Friday, May 29, 2020
Notes For May 29th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 29th, 1906, the legendary English fantasy novelist T.H. White was born. He was born Terence Hanbury White in Bombay, India.
His father, Garrick, was a police superintendent and a drunkard, his mother Constance emotionally cold and distant. They separated when he was fourteen.
White's unhappy childhood would have a lasting effect on his personal life. He was a bisexual who preferred men, but also had relationships with women, several of whom he came close to marrying.
He was ultimately unable to maintain an enduring romantic relationship with anyone, writing in his diary that "It has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."
As a student, White first went to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, then to Queen's College, Cambridge, where he majored in English and was tutored by L.J. Potts, a scholar and author who would become a lifelong friend.
White referred to him as "the greatest literary influence in my life." While at Queen's College, White wrote his thesis on Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th century compilation of French and English Arthurian romances by Sir Thomas Malory. Though he never actually read the book, White's thesis on it would play a part in his future writings.
In 1932, White taught at Stowe School, a coed boarding school in Buckinghamshire, for four years. In 1936, he published his first book, a memoir called England In My Bones. With the success of the book, White left Stowe and moved into a workman's cottage.
There, he wrote, went hunting and fishing, and took up falconry. Two years later, White published his first novel, The Sword In The Stone, the first in his famous Once And Future King series of Arthurian fantasy novels.
The Sword In The Stone told the story of a poor young boy named Wart who befriends an old wizard, Merlyn, who becomes his tutor. Merlyn knows that the boy is destined to become the King of England - a destiny Wart fulfills by removing a magical sword embedded in a rock.
The Sword In The Stone received rave reviews and became a Book Of The Month Club selection in 1939. That same year, White, a conscientious objector, moved to Doolistown, Ireland.
There, he rode out the war years writing. He published two more Once And Future King novels, The Queen Of Air And Darkness, and The Ill-Made Knight.
In 1946, White moved to Alderney, one of the Channel Islands (where he lived the rest of his life) and published his next book, Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's fantasy novel.
It told the story of a 10-year-old orphan girl who discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people from Jonathan Swift's classic novel, Gulliver's Travels) living near her home.
The following year, White - an agnostic - wrote another children's book, The Elephant And The Kangaroo, a retelling of the Noah's Ark story set in Ireland.
In the early 1950s, White wrote two nonfiction books, The Age Of Scandal (1950), a collection of essays about 18th century England, and The Goshawk (1952), an account of White's adventures in falconry as he attempted to train a hawk.
In 1958, he completed his fourth Once And Future King novel, The Candle In The Wind. Around this time, White's troubled personal life led him down the same path as his father: he began drinking heavily. He also became a lecturer.
On January 17th, 1964, White's drinking caught up with him. During a lecture tour, he died of heart trouble while aboard a ship near Athens, Greece. He was 57 years old.
Later, in 1977, White's final Once And Future King novel, The Book Of Merlyn, was published posthumously.
T.H. White's fantasy novels were and still are venerable classics of the genre. In 1960, they were the subject of the famous Broadway musical, Camelot, which was adapted as a feature film in 1967. In 1963, Disney released an animated feature film adaptation of The Sword In The Stone.
J.K. Rowling cites the Once And Future King novels as a strong influence on her Harry Potter books, describing Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor." Critics have compared Harry's wizard mentor Albus Dumbledore to Merlyn.
Quote Of The Day
"The only cure for sadness is to learn something." - T.H. White
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a lecture on the legend and appeal of King Arthur. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Notes For May 28th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 28th, 1940, the famous Irish writer Maeve Binchy was born in Dalkey, Ireland. Her father William was a prominent barrister in Dublin. He and his wife both encouraged their children to be avid readers and to share stories at the dinner table.
Nobody loved telling stories more than Maeve. She once quipped, "I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer."
Maeve Binchy went to University College in Dublin, majoring in history and French, and after she graduated in 1960, she became a schoolteacher, teaching history, French, and Latin at a Catholic grade school in Dublin.
She spent her summer vacations indulging in her passion for travel. Binchy became such a popular teacher that her students' parents chipped in to send her on a trip to Israel. While there, Binchy wrote long, detailed letters home describing her adventures there, the country, the daily life, and the people that she met.
Her father was so impressed with her writing that he typed up the letters and submitted them to the Irish Independent newspaper. When she returned to Dublin, to her surprise, she found that she'd become a published writer.
Binchy also found that she was interested in journalism, and landed a job as women's editor for The Irish Times. In the early 1970s, Binchy switched to feature reporting and moved to London to be with Gordon Snell, a BBC broadcaster turned children's book writer and mystery novelist.
The couple had met and fallen in love with during Maeve's previous visit to London. They married in 1977. In 1980, the couple moved to Binchy's hometown of Dalkey and bought a cottage, where they remained for the rest of her life.
After returning to Dalkey, Binchy began her writing career, publishing two collections of her newspaper work and a collection of short stories. In between reporting assignments, she wrote her first novel, Light A Penny Candle, which was published in 1982.
Set during the outbreak of World War II, the novel tells the story of Elizabeth White, a young British girl who is sent to stay with a large Irish family, the O'Connors, whose daughter Aisling is Elizabeth's age. The girls form an inseparable bond of friendship that remains long after the war ends, as they write to each other frequently.
As a novelist, Binchy has been described as a modern day Jane Austen. Her novels mostly dealt with the trials and tribulations of Irish women in the 20th century. They are also steeped deep in Catholicism, though as the influence of the scandal-plagued Church ended in Ireland, it also ended in Binchy's writing.
(It was revealed that thousands of Irish children had been molested by Catholic priests over the past several decades, crimes that were known and covered up by the Church, which pretty much controlled the Irish government until recently.
The Irish Church agreed to pay a nearly 150,000,000 euro settlement to the victims. In addition to the sexual abuse, it was also revealed that many orphaned Irish children were kept in squalid Church orphanages, where they were starved, viciously beaten, and exploited for cheap labor.
So great was the outrage that the Catholic Church finally lost its death grip on Ireland and her people. In two great, final acts of defiance, same-sex marriage and abortion were finally legalized in Ireland, in 2015 and 2018, respectively.)
Eleven of Maeve's novels reached the New York Times bestseller list; in reader polls taken in Ireland and England, she was rated higher than James Joyce. She quipped that it was because most of her books were sold in airport bookshops and "if you're going on a plane journey, you're more likely to take one of my stories than Finnegan's Wake."
In 1995, Binchy's popular 1990 novel Circle Of Friends was made into a movie starring Minnie Driver and Chris O'Donnell. Unfortunately for fans of the book, in his adaptation, screenwriter Andrew Davies elected to give the film a completely different ending.
In 2000, Binchy announced her retirement from writing, but it proved to be short-lived. She came back to write several more novels. In addition to her novels and short story collections, Binchy was also a playwright, and her plays have been staged at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin.
For over 30 years, she wrote a hugely popular monthly column called Maeve's Week for The Irish Times which was part advice column, part gossip column, and part humor column.
Throughout her long career, Maeve Binchy proved herself as one of Ireland's greatest writers. She died in July of 2012 at the age of 72.
Quote Of The Day
"I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks." - Maeve Binchy
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a documentary on Maeve Binchy. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Notes For May 27th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 27th, 1894, the legendary American writer Dashiell Hammett was born. He was born Samuel Dashiell Hammett in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on a farm called Hopewell and Aim. Hammett's mother, Anne Bond Dashiell, was a descendant of one of Maryland's oldest families. At 13, Hammett left school to work.
In 1915, at the age of 21, Hammett landed a job at the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he worked for six years as an operative. This experience would plant the seeds of his writing career. Disillusioned by Pinkerton's role in strike breaking and other anti-union activities, Hammett quit the agency in disgust.
During World War I, Hammett served in the Army in the Motor Ambulance Corps, but illness cut his tour of duty short; first he'd contracted Spanish flu, then tuberculosis. He spent most of the war in a hospital in Tacoma, Washington. While there, Hammett met a nurse, Josephine Dolan, whom he would later marry.
Josephine bore him two daughters, Mary Jane in 1921 and Josephine in 1926. Shortly after his second child's birth, due to Hammett's tuberculosis, Health Services nurses told his wife that she and the kids shouldn't live with him. So, they took an apartment in San Francisco.
Hammett visited them on the weekends, but the separation took too great a toll on the marriage, and it fell apart. He started drinking and tried his hand at several jobs before beginning a writing career. His early work was a series of short stories featuring a detective with no name, referred to as The Continental Op.
The short stories led to two novels, Red Harvest (February 1929) and The Dain Curse (July 1929). In Red Harvest, the Continental Op arrives in a coal mining town called Personville to meet with a new client, but finds that the man has been murdered. The client's father, a local industrialist, tells the Op that warring criminal gangs are fighting for control of Personville.
The Op solves his client's murder. With the Chief of Police totally corrupt, the Op cleans up the town himself by extracting and distributing the information he needs to set up a final showdown between the criminal gangs, manipulating them into wiping each other out.
It has been suggested that Red Harvest was the inspiration for legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterwork, Yojimbo. Kurosawa often expressed his admiration for hardboiled American detective novels, citing them as an inspiration for several of his movies.
In 1929, Hammett became romantically involved with mystery writer Nell Martin, dedicating his novel The Glass Key to her. By 1931, their relationship ended and Hammett embarked on a lifelong affair with legendary playwright Lillian Hellman. They would never marry.
Hammett's writing matured after the publication and success of his Continental Op novels, his prose becoming more realistic and hardboiled. In 1930, Hammett published his classic novel, The Maltese Falcon, featuring one of the great detective characters of all time, Sam Spade.
A bitter, sardonic character, Spade lets the police and other criminals think that he's a criminal while he works to nail the bad guys. The novel opens with Spade and his partner Miles Archer being hired by a woman, Miss Wonderly.
Their job to tail Floyd Thursby, a man who allegedly ran off with Miss Wonderly's underage sister. When Archer and Thursby suddenly end up murdered, Sam becomes the prime suspect.
Later, a man named Joel Cairo offers Sam $5000 to retrieve a valuable figurine of a black bird known as the Maltese Falcon. Then suddenly, Cairo pulls a gun on Sam and decides to search Spade's office for the bird.
The case leads Sam on a collision course with Cairo, rotund crime boss Kasper Gutman, and Gutman's bodyguard, Wilmer Cook. The Maltese Falcon was filmed three times, in 1931, 1936, (as Satan Met A Lady) and 1941.
While the 1931 version wonderfully captures the grittier elements of the novel, the other two were sanitized as per Production Code requirements. In the novel, Sam Spade has affairs with both his partner's wife and his female client.
Gutman and Cook were obviously homosexual lovers, and the effeminate Cairo was also gay. Despite these changes, the 1941 version, featuring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, is still the best of the three and rightfully considered an all-time classic film.
Hammett's 1934 novel, The Thin Man, also turned out to be a classic. Set in New York City during Prohibition, ex-private detective Nick Charles and his clever, witty wife Nora - a wealthy socialite - spend most of their time cheerfully drunk in speakeasies and hotel rooms.
Though he retired from the detective business, Nick finds himself investigating yet another crime, with Nora's help. As they try to solve a murder, Nick and Nora engage in snappy banter and imbibe vast quantities of alcohol. The case leads them into the rough world of gangsters, hoodlums, and the grotesque Wynant family.
The Thin Man would inspire a series of movies featuring the characters of Nick and Nora Charles, as well as a Thin Man TV series. It has been suggested that Dashiell Hammett modeled Nick and Nora after the personalities (and drinking habits) of himself and his longtime lover, Lillian Hellman.
The Thin Man would prove to be Hammett's last novel, some say because he'd suffered an incurable case of writer's block. He devoted the rest of his life to political activism. In the 1930s, Hammett, a ferocious and outspoken antifascist, joined the Communist Party and the League of American Writers, a group of left-leaning activist writers.
In 1942, Hammett, a disabled veteran of the first world war and ex-tuberculosis patient, pulled strings to get himself readmitted to the service. He spent most of World War II as a Sergeant stationed in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper.
He came home from the war with more lung trouble, this time emphysema. Returning to political activism, Hammett was elected President of the Civil Rights Congress of New York in June of 1946 and devoted most of his time to working for the CRC.
In 1951, he would be brought to testify before a U.S. District Court judge about his CRC activities. He refused to testify to anything, pleading the Fifth Amendment to every question. Congress began a full investigation of Hammett.
Two years later in 1953, he was brought to testify before the HUAC - the notorious House Unamerican Activities Committee. Hammett openly testified to his own activities, but refused to cooperate with the committee and inform on others. As a result, he was blacklisted.
Both trials took a toll on Hammett's already declining health. He died of lung cancer a few years later in 1961, at the age of 66. As he was a veteran of two world wars, Hammett was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Dashiell Hammett was one of America's greatest writers, a former detective turned author of hardboiled detective stories and novels whose iconic characters - and the classic films they inspired - will live on forever.
Quote Of The Day
"When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is - and should be - your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling." - Dashiell Hammett
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Dashiell Hammett's classic novel, The Maltese Falcon. Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Notes For May 26th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 26th, 1897, Dracula, the classic horror novel by the legendary Irish writer Bram Stoker, was published in London. Though not a huge commercial success, it was very popular with Victorian readers and critics alike.
Stoker's epic epistolary horror novel is told in the form of letters and journal entries, as different characters, both male and female, narrate the story. The novel opens with entries from Jonathan Harker's journal.
The young solicitor travels to the border of Romania's Transylvania region in the Carpathian Mountains, where he has an appointment at the ominous Castle Dracula to help the nobleman Count Dracula complete his purchase of a new estate in London.
Though impressed by the Count's impeccable manners, Harker soon finds himself a prisoner in the castle. He meets "the sisters" - a trio of seductive female vampires that crave his blood. Dracula saves him, but Harker soon learns his host's terrifying secret.
Dracula himself is a bloodthirsty vampire and plans to move from Transylvania to London in search of new victims to feed on and add to his army of the undead. Harker barely escapes Castle Dracula with his life.
Later, in North Yorkshire, England, the Russian ship Demeter runs aground and the captain is found dead and bound to the helm. The log relates the story of the entire crew's disappearance. An animal resembling a large dog was seen leaping off the ship.
From there, we meet Jonathan Harker's fiancee, Mina Murray, and her friend, Lucy Westenra. One of Lucy's suitors is Dr. John Seward. When Lucy begins wasting away from a mysterious illness he can't diagnose, Seward contacts his old teacher. Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
Van Helsing immediately recognizes that Lucy is the victim of a vampire's bite, but keeps his diagnosis to himself. After Lucy dies, the newspapers begin reporting on nighttime attacks on children by someone described by the victims as a "bloofer lady." (beautiful lady)
Knowing that Lucy has become a vampire, Van Helsing finally reveals the truth to Seward, and his former student is shocked that a man whom he considers one of the world's greatest scientists could believe in vampires.
Seward becomes a believer when he and his mentor team up with Lucy's other suitors and track her to her coffin. She attacks them, but they destroy her by driving a stake through her heart, beheading her, and filling her mouth with garlic.
Around this time, Jonathan Harker returns, marries Mina, and joins Van Helsing, Seward, and their friends to hunt and kill the vampire who attacked Lucy - Count Dracula - before he can add more victims to his army of the undead.
Victorian readers described Dracula as "the most blood-curdling novel of the paralyzed century." In a review in the Daily Mail published on June 1st, 1897, Dracula was proclaimed a classic of Gothic horror, the critic stating:
In seeking a parallel to this weird, powerful, and horrorful story, our mind reverts to such tales as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, The Fall of the House of Usher ... but Dracula is even more appalling in its gloomy fascination than any one of these.
Dracula is a novel very much the product of its time, that being the late 19th century - the waning years of the Victorian era, as a new century approached. The book speaks both metaphorically and directly of the conflicts between science and religion and traditional versus modern life.
The character of Mina Harker represents the conflict between traditional and modern womanhood. Some have suggested that in Dracula, vampirism is a metaphor for uncontrolled sexual desire, the ungodly lust for blood equated with lust for the flesh.
Sexuality in the Victorian era was a strange and sharp paradox; rigid morality and fear of the body and one's natural biological impulses ruled on the outside, with unwed motherhood a scandal worthy of suicide. Yet, behind closed doors, Victorians rarely practiced what they preached.
There was a thriving, seamy sexual underground in England at the time that included both female and male brothels catering to all desires. Some of the best literary erotica ever written was penned during the Victorian era and published in underground literary magazines and anthologies, all of which were distributed on the sly - usually under cover of darkness.
Though the suave and seductive Count Dracula's name was taken from that of the infamous Romanian prince Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad Dracul - dracul meaning devil in the Romanian language - the novel was partly inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's classic 1871 novella Carmilla.
Carmilla told the story of a lesbian vampire preying on lonely, vulnerable young women. Stoker added new aspects to the vampire mythos; in Dracula, for the first time, a vampire cast no reflection in a mirror, could be driven away with garlic, and could be destroyed by driving a wooden stake through its heart - though Dracula himself meets a different, much nastier fate.
Dracula would be adapted as a stage play by Bram Stoker himself. While Dracula's name may have come from the Romanian prince, his charisma, elegance, and gentlemanly manner were inspired by an actor named Henry Irving, who also managed the Lyceum Theatre, where Bram Stoker had worked for twenty years.
Stoker admired Irving greatly and hoped he would play the vampire count in his stage play adaptation of Dracula, but Irving wasn't interested. Years later in 1931, a Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi, famous for his stage portrayal of the vampire, would play the part again in the first sound film adaptation of Stoker's novel.
The first film adaptation of Dracula was the classic silent feature film Nosferatu, made in 1922 by legendary German director F.W. Murnau. It was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel.
Though basically faithful to the plot of the book, in order to avoid a lawsuit, Murnau changed the ending and the names of all the characters. Florence Stoker, Bram's widow, still sued for copyright infringement.
The judge ruled in her favor. Prana Film, the studio that made the movie, went bankrupt. Nosferatu would be its first and only film. The judge's decision against Prana ordered all the studio's copies of the movie destroyed.
By then, the film had been distributed around the world, and the owners of those foreign release prints could not be forced to destroy them. As a result, the movie survived and fell into the public domain, where it could be distributed without payment.
Many distributors altered the title cards and restored the characters' original names to cash in on the Dracula names. Nosferatu would become a classic film, famous not for its sordid legal history, but for F.W. Murnau's brilliant direction and the surreal expressionist sets.
The most striking difference between Nosferatu and Tod Browning's Dracula is in the depiction of the main character. In Nosferatu, Count Dracula - renamed Count Orlock - is no suave, seductive aristocrat.
With his skeletal frame, long, claw-like fingers, bat ears, bald head, and mouth full of jagged, fangy teeth, Count Orlock, played by the legendary German character actor Max Schreck, looks like a human plague rat. There's nothing remotely alluring about him.
Though it wasn't the first classic novel to feature a vampire, over a hundred years since its initial publication, Dracula has inspired countless works of vampire fiction, most famously Salem's Lot, by modern horror master Stephen King.
Published in 1975, Salem's Lot, which told the story of a writer who discovers that his small New England hometown is infested with vampires, was inspired by and an homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula - one of King's favorite books.
Bela Lugosi's legendary performance as the Count in the first sound film adaptation of Dracula in 1931 set the stage for the vampire on film. The character would be played on film well over 200 times by other great actors such as Christopher Lee and Frank Langella. Jack Palance delivered a sympathetic portrayal of the count in a 1973 TV movie.
But it was Bram Stoker's novel that established the vampire as one of the most popular and intriguing characters in world culture. Dracula is more than just a horror novel. It's also a classic work of 19th century English literature.
Quote Of The Day
"There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part." - Bram Stoker
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete full cast reading of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula. Enjoy!
Monday, May 25, 2020
IWW Members' Publishing Successes
Joanna M. Weston
My poem, 'Arriving Home,' is up at The Blue Pepper.
Wayne Scheer
My flash, "The Naked City," is up at The Daily Drunk. This one had me laughing as I was writing it. I hope you enjoy my weirdness.
A bit sophomoric perhaps, but I'm amusing myself. My flash, "One Day in the Garden," is up at The Short Humour Site.
Friday, May 22, 2020
Notes For May 22nd, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 22nd, 1859, the legendary English writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The son of a drunkard, his father's only accomplishment in life was siring an intellectually gifted child.
At the age of eight, Arthur Conan Doyle was sent to a Jesuit prep school called Hodder Place. From there, he attended a Jesuit university, Stonyhurst College, but after graduating in 1875, he cast off the yoke of Christianity and became an agnostic.
For the next five years, Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. During this time, he began writing short stories. He sold his first story to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal before his 20th birthday.
In 1882, he joined his classmate George Budd in a Plymouth medical practice, but their relationship soon soured. Conan Doyle left for Portsmouth, where he set up his own medical practice. Unsuccessful at first, he began writing stories again while waiting for patients.
After many rejections, his debut novel A Study In Scarlet was published, first in 1887 by Beeton's Christmas Annual magazine, then in book form a year later, with illustrations by his father, Charles.
The novel's main character was a detective called Sherlock Holmes. The brilliant, analytical, and laid-back Holmes was assisted by his friend, Dr. John Watson, who also served as narrator for the duo's adventures.
When he wasn't solving crimes, Holmes' passions included playing the violin and enjoying a good game of chess. He also had a fondness for cocaine and morphine, which he used to escape from "the dull routine of existence."
As a detective, Holmes wasn't above deceiving the police or concealing evidence if necessary to solve the crime. His main nemesis was the evil Professor Moriarty, who possessed an intellect comparable to Holmes.
A Study In Scarlet was the first of four novels and 56 short stories to feature Sherlock Holmes, who would become one of the greatest iconic literary characters of all time.
Conan Doyle himself would later become a real life sleuth, investigating closed cases where he believed that the defendants had been wrongfully convicted.
In 1906, his first case, that of a half-English, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji convicted of writing threatening letters and mutilating animals, led to the establishment of England's Court of Criminal Appeal a year later.
In addition to the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Conan Doyle's large body of work also included a series of science fiction writings featuring the character of Professor Challenger.
Though he possessed a brilliant mind like Sherlock Holmes, he was far from laid-back and described as "a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science." Conan Doyle's first work to feature Professor Challenger, a novel called The Lost World, was published in 1912.
In it, Professor Challenger claims to have discovered a South American plateau where dinosaurs still exist. A skeptical reporter, Edward Malone, accompanies Challenger on an expedition and finds that the irascible scientist was right. Not only are there dinosaurs in the Lost World, but a race of ape-men as well.
Conan Doyle was a believer in the supernatural world and wrote two nonfiction books on the subject, The Coming Of The Fairies (1921) and The History Of Spiritualism (1926).
In the 1920s, he became friends with the legendary American magician Harry Houdini, but Houdini's work as a prominent debunker of spiritualism soon led to a bitter falling out between the two men.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902, an honor he believed was bestowed on him as the result of The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, a pamphlet he had written justifying England's role in the Boer War to an outraged world.
He later wrote a nonfiction book on the conflict called The Great Boer War. He died in 1930 of a heart attack at the age of 71. He will always be remembered as one of the greatest mystery writers of all time.
Quote Of The Day
"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Vanguard Video
Today's video features the only filmed interview with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle known to exist - an early talkie shot in October of 1928 for a Movietone News newsreel. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Notes For May 21st, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 21st, 1688, the legendary English writer and scholar Alexander Pope was born in London. As a young boy, Pope's education was complicated by the anti-Catholic laws enacted to establish the Church of England as the British empire's official clerical body.
Unable to attend public school, he was taught to read and write by his aunt. Pope began his formal education at Twyford School in Hampshire. Twyford was a Church of England public school, but its administrators chose to ignore the law and allow him to attend.
He would later attend Catholic schools which, though technically illegal, were tolerated in some towns. When he was twelve years old, Pope contracted Pott's disease, a rare form of tuberculosis that attacks the bones and deforms them.
The disease left him a hunchback and stunted his growth. He would grow no taller than 4'6", or 1.37 meters. Already a social pariah because he was Catholic, Pope's deformities alienated him further from society.
He would never marry, but he had many female friends, and wrote them witty letters. One woman, his lifelong friend Martha Blount, was allegedly his lover.
Pope's health problems, which also included respiratory trouble, high fevers, inflammation of the eyes, and stomach pain, didn't affect his mind. He gained a reputation for his intellect, his rapacious wit, and his satirical verse.
When his first poetry collection, Pastorals (1709), appeared in the sixth part of publisher Jacob Tonson's anthology Poetical Miscellanies, it made him an overnight sensation. He soon struck up friendships with fellow writers Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot.
Together, they formed the Scriblerus Club, which was dedicated to satirizing ignorance and pedantry via a fictional scholar named Martinus Scriblerus. Pope continued on his path of literary success with his poems The Rape of the Lock (1712) and Windsor Forest (1713).
The Rape of the Lock was one of Pope's most popular poems. The mock-heroic epic poem satirized the high society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (named Belinda in the poem) and Lord Petre, (the Baron) who had cut off a lock of her hair without her permission.
Pope mocks the conflict in an epic style; after Belinda's hair is stolen, she tries to get it back but it flies through the air and turns into a star. He later became friends with poet and playwright Joseph Addison and contributed to Addison's classic play, Cato.
He also wrote essays for magazines of the day such as The Guardian and The Spectator. His classic epic poem An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously in 1711.
A satirical attempt to declare and refine his views as a poet and critic, the poem was said to be Pope's response to an ongoing debate on whether poetry should be a natural product of the poet's mind and heart or written according to predetermined, traditional rules such as meter.
In his inimitable style, Pope deliberately leaves the poem unclear and full of contradictions. His own position was that while rules were necessary, so was the passion and imagination that gave poetry its mysterious, sometimes baffling qualities.
An Essay on Criticism featured the famous line, "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Pope's most ambitious projects were his English translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Beginning in 1717, his translation of the Iliad appeared in one volume a year over a six year period.
For his translation of the Odyssey, Pope, confronted with the arduousness of the task and his increasingly fragile health, employed his friends William Broome and Elijah Fenton to work on the translation with him.
The entire translation was published under Pope's name; when word got out that he hadn't translated the entire work himself, his reputation took a hit, but the translation of the Odyssey still sold well. It first appeared in 1726.
Before he began work on the Odyssey, a volume of Shakespeare's plays transcribed and edited by Pope was published. The volume had been commissioned by Pope's publisher. It was hugely controversial - more like a revision of Shakespeare's plays than a transcription.
Pope cut over 1,500 lines and relegated them to footnotes, believing them to be of such poor quality that he doubted Shakespeare had ever written them. The lines, he thought, were the result of actors' interpolations. Poet Lewis Theobald wrote a scathing pamphlet denouncing the volume called Shakespeare Restored.
Among Pope's last great works were a series of poems called Imitations of Horace. Appearing between 1733-38, they were satires of life under King George II and the corruption of Robert Walpole's ministry, which Pope believed was tainting Britain. By the time he completed the series in 1738, his health began to deteriorate.
He planned to write an epic blank verse poem called Brutus, but he abandoned it and only a few lines have survived. Instead, he devoted his remaining years to revising his final masterwork, The Dunciad.
The four-book satirical epic poem told the story of how the goddess Dulness and her servants plunge Britain into a quagmire of imbecility, tastelessness, and ultimately, decay. Originally written in three books, Pope revised it and added a fourth book, which was published in 1742.
Alexander Pope died two years later, on May 30th, 1744. He was 56 years old.
Quote Of The Day
"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to." - Alexander Pope
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Alexander Pope's classic satirical epic poem, The Rape of the Lock. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Notes For May 20th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 20th, 1937, the legendary English writer George Orwell (the pseudonym of Eric Blair) was wounded in action while fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat by a sniper.
Orwell fought alongside the POUM, (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista - the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) which was allied with Britain's Labour Party, of which he was a member.
The POUM was one of several leftist factions which had formed a loose coalition to fight General Franco's fascists. Another member of this coalition was the Spanish Communist Party, which was controlled by the Soviet Union.
At the Soviets' insistence, the Spanish Communist Party denounced the POUM as a Trotskyist organization and falsely claimed that they were in cahoots with the fascists. Near the end of the war, the POUM was outlawed, and the Spanish Communist Party began attacking its members.
Tragically, this infighting would break apart the coalition and give the fascists the opportunity to win the war. While George Orwell recovered from his injuries in a POUM hospital, he had a lot of time to think, and he came to hate Soviet communism.
Orwell would later become famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both of which were brilliant allegorical satires of Stalinism. Animal Farm was a modern cautionary fable, while Nineteen Eighty-Four was a work of dystopic science fiction.
In the years since their publication, the right in the United States and Europe embraced these novels as the bibles of anti-communism. George Orwell became their hero, and this led to a popular misconception that he had been a staunch conservative - perhaps even a fascist - though he was really a lifelong socialist.
Just before leaving for Spain, he had written a nonfiction book called The Road To Wigan Pier. After publisher Victor Gollancz encouraged Orwell to investigate and write about the depressed social conditions in Northern England, he went to the poor coal mining town of Wigan, where he lived in a dirty room over a tripe shop.
He met many people and took extensive notes of the living conditions and wages, explored the mine, and spent days in the town's library researching public health records, working conditions in mines, and other data. The result was The Road To Wigan Pier (1937).
The book is divided into two parts. The first part is a straightforward documentary about life in Wigan. The second is Orwell's philosophical attempt to answer the question that if socialism can improve the appalling conditions in Wigan and such places around the world - which it can - then why aren't we all socialists?
Orwell places the blame on the ferocious prejudices of the white Christian middle class against the lower working class, the poor, and other people they associate with socialism, such as blacks, Jews, atheists, hippies, pacifists, and feminists.
He concludes that "The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight."
The lesson Orwell teaches us in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is that even an ideal as noble as socialism can become corrupted and twisted into something far worse than the ills it seeks to cure, and we must not let that happen.
He remained a lifelong socialist and always hoped for a better world free of poverty, inequality, and social injustice. He died of tuberculosis in January of 1950 at the age of 46.
Quote Of The Day
"In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." - George Orwell
Vanguard Video
Today's video features rare newsreel footage of George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War - demonstrating how to make tea in a trench! Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Notes For May 19th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 19th, 1930, the famous African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Carl Hansberry, was a prominent real estate broker.
In 1938, when Lorraine was eight years old, her father moved the family to an all-white neighborhood where a majority of homeowners had formed a covenant that banned blacks from buying homes in the neighborhood. So, he had a white friend buy the house for him.
After the Hansberrys moved into their new home, they were attacked by an angry mob. A brick was thrown through Lorraine's bedroom window, and she just barely avoided being struck by it.
Her father later sued the white homeowners for discrimination, and in the case of Hansberry v. Lee, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision banning homeowners' associations from discriminating against home buyers and renters on the basis of their race.
Although Lorraine's father had prevailed in court, the family was still subjected to harassment from their racist white neighbors. She later quipped that she had lived in a typical "warm and cuddly white neighborhood."
Ironically, after her death, her family home would be designated by the city of Chicago as a historical landmark. The climate of racism she grew up with would inspire her to write her first and most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959).
The title comes from a line in the poem Harlem by legendary African-American poet Langston Hughes. Set in the 1940s, A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of the Youngers, a poor black family living in a small apartment in Chicago's South Side.
The family patriarch has died, and his survivors will soon receive an insurance check for ten thousand dollars. His widow, Mama, wants to fulfill the dream she shared with her husband and buy a house.
Her grown son, Walter, wants to use the money to invest in a liquor store with his friends - an investment he believes will provide the whole family with long term financial security. Beneatha, Walter's sister, wants to use the money to pay for her medical school tuition.
Walter's wife, Ruth, agrees with Mama, believing that a new house would provide more living space for themselves and their son, Travis. As the play progresses, the Youngers fight over their conflicting dreams.
When Ruth becomes pregnant, she considers having an abortion, as she and Walter really can't afford another child. Walter doesn't object, which drives Mama to put a down payment on a nice house in a white neighborhood.
Beneatha is not happy about her family mixing with whites. She's not the only one. When the Youngers' soon-to-be new neighbors find out that the black family is moving in, they send Mr. Lindner from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association to bribe them to stay out of the neighborhood.
They refuse the deal, even after Walter loses the rest of the insurance money when his friend Willy runs off with it instead of investing it in the liquor store. In the play's third act, Beneatha's Nigerian boyfriend wants her to move to Africa with him after she graduates.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family prepares to move out of their apartment and into their new house, fulfilling their dream but also exposing them to a dangerously racist environment. When A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959, it became the first play written by an African-American to be produced for the Broadway stage.
The original cast featured Sidney Poitier as Walter, Ruby Dee as Ruth, and Claudia McNeil as Mama. It would be adapted as an acclaimed feature film in 1961, with the entire original Broadway cast reprising their roles - including a young Louis Gossett, Jr. as George Murchison.
The play would also be adapted as a hit Broadway musical called Raisin in 1973. The musical would be nominated for nine Tony awards and run for 847 performances. Original cast members included Joe Morton as Walter, Debbie Allen as Beneatha, Ernestine Jackson as Ruth, Ralph Carter as Travis, and Virginia Capers as Mama.
Lorraine Hansberry wrote several other plays, including her second most famous play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. After 110 performances, the play closed on the day she died, January 12th, 1965. She was 34 years old and had lost a long battle with cancer.
Despite her illness, she continued to work as an activist for civil rights, women's rights, and other causes. Her other writings were turned into an acclaimed play called To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. It would be the longest running off Broadway play of the 1968-69 season.
Quote Of The Day
"Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be — if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking — but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it." - Lorraine Hansberry
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare recording of Lorraine Hansberry speaking in New York City, circa 1964. Enjoy!
Monday, May 18, 2020
IWW Members' Publishing Successes
Joanna M. Weston
My poem, 'The Future', is up at Writing in a Woman's Voice.
Wayne Scheer
My flash story, "Beers and Bears," is up at The Daily Drunk. Another flash, "The Naked City,"has been accepted by the same site and will be up next week.
The Daily Drunk publishes humor--flash humor--fiction, nonfiction, poetry. They respond within a few days and put up the story within a week or so, making this a good site for writers with short attention spans and a need for immediate gratification.
Both of the flash stories were originally written in Practice, so a bit thanks to them.
Friday, May 15, 2020
Notes For May 15th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 15th, 1890, the famous American writer Katherine Anne Porter was born. She was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas. The fourth of five children, she was a descendant of the legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone. The famous writer O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) was her father's second cousin.
When Callie was two years old, her mother died of complications following the birth of her last child. Callie's father sent his children to live with his mother, and the children, especially Callie, adored their grandmother.
Seven years later, Callie's grandmother died suddenly. She and her siblings lived with various relatives or in rented rooms paid for by their father. At the age of 16, Callie ran off to marry her boyfriend John Henry Koontz, the son of a wealthy rancher.
In order to marry Koontz, Callie, a Methodist, had to convert to Catholicism, which she did. Her devout Catholic husband turned out to be an abusive drunk who once threw her down the stairs, breaking her ankle.
After suffering for nine years in a rotten marriage, Callie divorced her husband - a shocking thing for a woman to do in 1915. As part of her divorce decree, Callie had the court legally change her name to Katherine Anne Porter, which was the name of her beloved grandmother.
From there, Katherine fled Texas for Chicago, where she tried her hand at acting and singing, but that was cut short when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent two years in a TB sanitarium before it was discovered that she'd been misdiagnosed; she actually had bronchitis.
During her stay at the sanitarium, Katherine decided to become a writer. She began her writing career as a newspaper drama critic and gossip columnist. Then, during the 1918 flu pandemic, she contracted the virus and nearly died from it.
She was left in a frail state; her hair turned white and would remain white for the rest of her life. After regaining her health, Katherine moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she made her living as a ghostwriter and movie company publicist. She also wrote children's stories.
By 1920, she met some Mexican revolutionary leaders, including legendary painter Diego Rivera, and traveled to Mexico to cover the leftist revolution. She would split her time between Mexico and New York City, where she continued to write short stories and would become a master of the form.
One of her best known stories was The Jilting of Granny Weatherall. In it, the sick, elderly Granny lies on her deathbed. Her daughter Cornelia has been serving as her caregiver, but Granny considers herself a better housekeeper than Cornelia.
The delirious Granny is still obsessed with George, the man who jilted her at the altar when they were a young couple. She later married her late husband John, and it was a happy marriage, but Granny never got over George and still loves him.
Meanwhile, she's visited by her priest, Father Connolly, whom she chides for being more interested in drinking tea and gossiping than in the welfare of her soul. She's also visited by her son, Jimmy.
What she really wants is to see her daughter Hapsy, who never comes to visit. It's suggested, but not directly implied, that Hapsy died at birth. Granny has a vision of Hapsy visiting her and holding a baby, but it's really another daughter, Lydia, who has come to visit.
Realizing that she's dying, Granny doesn't want to go yet and worries what will happen if she can't find Hapsy. She looks for a sign from God. No sign comes, and Granny, believing that she's been jilted again, dies in despair.
Katherine married her second husband, Ernest Stock, in 1926. The marriage would only last a year, ending when the unfaithful Stock gave her venereal disease. During both her marriages, she had tried to conceive children, only to suffer miscarriages and at least one stillbirth.
After divorcing Stock, she had a hysterectomy. During the 1930s, Katherine spent several years in Europe, continued writing short stories, and endured two more disastrous marriages. She continued to receive acclaim for her short story collections.
In the 1940s and 50s, she taught at several universities, including Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas. Her very unconventional method of teaching endeared her to her students.
As a short story writer, Katherine Anne Porter loved to delve into the dark side of human nature. Though she was best known for her short stories, she also wrote four novellas (she hated the term novella) and one full length novel, which would become a classic.
Ship of Fools, published on April 1st, 1962, (April Fool's Day) took Porter over twenty years to write. She was never really satisfied with it, calling it "unwieldy" and "enormous."
The novel received mixed reviews at the time of its publication, but has since been recognized for its brilliance and prescient insight into the human condition. It was an existentialist character study rather than a standard plot driven story.
It's the summer of 1931, and a cruise ship has left Mexico, bound for Germany. The ship contains a wide variety of passengers. Many are German expatriates, but there is also a drunken lawyer, an American divorcee, a Spanish noblewoman, two Mexican Catholic priests, and others.
In following these characters, Porter explores the nature of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and human frailty in general as she examines the attitudes that would enable Hitler to come to power, maintain dictatorial control, and plunge Europe into a devastating war. The story is full of passion, duplicity, and treachery.
Ship of Fools became the best selling novel of 1962 and a Book of the Month Club selection. The movie rights were snapped up immediately for $500,000 - the equivalent of nearly four million dollars in today's money. It provided Katherine with financial security for the rest of her life.
The feature film adaptation of Ship of Fools premiered in July of 1965. It was directed by Stanley Kramer, best known for classic films such as The Defiant Ones (1958), On The Beach (1959), and Judgement At Nuremberg (1961).
Featuring a screenplay by Abby Mann, Ship of Fools starred Vivien Leigh in her last film role. The film won an Oscar for Best Cinematography and was nominated for several other Academy Awards. It is rightfully considered one of the most acclaimed films of the 1960s.
In 1965, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter was published. It would win the author a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Twelve years later, in 1977, Porter, then 87 years old, published her last book, The Never-Ending Wrong.
The Never-Ending Wrong was a work of nonfiction - an account of the infamous trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which Porter had protested against when it took place fifty years earlier.
Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrant anarchists who had been tried, convicted, and executed for robbery and murder in Massachusetts. Their politically charged trial was tainted by racism and malicious prosecution, including coerced false testimony. It remains controversial to this day.
Katherine Anne Porter died in 1980 at the age of 90.
Quote Of The Day
“A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.” - Katherine Anne Porter
Vanguard Video
Today's video features Katherine Anne Porter being interviewed by James Day on the 1970s PBS TV show, Day At Night. Enjoy!
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Notes For May 14th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 14th, 1962, A Clockwork Orange, the classic novel by the famous English writer Anthony Burgess, was published in London. The title comes from the British slang expression, "queer as a clockwork orange."
An antifascist parable set in a dystopic England of the future, it examined a major problem facing Britain at the time of its publication - a huge rise in juvenile delinquency and the government's inability to deal with it constructively.
The novel is narrated by its main character, Alex, who refers to himself as "Alexander the Large." A highly intelligent but psychopathic teenager, he leads the Droogs, a violent street gang comprised of his friends Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Alex introduces everyone and sets the scene in this unforgettable opening paragraph:
There was me, that is Alex, and my three Droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much, neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthmesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog and All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with.
The dazzling poetic prose is written in Nadsat, a language invented by Anthony Burgess for this novel. It's a dialect that combines proper English with British and Russian slang words and phrases. Alex speaks this lyrical language as he tells his horrific story.
The novel opens with Alex and his gang at a milk bar, where they drink drugged milk to get themselves high and ready for committing random acts of violence. First, they gleefully beat an old, homeless drunkard. One night, while joyriding in a stolen car, the gang breaks into an isolated cottage.
There they terrorize the occupants, beating the husband and raping his wife. When he's not out with his gang, Alex passes the time in his dreary home, escaping his poor excuse for parents by blasting the works of his favorite composer, "Ludwig Van," (Beethoven) and masturbating to violent sexual fantasies.
When Georgie challenges Alex for leadership of the gang, he puts down the rebellion by beating Georgie in a fight and slashing open Dim's hand. Then he takes them out for drinks at the milk bar.
Georgie and Dim have had enough, but Alex demands that the gang follow through with Georgie's plan for a "man-sized" job and rob a rich old woman who lives alone. The robbery is botched when the old woman calls the police - but not before she is assaulted and knocked unconscious.
The gang then turns on Alex, attacking him and leaving him to take the fall when the police arrive. The old woman later dies of her injuries and Alex is accused of murder.
After spending a couple of years in prison, Alex becomes an involuntary participant in an experimental rehabilitation procedure called the Ludovico Technique, which is supposed to remove all violent and criminal impulses from the human psyche.
The prison chaplain is opposed to the Ludovico Technique. He argues that conscious, willing moral choice is a necessary component of humanity. Nevertheless, Alex is forced to undergo the procedure.
For two weeks, his eyes are wired open and he is forced to watch violent images on a screen while being given a drug that induces extreme nausea. It's basically a horrific form of aversion therapy.
When Alex recognizes the soundtrack to the violent film presentation as Beethoven's fifth symphony, he begs the doctors to turn off the sound, telling them that's a sin to take away his love of music, and Beethoven never did anything wrong. They refuse.
After the procedure is completed, Alex is brought before an audience of prison and government officials and declared successfully rehabilitated. To demonstrate this, they show how Alex is unable to react with violence even in self defense, and becomes crippled by extreme nausea when sexually aroused.
The outraged prison chaplain again protests the Ludovico Technique, accusing the state of taking away Alex's God-given ability to choose good over evil. "Padre," a government official replies, "There are subtleties. The point is that it works."
Alex is released from prison, but his life plunges into a downward spiral. He finds that the Ludovico Technique has rendered him physically unable to listen to his Beethoven and unable to defend himself from attack. He is promptly beaten up by a former victim.
The police arrive, and they turn out to be Alex's former gang member Dim and former rival gang leader Billyboy. They beat him savagely and leave him for dead. Later, Alex is befriended by a political activist who turns out to be the man whose wife Alex had raped during the home invasion.
When the activist finally recognizes Alex as the gang leader, he tortures him with the classical music he once loved. His life destroyed by the therapy that was supposed to make him a model citizen, a desperate Alex attempts suicide and survives.
A huge scandal erupts and the embarrassed government officials agree to reverse the Ludovico Technique in order to quell the bad publicity. Afterward, they offer Alex a cushy job at a high salary, but he looks forward to returning to his violent ways.
He forms a new gang, but after watching them beat a stranger, Alex finds that he has tired of violence. He contemplates giving up gang life, becoming a productive citizen, and doing what he secretly always wanted to do - start a family of his own. He wonders if his children would inherit the violent tendencies he once had.
In the U.S. first edition of the novel, the last chapter was cut. The publisher wanted the story to end on a dark note, with Alex looking forward to resuming his violent ways. He believed that the original UK edition ending, with Alex deciding on his own to reform, was unrealistic.
Anthony Burgess resisted the idea at first, but gave in because he needed the money. He would always regret allowing the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange to be cut from the U.S. edition. In America, the novel would not be published in its original version until 1986.
When legendary British filmmaker Stanley Kubrick adapted it as an acclaimed feature film in 1971, he based his screenplay on the U.S. first edition of the novel, ending the film on a dark note, with Alex smirking wickedly and saying, "They cured me all right!"
A huge success at the box office and widely praised by critics, A Clockwork Orange was one of the few X-rated films to be nominated for Academy Awards. The movie did have its detractors, due to its relentlessly dark tone and violence.
Passed uncut for release in the UK, the film sparked outrage when several violent juvenile offenders claimed that their crimes were inspired by it. After he and his family received death threats and their home was picketed, Stanley Kubrick withdrew the film from circulation in the UK, where it would remain out of print until after Kubrick's death in 1999.
I've read both versions of the novel, and I prefer the U.S. first edition because its grim ending really brings home the main theme of the novel - that fascism is an evil far worse than the societal ills it promises to cure.
The cut final chapter makes for interesting reading, but it does seem unlikely that the damage done by the horrific Ludovico Technique could be reversed, which leaves the reader wondering if Alex's ultimate rejection of violence really was the product of his own free will.
Today, both editions of A Clockwork Orange are available in the U.S., and the novel remains a classic work of literature.
Quote Of The Day
"It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself." - Anthony Burgess on A Clockwork Orange
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Anthony Burgess's classic novel, A Clockwork Orange. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Notes For May 13th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 13th, 1907, the famous English writer Daphne du Maurier was born in London, England. Her father, Sir Gerald du Maurier, and her mother, Muriel Beaumont, were both prominent actors. Her grandfather was the famous writer and cartoonist, George du Maurier.
The Llewelyn-Davies boys, who would be befriended by writer J.M. Barrie and used as the inspiration for the Lost Boys in Barrie's classic play, Peter Pan (1904) were her cousins.
Daphne du Maurier's first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931, but it would be her fourth novel, Jamaica Inn (1936) that made her name as a writer. Set in Cornwall in 1820, the novel told the story of Mary Yellan, a young woman forced to live with her Aunt Patience after her mother dies.
Her aunt's husband Joss is the keeper of the Jamaica Inn. When Mary arrives, she finds her aunt under the thumb of her vicious, domineering husband. Mary senses that something is definitely wrong at the gloomy, ominous Jamaica Inn, which has no guests and is never open to the public.
Mary soon falls in love with Joss' younger brother Jem, who, although a thief, is not evil like Joss. As she tries to solve the mystery of the Jamaica Inn, Mary discovers that her uncle Joss is really the leader of a murderous criminal gang.
She turns to the town vicar for help. After her aunt and uncle both turn up murdered, Mary finds a shocking clue that reveals the killer's true identity, placing her life in danger. Jamaica Inn would be adapted as a feature film by the legendary English director Alfred Hitchcock in 1939.
The screenplay took great liberties with the novel, and du Maurier hated the film. Alfred Hitchcock would adapt more of her writings as feature films, including her next novel, which is considered her masterpiece.
Part suspense thriller, part Gothic romance, Rebecca (1938) is narrated by an unnamed woman who tells the story of her marriage to wealthy Englishman Maxim de Winter. She met him while working as a companion to a rich American woman on vacation in the French Riviera.
They fall in love, and after a courtship of two weeks, the narrator accepts de Winter's marriage proposal. After their wedding, they return to live at de Winter's beautiful West Country estate, Manderley.
The narrator soon realizes that her husband is haunted by the death of his first wife, Rebecca. Their sinister, controlling housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, was deeply devoted to Rebecca, and is determined to undermine her employer's new marriage by any means necessary.
She even manipulates the narrator into wearing a replica of one of Rebecca's dresses. After her attempt at manipulating the narrator into committing suicide fails, the narrator's husband makes a shocking confession.
Rebecca was an evil woman who tortured Maxim with her affairs and illegitimate pregnancy. Finally, Maxim could stand no more. He killed Rebecca and disposed of her body on her boat, then sunk the vessel.
After Rebecca's boat is raised, an inquest is held and Maxim is cleared of suspicion due to lack of evidence. Unfortunately, Rebecca's cousin (and lover) Jack tries to blackmail Maxim with evidence of his guilt...
Rebecca was adapted several times, first as a feature film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. The film, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The novel was also adapted as a play by its author. The play opened in London in 1940 and ran for over 350 performances.
In addition to her novels, Daphne du Maurier was famous for her short story collections. Her second short story collection, The Apple Tree (1952) contained six stories, including one of her most famous - The Birds.
Told from the viewpoint of Nat Hocken (a farm worker in coastal Cornwall) and his family, the story chronicles the inexplicable attacks on humans by birds in the area. The Birds would be adapted by Alfred Hitchcock as a classic horror film in 1963, starring Tippi Hedren.
In the title story, The Apple Tree, a widower believes that the old apple tree in his garden is possessed by the spirit of his neglected wife. du Maurier's 1971 short story collection Not After Midnight, features her second most famous story, Don't Look Now.
In it, married couple John and Laura Baxter are vacationing in Venice, trying to recover from the devastating, sudden death of their five-year-old daughter, Christine, which has strained their marriage.
In a restaurant, Laura meets two odd looking women - elderly identical twin sisters who have psychic knowledge of Christine. Meanwhile, John encounters a little girl who bears a striking resemblance to his dead daughter. Don't Look Now would be adapted as an acclaimed horror film in 1973 by the famous English director Nicolas Roeg.
du Maurier also wrote several works of nonfiction, including memoirs both of herself and her family members. She married Sir Frederick "Boy" Browning, a Lieutenant General in the British Army, and bore him a son and two daughters.
Biographers have noted that as a wife and mother, she was sometimes warm and loving, and sometimes cold and distant. Writer Margaret Forster, who worked with the approval and assistance of the du Maurier family, revealed in her biography that Daphne had a few affairs with women.
She vigorously denied being bisexual. Personal letters released after the author's death revealed, according to Forster, that Daphne was terrified that she might be a lesbian. She had been raised to hate homosexuals with a passion by her father, a virulent homophobic bigot.
Daphne du Maurier died in April 1989 at the age of 81.
Quote Of The Day
"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person." - Daphne du Maurier
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Daphne du Maurier's classic short story, The Birds. Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Notes For May 12th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 12th, 1883, Life on the Mississippi, the classic memoir by the legendary American writer Mark Twain, (the pseudonym of Samuel Clemens) was published simultaneously in Boston and London.
In this great book, Twain combines autobiography with history. He begins with the discovery of the Mississippi River by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1542. Twain's personal history with the Mississippi began in childhood.
As a young man, while traveling by steamboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, he befriended the pilot, Horace E. Bixby, who inspired him to become a steamboat pilot himself.
At the time, steamboat piloting was a very prominent and respected position. It paid handsomely - around $3000 per year, which is equivalent to about $72,000 in today's money. That's because the job required lots of training.
As he chronicles his own personal history with that of the river, Twain tells of his training and career as a steamboat pilot before the Civil War, discussing the science of navigating the Mississippi.
To become a steamboat pilot in those days was a daunting task - you had to learn everything about the piloting and mechanics of a steamboat and also memorize the geography of the entire Mississippi River, from St. Louis to New Orleans, which changed course frequently.
Later in his life, Twain and some of his friends traveled the same path by steamboat, and the author discusses how the river boating industry had changed since he was a pilot, including the competition it faces from the railroad.
Interspersed through the straightforward documentary are numerous anecdotes and commentaries, as Twain offers his perspective on the people who live on the Mississippi and their culture - everything from the architecture of homes to local customs and folklore.
The narrative is classic Mark Twain, often tongue-in-cheek and filled with self-deprecating humor. A good example of the narrative can be found in the following passage:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Life on the Mississippi is a fascinating read that paints a colorful, detailed portrait of life in the 19th century American South. To write the book, Twain used a then newfangled instrument called a typewriter. Life on the Mississippi is believed to be the first book submitted to a publisher in the form of a typewritten manuscript.
In 1980, Life on the Mississippi was adapted as a movie for American public television. Starring David Knell as Samuel Clemens, the film weaves folklore from the book into a fictional narrative of the author's life.
Quote Of The Day
"Words are only painted fire; a book is the fire itself." - Mark Twain
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Mark Twain's classic book, Life on the Mississippi. Enjoy!
Monday, May 11, 2020
IWW Members' Publishing Successes
Chandrika Radhakrishnan
I had two submissions published by Penmancy in the month of April. Though the poem is a real old one, the story was written for the theme Radio.
Fortuitous Escape
Unlocking the Memories
Friday, May 8, 2020
Notes For May 8th, 2020
This Day In Literary History
On May 8th, 1956, Look Back in Anger, the classic first play by the famous English playwright John Osborne, opened in London at the Royal Court Theatre. It introduced a character whose volatile nature would define a generation in England.
Look Back in Anger opens in a grim and seedy one-bedroom flat in the Midlands where Jimmy Porter, his wife Alison, and their friend Cliff Lewis live. Although college educated, Jimmy lives a lower class existence where his only means of support is the candy counter that Cliff helps him run.
Jimmy's wife Alison comes from an upper-middle class family - more upper than middle class. Jimmy loathes them. When he's not reading the newspaper, he's ranting and raving about Alison's family and friends.
What really drives Jimmy's rage is Alison and Cliff's taciturn acceptance of their lot in life and the world around them. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West is at its apex.
British citizens are conditioned through right wing propaganda to be thankful for their so-called freedom, but Jimmy is anything but thankful for his lot in life. An intelligent university graduate, he sells candy for a living because that's best work he can get.
England's so called welfare program is a failure, thanks to the conservative government which primarily serves the interests of the rich. Unable to provide a better life for himself and his wife, Jimmy's rage has reached the boiling point.
Struggling to find meaning in a meaningless existence, at one point he says, "I've an idea. Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings and that we're actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say?" When Alison becomes pregnant with their first child, she's terrified to tell Jimmy, who, not knowing she was pregnant, said to her:
If only something — something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognizable human face emerge from that little mass of India rubber and wrinkles. Please — if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognizable human being yourself. But I doubt it.
Meanwhile, Jimmy flies into a rage when Alison announces that her snobbish best friend Helena is coming to visit. Helena, shocked by the squalid surroundings, calls Alison's father, a retired colonel, and urges him to take Alison away from the flat. Which he does - while Jimmy is visiting a friend's mother.
The Colonel is also distressed by his daughter's living conditions. She tells him "You're hurt because everything's changed, and Jimmy's hurt because everything's stayed the same." Although he's out of touch with the modern world, the Colonel becomes a sympathetic character - he feels sorry for Jimmy.
After Alison is taken away, Helena moves in with Jimmy and Cliff. She and Jimmy still despise each other and come to physical blows, but they ultimately become friends, and when the curtain falls on the second act, they end up kissing passionately and falling on the bed.
In the third act, Jimmy and Helena have another fight, and she decides to leave. Cliff also decides to get his own flat, so Jimmy plans a final night out for the three of them. That night, Alison shows up out of the blue. Jimmy dismisses her coldly at first, but then she tells him about her pregnancy - and that she lost their baby.
Ashamed of her affair with Jimmy, Helena reconciles with Alison. As the final curtain falls, Jimmy and Alison reconcile with each other, taking up an old game they used to play together.
Look Back in Anger received fiercely mixed reviews after its premiere in London. Some critics were shocked and appalled by the searing play's anti establishment themes and nihilism, while others recognized it for the breakthrough work it was. Critic Kenneth Tynan wrote the following in his rave review:
All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour (Jimmy describes a [gay male] friend as 'a female Emily Bronte'), the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who does shall go unmourned...
...I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it as roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of 20 and 30. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups who are curious to know precisely what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.
The hugely influential play would define an entire genre of anti establishment plays, novels, and films in 1950s and 60s England - the "angry young man" genre, named after the volatile character of Jimmy Porter. Look Back in Anger would be adapted in 1959 as an acclaimed feature film.
Directed by Tony Richardson and starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom, the screenplay was written by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale. The film would earn four BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Award) nominations.
John Osborne would write more classic plays, including The Entertainer (1957), Epitaph for George Dillon (1958), and Luther (1961). He died in 1994 at the age of 65.
Quote Of The Day
"I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong." - John Osborne
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete live performance of Look Back in Anger. Enjoy!