for you. I hope someday to read more of Carson McCullers.

Robert

Hardly ashamed Mistah D. She's as least as fine as Hortense Callisher or Ellen Glasgow.

I don't get the deal with dissing Oprah's book club. If she recommends a good book irregardless of the cover, whether it has a big Oprah Book Club seal or not, the words between the covers are the same. Isn't that what counts?

some Boccherini. used in one of the greatest movies made in the last 10 years.

My dream as a child cellist was to play the Boccherini cello concerto but I quit when I was in college. I love him.

Charles Barkley, Imogen Stubbs, Randy California, Walter Becker, Nancy Wilson, Robert Altman, JACKIE GLEASON, Ansel Adams, LOUIS KAHN, HESKETH PEARSON, Honore Daumier

I am a Boccherini-ite too, along with Albinoni, and of course Vivaldi; all those harmonic cats. And yes, ditto on the cello; Haydn's double concerto comes to mind.

WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN, Dr. Jack Ramsay, Ann Sheridan, Thomas Yawkey, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Constantine Brancusi, JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, David Foster Wallace.

Died: Benedict de Spinoza (1677), Malcolm X (1965), Gershom Scholem (1982).

Long before the wedding cake left out in the rain:
http://johngushue.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451f25369e2010536649fed970c-800wi

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/5/28/1243508999955/W...

Thanks, Por-Mon (and btw, slick can call you "Por-Man" but not "Por-Mon," don't you agree? Shouldn't only I be allowed to call you "Por-Mon"?) for listing my idol, David Foster Wallace. He'd of been 49 today.

Hardcore DFW fanatics have already seen this clip, but perhaps you and Piero and others haven't. It's DFW being interviewed in Italy in 2006, discussing the topic of "failure" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVzhhvCRTCo

Julius Erving, Dennis Awtry, Tom Okker, Dick & Tom Van Arsdale,Chet Walker, ISHMAEL REED, Samuel Whitbread, Charles O. Finley, Sid Abel (1918), Jane Bowles, Nicholas Monsarrat, John Mills, Gale Gordon, Morley Callaghan, Arthur Schopenhauer, Rembrandt Peale, Anthony Van Dyck, George Washington

ok not one of them owes me money..... Next !!

GG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwnFffPP3us

Gale Gordon always reminded me of the great Frank Morgan. Similar vocalizations. Great mountebanks, flim-flam men, barkers in the circus of life.

Shakira Caine, Johnny Winter, Fred Biletnikoff, Peter Fonda, George F. Handel, Samuel Pepys

August Derleth, Chester Nimitz, Honus Wagner, WINSLOW HOMER

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ztkgQyBYDXE/TMdSZ28esDI/AAAAAAAAAYI/tCvL3IDECi8/s1600/...
http://www.theartwolf.com/articles/impressionism/winslow-homer-summer.jpg
http://www.bestpriceart.com/shop-online/images/vault/homer4.jpg

ANTHONY BURGESS, 'The Nature Boy' Rik Flair, GEORGE HARRISON, Diane Baker, TOM COURTENAY, Bobby Riggs, Jim Backus, Herbert 'Zeppo' Marx, Enrico Caruso, Bendetto Croce, AUGUSTE RENOIR, Carlo Goldini

http://www.wholesalechinaoilpainting.com/upload1/file-admin/images/new16/Pierre-...
http://www.renoirgallery.com/paintings/large/renoir-the-umbrellas.jpg

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Died: Fredrick Busch, and Tennesse Williams, or 'The Immortal Bird', as Gore Vidal named him, if memory serves.

I never knew Renoir's first name was August.

Never too late C.

Johnny Cash, Godfrey Cambridge, Lazar Berman, Marta Kristen, Antoine 'Fats' Dominoe, Betty Hutton, Tony Randall, Edward Charles 'Preacher' Roe (not to be mistaken with Lynwood T. 'Schoolboy' Rowe), I. A. Richards, William Frawley, Grover Cleveland Alexander, William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, Camille Flammarion, Victor Hugo, HONORE DAUMIER, CHRISTOPHER 'KIT' MARLOWE

HD
http://www.frenchdrawings.org/images/hpt/1950.12.659.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Honoré_Daumier_031.jpg
http://rpmedia.ask.com/ts?u=/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Honoré_Daumier_017.jp...

Died: LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827), Karl Jaspers, Bill Hicks.

A fine passage from LvB
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgHxmAsINDk

227> that's in my top ten songs all time ... I'll take his version over Trent Reznor's any freaking day of the week ...

Paddy Ashdown, Timothy Spall, Virginia Maskell, Ralph Nader, Raymond Berry, Elizabeth Taylor, Dexter Gordon, Paul Ricoeur, Lawrence Durrell, Peter de Vries, Gene Sarazen, Rudolf Steiner, Ellen Alice Terry, Richard Garnett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Steinbeck.

Deaths on this February date: Konrad Lorenz, S.I. Hayakawa, Spike Milligan, William F. Buckley.

Ricky 'the Dragon' Steamboat, John Fahey, Zero Mostel, Stephen Harold Spender, Bugsy Siegel, Linus Pauling, Vaslav Nijinsky, Ernest Renan, John Tenniel, MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

The Dook: dead.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110228/ap_on_sp_ba_ne/bbo_obit_snider

Hurt is probably my favorite Cash song. It's one of those I never get tired of. I like NIN, too. Reznor has created two of my all-time favorite rock songs, perfect songs: Closer and Head Like a Hole. I was pleased that his score won last night. I was surprised. They usually pick the boringest score and the most treaclily(?) (I'm not trying to spell treacly) offensive song for best song. I didn't agree with the Best Song pick (Randy Newman), but at least it wasn't the absolutely horrendous just-lying-there song from Tangled. I mean, people: the best songs are not in cartoons!!!!!!!

Kinda lost my head there.

I love that song too. Esp. the Cash version. I love the Bowie "I'm afraid of Americans" video where he is stalked by Trent R.

Yeah, The Boys of Summer have faded into baseball lore and are here no more.

>234 anna_in_pdx: ha ha YES. I always wanted someone to do a video of the remix with Ice Cube.

Henri 'the Pocket' Richard, Balthus, John 'Pepper' Martin, Edward Cave.

Died: George Grossmith and Arthur Koestler.

And Ralph Ellison.

Peter Gomes has died.

Suze Rotolo died yesterday after suffering a long illness. She was 67. She was the woman hanging off of Bob Dylan's arm on the cover of Freewheelin'.

Yes, the ocean took my baby
My baby took my heart from me
Lord, she took it away to Italy, Italy

ROGER DALTREY, Robert Conrad, Richard Wilbur, Harry Caray, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Robert Lowell, Dinah Shore, Howard Nemerov, Ralph Waldo Elllison, Glenn Miller, LYTTON STRACHEY, William Dean Howells, Fredric Chopin, John Gottfried Weber

F.C. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MzrAGZHDvo

Died: Horace Walpole, Henri Troyat, David Herbert Lawrence, Phillip K. Dick, Henry Steele Commager.

A feint, a diversion, an obfuscation, Ralph Waldo Ellison

Robert

♥Oh Chopin, master of the miniature♥

Nocturne in C sharp minor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_djGjozHPbM

Andante spianata and grand polonaise (and I also ♥ Yundi Li): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1RPMatKJxg&feature=related

Prelude in A flat (I can play this one! Yay!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVL4XPLluXk

Waltz in C sharp minor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdmXc84a6iE

♥I could go on forever, but better not♥

Tacksharp as always Mistah D. RWE, Oklahoma City born 1 March 1914, died, 16 April 1994. A bob, a weave, a slip, a duck, ropeadope, cranielleggerdamain, pumpkinification, sleight of head, slightintheloafers, zounds did you get the slumber of that truculence?

Go on to your hearts content C. Ah, the Waltz in C sharp minor.

And this charmer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Pbbcfjw4c&feature=related
Nevermore!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R3pjDWRKmQ&feature=related

Choco, Yundi Li came to taiwan in october. I skipped class to go hear him. I sat in the third row from the front. he smiled at me. I got moist. I swooned.

jealous?

WHAAA#X*koffchokesplutter#$@!#@#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****

...krkrkr...

*gulp*

Murr, I just had to go have a lie-down and half a kilo of chocolate. You are talking about seeing and hearing my Last Living Hero (saving your presence of course) up close, and smiling at you!?!?!

*gulp* *sob*

Why wasn't I born a Cat?

So you could eat chocolate, and like it.

But in situations like this, Piero, chocolate is merely a compensation.

swooooooooon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d08bftfuBW0

Por, she is rather a charmer.

SWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOn omg, he's heaven isn't he. he has come under criticism in some quarters for only playing and recording Chopin. but I think this is a very astute move on his part. he said in an interview, he is young, and there is plenty of time for other composers later. meanwhile, his interpretations and insights into chopin just get better and better.

DSwwwowonnoonnnn

A cool cat indeed.

Ian Woosnam, Laraine Newman, Larry Carleton, Eddie Money, George Benson, Lou Reed, Howard 'Hopalong' Cassady, Tom Wolfe (1931), Phillip K. Dick, 'Doc' Watson, Jennifer Jones (1919), Mel Ott, Kurt S. Weil, Scholom Aleichem, George Linnaeus Banks, Thomas Bodley, ARTHUR MACHEN.
http://londoneveningnews.bravehost.com/arthurmachen.jpg

Died: Lewis Spence, ARTHUR KOESTLER.

This group may shoot me, but I have just decided that I can't make a birthday party for Richard Wilbur (undoubtedly with a few hundred of his nearest and dearest). Apparently he's not only made it to 90, but is actively teaching the writing of poetry to young upstarts.

I guess the reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. No shooting your much too amusing.

Dmitri Volkov, Miranda Richardson, James Merrill, Richard Vernon, Julius Boros, Wee Willie Keeler (hit 432 in 1897), Georg Cantor, Vissarion Belinsky, William Godwin, Thomas Otway, Edmund Waller.

Died: Nikolai Gogol (1852), and Antonin Artaud (1948).

SONG
Go, lovely Rose -
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die - that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Edmund Waller (1606-1687)

He was in political exile when this Royalist lawyers' poetry was first published. He was credited with bringing new mastery to the verse of his time. He was born as old Shake-speare was getting ready to retire to New Place and his mulberry tree, and he kicked the bucket just months before the 'Glorious Revolution', wherein the Stuarts were sent packing.

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/01/belinsky-on-religion.html

Happy birthday Furious Vissarion.

Gogol and Artaud in one black day

Gone in a cantor of an eye. Gone like a kool breeze. Gonne with the, what else, wind.

a black day indeed, Mac.
But thanks to Waller for consoling us. fabulous poem.

Wallers' poems
http://www.poemhunter.com/edmund-waller/

Insomnia. Has educated me as much as anything else.
Waller rusticated, need I add to the woods, where he found the trees as bare and withered as himself. Bare ruined choirs, perhaps?

He bought a cottage at Coleshill where he was brought into this 'vale of tears', meaning to die there as a stag, when hunted, and a spent force, returning home to die, upon the midnight in, we can imagine, not a little paine. He eventually did meet his maker at Hall Barn surrounded by family on 21 October, 1687. He was buried in woolen, against his wishes, it appears, in the churchyard at Beaconsfield

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleshill,_Buckinghamshire.

Wee Willie Keeler was always a favorite of mine. He played back in the day when their weren't any fences and all home runs were inside the park. Hitting was a much more strategic part of the game then. People knew how to do more than hit the ball out of the park, they needed to be able to place the ball in spots on the playing field, the old hit 'em where they ain't style of hitting. Of players I have seen play Pete Rose was probably the best at this and look where it would have gotten him, had not character issues got in the way. The Hall of Fame is about Baseball talent, not character. All of the great place hitters are in the Hall. About one in five (remember 97% of all stats are made up on the spot) home run hitters make it to the hall. Anyone remember Dave Kingman, or Bob Horner? Wee Willie was a true champeen.

its' my birthday today. I am 45. gulp.

Get out of town! We're practically birthday bro's. Happy Birthday, Cat! In Cat lives, you're only 6.43 years old.

Joyeux anniversaire !!

What they said! Your whiskers may be greying...but your teeth are sharp.

Happy Birthday TCM. Long may you run.

Catherine O'Hara, Paula Prentiss, Francis 'Lefty' O'Doul, Dazzy Vance, ANTONIO VIVALDI, TCMURR.

Died: Edgar Lee Masters.

For the season.

Robert

Excellent stuff Mistah D.
Not Vivaldi more along the lines of Jim Capaldi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh4Tgefxm3M&feature=related

We missed mentioning the death of Arnošt Lustig.

12-21-1926 ~ 2-26-2011

One persevering individual: He survived Theresienstadt, Aushwitz & Buchenwald. While bound for Dachau & certain death in '45, the train he was crammed into with other Jews had its engine bombed by an American plane.

Anybody ever read him? The only book of his I've serendipitously happened upon in my book hunting rounds is Night and Hope.

Murr, most happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, TomCat! May you experience as many as you want.

thanks everyone for your good wishes.

Jack Cassady, Rex Harrison, Sophie Stewart, Howard Pyle, Isabella Gregory, Austen H. Layard, Giovanni Galeotti Tiepolo, Antoine de Cadillac, the poet who occasionally tossed Flush a bone, while she wasn't polishing a sonnet or so.

That's Jack Cassady in profile in the picture. He's playing the bass on the song.

Happy birthday Murrrrrrrrr!

Eric 'Sleepy' Floyd, Dick Fosbury, Kiki Dee, David John Gilmour, Mary Wilson, Willie Stargell, WILLIE MAYS, Ed Mc Mahon, Stewart Granger, Bob Wills, Lou Costello, Robert 'Lefty' Grove, Furry Lewis, Ring Lardner, Guy Kibee, Cyrano de Bergerac, Michelangelo.

Died: Thomas Aquinas, and WYNDHAM LEWIS (1957)

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/files2008a/Wyndham-2.jpg

Jesper Bo Parnevik, Lord Snowdon (Anthony Armstrong-Jones), Koko Abe, Mircea Eliade, Piet Mondriaan, Luther Burbank, HENRY PURCELL, Edward Christian Kleist, Maurice Ravel, Milton Avery, Homero Blancos, Robert Roy MacGregor, Publius Septimus Geta, Baldassare Peruzzi, Kano Tanju.

Lynn Redgrave, JOHN MCPHEE, Carl Furillo, CYD CHARISSE, Eva Dahlback, Alan Hale, Leslie Fiedler, Claire Trevor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, Eric Linklater.
C.C. http://www.mymilkglassheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/cyd-charisse.jpg

Died: Sherwood Anderson

Alan Hovhaness is 100 today.

Robert

Happy Birthday Alan, from us and the whales.

Murrcat, I'm so sorry I missed your bday. I feel terrible. I've been underwater at work and my scuba gear is not properly functioning. May I offer you a belated gift?

You are so much more refined than me.

than I ;)

Oh, pardon me for living, I'm sure. Or should I say "pardon I"?

Nope, you got it right. But I shan't pardon you for living, since no pardon is required, and I am not a deity, at least not today.

:-p

Or maybe I am. I seem to be feeling insufferable today. Perhaps and exorcism is required. Suggestions?

I must justify myself and note that >288 ChocolateMuse: was entirely sarcastic. The question was facetious. I do know when to use I and me, I just don't always do it.

Just defending my education.

And will further justify it by pointing out that "Perhaps and exorcism is required" is not a well-structured sentence...

y'know, I hate sounding narky when I actually mean it as a joke. Someone needs to develop an online font that means "in a light tone".

There's comic sans, but that just makes me stabby.

Sarcasm from a prickled Muse? Is this what happens the day after one's un-birthday? Or only in Australia?

Bu seriously, my apologies again for creating a fiction yesterday that everyone thought otherwise, including myself. Clearly, on second glance, the cat in #279 was supposed to be tomcat. In penance, I will slow myself down a smidge.

Piero, I enjoyed it. And since despite being rushed you still took the time to do an astrological reading for me, well all I can say is I'm flattered.

Yeah, only now we know it was for someone else. However, I'll have one for you on May 7th, your very own horoscopic metaphor. Which will also apply to ncgraham, unless he was born far from the Outback, say on another planet.

ooooh herring and vodka how lovely. So peiro was that horoscope for me?

I thought it was for Sheila, though day was yours so the interpretation would apply to you. Except if you were born in England, say, and not Australia (or Taipei), the degree would be different, and so would the accompanying metaphor. Does May 7 in England come before May 7 in Australia or after?

It gives me a headache thinking about it, so what the hell, take yesterday's reading, with its "deep, vibrant realization," drinking in inspiration in a quiet museum, accumulating race power (whatever that is): they're all yours. Happy Birthday, young man.

Edwin Forrest, William Cobbett, Robin Trower, Bobby Fischer, John Cale, Mark Lindsey, Jim Colbert, Honore Mirabeau,Yuri Gagarin, Irene Papas, Carl Betz, Peter C. Quennell, DAVID GARNETT, Vita Sackville-West, Eddie Foy, Amerigo Vespucci

Haven't thought of Robin Trower in forever.

Bridge of Sighs

290, Choc, I meant to say "perhaps and exorcism." Surely you know that sometimes perhaps are required, and they work best with exorcisms. But sadly, I was unable to obtain any perhaps or exorcisms yesterday.

Italics are screwed up.

And, being a conjunction (just think of the junction) ties a list of words together. It works great tying nouns, verbs and adjectives together, but tying an adverb to a noun just doesn't work well at all. "Perhaps and exorcism" is a problem for more reasons than poor sentence construction. Even poor sentence construction can yield meaning. This phrase yields nonsense.

Now if and was supposed to be the indefinite article an that would make more sense. "To have, perhaps, an exorcism... " with the indefinite article pointing out that the exorcism in question is a generic exorcism, not a particular exorcism. If it was particular then the or that would be called for.

Modest Mussorgsky is celebrating his birthday today based on the old calendar, and Samuel Barber is just plain celebrating his birthday today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK7I284Xf3k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1I1WMCX0rU

Robert

gene sez: tying an adverb to a noun just doesn't work well at all

I say: gene is forcing his normative notions of coupling on said adverb and said noun. Just because they're not allowed to wed in your state doesn't mean they don't deserve equal rights and treatment. What's next, gene? An amendment?

gene sez: This phrase yields nonsense.

I say: Just because they don't yield offspring the traditional way is no reason to label their children "nonsense." Really. I really thought you more open-minded, gene.

I followed an obvious misuse of the word and through three posts with no one either remarking on it being the cause of the poor construction or trying to fix it. I felt a little catty so I commented.

In any case "perhaps and exorcism" in English, and I am assuming we are working in English here since I can attach meanings to the words, something I can not do reliably in any other language, is jibberish. Sorry.

I read it completely differently; everyone noticed the obvious typo but pretended to take it literally.

Bix Biederbecke, Nancy 'Baby Bucktrout' Cunard, Fredrick von Schlegel, H.W. Fowler, Peter Beresford Ellis.

Died: Michail Bulgakov, Israel Regardie, Robert Shea.

I.R. http://holythelemicchurch.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/regardie.jpg

Don't remember Peter Beresford Ellis but I remember a John Beresford Tipton.

Hey, gene, I was just being silly. I made a typo, and when Choco pointed it out I saw an opportunity for politico-grammatical hijinks.

Por, please explain "Baby Bucktrout."

I was just pfunnin' with ya, too. What say we move on?

It was great to see "conjunction junction" again, anyhow. Any excuse will do!

How Nancy Cunard appeared in a Wyndham Lewis novel.

Happy Birthday to Osama bin Laden! According to LT, he's a "terrorist/poet".

Well, there is some function at that junction.

311: Like Joyce Kilmer?

313: Killing you softly with all the treacle?

I memorized a child's poem once. It was something like:

I think that I shall never see
A poem in a tree,
And if I should ever see one,
I'd rather see than be one.

Robert

Constantine Huygens Jr., Barry Fitzgerald, Edie Brickell, David Rabe, Albert Salmi, Harold Wilson, Rauol Walsh, Torquato Tasso

Is that this Barry Fitzgerald or this Barry Fitzgerald?

Oh, the crud we clog our brains with.

You're on to something there Gene.
Darryl Strawberry, James Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Paul Kantner, Elaine de Kooning, Bert Campenaris, Barbara Feldon, William 'Buckwheat' Thomas, Edward Albee, Jack Kerouac, GORDON MACRAE, Jesse 'Lone Cat' Fuller, Vaslav Nijinsky, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Clement Studebaker, GEORGE BERKELEY, JOHN AUBREY, RICHARD STEELE, 'Two Ton' Tony Galento.
Gordon MacRae & the lovely Shirley Jones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C6J9gij5SQ&feature=related

Died: Rosamond Lehmann (1990)
http://www.fashaddictblog.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Rosamond-Lehmann-with...

I am God.

Nijinsky

I highly recommend his diary.

Colin Wilson is superb on the dancer with the turned in toes, etc. As is Modris Eksteins
http://books.google.com/books?id=yM8lkb3z68oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mod...

I was planning on tackling one of these.
White in his Rimbaud biography spoke about Nijinsky's writings

second the nijinsky

March 13
Andy Bean, Doug Harvey, John 'Home Run' Baker, Georgie Jessel.

Died: Mircea Eliade.

There's a baseball story told about Ty Cobb that has a Home Run Baker component. One year, back in the dead-ball era Home Run Baker set the season record for home runs at 18. People would complain to Ty Cobb that if Home Run Baker could hit so many home runs, why couldn't he? So the next year Cobb set the record for home runs. Having done that, and shut his critics up, he returned to the singles and doubles, hit-em-where-they-ain't kind of hitter he had always been. In some ways, I think Cobb transcended baseball.

The 'Georgia Peach' was sui generis.

Happy Pi Day everyone!

Kirby Puckett, Wes Unseld, Michael Martin Murphy, Clyde Lee, Jerry Jeff Walker, Rita Tushingham. Bob Charles, Michael Caine, Jon Wain, Diane Arbus Max Schulman, Maurice Jean-Jaques Merleau-Ponty, Albert Einstein, Johann Strauss, THOMAS HART BENTON, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, George Phillip Telemann, Sylvia Beach, Les Brown

Died: Sir Thomas Malory, Karl Marx.

But Marx just won't stay dead, will he?

Robert

Malory neither.

ROBERT NYE, Norm Van Brocklin, RICHARD ELLMANN, Harry James, Sam 'Lightnin' Hopkins, Augusta Gregory, Hadrian (of the Wall fame), Margaret Plantagenet, George Brent, Ryland Cooder

Do you have a book or books, a website or websites, that you tap to come up with all these births and deaths, Peter? I mean, it's prodigious, man.

Died on this date by the hand of perfidy and justice in 44 B.C.E. one Gaius Julius Caesar. He drove his army across the Rubicon and into Rome and for that transgression (among others) he paid the price.

Ah, yes. The Ides of March.

I've been compiling birthdays, etc. for more years than I care to count, PW. From countless sources including the internets. My notebooks, 100's of them contain every sort of historical clap-trap and minyootay, I could use them for weightlifting if my 62 year old bag-of-bones could manage the feat. I have whole shelves of reference books, etc. If I was as smart as my books would suggest I'd really be a marvel, indeed. But I have a memory like a policeman: never there when needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je0gTnheVe4

Damn it! I usually remember to beware this day, but this year I completely forgot. So far nothing bad's happened, but I am now ware.

Nancy Wilson, Wolfgang Van Halen, Kate Nelligan, Bernardo Bertolucci, Thelma Hopkins, Jerry Lewis, LEO MC KERN, Henny Youngman, Sydney Chaplin, Maxim Gorky, Rene F. Armand Sully-Prudhomme, Donal Og Cusack

Big Jerry Lewis fan. Anyone else? (Of course, I felt so gratified when I found out the French feel the same way.)

My favorite is either Cinderfella or the one with the 7 uncles.

ETA: It's six uncles and the title is The Family Jewels.

Boeing Boeing and the Nutty Prof. Paired with Deano too.

Always better with the unflappable Mr. Martin.

Danny De Vito John Sebastian, Rudolf Nureyev, 'Slingin' Sammy Baugh, Bobby Jones Jr., Edmund Kean, Shemp Howard, Arthur Basil Cotle, Nat 'King' Cole

The death of Owsley (of Owlsey acid), and a eulogy for the drug sixties:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/music/from-owsleys-60s-to-today-a-long-st...

One more birthday for today: Penelope Lively.

And died, with eekwannanimity, as someone from mombaymightsay, Mahkus Awreelius, and Maynid Mak, as would say Leo 'Slip Mahoney' Gorsey.

Reading the NYT obituaries I see that the slick fielding shortstop Marty Marion has joined the Choir Invisible. His nickname was 'Octopus' because of his long arms and great range in 5 position. 6'2", he was tall for a shortstop of that age. Stan Musial said he could go into the hole as good as anybody, with a strong accurate arm. He got out of military service because of a leg problem. But went on to play 13 seasons with a lifetime 263 ave. and hit a league leading 38 doubles in 1942.

Nancy Tudor, Stephane Mallarme, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Edgar Cayce, WILFED OWEN, George Plimpton, Wilson Pickett, Ingamar Stenmark, W.H. Murray, John Updike.

Died: LAURENCE STERNE, Bernard Malamud.

Wilfred Owen

Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstruous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Owen

Owsley was the supplier for Ken Kesey's Acid Tests. His was supposed to be the best street level LSD ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_pkRH2DZuw
http://it.stlawu.edu/~rkreuzer/pbearse/rimsky-korsakov.htm

Ursula Andress, Phillip Roth, Ornette Coleman, Richie Ashburn, Jackie 'Moms' Mably, Sergei Diaghilev, Wyatt Earp, RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (1821), David Livingstone, TOBIAS SMOLLETT, Aleksei Romanov, Georges de la Tour, Joe Kapp

Georges de la Tour
http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=54386&image=13430&c=

Since it is tomorrow in India now, I'll wish everyone here a Happy Holi!

To go along with the India theme, HB to Anand Armitraj,
number 4 Bobby Orr, Jerry Reed, Hans Kung, Michael Redgrave, Ozzie Nelson, HENRIK IBSEN, Ovidius Naso.

VICTOR SAWDON PRICHETT died on this date.

James Jesse Strang, Timothy Dalton, Jules Verne, PETER BROOK (1925), Albert Kahn, Charlotte Bronte, J.S. Bach, Jean Paul, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
http://taioo.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/mussorgsky_by_repin.jpg

Amazing portrait of Mussorgsky! Love it!

Quite a day today!

Bach : "If I can't drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat" - his "Coffee" Cantata: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6-PRCv7SfM
(Old Bach wasn't funny very often)

Here's a gothic chunk of Charlotte Bronte:

"On waking, a gleam dazzled my eyes; I thought—Oh, it is daylight! But I was mistaken; it was only candlelight. Sophie, I supposed, had come in. There was a light in the dressing-table, and the door of the closet, where, before going to bed, I had hung my wedding-dress and veil, stood open; I heard a rustling there. I asked, ‘Sophie, what are you doing?’ No one answered; but a form emerged from the closet; it took the light, held it aloft, and surveyed the garments pendent from the portmanteau. ‘Sophie! Sophie!’ I again cried: and still it was silent. I had risen up in bed, I bent forward: first surprise, then bewilderment, came over me; and then my blood crept cold through my veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax: it was not—no, I was sure of it, and am still—it was not even that strange woman, Grace Poole.”

...

“Describe it, Jane.”

“It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell.”

“Did you see her face?”

“Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass.”

“And how were they?”

“Fearful and ghastly to me—oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!”

“Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.”

“This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?”

“You may.”

“Of the foul German spectre—the Vampyre.”

“Ah!—what did it do?”

“Sir, it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them.”

Why is Mussorgsky's nose so red? Does he have cold, you reckon, or is it one big wodka blossom?

I forgot to wish all our Persian friends a Happy New Year yesterday as well!

352: We had the Peasant Cantata and the coffee cantata on a record when I was a kid and we still love to listen to it when I visit my father. They are both kinda funny, though I don't totally understand them being it is an old Archiv recording and is not translated into English. My son who took 4 years of German loves the Coffee Cantata and we sing the "Coffee! Coffee! Muss Ich haben" tune in my house often.

>355 A_musing: yeah, for real! Happy Nowruz! Take my yellow and give me your red.

Rudy Rucker, George Benson, Glenn Campbell, Stephen Sondheim, Marcel Marceau, Wilfred Brambell, CHICO MARX, Edward Moore, Anthony Van Dyck, Thomas de Mowbray (1366), Ellen Glasgow, Nicholas Monsarrat, May Britt, BILLY COLLINS.

Died: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E.W. HORNUNG.

Moses Malone, Rik Ocasek, Gail Goodrich, Ugo Tagnazzi, Akira Kurosawa, Fanny Farmer, Margaret of Anjou (1429), Joan Crawford

I luffa ghicomahks, eesa nyesa ona da peeann-o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khJaHNocYK0
Itwassaeesabirthdayayestiddaya

I guess Liz Taylor has died. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world and had a full life of pain, adventure, and joy, just like the rest of us.

Oh, well. We still have Mickey Rooney.

LOL

Also died on this date: Stendhal and Mario Praz (has a fine study: THE HERO IN ECLIPSE: A Study in Victorian Fiction).

Denny McLain, Jesus Alou, DAVID SUZUKI. Mai Zetterling, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lilli Palmer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Wilhelm Reich, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Edward Weston, Harry Houdini, Earnest Rutherford, John Wesley Powell, WILLIAM MORRIS, George Sisler, Gorgeous George (George Raymond Wagner)

Died: J.M. Synge, Jules Verne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass.

and

Under a spreading chestnut tree, The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.

My emphasis.

A blacksmith in full
http://www.wockyjivvy.com/poetry/acclaim/hwl-vill.html

Bob Sura, Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Gloria Steinem, Flannery O'Connor, Simone Signoret, Mary Douglas, Jeanne Cagney, Howard Cosell, Ernie 'Dutch' Leonard, David Lean, Bridgit D'Oyly Carte, ALAN J.P. TAYLOR, Binnie Barnes, Mary Gladys Webb, Arturo Toscanini, Henry II of England (1154-1189), Bela Bartok, Woody Held

John Stockton, Marcus Allen, Martin Short, Bob Woodward, Erica Jong, Barclay & Bob Plager, Richard Dawkins, James Caan, Alan Arkin, Pierre Boulez, Tennesse Williams, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Joseph Campbell (1904), ROBERT LEE FROST (1874), A.E. HOUSMAN (1859), George Smith (1840), Edward Bellamy.

Died: John Kennedy Toole, Roland Barthes, Noel Coward, Walt Whitman.

Must ye continue Looking Backward dear, Por-Mon?

I'm owl-like, didn't you know E.

I think of Porious as the Salon's Merlyn and I mean specifically the Merlyn from TH White's Once and Future King. He's living backwards as the rest of us are living forwards. He has all this wisdom that all too often rushes over our heads. (At least mine.)

I should have been a crab scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730), Nathaniel Currier, Edward Steichen, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Miler Huggins, Gloria Swanson, Bud Schulberg, Arthur Lewis, Michael York, Charles Lyell, Heinrich Mann (1871), Alfred de Vigny, Mario Vargas Llosa.

M.C. Escher, ARNOLD BENNETT, died of corse.

A.B.
http://johngushue.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/13/arnold_bennett.jpg

Escher
http://hightouchconcept.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/mc_escher_relativity_623x600...

If you are not opposed to the idea of listening to audio books, these are well worth it - light and fun:

The Card: http://librivox.org/the-card-by-arnold-bennett/
The Regent: http://librivox.org/the-regent-by-arnold-bennett/

Both by Arnold Bennett, and read by a competent Andy Minter.

ETA: Free, too!

Rick Barry, Brian Jones, Rudolf Serkin, Pandro S. Berman, Neil Kinnock, Myfanwy Piper.

Died: VIRGINIA WOOLF, Eugene Ionesco, Anthony Powell, PETER USTINOV.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_MXBMK7NQtLk/TJCak414wuI/AAAAAAAAAvw/EkPe9ZzpBHc/s320/v...
http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgpqd7gKCF1qaouh8o1_400.jpg

Myfanwy (Evans) Piper
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw79447/Myfanwy-Piper?LinkID=m...

Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
White o’er the playpen the sheen of her dress,
Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
Soap scented fingers I long to caress.

Were you a prefect and head of your dormit'ry?
Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge,
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.

Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
Out of the shopping and into the dark,
Back down the avenue, back to the pottingshed,
Back to the house on the fringe of the park.

Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
Golden the light on the book on her knee,
Finger marked pages of Rackham's Hans Anderson,
Time for the children to come down to tea.

Oh! Fullers angel-cake, Robertson’s marmalade,
Liberty lampshade, come shine on us all,
My! what a spread for the friends of Myfanwy,
Some in the alcove and some in the hall.

Then what sardines in half-lighted passages!
Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

John Betjeman.

R.S. THOMAS, Earl Campbell, Judith Guest, ERIC IDLE, JOHN SUCHET, WALT 'CLYDE' FRAZIER, GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON.
E.I.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRKYsao2ciY

David Suchet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLhu_f4Pwg

"Clyde'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVaCNzvvNf0

RST
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Bright_Field.html

Died: Joyce Carey, Emmanuel Swedenborg.

Eric Clapton, JERRY RAY LUCAS, Astrud Gilberto, Sonnt Boy Williamson, Frankie Laine, Erwin Panofsky, Joyce Carey, Sean O'Casey, VINCENT VAN GOGH, Paul M. Verlaine, Jethro Tull, Peter I (Romanov), Moses Maimonides (1135), Anne Sewell, Turhan Bey, Secretariat, E.H. Gombrich.

Secretariat
http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID18706/images/secretariat.jpg
Jerry Lucas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baMS2VvkdSA

Died: Alaistair Cooke

Frankie Laine. This is the first record I ever owned. It was a 78 b/w Carry Me Back to Old Virginney.

SHIRLEY JONES, Herb Alpert, GORDIE HOWE, John Fowles, NIKOLAI GOGOL, FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDYN, ANDREW MARVELL, Rene Descartes, Edward Fitzgerald, Jack Johnson (1878), Miller Barber.

Died: JOHN DONNE & CHARLOTTE BRONTE
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KP0BYctB-O4/TL_LzQz8qEI/AAAAAAAABFA/RRgsYIO4HAs/s1600/...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhqs8x_john-donne-a-nocturnal-upon-st-lucy-s-da...

Happy birthday Nikolai

Magdalena Maleeva, Jimmy Cliff, Arthur Conley, Phil Niekro, Milan Kundera, Jane Powell, William Manchester, Wallace Beery, Lon Cheney, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Edmond Rostand, Abbe Prevost, William Harvey, Abraham H. Maslow, Bo Schembechler, Rusty Staub (Le Grande Orange).

Died: Flann O'Brien

Phil "Knucksie" Niekro, one of my all time favorite baseball players. He spent all but the last two or three years with one of the crappiest baseball teams in the history of the sport, won over 300 games, lost more 1-0 and 2-1 baseball games than anyone else. Pitchers can win low scoring games, but they don't lose them. Unlike many pitchers, dude carried a stick when he went to take his cuts. The sports writers wanted to keep him out of the Hall of Fame because he was an unorthodox player: he threw the flutter ball (pflutter for Porios). That was just so much bullshit. But then I think Pete Rose should be in the Hall, too. I ate supper with Phil and two of his boys one night. We were the only two groups in the dining room of a good tex-mex place here in Atlanta.

Wow! Wallace Beery and Lon Cheney share a birthday. I really like Wallace Beery, a lot.

What about Joe? Pete Rose should be in the Hall. I have nothing but loathing for those that keep him out. Let he who is without . . .

Joe's wasn't good enough for a long enough time. He had some great years, 20-win seasons, but not the longevity of his brother. And notice how many complete games those guys had in their day too, compared to the wussified pitch-count, it's all about pitch-count, prima donnas of today.

Emmy Lou Harris, Camille Paglia, LEON RUSSELL, Marvin Gaye, Rita Gam, Alec Guiness, BUDDY EBSEN, Max Ernst, Emile Zola, Giacomo Casanova, Charlemagne (742), Hans Christian Andersen

Died: C.S. Forester

Washington Irving, Eddie Murphy, Wayne Newton, JANE GOODALL, George Jessel, Leslie Howard, GEORGE HERBERT (1593), Henry IV (Bolingbroke - 1399-1413)

Deaths: Pinky Lee, Graham Greene, Sarah Vaughan, PETER PEARS, Warren Oates, Kurt Weil.

W.O.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnYrTzOsydI&feature=related

Charlemagne? Really? Born on April Fool's Day?

Joe Niekro...

Consecutive season with 8 wins and 17 then 18 losses, but an ERA of 3.70. Overall 221 and 204, 3.59 ERA. I think he should get a brother pass into the Hall. And of course, he, too, pitched mostly for lousy teams.

Rose's exclusion is a particular cruelty. Probably no one could possibly care as much as he certainly does. His inclusion would tip a hat to the seedy history of the game combined with the remarkable personalities it sometimes breeds.

As for Phil Niekro. One of my dream staffs would have Phil, Gaylord Perry, Wilbur Wood, Luis Tiant, and Mike Cuellar.

Luis!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf_cyUlv4zk&feature=related

Died on this date: Johannes Brahms and Lester Bangs.

Hugh Masekala, Andrei Tarnovsky, Eva Marie Saint, Muddy Waters, Tristan Tzara, Tris Speaker (1888), Margaret Oliphant, Remy de Gourmont, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Gil Hodges, William Strachey

Deaths: Gloria Swanson, Edward Dowden, Charles Bulfinch, OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Once married to William Dufty
http://www.sarahannsmith.com/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/gloria-swanson-by...

Remy de G.
http://oceanelle.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/20028.jpg

'Goldy"
http://people.stu.ca/~hunt/archive/49660809/images/oliver_goldsmith.jpg

Johan Kriek, Vince Gill, Jane Asher, Chrispian St. Peters, Eric Burdon, Frank Gorshin, Gregory Peck, Bette Davis, Herbert Von Karajan, Thomas Hobbes, Spencer Tracy

Died: Allen Ginsberg and SAUL BELLOW.

Frank Gorshin!

Sorry we have been entertaining my brother and 2 of his 3 daughters.

Janet Lynn, Michelle Phillips, Merle Haggard, Ram Dass, Gerry Mulligan, JOHN BETJEMEN (1906), Black Mike Cochrane, Walter Huston.

Died: GREER GARSON, Igor Stravinsky, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Francis Walsingham, Petrarch's Laura, Richard Lionheart,

I first heard Ram Dass speak when he was Richard Alpert, in a meeting hall on Second Avenue in the East Village in the psychedelic days. I was brought there by Patrick Malone, of I Think, Therefore Who Am I?, who knew Alpert from when he was one of Leary's crew at Millbrook, in upstate New York. The drug commune.

So we sat in chairs with fifty other people, mainly if not all stoners, and Alpert lectured, and after a while my poke-you-in-the-eye Zen companion leaped up and shouted at him, "I! Me! Mine!" which apparently was something they did at Millbrook (long before George Harrison's song), because it bothered Patrick that Alpert was talking so much about himself.

Good story!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01UipbZL3ww
Imemine

Who isn't always talking about himself/herself? Here's a song that has stuck to my ribs all this while
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKggq6EsqIU

Tiki Barber, Ronde Barber, Mick Abrams, David Frost, Daniel Ellsberg, Andrew Sachs, Ravi Shankar, James Garner, Billie Holiday, Gerald Brennan, David Low, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Francis Xavier, Robert Charroux, Bobby Doer, Swami Shantananda, Janis Ian,

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

WW

Recollection gathered in tranquility
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQnyV2YWsto&feature=related

Peter Cook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ZuPR8QQ1g

8 April
Ponce de Leon (1460), Edmund Husserl, Mary Pickford, Sonja Henie, Shecky Greene, JAQUES BREL, Seymour Hersh, John Havlicek, Julian Lennon, Jim 'Catfish' Hunter

Died: Pablo Picaso

Marieke
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faMV_drSouA
A twist of Lennon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmJ0AkzvdN8
#17 was a boyhood hero of mine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsYAICmVMHA
P.P.
http://mypaintinggallery.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/pablo_picasso_-_donna_con_c...

399: Thanks for posting that, CM. That is one of my favorite poems. So beautiful.

>399 ChocolateMuse:/402 Mine, too. When I read it I always feel as though I'm there with him.

Thea, that's exactly it. It's almost magical how you're instantly transported there. I never tire of reading it.

My wife's name is Marieke

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Carl Perkins, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, David Cecil, Paul Robeson, Elias Lonrot, Tamerlaine, Gerald Festus Kelly, Efrem Zimbalist, Earl 'Curly' Lambeau, Gregory Pincus, Ward Bond, Antal Dorati, Cheeta, Severiano Ballesteros

Died: Francois Rabelais

Ah Bebel !

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,
S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.
Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,
Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.
Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade
Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;
Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,
Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,
Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette
Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.
Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu
De son être extirper l'élément corrompu,
Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,
Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,
II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété
Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé

I'm like the King of some damp, rainy clime,
Grown impotent and old before my time,
Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachers
And bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.
Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed, or chase:
No, not the mortal plight of his whole race
Dying before his balcony. The tune,
Sung to this tyrant by his pet buffoon,
Irks him. His couch seems far more like a grave.
Even the girls, for whom all kings seem brave,
Can think no toilet up, nor shameless rig,
To draw a smirk from this funereal prig.
The sage who makes him gold, could never find
The baser element that rots his mind.
Even those blood-baths the old Romans knew
And later thugs have imitated too,
Can't warm this skeleton to deeds of slaughter,
Whose only blood is Lethe's cold, green water.

Spleen III
Trans: Roy Campbell

Happy Birthday Charles

And to Paul Robeson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiJx1Hbn_KM&feature=artist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQV3dELWojk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfsWoNpHg2s&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9WayN7R-s&feature=related

On some occasions, back in the thirties, my father was a bodyguard for Paul Robeson. At communist gatherings, I expect, where club wielders and rock throwers were expected, and indeed usually showed up.

>410 copyedit52: That's an amazing association, Peter.

My parents never actually told me they'd been communists until I was a teenager (though I marched in the old May Day parades in NYC when I was a kindergartner). Once I was told, a lot of those details came out. My father, as I've mentioned before, was a Marine (later, in WWII); a tough guy. But Robeson was no slouch in that department either.

Peter, while working on my review of DD (hope to finish it soon), it occurred to me that your father would make a fascinating character to base a book on. Have you ever considered writing one?

A tough guy. What's better? My father, a George, was drill sergeant. We'd have to line up for inspection every now and then. We almost never passed muster. I'd cut the grass, he'd come home after 14 hours of work, inspect the grass, find my job less than satisfactory, march out at once, rain or shine and do it over. Muttering under his breath the foul names for me which cannot be repeated in polite company.

>413 beelzebubba:. In this third book in what will be a triology, or maybe a quartet, for all I know, my father is a major character, bubba.

I am very much looking forward to your review, btw. You seem to me an eminently thoughtful and sensible person.

>414 Porius:. My father and I waged a pitched battle for most of my life and the second half of his. In some respects, it was because we were so temperamentally similar.

Thanks, Piero. I just hope I can do it justice.

Jukka Tammi, Dr. Carey Middlecoff, Steven Seagal, DAVID HALBERSTAM, Poncie Ponce, Max Von Sydow, George Arliss, WILLIAM HAZLITT, Cosimo de Medici, James Bowie, Claude Ambroise Seurat, Montague Summers, Ben Nicholson.

Died: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, EVELYN WAUGH, Kahlil Gibran.

M.S.
http://www.vampires.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Summers.jpg
W.H.
http://www.dandyism.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/young-disraeli.jpg

You mean there was actually a real person called Poncie Ponce?

Soytennlie. We give you the one the only Poncie Ponce
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGUOTqDEOVo

Peter Riegert, John Montagu, Loise Lasser, Christopher Smart, Adrianno Olivetti, Danny Gallivan.

Died: Kurt Vonnegut.

Louise Lasser.

Frank Bank, James Hillman, Tiny Tim, Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604), Charles Burney (friend of Sam: Johnson & father of Fanny), Aleksander Ostrovsky.

Died: Abbie Hoffman

Catherine de Medici (1519), Th: Jefferson, GEORG LUKACS, Olga Rudge, Jaques Lacan, Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, HOWARD KEEL (1917), Roberto Calvi, John Braine, Seamus Heaney, Lowell George, Al Green, Gary Kasparov, Christopher Hitchens.

Died: MURIAL SPARK (2006), WALLACE STEGNER (1993), Ernst Cassirer (1945).

And what a sad death it was for Abbie Hoffman. Wavy Gravy, as he calls himself, bloviated about how no one should say as much, a few days after Hoffman killed himself. What a jerk, telling people how they should feel.

Wavy Gravy can go fuck himself.

Julie Christie, Pete Rose, Loretta Lynn, Rod Steiger, John Gielgud, Arnold Toynbee, James Branch Cabell, Roberto de Vincenzo

i recently saw Waterloo, directed by Bondarchuk starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon. What a masterpiece, and what a performance! Fantastic actor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTpT9lYGnRY&feature=related

And in The Pawnbroker.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qWqizV_puk

Emma Thompson, Evely Ashford, Walt Rafael Hazzard, Claudia Cardinale, Elizabeth Montgomery, Roy Clark, Hans Conried, Bessie Smith, THOMAS HART BENTON, Robert Walser, HENRY JAMES, Emile Durkeim, Leonardo da Vinci.

Died: Jean-Paul Sartre.

And Charlie Chaplin, apparently. See the Google homepage topday, and click on the logo.

And for the real thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoKbDNY0Zwg

And for Ms Smith:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Who6fTHJ34

Chaplin & Keaton in THE LIMELIGHT, with the exquisite Claire Bloom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUpiD8vEw2Y

Penelope Lively,Cynthia Ozick, William Holden, Olivia Hussey, Vinegar Banana, Aijn Banana, Thorto Wilder, Nikita Krushchev, Isak Dinesen, Henry Vaughan (Silurist,1622), John Ford (1586), KINGSLEY AMIS, Spike Milligan.

Died: Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Earle Funk, RALPH ELLISON.

Rick Moranis, Clarence 'Gate Mouth' Brown, Hayley Mills, Leopold Stowkowski, Clarence Darrow, GEORGE HENRY LEWES, Lucretia Borgia, Nate 'Tiny' Archibald, THOMAS MIDDLETON

Died: THOR HEYERDAHL 2002

Maria Sharapova, Ashley Judd, Paloma Picasso, Dudley Moore, Frank Fontaine, Edward John Gregory, Sue Barker

I don't remember the name of it, but many years ago I saw Paloma Picasso in a soft core porn flick with a bath filled with the blood of virgins. It was a pretty bad movie.

Doesn't sound promising.

Died on this date: CHARLES DARWIN; BYRON (GEORGE GORDON, LORD), Daphne du Maurier.

Don Mattingly, Vlacheslav Fetisov, Nina Foch, Pietro Aretino (1492), Gerald S. Hawkins.

Died: Bram Stoker & Archibald MacLeish.

Iggy Pop, JOHN MORTIMER, Anthony Quinn, John Muir, CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Catherine the Great (1729), H. de Montherlant, Elaine May

Por, check out #351. It would appear that CBronte was born twice. :)

Right as rain Choc. Disregard that previous date it seems 21 April is the correct date. I'll bet I get more than one of these things screwed up. I should be more careful with the 'Prunty' sisters or old Emily might come over and slap me around some. Don't even mention the redoubtable Patrick and his blunderbuss.

Yes - And Anne would sweetly forgive you, but Charlotte would call you a proud, ruthless, uncivil man, and after a passionate struggle, she'd fall in love with you.

Steve Erickson -- a writer I don't necessarily completely "get," but writes some stellar stuff: Moody, atmospheric, surrealistic. I've read and liked both The Sea Came in at Midnight & Tours of the Black Clock. If you like Rimbaud's Illuminations, and aren't put off by not fathoming every facet of the symbolism you encounter with him, then you might feel similarly in regards to Erickson's novels. You might recall that our underappreciated author alumnus, Alex Austin, was a colleague of Erickson's at Westway's, cohorts together in reviewing & attending the Los Angeles punk concert scene of the late '70s/early 80s.

Well, those of you with a copy of the author's life at hand know better than I, but I don't believe that Currer Bell ever had the opportunity to be a Prunty. I believe her father changed his name before she was born.

Robert

How does that change things Mistah D? The false modesty doesn't suit you.

Huh?

Robert

You don't get it. You were being too cute by half and now you're pleading innocent. I have no time for your obtuse ways.

I know that the Brontes were never called Prunty. I used the name to accentuate Emily's plug-ugly ways. I didn't need Barker's or anyone else's biography at hand.

Peter

When I lived in Flemington, W.Va. we were less than ten miles from the State Reformatory at Pruntytown. Prunty was a fairly well represented surname in those parts at that time.

447-9: I am picturing Mr. Durick as Mr. Lemmon and Mr. P. as Mr. Matthau.

A guy named Joe Prunty used to work with us many years ago, now he's on an NBA bench as an assistant. He was one of the most organized and meticulous fellows I've ever met. Who knows someday he might get a head coaching job.

Again, I was playing around when I referred to the sisters as Prunty. Patrick changed the name early on so he could better get a man-of-the-cloth job in his new local, if memory serves. Though I'm sure Mr. D. could correct me.

> 451 Mac has collapsed laughing

Peter Frampton, Specer Haywood, Joshua Rifkin. Jack Nicholson, Glenn Campbell, Charles Mingus, Yehudi Menuhin, Vladimir Nabokov (1899), Sergei Sergevich Prokofiev, Otto Rank, O.E. Rolvaag, Mdme. de Stael (1766), Immanuel Kant (1724), HENRY FIELDING (1707), Nicola Sacco

456:

Wow an auspicious day for many reasons!
Please flag 455 as spam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDOaweG2wQo&feature=fvst

456: Today is also Anna's son Osama's 19th birthday. It is also Iggy Pop's birthday.

Mr. Pop's b-day is celebrated on #441 above, 21 April.
Happy 19 there O.

The ONE time I turned to American Idol I found Iggy Pop. What this bodes I know not. See it here: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/blogs/nonstop-sound/Iggy-Pop-Performed-on-American-Ido...

And a very happy birthday to Osama, Anna.

ditto to Osama.

Thanks everyone!

Died this date: Miguel de Cervantes, Erma Brombeck, Ansel Adams, Mircea Eliade (THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN). Yesterday we celebrated Otto Rank's birthday, he wrote THE MYTH OF THE BIRTH OF THE HERO.

William Penn, George Steiner, Roy Orbison, Tony Esposito, Michael Moore, Max Planck, Sandra Dee, Victoria Gleninning, J.P. Donleavy, Warren Spahn, Simone Simon, Halladore Laxness, Joseph Mallord Turner, Miguel de Cervantes Saavadra

JMWT
http://www.terraingallery.org/J-M-W-Turner/Slave-Ship-JMTurner-lg.jpg
Does anyone remember that line concerning the sunset & Turner in Wilde's DECAY OF LYING?

Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.

Also born on this date:
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, VLADIMIR NABOKOV.

DIED: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Legend has it he died on a drinking binge with Rare Ben, and Michael Drayton), William Wordsworth, and Jules Verne (the first book I finished: 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.

WS http://www.abm-enterprises.net/william-shakespeare-portrait.jpg
VN http://thepanelists.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Vladimir-Nabokov.jpg
WW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ZuPR8QQ1g
JV http://lifeismoremysterythanmisery.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/jules_verne.gif

Lee Westwood, Pascale Paradis, Glenn Cornick, Robert Penn Warren, Angela Burdett-Coutts, ANYHONY TROLLOPE

A.T. (The writing Trollope's: Fanny T., Thomas Adolphus, and Anthony had well over 300 books to their credit)
A.T.
http://caines.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/anthony_trollope.jpg
Fanny T.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/fanny/portrait.jpg
Fanny & Thomas A.
http://domain2283782.sites.fasthosts.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/trollope.jpg
Anthony & Th:
http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/TrollopeBrothers.jpg

>464 Porius:

Sunsets are quite old fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. to admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window and looking at the glorious sky as she called it. Of course I had to look at it...and what was it? It was simply a very second- rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and overemphasised...

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life...external nature also imitates art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry or in painting.

Oscar Wilde,
THE DECAY OF LYING

OW was a brilliant theorist.

WHY DIDN'T OSCAR HEAD FOR THE HILLS WHEN HE HAD A CHANCE? I GET APOPLECTIC WHEN I THINK OF QUEENSBURY AND HIS BLIGHTER SON.
OSCAR COULD RIP THE HEART OUT OF A BOOK IN A MATTER OF MINUTES. THE ONLY ABILITY WORTH HAVING ON THIS VALE OF SIN AND SORROW. DID YOU EVER READ 'BOSIE'S' POETRY? PUERILE STUFF. OSCAR WAS A GIANT. I AM A TICKBIRD BY COMPARISON, A PLAYER OF CHOPSTICKS.

Fuck, Por, quote of the day.

yep, I feel the same way. Oscar was a giant.

Oscar messed with the wrong bully. Indeed he should have headed for the hills pronto.

So it doesn't get lost in the shuffle on this date in 1815 ANTHONY TROLLOPE was brought into this vale of tears.

Died: Willa Cather

Andrea Temesvari, Bobby Rydell, Duane Eddy, I.M. Pei, Bernard Malamud, Gracie Allen, William 'Count' Basie, Ma Rainey, ROBERT HERRICK, Fredrick Law Olmstead, Ferdinand Eugene Delacroix, John Jay Audubon. Pasquale Paoli, Denis O'Dea, DAVID HUME, Marie de Medici, Marcus Auerelius

Audubon, the bird man !

Would the world have been better off had Bobby Rydell not been born? Methinks so, but others may have other opinions. Of course the record companies would have found other schlubs to record such inanities as Swingin School and other "hits" by this master of schlock pop. No rock n roll happening here, move on, please.

Birds of America is one of the most beautiful books ever published.

You're right as rain there GG. I remmber the 'ducksass' coif mostly. No edge, is quite right. Square. The 'business man's bounce' all the way.
Boo-fant minus DA!?

Johan Cruyff, Vladislav Tretiak, Astrid Varnay, Al Pacino, Wolfgang Pauli, Antonio Fogazzaro, John Keble, Billy Fish, Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Il'yich Tchaikovsky

As a boy, Audubon's Birds of America was the first book I ever bought with my own money. (I still have it.) The other books, I stole, from the book warehouse I worked in as a teenager.

> 480 LOL, I stole quite a few books when my pocket money ran out.

Tchaikovsky. In honor of today being instrumental day.

Died on this day: Edmund Husserl, DANIEL DEFOE.
DD
http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/D/DEF/daniel-defoe.jpg

And as of today, Phoebe Snow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h0KW6DaXgk&feature=related

Ceci Day-Lewis, Judy Carne, Frank Belkamp Long, Rogers Hornsby, Walter Lanz, Herbert Spencer, EDWARD GIBBON, Ulysses S. Grant, Mary Wollstocraft Godwin.

Died: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Walter Lantz - creator of an American Icon.

Niklas Lidstrom, Hal Sutton, Carolyn Jones, Kurt Godel, Lionel Barrymore, George Villiers (1rst Duke of Buckingham).

Died: Ice Berg Slim, Penelope Fitzgerald (2000).

God Shamgod, Uma Thurman, Curtis Joseph, Reggie Miller, David Icke, Klaus Voorman, Zubin Mehta, George Allen, Duke Ellington, JOHN ARBUTNOT, William Randolf Hearst, TALIESIN (534), Charles Nodier, Constantine Cavafy (1863), Thomas Beecham, Celeste Holm, Toots Thielemans, Tammi Terrell

Is that of the eventual Chennai Arbuthnots?

Listen Learn Read On from The Book of Taliesyn.

Bobby Vee, Willie Nelson, Larry Niven, Eve Arden, Al Lewis (Munsters), John Crowe Ransome, Alice B. Tolkas, Kaspar Hauser

Died: A.E. Housman
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1TOz28UwrVI/S7D6i3T2klI/AAAAAAAAAro/bmKYWg6hI3w/S269/h...
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/housman/1.jpg

Jack Paar, Joanna Lumley (1946), Judy Collins, Marina Stepanova, Rita Coolidge, JOSEPH HELLER (1923), Glenn Ford, Kate Smith, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, Marie Corelli, Arthur Wellesley, Benjamin Latrobe, JOSEPH ADDISON,

Jamaal Wilkes, David Beckham, Leslie Gore, Bianca Jagger, Pinky Lee, Tyrone Power, Jerome K. Jerome, Novalis, Athanasius Kircher, William Camden, Hedda Hopper, Brian Aherne, DAVID SUCHET.

Died: Marylyn French.

& Terry Southern too

You may have heard Sir Harry Cooper died today. I didn't know of him myself, but when I heard it I thought of Porius.

He didn't die today, but is just being reported as having died (he died, er, was captured and killed) a week ago ... He was one of the naughtyhottie's favorite authors; may he R.I.P., Osama bin Laden.

Correction, after listening to Barack Obama's press conference, bin Laden was killed today.

Is he really dead?

Does it matter to you, if he's dead or not?

Henry Cooper is indeed no longer with us.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/may/02/henry-cooper-dies

LOL ... at yoooooooou, POOOOOOR-MON, not at the sad fact that, may he R.I.P., Henry Cooper is indeed, passed.

Rique, I don't always understand you, but it's so good to have you back. :)

You know, Muse, I don't always understand myself sometimes either; and "reading-between-the messages," for all the loosely connected, oft-recondite segues & gnosis arcana, if you will, has proven exceedingly difficult for me at times too to comprehend. However, let me just say that POOOOOOR-MON, in "Message 501, is one deliciously deadpan of a mutha pfuqua, and he cracks me up! Por-Man, a dry, deadpan SAMARAI MASTER.

Mary Hopkin, James Brown (1928), Bing Crosby, Nicolo Machiavelli, (what a pair the last two make), Vyacheslav Kozlov, Jeff Hornacek, Samantha Eggar, Engelbert Humperdinckt, Frankie Valli, 'Sugar Ray' Robinson, Marina Svetlova, Charles 'Red' Ruffing (1904), Walter Slezak, Golda Meir, Richard D'Oyly Carte, Beaulah Bondi, Dodie Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Cooper (1934), Tatyana Tolstaya

Cooper gave Ali all he could handle until his paper thin eyebrows gave out.
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkjagxUuAq1qbuwy7o1_400.jpg
Mary Hopkin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KODZtjOIPg
The Godfather of Soul. A rhythm section on top of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otF5XwyVy2M

John Galt died today too.

Forgot to mention:
Birthday - Christopher Hibbert, an excellent biographer.
Death - Jerzy Kosinski, Peter Sellers played Kosinski's Chance the idiot savant gardner.

Oh my gaaad, I missed Darling Vlad's bday, twice (see 4/21 and 4/23).

There's a real John Galt? Hmmm. Learn sumpin ever day. Of course, by hanging out with this crowd I learn 24 things everyday.

If anyone could pull off the trick it would be VN.

I screw these birthdays up here and there but they are close enough for government work.

Audrey Hepburn, Amos Oz, Maynard Ferguson, Thomas Henry Huxley, Ana Gasteyer

Died: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jane Bowles, Dom DeLuise (was pfunny in FATSO.

Harold Miner, MICHAEL PALIN (1943), Howie Komives, Eic Burdon, Rex Harrison, Kenneth Muir, James Beard, Kenneth Burke, Soren Kierkegaard, Tammy Wynette.

Died: James Branch Cabell, Irving Howe.

Howie Komives ... how many besides you and I, Peter, know who he is, do you think?

Question from the floor. Eric Burdon (of the Animals). Two conflicting birthdays, 5/5/40 and 5/11/41. Which is correct?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmdPQp6Jcdk

E.B.'s day is the 11th, sorry A. it's not always easy to keep it all clear. My intentions are good though. It sort of mocks the rest of my life, sometimes all at sixes and sevens.

We are doubtless the only two to recognize Howie's day. Of course I knew it would turn out this way, knowing EF is not nearly old enough to remember. And GG's hatred of the hardwood heroes would explain his silence on the matter.
H.K. was another fine 6ft. guard. Born in Toledo, Ohio (just 45 minutes south on I-75) he got traded to Detroit for Dave DeBusshere and missed out on the Knicks glory years. Howie was a rugged piece of work who played collegiately at Bowling Green U. He died in the late 90's at the age of 67. Howie didn't have a lot of French pastry in his game, you could say that he was all that he should have been. Isn't that enough for most of us?

Wow, you guys are hardcore basketball people. I know lots of people who are aware of early baseball players but fewer who are into basketball history.

Jewish, wasn't he? Or such was the rumor within my tribe.

Jewish he was indeed. In my haste I had his nativity in Toledo, Ohio. Actually he was Brooklyn born, a great Dodger fan with Komives senior. A lefthanded sharpshooter, and was a good defender regardless of what the pundits say. His nickname was Butch. Hardly surprising his Jewishness was, the early history of BB was very much a city game very friendly to your indomitable tribe.

He was okay. Not a bad shooter, as I recall. But he was lost in the Knick shuffle around that time. What with Cazzie Russell drafted, and Bill Bradley, Howie was shuffled elsewhere. His shooting replacement was Dick Barnett. Anna, you taking notes on this?

He and Cazzie got into a scuffle which precipitated his trade to the Pistons. My younger brother and myself saw him play at Cobo Arena.

WILLIE MAYS, Shannon Shakespeare, Martin Brodeur, Dick Fosbury, ORSON WELLS, Randall Jerrell, Stewart Granger, Weeb Ewbank, Rudolf Valentino, Sigmund Freud, Rabindranath Tagore.

L. Franl Baum, Henry David Thoreau, died of course.

Coincidentally, I pulled my Dover Thrift Edition Civilization and its Discontents from the shelf last week and started it. I have never read it. The first pages were absolutely stunning and a model for anyone engaged in expository writing. Then I got busy. I shall return!

F. was a first rate writer but a reductive thinker. His narrowness was the reason Jung bolted. Though hardly a F. expert I have enjoyed many of his works pessimistic though they are. And he was courageous till the end with 'Andy Gumps' disease. Painful, ungodly painful. The price he paid for those stogies, etc.

Chris St. John 'Sinjin" Smith, Janis Ian, Tim Russert, JOHNNY UNITAS, Gary Cooper, Archibal McLeish, George 'Gabby' Hayes, Johannes Brahms, Robert Browning, David Hume, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

D.H.
http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/gazette/david_hume.jpg
Well old 'Gabby' wasn't PC, anyway, 'a daburned outrage.'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7koigiUq7GE

Died: James George Frazer

RICKY NELSON, Thomas Pynchon, Sonny Liston, TRISTAN JONES (1927), David Attenborough, Don Rickles, Romain Gary, Roberto Rossellini, EDMUND WILSON, Francis Quimet, EDWARD GIBBON

Dead, Seve Ballesteros

Pynchon: the greatest "underground" (and yet alive) writer of all time?

Died: John Stuart Mill, GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (1880)
http://www.nndb.com/people/561/000024489/Flaubert3.GIF

525: a resounding YES!

Steve Yzerman, Miroslav Mecir, Tony Gwynn, Balazs Taroczy, Tommy Roe, Candace Bergen, ALBERT FINNEY (1936), Daniel Berrigan, Arthur English (1919), James M. Barrie, John Brown, Dante Alighieri (1265), Charles Simic, Calvin Murphy

Calvin Murphy, from Norwalk, Connecticut.

Sid Vicious, Donovan Leitch, Manuel Santana, Monica Dickens, Jimmy Demaret, FRED ASTAIRE, Olaf Stapleton, Fats Domino
Fred with who else
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuJxYmJlEHY

Died: Walker Percy and Shel Silverstein.

Natasha Richardson, Eric Burdon, Stanley L. Elkin, Foster Brooks, Dali, Charlie Gehringer, IRVING BERLIN, Phil Silvers, Mort Sahl

Died: J.E. Cirlot, William Dean Howells

Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko. I had a friend whose father owned a big, '59 Pontiac. We used to ride around with him in it until the night he lost control taking a curve at over a hundred, went into a ditch and crushed the car against a culvert pipe. No one was killed, but several were hurt. Fortunately I was not with him then. That car was BIG.

We loved Sgt. Bilko.
http://videoeyeball.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/09/11/bilko_2.jpg
Phil & Jack Benny on Cavett
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obzGYIiWw90

Iva Majoli, Mike Weir, Steve Winwood (1948), George Carlin, Lawrence 'Yogi' Berra, Kate Hepburn, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Lear, Dollard St. Laurent, Johnny Bucyk.

Died: Joris-Karl Huysmans (1907) , August Strindberg (1912)
J-KH
http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/51/10851-004-DE526DCB.jpg
http://www.victorianweb.org/decadence/painting/moreau/2.jpg
A.S.
http://strindberg.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/August_Strindberg_07.781859...

Two very strange birds were Huysmans and Strindberg. Both bit off more they could chew in the 'eldritch' realm. Both could have used Violet Firth's PSYCHIC SELF DEFENSE.

Dennis Rodman, Tim Pigott-Smith, Senta Berger, Harvey Keitel, Joe Louis, George Braque, Frank Brangwyn (1867), Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842), Alphonse Daudet, St.Francis of Assisi, Stevie Wonder, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Francis Barber.

Died; Richard Ellmann (1987)

I think we should all wish beelzebubba a belated birthday, er, blahday.

Happy belated blahday, bubba. Listen, it may not help you finish the book, but you must know you're not alone in that quandary, and reading your heartfelt post was strangely like listening to me berate myself for the same thing.

Write on, bubba!

Sofie Coppola; Cate Blanchette (1969); Jack Bruce; Dick Howser; Eric Morcambe (1926); Diane Arbus; Robert Owen; Thomas Gainsborough (1727); Gump Worsley (1929) how the Gumper bamboozled the Red Wing; Bobby Darin; Pooh Richardson

536: Thank you, Henri, I just noticed this.

BLAHDAY

Raymond Federman's birthday is tomorrow.

I shared some correspondence that I was lucky enough to have with him on another thread a couple years back, from which I've just recently turned into a tribute to him on my blog, using his birthday as an incentive to finally finish the piece. Hope you'll drop by and check it out, but more importantly, hope you'll give this neglected metafictional master the reading attention he's always deserved, yet rarely received, in North America at least.

Homage to Raymond Federman

Died on 14th: Matthew Gregory Lewis, August Strindberg, and Sir Henry Rider Haggard KBE, 22 June 1856 - 14 May 1925

Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-bird at night we fly out of Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire and, lo! we are gone again into Nowhere.
KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885)
Rider Haggard

Monk Lewis
http://www.thesicklytaper.com/LEWIS%20PORTRAIT.GIF

George Brett (1953) I would rather see GB putz around in the on-deck circle than watch most hambones play; Jasper Johns; Richard Avedon; Peter Shaffer; Clifton Fadiman; Mikhail Bulgakov; Edwin Muir; L. Frank Baum; Katherine Anne Porter; Joseph Cotton; James Mason

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir

Joseph Cotton was one of my favorite actors. As a kid I watched every Joseph Cotton movie I could. Of course it didn't hurt that many of them came with Orson Welles. Here are Cotton and Welles in a brief scene from The Third Man. At present one of my top five favorite movies. It drifts back and forth. This is the recognition scene, when Holly sees Harry for the first time, about half-way through.

>544 geneg:, Mine, too Gene. Remember Portrait of Jennie? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emfguw2L1EE&feature=related.

Gabriela Sabatini; Jack Morris; Dafydd Rhys Williams; Pierce Brosnan; Bernardo Bertolucci; Peter Levi; Billy Martin; Harry Carey Jr.; Liberace; Geraint Jones; Studs Turkel; Woodie Herman; Henry Fonda

Sabatini was one of my favorites when I was a tot. She was both elegant and effective on court.

Yes, she had a smashing one handed backhand which she hit with an elegant abandon. She and Guillermo Vilas were first-rate Argentine netters.

543: One of my mother's favorite poems. I remember reading it in a creative writing class I took from her. I still love it and the ending still tears me up. Thanks for posting it!

Yes again. Muir. Scots born. Published throughout his days by the Hogarth Press (V. Woolf & L. Woolf). Had some rough patches.

yes, it's an excellent poem.

Died on this date Eugen Weber. How many times have I watched his Western Civilization series. These things are vital. The New York Review of Books. Roberston Davies essays, Gore Vidals', Anthony Burgess's, Kenneth Clarks' CIVILIZATION, Jacob Bronowski, just to name a few.
Sister Wendy's great series on Art, extraordinarily moving.

Harmon Killebrew died today. He hit 500+ home runs.

It's going, going, going, gone.
http://www.tchuddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/harmonkillebrew.jpg

Danny Manning; Sugar Ray Leonard; Earl Morrall; Cicely Berry (champion of the caesura); Maureen O'Sullivan; COOL PAPA BELL; Henri Barbusse; Timothy Healy; Sandro Botticelli; Bertrand Russell.
S.B.
http://www.abm-enterprises.net/artgall2/botticelli_birth_venus_2.jpg

Cool Papa Bell was faster than light
http://education.baseballhalloffame.org/experience/thematic_units/fine_arts/asse...
http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slideshows/382/slideshow_38220/display...

Died: Beaumarchais; Nathaniel Hawthorne; William Saroyan.

Jarri Kurri; Yannick Noah (father of Joachim of the Chicago Bulls, a great tennis star in the age of Borg, et al); W.G. Sebald; Diane McBain; Brooks Robinson (a vacuum cleaner at third); Dwayne Hickman (Da-o-o-o-bie); Margot Fonteyn; Perry Como; Frank Capra; Omar Khayyam (1048); Malcolm X

MF http://www.annakatherine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Margot_Fonteyn_002....
http://echostains.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/nureyev-and-margot-fonteyn.jpg

Died: T.E. Lawrence (1935), he died while trying to avoid a couple of voters as he was cycling. He was thrown over the handlebars and died 6 days later. Lawrence was a speed demon, he was speeding at near 100 mph, he never regained consciousness.
http://neal.oxborrow.net/Thomas_Hardy/brough1.jpg

Happy Birthday Jodi Picoult!

552: Chris has Sister Wendy's book on art. It is indeed very beautiful.

Check out the video series. You can't help but pfall in love with her by the final episode. Very powerful.

Love Sister Wendy.

Bill Laimbeer, Grace Jones, Peter Townshend, Harvey Cox, Malcolm X,

Died: Max Beerbohm, Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Ricouer, 'Macho Man' Randy Savage.

Max http://danliterature.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/max-beerbohm2.jpg

The 'Macho man' has gone to that great squaredcircle in the sky, he was 58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK7J0jYKpiY

Honore de Balzac (1799); Joe Cocker (1944); Stan Makita; Dave Hill; Harold 'Bud' Grant; George Gobel; Jimmy Stewart; Sigrid Undset; William Congreve (1772); Pietro Bembo; Henry Percy (1367); John Stuart Mill

21 May
Stanley Wells; Dennis Day; 'Fats' Waller (1904); Robert Montgomery; Henri Rousseau; ALBRECHT DURER; Plato (427)
A.D.
http://www.friendsofart.net/static/images/art1/albrecht-durer-self-portrait-at-2...

Died: Eric Hoffer

As a low and callow yout I was privileged, although at the time I hardly understood it as a privilege, to see George Gobel in a performance of Bye Bye Birdie at the theatre in the round in Maryland, in suburban D.C. The name of the place escapes me. I want desperately to say Olney, but I know that's not it. Owings Mills, maybe? It's a shame it's also where I saw Bob Dylan for the first time with Joan Baez.

I saw an episode of Antiques Roadshow a number of seasons back, in which a woman brought a framed copy of an Albrecht Durer woodcut or print. She had paid a quarter for it in a garage sale. As the curator discussed and the more he looked and consulted with his brothers and sisters in trade, they began to realize this was an original Durer print, sold by Durer's wife through the window of their home and out the Dutch door and it was in excellent condition. It was, needless to say, worth somewhat more than a quarter.

Bernie Taupin, Anthony Holden, Gerard de Nerval, Barbara Parkins, Charles Aznavour, LAURENCE OLIVIER (1907), Al Simmons (1902), Mary Cassatt, Richard Wagner, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Wagner was a jerk but he could write some fine musick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGmUHepwVE8

Died: VICTOR HUGO, Langston Hughes, Martin Gardner.

Helena Bonham Carter; Marvelous Marvin Hagler; Anatoli Karpov; Jonathan Pryce; John Newcombe; Rosemary Clooney; Artie Shaw; Scatman Crothers; Par Lagervist; Herbert Marshall; Douglas Fairbanks; William 'Dummy' Hoy; Thomas Hood (1799); Fredrich Anton Mesmer; Carolus Linnaeus (1707); ELIAS ASHMOLE (1617), Pieter Neefs 'The Younger' 162_

Died: HENRIK IBSEN (1906)
The mutton chops?
http://danliterature.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/henrik-ibsen4.jpg

Roseanne Cash, Joe Dumars, Bob Dylan (1941) He's 70 for crying out loud, Joseph Brodsky (1940), Tommy Chong, William Trevor, Mai Zetterling, Siobhan McKenna, Arthur Pinero, Louis Mountbatten, Julius Caesar (15), Suzanne Lenglen (1899) the French Open started yesterday.
MZ
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/03/03/article-1158740-02BFE922000004B0-144_4...
SL

Died on 23 May: Eustace Mandville Wetenhall Tillyard, John Wain, Charlotte M. Yonge

1941! Dylan is right between my mom (1940) and my dad (1942).