Archives

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 17th

Thomas Robert Malthus, b. 1766. “Population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increases in an arithmetic ratio.” What Malthus didn’t consider.

Ann Manning, b. 1807.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, b. 1879. Author of Understood Betsy.

Bess Streeter Aldrich, b. 1881. Nebraska author of A Lantern in her Handand many other books and short stories. I read a description of her writing as “cheerful realism.”

Robert Newton Peck, b. 1928. Author of the “Soup” books.

Chaim Potok, b. 1929. Rabbi and author of The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev. “I would prefer to say that the universe is meaningful, with pockets of apparent meaninglessness, than to say it is meaningless with pockets of apparent meaningfulness. In other words I have questions either way.” (Potok in Christianity Today, September 8, 1978)

Ruth Rendell, b. 1930. Author of detective fiction and also other non-detective fiction using the pseudonym, Barbara Vine. “I think that most writers have these two opposing feelings co-exist. One, this is the most wonderful work of art since War and Peace, and also this is the most awful trash, and why did I ever write it?” I feel that way about almost everything I write–especially the latter feeling. Does that mean I’m a real writer?

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 16th

Henry Adams, b. 1838. He was the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of another. Numbered among his many friends were Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, geologist Clarence King, Senators Lucius Lamar and James Cameron, artist John La Farge, and writer Edith Wharton. His most famous work was an autobiography written in third person, The Education of Henry Adams. (online here) He also wrote and published many books about his extensive travels and about history.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

I’m sure mine are the most discerning and influential readers in the blogosphere. Just not sure where all that influence is headed.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 15th

Galileo Galilei, b. 1564.

Jeremy Bentham, b. 1748. Utilitarian, very odd, philosopher.

Susan Brownell Anthony, b. 1820. Did you know that Susan B. Anthony was a pro-life women’s rights advocate?

Norman Bridwell, b. 1928. Author and ilustrator of Clifford, the Big Red Dog. Z-baby loves Clifford. I wonder what it is about a big red dog with a normal-sized owner that’s so appealing?

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 13th

Eleanor Farjeon, b. 1881. Click on her name to read a little more about her life and her poetry.

Grant Wood, b. 1892. American artist born near Anamosa, Iowa.

Georges Simenon,, b. 1903. He was a Belgian-born author of detective fiction. Many of his books feature the Parisian detective, Inspector Maigret. Has anyone read these books? I think I tried one a long time, and it lost something in the translation. But maybe not.

Betsy-Bee, b. 1999. She’s a joy and a wonder, Miss Fashion, full of life, our Funny Little Valentine.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 8th

John Ruskin, b. 1819. Known as a literary and art critic, Ruskin lived a rather tragic life. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne, and his wife left him and married the painter Millais. He fell in love with a young Irish girl, but she would not marry him and she later died. He lost his faith in Christianity, suffered from mental illness, and finally re-embraced the Christian faith of his youth, although he refused to believe in hell. Maybe this rejection had something to do with the fact that during episodes of mental illness he had horrendous visions of himself battling with Satan.

Henry Walter Bates, b. 1825. Naturalist, entomologist, and evolutionist. He wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863. Has anybody out there read it?
If you’d like to know more about this pioneer in entomology, here’s a good article from The New Yorker, August 22, 1988, about Bates’s life and travels along the Amazon.

Jules Verne, b. 1828. In a letter: “I must be slightly off my head. I get caught up in all the extraordinary adventures of my heroes.”

Digby Mackworth Dolben, b. 1848. English poet, he was rather a character. He wrote love poetry to another (male) student at Eton and then considered conversion to Roman Catholicism and went around wearing a Benedictine monk’s habit. He drowned in a rather mysterious accident at the age of nineteen before he could go up to Oxford.

Kate Chopin, b. 1851. American author of The Awakening.

Martin Buber, b. 1878. Jewish philosopher and teacher. In 1938 he left Germany and went to live in Jerusalem. He wrote the book, I and Thou about the relationships of people to people and persons to God. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”

John Grisham, b. 1955. OK, I’m not really terribly intellectual at all. Of all the authors who have birthdays today, the only two I’ve read are Jules Verne (Around the World in EIghty Days and John Grisham. Which Grisham novel do you like best? Do you agree with me that his novels have not gotten better but rather the opposite? I did enjoy The Firm and The Client and, my favorite, The Rainmaker.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 7th

I wrote a post a couple of years ago (my, have I really been doing this blogging thing for that long?) about all the illustrious people born on February 7th: Sir Thomas More, b. 1478, Charles Dickens, b. 1812, Laura Ingalls Wilder, b. 1867, Sinclair Lewis, b. 1885, Henry Clifford Darby, b. 1909.

And last year at this time, I told you about all my favorite Dickensian things.

Charles Dickens



Buy this Art Print at AllPosters.com

This year I present a Dickens quiz. Can you match the quotation to the novel?

1. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

2. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

3. “I would rather, I declare, have been a pig-faced lady, than be exposed to such a life as this!”

4. “It’s over and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off.”

5. “If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass–a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience–by experience.”

6. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”

7. “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.”

Those are from the seven Dickens novels I’ve read. Perhaps you’ve read them. too?

(Doesn’t Shakespeare somewhere call the law “an ass”?)

February 19th Birthdays: Astronomer, Actor, Artist, and Author

Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer, b. 1473. Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by placing the sun instead of the earth at the center of our planetary system.
David Garrick, actor, playwright, theatre manager, b.1717. Garrick was, by all acconts, an extraordinary Shakespearean actor. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, and there is a statue of him there with these lines underneath it:

To paint fair nature by divine command,
Her magic pencil in her glowing hand,
A Shakespear rose: then, to expand his fame,
Wide o’er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
The actor’s genius bade them breath anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day;
And till Eternity with pow’r sublime
Shall mark the moral hour of hoary Time,
Shakespear and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be paired with Shakespeare himself as a “twin star”? Garrick must have been some actor. It’s a pity that the art of stage actors (and singers) doesn’t last past their deaths.

Louis Slobodkin, sculptor and Caldecott Award winning illustrator and author of children’s books, b. 1903. Mr. Slobodkin was a sculptor until his late 30’s when he began illustrating the books of his friend, Eleanor Estes. He illustrated several of her Moffat books and also my favorite, The Hundred Dresses. (If you want to teach children about compassion without preaching at them, read The Hundred Dresses.) He won the Caldecot Award for his illustrations of James Thurber’s story, Many Moons about a sick princess who asks to have the moon to make her well.

February 18th Birthday

Wilson Barrett, b. 1846, was an actor, a manager, and a playwright. He played Hamlet and other Shakespearean roles, but his most famous role was in a melodrama he wrote called The Sign of the Cross. In this very popular drama, Barrett played Marius Superbus, a Roman prefect, who attempts to seduce a young Christian maiden named Mercia. As the play ends, Mercia is condemned to be eaten by the lions; however, Marius is so impressed by her faith that he joins her in the arena and dies with her. Audiences in 1896 and thereafter loved the play. In fact, it was so popular that Cecil B. DeMille made a 1932 movie based on the it. According to reviews I read, the movie was an extravagant epic filled with blood, gore, violence and sexually provocative scenes of all kinds. The scene everyone mentions in telling about this film involves Claudette Colbert as Nero’s wife, Poppaea, taking a bath in milk, but that was by no means the most vivid depiction of evil in this film. By the way, I’m not recommending the movie. It sounds to me as if the original play was melodramatic and contrived, and the movie just went beyond all bounds. One reviewer said this movie could only have been made by DeMille before the Hollywood Production Code came into effect in 1934.

My point: We think movies are bad now, but sin has always been sin. And some movie makers, as well as some writers and other artists, will always push the limits of what is acceptable if they think they can get away with it. And even those who mean well (possibly Barrett?) can write and produce some poor stuff for mass consumption. Witness the “Left Behind” phenomenon.

February 15 Birthdays

Galileo Galilei, scientist and astronomer, b. 1564. The Catholic Encyclopedia on Galileo and his conflict with the Inquisition.
Jeremy Bentham, eccentric philosopher,b. 1748.
Susan B. Anthony, women’s rights advocate and abortion opponent, b. 1820. “Guilty? Yes, no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! Thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.” Article about Susan B. Anthony and pro-life feminism in Focus on the Family magazine by Frederica Mathewes-Green
Lucy Beatrice Malleson, author of murder mysteries using the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert, b. 1899. Her most popular detective character was “beer-drinking Cockney barrister Arthur G. Crook, an overweight detective like Nero Wolfe, who drives in Rolls Royce and comes on stage when it is time to solve the case.” I’ll have to try one of these. Maybe I’ll find a new mystery author to add to the list.
Norman Bridwell, author of Clifford the Big Red Dog, b. 1928. Scholastic Clifford website with games and stuff for kids. PBS Clifford website.