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Interesting ...

Thank you! Here are some synonyms of interesting:
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November 30, 1900 death of Oscar Wilde in Paris. He was aged 46.

On Thursday, November 29th, 1900, towards 4 in the evening, Father Cuthbert was called to the bedside of the once famous Oscar Wilde to receive him into the Catholic Church and administer the sacraments of the dying. He was unable to articulate but endeavoured to recite the acts of Faith, etc, suggested and showed signs of a sincere conversion. The following day he passed away peacefully. That is a record of simple fact, but in the priest’s personal narrative the scene springs suddenly to life.

‘As the “voiture” rolled through the dark streets that wintry night, the sad story of Oscar Wilde was in part repeated to me. When we reached the little bedroom of the hotel, the attendants were requested to leave. Robert Ross knelt by the bedside, assisting me as best he could while I administered conditional Baptism, and afterwards answering the responses while I gave Extreme Unction to the prostrate man and recited the prayers for the dying.’

But the crucial question remains: what was the precise condition of Oscar Wilde at that moment of supreme spiritual crisis? Father Cuthbert Dunne was not unaware of the importance of this point. His is not only an eye-witness account; it is the narrative of one who played the leading part in that last scene.

‘As the man was in a semi-comatose condition,’ states Fr Cuthbert Dunne, ‘I did not venture to administer Holy Viaticum; still, I must add that he could be roused and was roused from this state in my presence. When roused, he gave signs of being inwardly conscious. He made brave efforts to speak, and would even continue for a time trying to talk, though he could not utter articulate words. Indeed, I was fully satisfied that he understood me when told that I was about to receive him into the Catholic Church and give him the Last Sacraments. From the signs he gave, as well as from his attempted words, I was satisfied as to his full consent. And when I repeated close to his ear the Holy Names, the Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope and Charity, with acts of humble resignation to the Will of God, he tried all through to say the words after me.’

In a second draft of his MS, Fr Cuthbert Dunne confirms this account and adds a further detail:

‘When I reached his bedside he was half-conscious, trying indeed to speak, yet not able to utter an articulate word. I remarked at once that, on his head above the forehead, there was a leech on either side, put there to relieve the pressure of blood upon the brain.’

Fr Cuthbert Dunne was assiduous in his ministrations and visited the dying man several times to comfort and console him. He continued to observe him closely and what he saw confirmed his first impression that, although the power of speech had failed, Oscar Wilde still retained a large measure of consciousness and coherence. His evidence continues:

‘At a later visit, I was if anything more convinced as to his inward consciousness when, in my presence, one of the attendants offered him a cigarette, which he took into his fingers and raised to his face although, in the attempt to put it between his lips, he failed. At these subsequent visits, he repeated the prayers with me again and each time received Absolution.’ Oscar Wilde died shortly before two o’clock in the afternoon on November 30.

Source: www.poetrymagazines.org.uk (adapted)

"Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian.* I am one
of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I
see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that
there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well that I
have learned this."

So wrote Oscar Wilde in March of 1897 in an exceptionally long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on today's date November 30, 1900. The letter was posted from "H.M. Prison, Reading".

Source: www.historysstory.blogspot.it (adapted)


Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions, Vol 1

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks was arrested.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks is jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws. The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park’s historic act of civil disobedience.

“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913. She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

According to a Montgomery city ordinance in 1955, African Americans were required to sit at the back of public buses and were also obligated to give up those seats to white riders if the front of the bus filled up. Parks was in the first row of the black section when the white driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white man. Parks’ refusal was spontaneous but was not merely brought on by her tired feet, as is the popular legend. In fact, local civil rights leaders had been planning a challenge to Montgomery’s racist bus laws for several months, and Parks had been privy to this discussion.

Learning of Parks’ arrest, the NAACP and other African American activists immediately called for a bus boycott to be held by black citizens on Monday, December 5. Word was spread by fliers, and activists formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize the protest. The first day of the bus boycott was a great success, and that night the 26-year-old Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., told a large crowd gathered at a church, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” King emerged as the leader of the bus boycott and received numerous death threats from opponents of integration. At one point, his home was bombed, but he and his family escaped bodily harm.

The boycott stretched on for more than a year, and participants carpooled or walked miles to work and school when no other means were possible. As African Americans previously constituted 70 percent of the Montgomery bus ridership, the municipal transit system suffered gravely during the boycott. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama state and Montgomery city bus segregation laws as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On December 20, King issued the following statement: “The year old protest against city buses is officially called off, and the Negro citizens of Montgomery are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning on a non-segregated basis.” The boycott ended the next day. Rosa Parks was among the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and his nonviolent civil rights movement had won its first great victory. There would be many more to come. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005. Three days later the U.S. Senate passed a resolution to honor Parks by allowing her body to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

Source: www.history.com

Rosa Parks: My Story

Today December 2 in the History of Librarianship and Poetry

LONDON, Dec. 2, 1985. Philip Larkin, a reclusive librarian who was one of Britain's best-loved poets, died early today.

He was 63 years old. He had lived for almost 30 years in Hull, a northeastern city sufficiently out of the way, he once noted, that importunate visiting Americans usually decided to bother someone else. He refused to give poetry readings, shunned interviews, and when asked by Kingsley Amis if he thought about becoming Poet Laureate, replied: ''I dream about that sometimes - and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over.'' Mr. Larkin was admitted to a private hospital in Hull last Friday, but the cause of his death has not been disclosed. Five months ago he was treated at the Hull Royal Infirmary for breathing problems after a throat operation. His publisher, Faber & Faber, said today: ''He had been ill for some months.''

He had never married, lived alone, and insisted to the last that he was happy. But ''it's very difficult to write about being happy,'' he told The Observer in one of his few extended interviews, in 1979. ''Very easy to write about being miserable. ''I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?'' He continued: ''Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.''

Sometimes the deprivation is visible (''Their nippers have got bare feet,'' he wrote of the unemployed, ''Their unspeakable wives/Are skinny as whippets''), but more often, it is the unseen torment of disappointment and desolation. ''In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love,'' he wrote in ''Faith Healing.'' ''To some it means the difference they could make/By loving others, but across most it sweeps/As all they might have done had they been loved./That nothing cures.''

Philip Arthur Larkin was born Aug. 8, 1922, the son of Coventry's city treasurer. He later described his childhood as ''a forgotten boredom.'' His father, who twice took the family to visit Germany, left his son with a lifelong aversion to travel. ''I wouldn't mind seeing China,'' he told The Observer, ''if I could come back the same day.'' Novelists, he said, need to travel. Poets re-create the familiar. He stammered badly, from childhood to the age of 30, and by the time he reached St. John's College, Oxford, hoping at that time to be a novelist, already had thick glasses and receding hair. ''Like a balding salmon,'' he once said when asked how he thought he looked.

He was declared unfit for military service and joined the staff of a small Shropshire public library. In the evenings, he wrote. If he had tried to live by writing in those years, he said later, ''I'd have been a heap of whitened bones long ago.'' His first book of poems, ''The North Ship,'' was published in 1945. Two novels, ''Jill'' and ''A Girl in Winter'' followed, and although he tried to write a third, he found fiction ''just too difficult.''

He worked at universities in Leicester and Belfast. In 1955, with the publication of ''The Less Deceived'' his reputation as a poet was made, and he went to Hull University as librarian and remained. His next book, ''The Whitsun Weddings,'' was published in 1964. His last collection, ''High Windows,'' was published in 1974. Two collections of essays have also been published, one, ''All What Jazz,'' an anthology of his work as the jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph.

''Truly, though our element is time,'' he wrote in ''Reference Back,'' a poem about playing some old jazz records, ''We are not suited to the long perspectives/Open at each instant of our lives./They link us to our losses: worse,/They show us what we have as it once was,/Blindingly undiminished, just as though/By acting differently we could have kept it so.'' A poem, Mr. Larkin told The Sunday Times of London a year ago, ''represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you - you the poet, and you, the reader - to go on.''

Source: www.nytimes.com (adapted)


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This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse" from Collected Poems. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)

Collected Poems

The most significant events in the history of books on the 3rd of December.

1857: Joseph Conrad is born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian-occupied Poland. He would become fluent in several languages, including Polish, Russian, French, and English – and it would be in the last of these that he would write his classic novels, the best of which we have discussed here. Although his work did receive some encouraging reviews in the press, it was not until 1914 – when much of his best work was behind him – that Conrad would achieve commercial success for the first time, with his romantic novel Chance.

The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography

1894: Robert Louis Stevenson dies. He was trying to open a bottle of wine and suddenly exclaimed, ‘What’s that!’ He turned and asked his wife, ‘Does my face look strange?’ before collapsing from what was probably a cerebral haemorrhage. He died a few hours later. Stevenson had begun his writing career as a journalist and reviewer, and his first published books were works of travel writing. He had moved to the South Pacific in an effort to improve his health, but it didn’t work for long: he was just 44 when he died, leaving several books – including Weir of Hermiston, which he hoped would be received as a ‘great’ novel – unfinished.

The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Sir Graham Balfour (Illustrated) (Delphi Parts Edition

1944: Craig Raine is born. He is perhaps the most famous exponent of ‘Martian poetry’, a short-lived poetic movement that takes as its thesis the idea that the poet should explain ordinary everyday things as if seeing them for the first time – i.e. like a Martian who has just arrived on Earth. Martian poetry had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Raine has written two books on fellow poet T. S. Eliot.

http://greatpoetryexplained.blogspot....

1947: Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire makes its debut on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. In the role of Stanley Kowalski was a then-unknown 23-year-old actor named Marlon Brando, whose performance in the play would help to catapult him to stardom. The play sees the ‘daintily dressed’ Blanche Dubois arriving to stay at her sister Stella’s house in New Orleans. Stella is the meek wife to overbearing and angry, snarling husband Stanley Kowalski. Marlow’s method acting style was a huge hit: the Broadway production would run for two years, and Brando would reprise the role of Kowalski in the 1951 film adaptation.

The Kindness Of Strangers: The Life Of Tennessee Williams

Today in History of Journalism - December 4, 1791

A short history of the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. Revolutions, wars, famines and disasters have shared space with celebrations of mankind's achievements in the arts, science, literature and sport since The Observer's launch in 1791, December 4. The first Sunday paper published in Britain. It is one of England’s quality newspapers, long noted for its emphasis on foreign coverage. The paper devotes extensive space to the arts, government, education, and politics, and it has a worldwide reputation for responsible journalism. The Observer is considered by other editors to be among the world’s best papers. For many years it has maintained a substantial staff of foreign correspondents that supplies news and background pieces for the paper’s generally well-educated readers, including a large international audience. The Observer briefly passed out of British ownership in 1976, when it was sold to an American conglomerate, the Atlantic Richfield Company. In 1981 it was returned to British hands when an industrialist, Roland Rowland, bought control. The Observer was purchased in 1993 by the Guardian Media Group, of which The Guardian newspaper is also a part.

A History of English Journalism to the Foundation of the Gazette

On December 5, 1830 Christine Rossetti was born.

One of the most important female writers of the 19th century, Christina Rossetti is remembered for her acerbic love poetry, vivacious ballads and nursery rhymes. She is probably best-known today for writing the carol In the Bleak Mid-Winter.

Rossetti was born in London in 1830 into a remarkable family of artists, scholars and writers. Her father was an exiled Italian revolutionary and poet and her brothers William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were founding members of art movement the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Christina had her own first book of poetry privately printed by her grandfather when she was 12 years old. Aged 19 she contributed poems to Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn.

The women in her family were committed High Church Anglicans and as a teenager, Christina suffered a nervous breakdown that was diagnosed at the time as 'religious mania'. Rossetti fell in love with several suitors, but rejected them all because they failed to share her precise religious convictions. In 1862, at the age of 32, she published her first full collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems. A sensuous fairy story, Goblin Market is a heady tale of repressed sexuality and sisterhood. Her concern with female fellowship was played out in real life as Rossetti devoted ten years as a volunteer at St Mary Magdalene's penitentiary for prostitutes and unmarried mothers in Highgate.

Religious themes dominate her work but Rossetti never preaches, instead exploring the tensions between earthly passions and divine love. Graves Disease took its toll on Rossetti in later years, and the loss of beauty was a recurrent theme: "Youth gone and beauty gone, what doth remain?/ The longing of a heart pent up forlorn" (Youth Gone, And Beauty Gone). She died in 1894.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poets

Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life

1st edition of "Encyclopedia Britannica" published in Scotland On December 6, 1768, the oldest English-language general encyclopaedia. It began to appear in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The following account sketches the development of the Encyclopædia Britannica from its Scottish beginnings to its established position as a major English-language work of reference with editorial offices in Chicago and thousands of contributors worldwide. The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published and printed in Edinburgh for the engraver Andrew Bell and the printer Colin Macfarquhar by “a society of gentlemen in Scotland” and was sold by Macfarquhar at his printing office on Nicolson Street.

On December 10, 1768, the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Evening Courant carried an advertisement announcing that “This day is published” the edition’s first part; it further pledged that the encyclopædia would provide “Accurate Definitions and Explanations, of all the Terms as they occur in the Order of the Alphabet.” The work was issued in parts from December 1768 to 1771 with double-columned pages.

The parts were bound in three stout quarto volumes of some 2,500 pages, with 160 copperplate engravings by Bell, and dated 1771. The title page begins as follows: “Encyclopædia Britannica; OR, A DICTIONARY OF ARTS and SCIENCES, COMPILED UPON A NEW PLAN.” The work could not compete in bulk with the 68 volumes of Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Universal Lexicon or with the French Encyclopédie, whose 17 volumes of text had recently been completed. But it did challenge comparison with all previous dictionaries of arts and sciences, large or small, because of its new plan …

Source: www.britannica.com

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I’ve been using the “Encyclopedia Britannica” for my studies and work for many years. I also used to subscribe to the two update volumes published every year until late eighties. All together, it’s a library formed by more than fifty hardbound volumes. I have been really proud of it for a long time. Those were the pre-Internet happy days, “papery days” ...

Till, one day, it was the year 2013, when I received as a present from TIME magazine, a DVD that contained “the full three age-appropriate encyclopedias, The Elementary, the Student, and the renowned Encyclopædia Britannica, that provide trusted answers. Additional reading tools, including dictionaries, multimedia, and atlases, make the ultimate DVD your very own personal library. The 2013 Ultimate DVD is packed with learning tools etc. etc. for only $29.95 USD.”

My full, original, leather bound library, sold and offered for less than thirty digital American dollars!!! A real, true “bibliocide”: 32 volumes plus the updates, 44 million words or more, 30,000 or more burned pages ...

https://aeon.co/essays/burning-books-...

Interesting piece about the Britannica burning! Thank you for posting it. - )

December 7, 1941 - Hawaii -- Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor.
Japan launches a surprise dawn attack using midget submarines, 350 bombers and torpedo carrying planes targeting warships, aircraft and military installations on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and has declared war on Britain and the United States. The attack destroyed two battleships, one minelayer, two destroyers with the loss of more than 2,300 US servicemen The US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, has mobilized all forces and is poised to declare war on Japan. The next day when the president addressed Congress and the nation he swore that America would never forget December 7, 1941, as a "date that would live in infamy."

Pearl Harbor Ghosts: The Legacy of December 7, 1941

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7 December
Marcus Tullius Cicero (3 Jan 106 BC – 7 Dec 43 BC) was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists.

Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. It was during his consulship that the Second Catilinarian Conspiracy attempted to overthrow the government through an attack on the city by outside forces, and Cicero suppressed the revolt by executing five conspirators without due process. During the chaotic latter half of the 1st century BC marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government.

Following Julius Caesar’s death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed by soldiers operating on their behalf in 43 BC after having been intercepted during attempted flight from the Italian peninsula. His severed hands and head were then, as a final revenge of Mark Antony, displayed in the Roman Forum.

Source: www.historybytez.com

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

Mark wrote: "Interesting piece about the Britannica burning! Thank you for posting it. - )"

Thanks Mark!

Today December 8, in the History of War Poetry

On December 8, in 1915 John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields" appears anonymously in "Punch" magazine.

"In Flanders Fields" is a war poem in the form of a rondeau, written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. He was inspired to write it on May 3, 1915, after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. According to legend, fellow soldiers retrieved the poem after McCrae, initially dissatisfied with his work, discarded it. "In Flanders Fields" was first published on December 8 of that year in the London magazine Punch.

It is one of the most popular and most quoted poems from the war. As a result of its immediate popularity, parts of the poem were used in propaganda efforts and appeals to recruit soldiers and raise money selling war bonds. Its references to the red poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers resulted in the remembrance poppy becoming one of the world's most recognized memorial symbols for soldiers who have died in conflict. The poem and poppy are prominent Remembrance Day symbols throughout the Commonwealth of Nations, particularly in Canada, where "In Flanders Fields" is one of the nation's best-known literary works. The poem is also widely known in the United States, where it is associated with Memorial Day ...

John McCrae was a poet and physician from Guelph, Ontario. He developed an interest in poetry at a young age and wrote throughout his life. His earliest works were published in the mid-1890s in Canadian magazines and newspapers. McCrae's poetry often focused on death and the peace that followed …

McCrae fought in the Second Battle of Ypres in the Flanders region of Belgium, where the German army launched one of the first chemical attacks in the history of war. They attacked French positions north of the Canadians with chlorine gas on April 22, 1915 but were unable to break through the Canadian line, which held for over two weeks. In a letter written to his mother, McCrae described the battle as a "nightmare".

“For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds.... And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Source: www.en.wikipedia.org (adapted)

In Flanders Fields: The Story of the Poem by John McCrae

Today December 8 in History

It’s now a pizza history! The noble tradition of Neapolitan pizza twirling was granted world heritage status by the United Nations on Thursday. The art of “pizzaiuoli”— prepping and extravagantly flipping the dough, then topping it and throwing it in a wood-fired oven — has been handed down for generations in Naples, and was added to UNESCO’s coveted “intangible heritage” list.

About 2 million pizza enthusiasts had signed a petition to support Naples’ application — while the head of the Association of Neapolitan Pizzaiuoli had promised to give our gratis grub if the culinary tradition made the grade. “We’ll be giving out free pizza in the streets,” ‘za czar Sergio Miccu told AFP.

Pizzeria owners across the country were spinning out after the UN cultural agency announced its momentous decision. “I am honored, like all Italian and Neapolitans are. Pizza has centuries of history,” pizzeria owner Romano Fiore said.

“Pizza is a food that must be internationally recognized, just like the other monuments we have in Italy, it should be considered as a historical monument of Italian cuisine,” Roberto Guglielman a patron at an Italian pizzeria said before digging into his pie. True Neapolitan pizza has a thin crust — with the exception of the rim, which bloats up when baked and comes in two forms, Marinara and Margherita.

According to local lore, Margherita pizza was created in 1889 by a local chef in honor of Queen Margherita, who was visiting Naples at the time. And now that “pizzaiuoli” is officially recognized as an art form, pizza purists hope it will spell the end of foreigners putting questionable toppings on the dish.

“I think, and I hope, that this could be the chance to make foreigners understand how pizza is made, without Nutella or pineapple,” said Matteo Martino, a customer at a Roman pizzeria.

UNESCO created its intangible heritage list in 2003 to raise awareness about cultural traditions and to offer support to countries struggling to protect those practices — and has since added Turkish coffee culture, Croatian gingerbread craft and the ancient Georgian method of wine-making.

Neapolitan pizza-making was one of 34 candidates for a spot on the list this year. Countries celebrating the accolade alongside Italy include Saudi Arabia for “Al-Qatt Al-Asin,” a style of wall painting traditionally created by women, and the Netherlands, which was recognized for the “art” of operating windmills and watermills, among others.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Inventing the Pizzeria: A History of Pizza Making in Naples


https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/art-of-n...

Event Date: December 9, 1960

Location: Manchester, England, United Kingdom

Coronation Street, the world's most successful television soap opera, began broadcasting on this day. It went on to become the only soap to have triggered comments by a Prime Minister in Parliament and to have received royal patronage.

Set in the cobbled streets and terraced houses of northern England, not everyone at the Manchester studios where it was made were optimistic, some declaring that the show would be lucky to complete its scheduled 13-episode initial run.

But within six months "Corrie" – as it was to become affectionately known – was riding high as the most-watched programme on British television.

Other soaps have come: Emmerdale and Eastenders; and gone: Crossroads and Australia's Neighbours, but Coronation Street continues to dominate the scene, officially becoming – in September 2010 – the world's longest running TV soap opera in production.

Principal scriptwriter Tony Warren originally planned to call it Florizel Street, but fortuitously changed his mind and decided that the fictional road had been built in the early 1900s and named in honour of the coronation of King Edward VII.

From the start, strong, dominant female characters ruled the roost. At their head in the early years was actress Violet Carson who played Ena Sharples, a battle-axe in a hairnet who would hold court in the Snug bar of the Rovers Return pub with her friends Minni and Martha.

Once compared to the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, they would set the world to rights as they sat gossiping and passing judgment on neighbours, friends and each other. And the viewers loved it.

As caretaker of the Glad Tidings Mission Hall, Ena took particular exception to the "loose morals" of feisty Elsie Tanner who had a passion for men. But this powerful character, played by Pat Phoenix, was more than capable of squaring up to Ena and the no-holds-barred verbal battles between the two transfixed viewers.

The early episodes also featured William Roache as Ken Barlow, a youngster who had won a place at university, plunging him into conflict with his roots, his family and his neighbours. Roache is the only member of the original cast still performing in the serial, which makes him the longest-serving actor in Coronation Street, and in British and global soap history.

Despite those early doubts, "Corrie" quickly went from strength to strength. It reached Number One in the television ratings, judged on the number of viewers, in March 1961, claiming an audience of 15 million, which was estimated to be 75 per cent of the available viewing public. By the mid-Sixties the figures were considerably stronger, averaging 20 million for each episode and peaking on 2 December 1964 at 21.36 million.

Such was the "pull" of Coronation Street that in 1998 Prime Minister Tony Blair commented on one of the storylines in the House of Commons. The jailing of housewife Deirdre Rachid (actress Anne Kirkbride) for a crime she did not commit created outrage among viewers, caused jammed switchboards at the studio and triggered newspaper campaigns for her to be freed.

Asked in Parliament about this "miscarriage of justice," Mr Blair replied: "It is clear to anyone with eyes in their head she is innocent and she should be freed."

After a mention in Parliament there was only one greater honour – the stamp of royal approval. That came in December 2000 when the show celebrated its fortieth year by broadcasting a live, hour-long episode. During it, Prince Charles appeared as himself in a news bulletin as one of the Street's councillors was presented to him.

That's a hard act to follow, even for EastEnders, the rival BBC soap that has battled with "Corrie" for ratings honours ever since it was launched in 1985.

Source: www.onthisday.com

Fifty Years of Coronation Street

I used towatch it when teaching Italien in London tears and years ago; I didn't know it was still on

LauraT wrote: "I used towatch it when teaching Italien in London tears and years ago; I didn't know it was still on"

You too? At the time I worked in a north London hospital as a student nurse in the first years of the "roaring sixties". The afternoon shift would finish at eight, but the "Corrie" ran up to half past eight. Many of us would leave the ward later not to miss the episode ...

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Se...

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Hearing In Flanders Fields recited never fails to bring me to tears, especially when prefaced by taps and after a 2 minute silence, followed by reveille.

Evelyn wrote: "Hearing In Flanders Fields recited never fails to bring me to tears, especially when prefaced by taps and after a 2 minute silence, followed by reveille."

Thank you Evelyn for your comment to John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields"

Today in History of War Poetry

December 11, 1941: John Gillespie Magee dies. This British-American poet is best known for his sonnet ‘High Flight (An Airman’s Ecstasy)’, which was quoted by Ronald Reagan following the Challenger shuttle disaster of 1986.

High Flight

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Magee as a WWII pilot and was just 19 years old when he died in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire on December 11 1941. As a poet, Magee was influenced by another war poet, Rupert Brooke, who had won the same poetry prize at Rugby School some thirty years before Magee won it. Magee also wrote a ‘Sonnet to Rupert Brooke’:

We laid him in a cool and shadowed grove
One evening in the dreamy scent of thyme
Where leaves were green, and whispered high above –
A grave as humble as it was sublime:
There, dreaming in the fading deeps of light –
The hands that thrilled to touch a woman’s hair:
Brown eyes, that loved the Day, and looked on Night,
A soul that found at last its answered Prayer …
There daylight, as a dust, slips through the trees,
And drifting, gilds the fern around his grave –
Where even now, perhaps, the evening breeze
Steals shyly past the tomb of him who gave
New sight to blinded eyes; who sometimes wept –
A short time dearly loved; and after, – slept.

Source: www.interestingliterature.com (adapted)

High Flight: The Life and Poetry of Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee

December 12 in Literary Scientific and Poetry History

1731: Erasmus Darwin is born. This natural philosopher, scientist, and poet was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. One of his poems, The Botanic Garden, anticipates the Big Bang theory when it describes an explosion, a ‘mass’ which ‘starts into a million suns’. He was also a restless inventor, devising both a copying machine and a speaking machine to impress his friends, though neither design ever received a patent …

Sexing the plants

To Coleridge he was 'the most original-minded man', but Erasmus Darwin's poetry, which saw man's scientific endeavours reflected in nature, was too much for his time. Briefly, for one wild happy moment at the start of the 1790s, Erasmus Darwin thought he had a chance of becoming Poet Laureate. His verse was evoking nationwide rapture. Yet within a few years he was attacked as a crank, denounced as an atheist and a spy, lampooned by Gillray as an ape, staggering under a basket of "Jacobin flowers". What was so shocking?

Darwin's long poem "The Botanic Garden" (1789) is one of the most extraordinary - some would say bizarre - works in English literature. Arching between two eras, it was a final exuberant flowering of Enlightenment experiment and optimism but also a glittering treasure trove of images and ideas for the coming Romantic generation, plundered by Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth. Four thousand lines of rhyming couplets humming above thickets of footnotes, with engravings by Blake, Fuseli and others, it consisted of two parts, "The Economy of Vegetation", and "The Loves of the Plants" …..

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

The Botanic Garden: The Loves of the Plants

Today in History of publishing

1784. December 13 - Samuel Johnson dies. Among the books he planned to write, but died before he got a chance to undertake them, Dr Johnson listed a cookbook set out ‘upon philosophical principles’ and a history of his melancholy.

He did, of course, manage to complete his groundbreaking Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a book that is often very funny, as well as being informative, scholarly, and educational. However, it was not without its errors – ‘pastern‘ being one of the words Johnson got wrong (people weren’t about to let him forget about his mistake either).

He also misread the word ‘soupe’ in William Camden’s ‘Britannia’, and erroneously included the word ‘foupe’ in his Dictionary. He also included ‘Ponk’, defined as a ‘nocturnal spirit’, thanks to a misprint of ‘pouke’ in an Edmund Spenser poem (from ‘Pucke’, like the sprite from A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is his crowning achievement: it is more famous than his one novel (Rasselas) and, although he was also a gifted poet, it is for his lexicography above all else that Johnson is remembered. First published in two large volumes in 1755, the book’s full title was A dictionary of the English Language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. To which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar. It’s no surprise that it’s usually known as ‘Johnson’s Dictionary’.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

Antonio wrote: "Today in History of publishing

1784. December 13 - Samuel Johnson dies. Among the books he planned to write, but died before he got a chance to undertake them, Dr Johnson listed a cookbook set out..."

Coincidentally, I am currently reading Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Johnson...

Leslie wrote: "Antonio wrote: "Today in History of publishing

1784. December 13 - Samuel Johnson dies. Among the books he planned to write, but died before he got a chance to undertake them, Dr Johnson listed a ..."

“The Europeans,” answered Imlac, “are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.”

Imlac, p. 32 (Rasselas)

LOL -- I had highlighted that passage on my Kindle!

The first English woman who, Today in History …

December 14, 1640: Aphra Behn is (possibly) born. Few details about Behn’s early life are known for sure, but it’s possible that she was the ‘Eaffrey Johnson’ who was born in Harbledown in Kent, on December 14 1640.

Behn is often named as the first woman writer to make a living from her pen (by Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own”, for instance); it’s certainly true that she was the first consistently popular female playwright in England whose plays were put on the London stage.

She also wrote an early novel (or novella) in English, Oroonoko, about an African prince who is taken to be a slave in South America. I also discovered that perhaps, besides being the first English woman to make a living as a writer, she was also a spy …

Source: www.lithub.com

The Secret Life of Aphra Behn

International Tea Day is an annual feast celebrated on December 15. Is there anything that will make the snowy chill winter season into a warmer climate other than a cup of tea?

Of course, nothing can stand in front of the tea, and no other beverages can make you feel the warmth. Tea is the most popular drink from all over the world and is usually served hot. Having a tea kettle in hand and sipping it would never be compensated by any other drink. International Tea Day is observed as to draw the attention of government and public about the problems besetting the tea production and how tea plantations, small tea growers and consumers are being affected by the global tea trade. Hence, it is not yet another Day to excuse yourself to have a cup of tea rather it is a Day to think about the problems faced by the tea plantation and the impacts of the global tea trade.

“Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.” – Thomas de Quincey

History of International Tea Day
In the year 2005, the International Tea Day was first observed. Since then, the Day is celebrated in the tea producing countries from all over the world. It includes Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Malawi, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam. Although the idea for establishing this Day existed for many years, it was not made into an action earlier to 2004. Once after the initial discussions held at the World Social Forum in 2004, the first observance of the International Tea Day was celebrated in New Delhi in the year 2005. It was organized in Sri Lanka in the following year and in 2008. The trade union movements have jointly organized the celebration Day and the related Global Tea Conferences.

International Tea Day aims in raising the global attention of governments and citizens about the impacts of the global tea trade. The Day also brings out the problems faced by the workers and growers. With the observance, the Day also aims in linking the requests for the price supports and fair trade. The impact of the global tea trade falls on the workers of the tea plantations, small producers and the consumers. The Indian government in 2015 had proposed expanding the observance of this Day through the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. With the World Trade Organization commodity policies, world trade in tea is beholding some significant changes. Under the compulsions of WTO, the structure of the global tea trade commodity provides an absolute advantage to both the transnational brands and the retailers in the trade.

Source: www.happydays-365.com

A Social History of Tea

P.S. I prefer coffee! International coffee day October 1

https://internationalcoffeeday.org/

On this day December 16 in History

1863: George Santayana is born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás. A Spanish-born American philosopher and writer, he is remembered for his wise pronouncements, most famously ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

1900: V. S. Pritchett is born. A novelist and critic, Pritchett’s most enduring work of literary criticism is The Living Novel (1946).

1917: Arthur C. Clarke is born. A prolific author of science fiction stories and novels, he wrote the screenplay and novelisation for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film itself was partly inspired by Clarke’s short story ‘The Sentinel’. Along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clarke was one of the ‘Big Three’ of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century. In 1974, Clarke predicted the internet of the year 2001.

1928: Philip K. Dick is born. Along with Clarke, one of two great science-fiction novelists born on December 16. Dick’s novels and stories have inspired a number of films, from Minority Report to Total Recall and, most famously, Blade Runner (based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Aptly there is a life-size android version of Philip K. Dick, built in 2005 by David Hanson. It has been christened ‘Robo-Dick’.

1932: Quentin Blake is born. Blake’s most famous collaboration was with Roald Dahl, whose books for children Blake illustrated.

Source: www.interestingliterature.com

Today in History - December 17, 1849
Location: London, England, United Kingdom

Gamekeepers whose top hats were constantly being knocked off by low-hanging branches when they were on horseback needed a better form of headgear. They got it on this day when a new style of hat was put to the test at the world's oldest milliner – James Lock & Co of St. James's, London.

The story goes that Lock & Co were commissioned by a customer to produce a sturdy, low-brimmed hat that would overcome the low-hanging branches problem.

There is confusion over the identity of the customer. Some say it was Thomas William Coke (pronounced "Cook"), 2nd Earl of Leicester, who wanted the new hat for gamekeepers at his estate, Holkham Hall in Norfolk.

Others believe it was Edward Coke, younger brother of Thomas. Either way, Lock & Co engaged Thomas and William Bowler, hat-makers in East London, to fulfill the order. The new hat that they produced was taken to Lock & Co's premises on 17 December 1849 and presented to the customer.

There may be some doubt about which Coke it was, but there is no dispute about what happened next: he took the hat, placed it on the floor and stamped on it twice to test its ruggedness. Satisfied, he paid twelve shillings for it.

Originally, the hat was called a coke, after the man who placed the order, but it became commonly known as a bowler, after its makers.

Timothy Long, Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts at the Museum of London, has written that "throughout the mid-19th century, the bowler hat occupied the status of work-wear for London labourers, until it was adopted by King Edward VII, who made it fashionable.

"Throughout the 20th century, the hat’s popularity grew until it almost entirely lost its association with the working class and became synonymous with civil servants and bankers.

"By the 1980s, however, the hat had fallen out of general fashion and was seen only during the most formal occasions or within specific industries, such as in the work dress of the officers of the Queen’s Guard."

Showbusiness was quick to take the bowler on board. Charlie Chaplin was rarely seen without one, neither were Laurel and Hardy. In more recent times, actor Patrick Macnee made it his trademark icon as John Steed in the long-running television series, The Avengers.

Oddjob wore a lethal version of the bowler in the James Bond film, Goldfinger, while Liza Minnelli (as Sally Bowles in the 1972 musical Cabaret) and Malcolm McDowell (as Alex in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange) both favoured a bowler.

Now shunned by City gents and the Civil Service, all is not lost for the iconic headgear. Princess Diana's boys, Harry and William, were photographed wearing bowlers when they attended the annual Combined Cavalry Old Comrades' Association Parade in London.

Yes, tradition demands that Cavalry officers such as William and Harry must wear suits, regimental ties and bowler hats when on duty. But then royalty has a way of kicking off fashion trends . . .

Source: www.onthisday.com

The Man in the Bowler Hat

Today December 18 in History of Writing

1939: Michael Moorcock is born. A prolific novelist who is famous for being able to write a novel in three days, Moorcock was also the influential editor of New Wave publication New Worlds in the 1960s, publishing many of the great SF and fantasy authors of the era, such as J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss.

Moorcock’s own novels include the Elric series, the Dorian Hawkmoon quartet (written at speed during the mid-1960s), and The Dancers at the End of Time, a science-fiction trilogy that tells the last ever love story, published during the 1970s. Much of Moorcock’s fiction is linked by the figure of the Eternal Champion, who comprises many different incarnations, among them Elric and Dorian Hawkmoon … These are what we might call the seven pillars of Moorcock’s method:

1. Plan and prepare before you start. Set up a few key things before the three-day ‘writeathon’: characters, settings, themes, possible plot developments.

2. Make the basic plot of your novel the quest narrative (Moorcock uses the examples of The Maltese Falcon and the Grail Quest). Your hero/heroine and sidekick/helper etc. are looking for a particular item/person, but so are the bad guys. It’s a race against time to see who’ll get there first.

3. Make something happen every few pages, so the story is well-paced. Divide the action up into four sections and then divide those four sections up into six chapters. The idea is that you know that, by the end of each quarter, the plot has to have moved forward in a significant way. Moorcock also recommends that, at a more local level, each chapter directly moves the action forward.

4. If it’s a fantasy or SF novel (Moorcock’s forte during his early career) that takes place in a different world, make a list of some images which embody that world and make it vivid: landmarks, objects, geographical features, etc. Then, when you write, you can just go to this list and fill in the picture for the reader. Make these vivid: elsewhere in his list, Moorcock suggests that ‘paradox’ is a good rule of thumb, e.g. ‘the City of Screaming Statues’.

5. Prepare an overall structure. (This is not the same as a plot, Moorcock tells us – just the basic framework of the novel. You can fill in the gaps later.)

6. Think about the timing of the story’s events: e.g. how long has the hero got to retrieve the Grail/save the world?

7. Start off with a mystery – and then, every time you solve one mystery, that leads to, or creates, another. (An example might be: the hero needs to find someone who can help him in his quest. When he tracks down the person, they’ve already been killed – but there’s a clue on their person, such as a note or a map, that leads our hero on to his next challenge.)

Of course, many of these are common-sense rules, but it’s interesting to have them all put in one place by one successful writer and elucidated so clearly and helpfully. Moorcock provides a number of other rules and guidelines, too, but if this has got you interested in his technique, we’ll allow him to explain it in full in his own words, over at the website we’ve linked to above. The essential principle, though, is one of economy: as Moorcock says, ‘you don’t have any encounter without at least information coming out of it. In the simplest form, Elric [one of Moorcock’s first fictional characters] has a fight and kills somebody, but as they die they tell him who kidnapped his wife. Again, it’s a question of economy. Everything has to have a narrative function.’...

Source: www.interestingliterature.com (adapted)

Michael Moorcock

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, to give the work its full title, was the first, and the most popular, of Dickens’s series of Christmas books. The volume, published by Chapman and Hall on 19 December 1843, was an immediate success and the initial print run of 6,000 copies sold out within a matter of days.

Dickens had hoped the book would clear his debts with Chapman and Hall but the lavish production, including four woodcuts and four colour plates by John Leech, meant Dickens only made £230 from the first printing. Worse was to follow when a plagiarized version of the book appeared in January 1844. Dickens took the publishers of the pirated edition to court but, even though he won the case, he found himself liable for costs of around £700 when the guilty party declared bankruptcy. His bitterness at the whole affair resurfaced years later when he came to describe the labyrinthine and corrupt workings of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House (1853).

A Christmas Carol concerns a cold-hearted miser, Ebeneezer Scrooge, who is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley. During the night three further spirits - the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future - also appear to Scrooge, each holding a mirror to his behaviour and highlighting the unhappiness resulting from his misanthropy. The Ghost of Christmas Future, the most sinister of the three spectres, also reveals the gloomy consequences for Scrooge, and those like Bob Cratchit and his son Tiny Tim whose livelihoods depend upon him, should he fail to mend his ways.

In addition to Scrooge’s own plight the story also addresses wider social issues, particularly in the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the two children Ignorance and Want: ‘From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment’ (Stave III). Both children are the direct result of the poverty afflicting much of Victorian society. Dickens was a fierce defender of children, and took every opportunity to highlight the disastrous implications of neglect, financial hardship and a lack of education on their wellbeing.

Dickens had written about misanthropes, Christmas and the supernatural before in the Gabriel Grub episode of The Pickwick Papers (1837), but it was A Christmas Carol which truly caught the public imagination. The associations between Christmas, the supernatural and Dickens have lasted ever since. Names and dialogue from the story have also entered the language. Those who dislike Christmas are given the name ‘Scrooge’, but they do of course have the option of replying with Scrooge’s vehement ‘Bah, humbug!’ to any call for seasonal good cheer.

Source: British Library www.bl.uk.com

The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits

A landmark in History of Folklore was published on December 20th, 1812.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born at Hanau in the electorate of Hesse-Kassel in Germany in 1785 and 1786, respectively. They were the greatest figures of the new intellectual interest in folk tales that developed in their time. The first volume of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’), published in 1812, included 86 stories. The second, which came out in 1814, added 70 more. There were numerous later editions, deleting some stories and adding others, of what became known in English as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They have fascinated and frightened generations of children in more than 70 languages and have inspired authors, artists, composers and film-makers as well as generating what has been described as a minor industry of criticism and interpretation, including Freudian and Jungian analysis.

In 1697 in France Charles Perrault had published what would become classic fairy tales for children, including ‘Cinderellla’, ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, but his versions of the stories were meant for sophisticated aristocratic families. The Grimms’ attitude was entirely different. They believed that folk stories, handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another over centuries untold, enshrined the fundamental ideas, beliefs and reactions to human experience of ‘the folk’. Expressing their hopes and joys, fears and sorrows, the tales were profoundly significant for children and grown-ups alike. The brothers took stories from Perrault and many others, but their versions were frequently different.

An example is ‘Cinderella’, where the fairy godmother Perrault introduced does not appear. Demoted to the family’s kitchen maid after her own mother’s death and her father’s second marriage, the heroine is nicknamed Aschenputtel(‘Cinder-Fool’) by her cruel stepmother and stepsisters. She plants a hazel twig on her mother’s grave which, watered by her tears, grows into a tree. Two doves sent down from heaven by her mother come to the tree to help her when she prays for aid over the royal ball. They drop her a white gown and silk shoes for the ball’s first evening. For the second she has a far more splendid silver gown with silver shoes and on the third evening she is dressed in a magnificent golden gown and golden slippers. The prince has now fallen utterly in love with her and when she drops one of the golden slippers while running away he uses it to find her and identify her with the assistance of the heavenly doves, which also fly down and blind the evil stepsisters by pecking their eyeballs.

As in this case, many of the Grimms’ versions of the stories had a cruelty that was later frequently edited out as the stories became more and more popular as tales for children. Another change often made, incidentally, was turning an evil mother in a story into an evil stepmother, which was evidently considered more suitable.

The Grimms were keen German nationalists who wanted to see the multitude of German states united as one country and who believed that folk tales revealed a national German identity. Even stories like ‘Red Riding Hood’, told in varying versions in many languages, were thought by the Grimms to originate from ancient Germanic tales and they identified themes and incidents in Germanic mythology and legend that they believed were echoed in folk tales. The Nazis warmly approved of the Grimms’ work, which, as Professor Jack Zipes puts it in his book on the brothers, they exploited ‘to uphold the racist and nationalist supremacy of the German people’.

After university at Marburg, Jacob and Wilhelm spent several years working as librarians in Kassel. Influenced and encouraged by their friends Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, who published a collection of folk songs in 1805, they began collecting folk tales from peasant story-tellers and from middle-class friends and families and their servants, as well as from European literary traditions. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, for instance, came from a friend called Dortchen Wild and her family and their nanny. William married Dortchen in 1825, but Jacob never married and lived with his brother and his sister-in-law.

Besides the folk tales, between 1816 and 1818 the Grimms published two volumes of German legends and from 1819 Jacob published a huge work on the grammar of Germanic languages. In 1830 the Grimms moved to the University of Göttingen as professors and librarians and Jacob published a highly influential book on German mythology. In 1840 they were invited by Frederick William IV of Prussia to move to university posts in Berlin, where they remained until their deaths, working on a giant dictionary of the German language. William died at 73 in 1859, followed by Jacob at 81 in 1863. At that point the dictionary had reached the letter F and the word frucht, meaning ‘fruit’.

Source: www.historytoday.com

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

On this day, December 22, 1849, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky is led before a firing squad and prepared for execution. He had been convicted and sentenced to death on November 16 for allegedly taking part in antigovernment activities. However, at the last moment he was reprieved and sent into exile.

Dostoevsky’s father was a doctor at Moscow’s Hospital for the Poor, where he grew rich enough to by land and serfs. After his father’s death, Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy, studied military engineering and became a civil servant while secretly writing novels. His first, Poor People, and his second, The Double, were both published in 1846–the first was a hit, the second a failure.

On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky was led before the firing squad but received a last-minute reprieve and was sent to a Siberian labor camp, where he worked for four years. He was released in 1854 and worked as a soldier on the Mongolian frontier. He married a widow and finally returned to Russia in 1859. The following year, he founded a magazine, and two years after that he journeyed to Europe for the first time.

In 1864 and 1865, his wife and his brother died, the magazine folded, and Dostoevsky found himself deeply in debt, which he exacerbated by gambling.

In 1866, he published Crime and Punishment, one of his most popular works. In 1867, he married a stenographer, and the couple fled to Europe to escape his creditors. His novel The Possessed (1872) was successful, and the couple returned to St. Petersburg. He published The Brothers Karamazov in 1880 to immediate success, but died a year later.

Source: www.history.com

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life

On 23 December, 1888 Vincent Van Gogh - following an argument with fellow lodger and artist Gaugin - retreated to his room, where he took a razor to his left ear; severing it, wrapping it in paper, and delivering it to a woman at a brothel both he and Gaugin used to frequent. He was found unconscious the next morning by a policeman and was taken to the hospital.

Van Gogh awoke with no recollection of what had happened; he was diagnosed with "acute mania with generalised delirium" and placed under hospital care in Arles, spending the following months in and out of hospital before voluntarily entering an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It is here he painted one of his most iconic works, 1889's The Starry Night.

The motivation for such an act of self-mutilation has evaded art historians for more than a century, though writer Martin Bailey claims to have finally found evidence as to his reasons; stating that it was in fact inspired - not by his argument with Gaugin - but by the news that his brother Theo, who supported him closely both financially and emotionally, had become engaged.
Though it was previously thought he had only learnt of the impending marriage after his mutilation, Bailey's new book Studio of the South claims that Van Gogh actually learnt of it in a letter from Theo delivered on the very same day he cut his ear off; a note which enclosed 100 francs, and the news that a fortnight earlier Jo Bonger had agreed to marry him, having previously turned him down …

Source: www.theindependent.co.uk

Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence

Today in History of Christmas

Stuck for a bit of festive-themed poetry this Christmas? Let me help you. Here are 10 quick holiday recommendations. These are, I reckon, 10 of the greatest poems for the Christmas holidays. They’re all quite short and make for ideal festive reading, so I’ve provided links to each of the poems, too …

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Oxen’. Written in 1915 during WWI, this poem shows a yearning for childhood beliefs which the adult speaker can no longer hold. In other words, it highlights the yearning to believe, even – or perhaps especially – when we know that we cannot bring ourselves to entertain such beliefs. (Hardy had lost his religious faith early in life.) Click here to read ‘The Oxen’, and our analysis of it.

John Betjeman, ‘Christmas’. This poem forms an intriguing pair with Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’, but where Hardy longed to believe but could not, Betjeman – an Anglican – had belief in God but seemed to exist in a continual state of doubt. ‘Christmas’ beautifully reflects this doubt-within-faith.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’. Written by T. S. Eliot in 1927, supposedly in one Sunday morning (and with the help of half a bottle of gin), this poem was the first piece Eliot wrote following his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. It takes the form of a dramatic monologue told by one of the Magi (or ‘Wise Men’) travelling to see the infant Christ. What is noteworthy, though, is that Eliot elides the Nativity scene and ends by sounding a negative note which ponders death, rather than birth or life. You can read ‘Journey of the Magi’ and listen to Eliot reading the poem here. More about T. S. Eliot’s life and his turn to Christianity can be found here.

Wendy Cope, ‘A Christmas Poem’. This brief poem by one of the greatest living exponents of light verse addresses what Christmas can be like for people not fortunate enough to be basking in the warm glow of a romantic relationship – but Cope puts it better than that.

Anonymous, ‘I syng of a mayden’. If, like Philip Larkin, you prefer the Christmas of the illuminated manuscripts and books of hours to the Christmas of Dingly Dell, you might enjoy this short lyric. This medieval poem or carol dates from around 1400, so is roughly contemporaneous with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the birth of modern English poetry. Written in Middle English, the poem tells of the Annunciation and Virgin Birth. Here is the first verse:
I syng of a mayden
That is makeles,
king of alle kinges
to here sone che chees. (adapted & continued)

Source: www.interestingliterature.com

The History of Christmas

You can download this ebook for free!

This is why we celebrate Christmas on December 25 and it’s not because that’s when Jesus was born. The nativity didn't take place in December at all. Every year, on Christmas day, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus and churches all over the country tell the nativity story. But is December 25 actually the date that Jesus was born? It turns out that is pretty unlikely – and he was probably born in the spring or autumn. In fact, no one knows the exact date of the birth, and the bible doesn’t specify a date.

The first recorded date of Christmas being celebrated on December 25th was in 336, during the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine - the first Christian Roman Emperor. A few years after that, Pope Julius I officially declared that the birth of Jesus would be celebrated then. The reason for the choice of December 25 goes back to an ancient belief that prophets died on the same date they were conceived.

Believing Jesus died on March 25, early theologians pinpointed that as the date of the annunciation, when Mary was told she would have the baby. December 25 is nine months after that and was, therefore, chosen as the birth date. But historians who have studied the bible have concluded the birth of Jesus was more likely to be in the spring or autumn for three reasons.

Firstly, the shepherds tending their flocks on the hills at night were unlikely to do that in the winter, when the flocks were often moved to lower ground. Secondly, they believe that the census which brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem would have taken place either in the Jewish festival of Passover in spring or The Feast of the Tabernacle in autumn, when many travelled to Jerusalem and Bethlehem for the celebrations. Finally, the appearance of the Star of Bethlehem is thought by many astronomers to point to spring or autumn.

Source: www.thesun.co.uk

The History of Christmas

Dec. 26, 1982: Time’s Top Man? The Personal Computer

Twenty-five years after … I remember this cover ...

1982: The personal computer is selected as Time magazine’s Man (or in this case, Machine) of the Year. It marked the first time that the editors selected a non-human recipient for the award (the planet Earth would be second, in 1988), which Time has bestowed annually since 1927.

The magazine’s essay is a quaint reminder of the era’s dawning awareness of the computer as a force in modern life. (In 1982, 80 percent of Americans expected that “in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers”!)

But the primitive PCs of 1982 were doing remarkable things, things that the big mainframes had already done to transform the workplace. Once the silicon chip became the industry standard, computers dramatically shrunk in size and their moving to the home front was only a matter of time.

In 1980, according to Time, 724,000 personal computers were sold in the United States. The following year, with more companies joining the frenzy, that number doubled to 1.4 million. In 1982, the number doubled again.

In winning the nod from Time, the PC beat out some formidable competition, including Ronald Reagan (who would be named twice), Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Israel’s Menachem Begin.

But as the magazine opined: “There are some occasions, though, when the most significant force in a year’s news is not a single individual but a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process is changing the course of all other processes.”

As we sit here typing this, that’s a hard argument to refute.

Source: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0...

Today December 27 in History

December 27, 1831 - Charles Darwin set out from Plymouth, England, aboard the ship HMS Beagle on his five-year global scientific expedition. Darwin collected fossils and studied plants and animals, gradually beginning to doubt that many diverse species of living things had sprung into existence at one moment (creationism). In 1859, he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

December 27, 1927 - Josef Stalin consolidated his power in Soviet Russia by expelling rival Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Communist Party.

December 27, 1945 - The International Monetary Fund was established in Washington, D.C.

December 27, 1949 - The Dutch transferred sovereignty of Indonesia to the new United States of Indonesia. The new nation retained a formal association with the Netherlands until 1954, when an independent Republic of Indonesia was formed. Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia. It consists of 13,677 islands along the equator between the Indian and Pacific oceans, and a population of over 150 million.

December 27, 1996 - A genocide trial began concerning the killing of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. In 1994, a bloody civil war had broken out between the two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. After the Hutu army seized power it had waged a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against the Tutsi population.

Birthday - German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. Considered the father of modern astronomy, he discovered the elliptical (oval) shape of the orbits in which the earth and other planets travel around the sun at a speed that varies according to each planet's distance from the sun.

Birthday - French chemist-bacteriologist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was born in Dole, France. He developed the pasteurization process to kill harmful bacteria with heat and found ways of preventing silkworm disease, anthrax, chicken cholera, and rabies.

Birthday - Actress Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was born in Berlin, Germany. She starred in The Blue Angel, the first 'talkie' made in Germany. She then moved to Hollywood and starred in films including; Destry Rides Again, Touch of Evil, Judgment at Nuremberg and Witness for the Prosecution. In the 1950's she toured the world as a cabaret singer in a stage revue.

December 28, 1973

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the police-state system in the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, is published in the original Russian in Paris. The book was the first of the three-volume work. The brutal and uncompromising description of political repression and terror was quickly translated into many languages and was published in the United States just a few months later.

Solzhenitsyn’s massive work detailed the machinations of the Soviet police state from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to 1956. In the preface to the book, however, he warned that reading the work would be “very dangerous” for Russians in 1973. The book was important in that it maintained that police terror had always been essential to the existence of the Soviet state. This deviated from the standard Soviet line that such terror had only come about during the time of Stalin and evaporated upon his death in 1956. Solzhenitsyn admitted that political repression eased during the ensuing Khruschev years–the author himself was freed from political prison during that time. However, he believed that since Khruschev’s ouster in 1964, the Soviet state again resorted to intimidation and terror. His disappointment at the reversion of his country to these scare tactics influenced his decision to allow the publication of his book.

The book was an instant success in the West, but Soviet officials were livid. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, declared that the work was an “unfounded slander” against the Russian people. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported. He eventually settled in the United States. In the 1980s, he refused Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer to reinstate his Soviet citizenship, but did return to Russia to live in 1994. Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure in Moscow on August 3, 2008. He was 89.

Source: www.history.com

The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Christina Georgina Rossetti died 29 December 1894. She was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. Christina Rossetti is remembered for her acerbic love poetry, vivacious ballads and nursery rhymes.

Rossetti was born in London in 1830 into a remarkable family of artists, scholars and writers. Her father was an exiled Italian revolutionary and poet and her brothers William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were founding members of art movement the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Christina had her own first book of poetry privately printed by her grandfather when she was 12 years old. Aged 19 she contributed poems to Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn.

The women in her family were committed High Church Anglicans and as a teenager, Christina suffered a nervous breakdown that was diagnosed at the time as 'religious mania'. Rossetti fell in love with several suitors, but rejected them all because they failed to share her precise religious convictions. In 1862, at the age of 32, she published her first full collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems. A sensuous fairy story, Goblin Market is a heady tale of repressed sexuality and sisterhood. Her concern with female fellowship was played out in real life as Rossetti devoted ten years as a volunteer at St Mary Magdalene's penitentiary for prostitutes and unmarried mothers in Highgate.

Religious themes dominate her work but Rossetti never preaches, instead exploring the tensions between earthly passions and divine love. Graves Disease took its toll on Rossetti in later years, and the loss of beauty was a recurrent theme: "Youth gone and beauty gone, what doth remain?/ The longing of a heart pent up forlorn" (Youth Gone, And Beauty Gone). She died in 1894.

Source:www.bbc.co.uk

Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

(Christina Georgina Rossetti)

The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti

On this day, December 30, 1816,

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin wed. The pair had run away together in July 1814, but because Shelley was already married they were unable to marry for two years, until the death of Shelley’s wife.

Shelley, the heir to his wealthy grandfather’s estate, was expelled from Oxford when he refused to acknowledge authorship of a controversial essay. He eloped with his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a tavern owner, in 1811. However, just a few years later Shelley fell in love with the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of a prominent reformer and an early feminist writer. Shelley and Godwin fled to Europe and married in 1816.

Shelley’s inheritance did not pay all the bills, and the couple spent much of their married life abroad, fleeing Shelley’s creditors. While living in Geneva, the Shelleys and their dear friend Lord Byron challenged each other to write a compelling ghost story. Only Mary Shelley finished hers and later published the story as Frankenstein.

The Shelleys had five children, but only one lived to adulthood. After Shelley drowned in a sailing accident when Mary was only 24, she edited two volumes of his works. She lived on a small stipend from her father-in-law, Lord Shelley, until her surviving son inherited his fortune and title in 1844. She died at the age of 53. Although she was a respected writer for many years, only Frankenstein and her journals are still widely read.

Source: www.history.com

Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography


Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

"“the medium is the message”

Marshall McLuhan, in full Herbert Marshall McLuhan, (born July 21, 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, died Dec. 31, 1980, Toronto), Canadian communications theorist and educator, whose aphorism “the medium is the message” summarized his view of the potent influence of television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information in shaping styles of thinking and thought, whether in sociology, art, science, or religion. He regarded the printed book as an institution fated to disappear.

McLuhan was associated with the University of Toronto from 1946 until 1979. He became full professor of English literature there in 1952 and was made director of the university’s Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. He was also a popular lecturer.

In 1962 McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, the first of several books in which he examined communications and society. His other works include The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man(1964), The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (with Quentin Fiore; 1967), From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson; 1970), and City as Classroom (with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan; 1977). McLuhan’s critical view of 20th-century society’s self-transformation made him one of the popular prophetic voices of his time.

Source: www.britannica.com

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium And The Messenger

Sunday 1 January 1659/60 - New Year’s Day with Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament, who is now most famous for his diary. Although Pepys had no maritime experience, he rose by patronage, hard work and his talent for administration, to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under King James II. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalization of the Royal Navy.

The detailed private diary he kept during 1660–1669 was first published in the nineteenth century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London.
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“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife … gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year … [the hope was belied.] The condition of the State was thus; viz. the Rump, after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the Army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the river, and Monk is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come into the Parliament, nor is it expected that he will without being forced to it.

The new Common Council of the City do speak very high; and had sent to Monk their sword-bearer, to acquaint him with their desires for a free and full Parliament, which is at present the desires, and the hopes, and expectation of all. Twenty-two of the old secluded members3 having been at the House-door the last week to demand entrance, but it was denied them; and it is believed that [neither] they nor the people will be satisfied till the House be filled.

My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor; besides my goods of my house, and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain. Mr. Downing master of my office.

(Lord’s Day) This morning (we living lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr. Gunning’s chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon upon these words: — “That in the fulness of time God sent his Son, made of a woman,” &c.; showing, that, by “made under the law,” is meant his circumcision, which is solemnized this day.

Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand. I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts.

Then went with my wife to my father’s, and in going observed the great posts which the City have set up at the Conduit in Fleet-street.

Supt at my, father’s, where in came Mrs. The. Turner and Madam Morrice, and supt with us. After that my wife and I went home with them, and so to our own home …”

Source: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660...

The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection

January 2 1815: Lord Byron’s Wedding Day

On January 2, 1815, Lord Byron is married in a private ceremony to Annabella Milbanke at Seaham Hall. There are two clergymen present to perform the ceremony. One was Annabella’s illegitimate cousin, the Reverend Thomas Noel of Kirkby Mallory, son of her uncle, Lord Wentworth. Benita Eisler describes Byron’s marriage to Annabella Milbanke in Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame:

Well before ten o’clock on Monday, January 2, the day of the wedding, Hobhouse, dressed even to his white gloves, went to awaken Byron but found him fully clothed. They greeted the others, excepting the bride, who had not yet appeared. Then Byron and Hobhouse together walked upstairs to the drawing room. In an alcove formed by a large bay window and separated from the rest of the room by a proscenium arch, kneeling cushions had been placed for the bridal pair (“hard as though filled with peach stones,” Byron recalled). Two clergymen officiated: the Rev. Richard Wallis, vicar of Seaham, and the Rev. Thomas Noel, vicar of Kirkby Mallory, who, as Lord Wentworth’s illegitimate son, was also the bride’s cousin. Annabella was attended by her former governess, Mrs. Clermont.

The bride wore a simple white muslin gown, lace-trimmed only at the hem, and a short matching jacket called a curricle—“very plain indeed, with nothing on her head,” Hobhouse reported. In her responses she was “firm as a rock.” It was Byron who stumbled as he repeated, “I, George Gordon,” and when he came to the line “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” he looked over at Hobhouse “with a faint smile.” At eleven o’clock the ceremony was over. Wallis shook Annabella’s hand first, followed by Hobhouse, who then embraced Byron. Lady Milbanke kissed her son-in-law. After signing the register with Hobhouse and Wallis as witnesses, Annabella quickly left the room, her eyes full of tears. She had, Hobhouse observed, “compleated her conquest—her innocent conquest.” To his best man Byron appeared “calm and as usual.” When she reappeared, Annabella was wearing her going-away outfit, a gray satin pelisse* trimmed with a narrow band of white fur worn over the wedding dress. Discreetly, Hobhouse placed his wedding gift to the bride, a set of Byron’s complete works bound in yellow morocco, in the carriage. Handing in the new Lady Byron, he wished her many years of happiness. “If I am not happy, it will be my own fault,” she said. Through the window, Byron grasped his friend’s hand; he was still holding tight as the carriage pulled away. At Six Mile Bottom, Augusta’s tension mounted through the morning. At eleven o’clock, the hour when she knew the vows were to be exchanged in Seaham, her surge of feelings, she said, “were as the sea trembles when the earth quakes.”

SOON AS we got into the carriage, his countenance changed to gloom and defiance,” Annabella recalled fourteen months after the wedding day.1 When their coach passed through Durham and the “joy bells” pealed in their honor, Byron began singing and ranting: By refusing his offer of marriage two years earlier, Annabella had doomed him to nameless tragedy; he had only married her now “to outwit” her and exact his revenge. He then reviled her mother, retailing unflattering instances of her behavior as reported by Lady Melbourne, bemoaned Annabella’s meager dowry, and expressed impatience for her relations to die so she could inherit. Worse than these accusations was Byron’s “relentless pitying,” Annabella recalled, when his regrets were all for her: that she had not married a better man. Even if we concede a certain gothic exaggeration of Byron’s behavior by his shocked wife (“Now that I’ve got you in my power, I can make you feel it,” she recalled him saying), other evidence, including his own, points to his suffering a severe panic attack immediately after the ceremony. The finality of the step he had taken, the physical and emotional claustrophobia of finding himself alone at close quarters with a wife he scarcely knew, triggered a hysterical reaction. Byron’s own recollection is the most telling: He always insisted that Mrs. Clermont, Annabella’s governess, had “stuck” herself between them in the cramped carriage —a memory disputed by Hobhouse and everyone else who saw them off. At Halnaby the grounds were covered by deep snow, but the Milbanke servants and tenants, many of whom had known Annabella from birth, were waiting outside to greet the newlyweds. As she emerged from the carriage, the new Lady Byron made a very different impression on two witnesses: The old butler recalled Annabella coming up the steps alone, “with a countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair.” But the maid who had accompanied them remembered her mistress as “buoyant and cheerful as a bride should be.”

There was no disagreement, however, about Byron’s strange behavior. He did not hand his wife from the carriage but “jumped out … and walked away.” Byron lashed out at Annabella as the cause of his despair. “It’s too late now,” “it’s done,” “it cannot be undone”—these were his blasting words, constantly repeated, from the first day, “and continually, in the first week of our marriage,” she recalled. He told her he was more “accursed” in marrying than in any other act of his life, adding, “I am a villain—I could convince you of it in three words.” He harped on the issue of taint. Describing incidences of derangement among the Gordons and Byrons—the probable suicide of his grandfather and father, along with a case of arson in the family—he taunted her for writing, in a “Character” of the man she would marry, sent two years earlier to her Aunt Melbourne, that family insanity would be the only disqualifying factor in a future husband. (Thus he also revealed that Lady M had shown him Annabella’s letters but not that he had reciprocated in kind.) As though the required act of sexual possession must be gotten over and done with, he “had Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner,” he reported in his memoirs. That same night, Annabella recalled, he inquired “with an appearance of aversion, if I meant to sleep in the same bed with him, said that he hated sleeping with any woman, but that I might do as I chose.” She chose to remain with him. But Annabella omitted the only recorded incident of their wedding night. Samuel Rogers remembered from reading Byron’s destroyed memoirs that the poet, startled out of his sleep and seeing the crimson bedcurtains illumined by flickering candlelight in the room, screamed, “Good God, I am surely in hell.” It was the next morning that Annabella felt “perhaps the deadliest chill that ever fell on my heart.” Meeting her in the library, Byron coldly repeated his litany of remorse, now blaming his wife for her failure to avert the tragedy of their marriage. The “desolation of that first day” would be burned into her memory forever.

For the occasion Byron wrote this “Epigram On My Wedding- Day To Penelope”

This day, of all our days, has done
The worst for me and you :-
'Tis just six years since we were one,
And five since we were two.


Source: www.pastnow.wordpress.com

The Life of Lord Byron

WHERE DID THE WORD 'AUTOMOBILE' COME FROM?

On Jan. 3, 1899, the New York Times printed the word "automobile" upon its austere pages. It wasn't the first publication to do so; Scientific American used the phrase "automobile carriage" in a May 14, 1898, review of the Winton Motor Carriage, but the Grey Lady -- a more influential publication -- was the first to debate the term.

The Times penned an editorial lambasting the suggestions that these newfangled motor-carriages be called "autotrucks," or even "autowains" (which takes the latter part from an old Saxon word meaning "wagon", as one Avery Quercus explained less than a week later). No, "There is something uncanny about these new-fangled vehicles," wrote the beleaguered, invective-spewing editorial board. "They are all unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good, or even an endurable, name." The board cited that the word "automobile" has Greek and Latin roots that are "near to indecent that we print it with hesitation." Greek and Latin, how uncouth!

"Automobile" comes from the French, "who are usually orthodox in their etymology if in nothing else." A son of France did invent the car, after all, owing to the efforts of Nicholas Cugnot. L'Académie française, notorious sticklers for language, had already coined the word for steam-powered buses way back in 1875. Like flamenco, Smart cars and David Hasselhoff, it remained a European thing that Americans resisted for decades.

Our mysterious bile-filled scribes never did come up with another word. But within the month the Times was printing the word "automobile" with gusto. (What can you do? This modern world just moves too fast.) And we have the august publication to thank that we're not calling these machines "horseless carriages," "quadricycles," "oruktor amphibolos," "hippomobiles," benzene buggies," or "autowains," lest only the Wayans Brothers be allowed to operate them. Though "benzene buggy" has a nice ring to it. Who wants to start a band?

Source: www.autoweek.com

World History of the Automobile

This reminds me of various early terms for the motorcycle, including "motor-bicycle," which I came across in a mystery novel from around 1920.

How the past becomes the future

January 4, 1985: Inquiry over 'baby-for-cash' deal

Scotland Yard is investigating a surrogate mother in London following reports she is to receive Ł6,500 for her baby from a childless couple. Kim Cotton gave birth to a baby girl earlier today but was forced to leave her in the care of Victoria Maternity Hospital after the London borough of Barnet imposed a court order.

The baby, who is still unnamed, will remain at the hospital until at least next Friday, when a juvenile court will decide her future. Hospital Administrator David Davies said: "Until we hear to the contrary the baby must remain here in a place of safety."
Paying money for surrogacy is currently permitted by law, but Health Minister Kenneth Clarke has revealed that Parliament will move to ban it after MPs came under pressure to take urgent action.

The organisation responsible for arranging the surrogacy is an off-shoot of an American agency, based in Surrey. Run by former health visitor Barbara Manning, it is expected to make thousands of pounds from the Cotton surrogacy. Last year's Warnock Committee, which investigated human fertility, recommended that such agencies should be made illegal.
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Surrogacy is legal in the UK, but surrogate mothers cannot be paid. They can accept only "reasonable expenses" for costs incurred during the pregnancy.
Kim Cotton, the mother in the famous 1985 case, went on to set up COTS (Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy) in 1988, which gives help and advice to surrogates and childless couples in the UK.

She resigned in May 1999 complaining the government was cracking down on surrogacy. She is now managing director of Tablewhere, a china matching company based in North London. "Today I still help people but I match china rather than surrogates to couples," she told BBC On This Day.

Source: www.news.bbc.co.uk

Considering Surrogacy

We’re all still “Waiting for Godot”

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered as “En attendant Godot” at a small theatre on the Left Bank in Paris the Théâtre de Babylone on January 5 1953. It has since become one of the most important and best known plays of the 20th and 21st century and has been performed countless times the world over.

Samuel Beckett expert Anna McMullan answers some questions about the seminal work:

What are the standout productions of Waiting for Godot?

Obviously there's Roger Blin's first production in Paris. A number of French critics who watched it said: "We've never seen anything like this, this is not theatre as we know it." Then of course the 24-year-old Peter Hall directed the English language premiere in 1955 just two years later at the Arts Theatre in London. The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan said it changed the rules of theatre.British critics were initially more confused by it than the French, who had experienced a similar sort of existential drama. But then Tynan and a number of other significant critics began to write about the play. It's difficult to remember now, but nothing like it had been seen before. It began to change the way people thought about theatre. Beckett's own production was important too. He directed it at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1975. The production toured internationally and was described as a very balletic production. Beckett took extraordinary care over the costume and design. It's seen as a definitive version, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't reinterpret the play. The relationship between the two characters Pozzo and Lucky can be very disturbing. It's an oppressive and dependent relationship which has lead to the play being interpreted in a number of situations of conflict throughout the world, such as South Africa and Sarajevo – the latter by Susan Sontag under the siege.

Did Beckett make many changes to the play after it was first performed?

Yes, he made a lot of changes. When he first wrote it he really didn't know a lot about theatre. He had been to theatre as a young man, and some of his friends were involved in theatre but really he learnt the craft of theatre when he attended the rehearsals of his plays during the 1950s. In the Sixties he began to direct his plays and that's when you begin to see Beckett really writing the stage direction. He did rewrite parts of Godot and made many annotations when in rehearsals at the Schiller theatre – the originals of which still exist.

So have the scripts had all those changes incorporated?

Not all of them actually and there is an interesting debate about what actually is the definitive script. Faber and Faber have published a series of notebooks Beckett kept when he was directing a number of his plays. In any case, substantially the play is the same – two tramps still waiting for Godot – but those notebooks have a revised text and anybody directing the play can look at the published text and can consult those notebooks too. But he was a very precise writer and director, and he really didn't like people to simply change the text.

What are the standout Waiting for Godot performances?

There have been so many. The characters of Vladimir and Estragon have really appealed to a number of acting partnerships, including Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Steve Martin and Robin Williams. I saw the production from Johannesburg when it toured to London which starred Jon Kani and Winston Ntshona, which were really wonderful performances. Recently Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart took on the roles in the West End. Beckett is now almost like Shakespeare: those roles are actors want to cut their teeth in.

The play has confounded many: what do you think it is trying to do?

We could talk forever about its meaning but I actually think, like Beckett, it is about is experiencing the play. You go and take your seat in the theatre and you absorb what's happening. The characters that are in front of you are waiting and while they are waiting we share the same time, the same space and we watch the human beings as they interact on stage. We watch these moments of tenderness, moments of cruelty and I think it really confronts us with the basic facts of human existence.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/t... (adapted)

Literature of Consciousness: Samuel Becket - Subject - Negativity

January 6, the Twelfth Night and the Three Kings’s Day

What is the meaning of Epiphany? 10 facts about Twelfth Night and Three Kings' Day. Epiphany, or Three Kings' Day, is the 12th day of Christmas, with January 6 marking the official end to the festive season for many Christians.

These days, Brits tend to associate Twelfth Night with removing Christmas decorations because according to tradition, anyone who forgets to take them down by the night before Epiphany must leave them in place all year to avoid misfortune.

However, up until the 19th century, the Epiphany was more important than Christmas Day, and it was used to celebrate both the three kings' (or three wise men's) visit to Jesus shortly after his birth and also Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist. In the West, Christians began celebrating the Epiphany in the 4th century, associating it with the visit of the Magi (the three kings) to Bethlehem.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, the three wise men - named Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar - followed the star of Bethlehem across the desert to meet the baby Jesus, offering gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The gifts were symbolic of the importance of Jesus' birth, the gold representing his royal standing; frankincense his divine birth; and myrrh his mortality.

The word 'Epiphany' comes from Greek and means 'manifestation'. It celebrates 'the revelation of God in his Son as human in Jesus Christ'. The six Sundays which follow Epiphany are known as the time of manifestation. Festivities for the ancient Christian feast day vary around the world, from swimming in icy waters to exchanging presents, fireworks and parades. In many countries the day is a public holiday.

In the Spanish speaking world, Epiphany is known as Dia de los Reyes (Three Kings' Day). In Mexico, crowds gather to taste the Rosca de Reyes - Kings' bread. In other countries, a Jesus figurine is hidden in the bread.

As recently as the 1950s, Twelfth Night in Britain was a night for wassailing. Wassailers, like carol singers, go from house to house singing and wishing their neighbours good health.

The Drury Lane Theatre in London has had a tradition since 1795 of providing a Twelfth Night cake. The will of Robert Baddeley made a bequest of £100 to provide cake and punch every year for the company in residence at the theatre on 6 January. The tradition still continues.

Ten facts about the Feast of the Epiphany

The three Kings (Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar) represented Europe, Arabia and Africa respectively.

Hundreds of years ago, roast lamb was traditionally served at Epiphany in honour of Christ and the three Kings' visit.

Whoever finds the small statue of a baby Jesus hidden inside their slice of the Rosca de reyes throws a party on Candlemas in February.

In some European countries, children leave their shoes out the night before to be filled with gifts, while others leave straw for the three Kings' horses.

According to Greek Orthodox Church's traditions, a priest will bless the waters by throwing a cross into it as worshippers try to retrieve it.

In Bulgaria too, Eastern Orthodox priests throw a cross in the sea and the men dive in - competing to get to it first.

In Venice a traditional regatta that started as a joke in the late 1970s has been incorporated in the celebrations of Epiphany Day.

In Prague, there is a traditional Three Kings swim to commemorate Epiphany Day at the Vltava River.

In New York, El Museo del Barrio has celebrated and promoted the Three Kings' Day tradition with an annual parade for more than three decades. Thousands take part in the procession featuring camels, colorful puppets and floats.

The day's activities involve singing holiday carols called aguinaldos.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Feast Of The Epiphany And Of The Three Holy Kings