Literary Birthday: EBC Patron Saint #1 Jane Austen

They never made 'em like her again, as best expressed in a chat between me and my twin brother, after he had read "Emma" followed by "Ethan Frome."

Daniel: finished ethan frome

me: whatdjoo think? no "emma" right"

Daniel: no emma.

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Literary Birthday: Elizabeth "I Rule the BBC" Gaskell

Happy bicentennial birthday to the best 19th-century author whom I discovered as a post-adolescent, Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell. She was a literary supergenius in her own right whose books have made some of the yummiest, most emotionally potent, romantic, social critiquey BBC miniseries of all time.

• Here are all my thoughts about various Gaskell books I've read post-EBC-founding.

Here's some Gaskell-mania around the web:

• A Guide To Gaskell Around the Web at Jane Austen Today
• An Appreciation of the BBC Gaskell Adaptations, the best evah, at Enchanted Serenity
• Elizabeth Gaskell as seen through the words of Charlotte Bronte at Bronte-Blog

And may John Thornton stalk all our dreams. Amen.

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Literary Birthday: Daphne DuMaurier

Today, in 1907, that obsessive reader of "Brooding Hunx Weekly" and biggest Bronte fan EVAH, Daphne DuMaurier, was born unto this world. Her unstoppable pen gave us "Rebecca" and "Jamaica Inn" and "The Birds" and dozens of chilling settings and smoldering heroes and pseudo-retrograde, pseudo-feminist counter-narratives and subtexts. Most importantly, she gave us the kind of books that are utterly un-put-downable and so hard to replicate--and she lived a haunted life worth obsessing over on its own.

Shakespeare's Birthday~!

William Shakespeare. 1564–1616

It was a Lover and his Lass (from As You Like It)

IT was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;	5
Sweet lovers love the spring.
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would lie,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,	10
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that life was but a flower	15
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
And, therefore, take the present time
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,	20
For love is crown`d with the prime
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Oh, and here's a big article on "Shakespeare Today" in the Telegraph.

Literary Birthday: Toni Morrison

One of the best writers living, Morrison's work combines poetry with prose, historical testimony with the supernatural, the specifics of the African-American experience with the universality of the human experience. She's a chronicler of the most brutal of crimes and a believer in love.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. -Toni Morrison

I've read a lot of her work, but still haven't read Jazz, Tar Baby, Love or Paradise. Must rectify that.

Literary Birthdays, Redux

Here's what I wrote last year on the occasion of Charles Dickens AND Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthdays.

What a great pair of authors, both of whom wrote long, epic and much-beloved tales filling many volumes, but who, in other ways, couldn't have been more different from each other as people and writers.


What are your favorite books by these two? I'd have to go with David Copperfield and Little Town on the Prairie (where Manny courts Laura--aww)

Literary Birthday: Edgar Allan Poe

Actually, his birthday was yesterday, but I would be remiss in not giving old Edgar (who moved around so frequently there are like fifteen Poe sites here in NYC) a hearty EBC shout-out.

I live near a famous church and so when its bells toll, I quite frequently hear lines of his fabulously onomatopoeic poem, "The Bells," running through my head.

Readers, what is your favorite Poe story or poem?

55 Years of Pouring Water Down the Mail Chute

"I am a city child. I live at the Plaza."

Happy 55th birthday to Eloise, the most mischievous scion of wealth who ever grew up in NYC's Plaza hotel, and star of one of my absolute favorite childhood books. I can still hear my mom chuckling over the phrase "city child" as she read it aloud; indeed, prank-loving Eloise is a quintessential fictional New Yorker.

The Daily Beast has an interview with Hilary Knight, the book's illustrator.

And Knight will be giving lessons on how to draw the iconic character in NYC!

Literary Birthday: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Happy 90th! An icon of our age.

I Am Waiting
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti


I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


Full poem here

Literary Birthday: Dr. Seuss

I have five minutes until it's no longer Seuss day, but if you read one thing about Ted Geisel, read this amazingly tidbit-y article about the political (& personal) stories behind many of Seuss' books. My favorite one is this:

---

8. "The Butter Battle Book" is one I had never heard of, perhaps with good reason: it was pulled from the shelves of libraries for a while because of the reference to the Cold War and the arms race.

Yooks and Zooks are societies who do everything differently. The Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up and the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. Obviously, one of them must be wrong, so they start building weapons to outdo each other: the "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch," the "Triple-Sling Jigger," the "Jigger-Rock Snatchem," the "Kick-A-Poo Kid", the "Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz," the "Utterly Sputter" and the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo."

The book concludes with each side ready to drop their ultimate bombs on each other, but the reader doesn't know how it actually turns out.

---

I loved that book as a kid, but it was insanely creepy!

More Literary Birthdays--Dickens and Wilder

A lot of literary geniuses happen to share my week of birth. Today we honor Chlarles Dickens--how appropriate, just as Dickensfest '09 prepares to be aired on PBS, and we honor Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom we all doubtless read and loved as a child.

I've talked about Dickens a lot here and will be talking about him a lot more in the next month.

But Laura Ingalls Wilder was an early favorite of mine. I read the "Little House" books over and over again for years after my parents first read them to me. But one of my saddest moments was when I was in fourth grade or something and I wanted to re-read something fun, and picked up "Little House on the Prairie" and realized it was too easy for me, even as a diversion, and it would be hard to immerse myself in it. I felt like I had lost this incredible world of scenes and characters. I look forward to someday reading the books with my kids.

Anyway, happy birthday to both of them where ever their spirits may be! They made our world more beautiful and just with their words.

Happy Posthumous Birthday James Joyce

Let's celebrate with feminist heroine for the ages, MOLLY BLOOM's monologue. I contemplated putting up the end of Stephen's experience in "Portrait" or its moocow opening or a bit of "The Dead" (or even a youtube clip of the awesome John Huston "Dead" movie) or another short story, but there's no one like Molly, so here she is:

theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Tuesday Poem: Happy Birthday Jane Austen

A Letter To Lord Byron by W. H. Auden

"... There is one other author in my pack
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided I'd give a fright to
Jane Austen if I wrote when I'd no right to,
And share in her contempt the dreadful fates
Of Crawford, Musgrove, and of Mr. Yates.

Then she's a novelist. I don't know whether
You will agree, but novel writing is
A higher art than poetry altogether
In my opinion, and success implies
Both finer character and faculties
Perhaps that's why real novels are as rare
As winter thunder or a polar bear.

... I must remember, though, that you were dead
Before the four great Russians lived, who brought
The art of novel writing to a head;
The help of Boots had not been sought.
But now the art for which Jane Austen fought,
Under the right persuasion bravely warms
And is the most prodigious of the forms.

She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
'Twas rash, but by posterity she's read.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of 'brass',
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society..."