Well, everyone, today is it: Fitzgerald Day, the annual holiday in which I celebrate my favorite author and what reading at large means to me. Go out and celebrate, my wonderful readers!
Happy Birthday, Fitzgerald!
Showing posts with label literary birthday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary birthday. Show all posts
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
Happy Birthday, Apollinaire!
Today is the 131st birthday of one of my favorite poets, Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire is famous for writing very surreal and symbolic poems, and he experimented a lot with how poetry looked on the page, sometimes shaping his poems into images reflecting the poem's title. I am a huge fan of his book Calligrammes, which deals heavily with World War. Today's Writer's Almanac features a short, interesting summary of his life. Happy birthday, Apollinaire!
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Jane Austen's Birthday: A Guest Post from Amy
Today is the birthday of Jane Austen, one of the most famous writers of the English language. To celebrate, I asked my good friend and fellow blogger Amy, an Austen fanatic, to write something about the author. I hope you enjoy Amy's musings on Jane!
235 years ago today, Jane Austen was born in Hampshire, England. It was there that she grew up reading, writing little plays and stories for her family, and honing the all-observing eye and wit for which she has been remembered these past centuries. Whether you personally enjoy Austen’s writings or not, the continued presence of her oeuvre on bookshelves worldwide, in academia, and in practically every corner of popular culture speaks to the virtues of the lady who should, by all standards of her time, have been insignificant and not worthy of any special notice.
Happy am I that she wrote, though, and that she was significant. And that we still read.
You see, the beauty of Austen’s novels lies in their total reality. True, barouches and assembly room balls and entailed estates are no longer really part of the common experience. But what about friendship? What about negotiating your place in the family unit, or in the neighborhood? What about working through conflicts between what you want and what is expected of you? What about the struggle of wanting to be an adult, and sometimes mis-stepping? What about having faith in yourself?
All of Austen’s characters experience at least one of these things, and for good reason—they are universal themes. We all experience them at some point. We all struggle to be kind to that one person who completely grates on our nerves. We all secretly want to smack upside the head that person who only thinly veils their boasts. And we all do boast, sometimes even when we know we shouldn’t. We all do all of the things that Austen’s characters do, and we encounter the same people (do you know a Miss Bates? a Mr. Collins? a Mrs. Bertram?). Sure, the mechanics of daily life have changed since the Regency period. But what we experience and feel as humans? That has remained remarkably constant.
My point, I suppose, is that reading Jane Austen is like peering through a window into our own lives, albeit dressed up with some finery and the sort of language we’d be so lucky to encounter. When all the waistcoats and muslins are stripped away (metaphorically, of course!), the stories have just as much place in the modern day as they did in the Austen’s time—Clueless, Bride and Prejudice, and the recently-published book The Cookbook Collector are all proof. The strength is in the story, in the wry observations of how people act, of what is in their nature.
It is in my nature to read Austen, and I hope that, in honor of her birthday, you’ll read something of hers as well. Two hundred-years’ worth of readers recommend it.
I want to close by attempting to answer a question posed to me at the library earlier this week: what do you think Jane Austen would have thought about the fact that people still read and discuss her novels so passionately?
I think, publically, Austen would have been properly embarrassed by all of the praise and attention.
In private, though? I think she would have laughed, turned to her sister, and very astutely characterized us all: “I am sure that they all fancy themselves an Elizabeth Bennet or an Anne Elliot, a Darcy or a Wentworth. If only they could see themselves as I see them, as they really are! But, if all human creatures were so handsome and well-principled, I would never have had anything to write about in the first place.”
235 years ago today, Jane Austen was born in Hampshire, England. It was there that she grew up reading, writing little plays and stories for her family, and honing the all-observing eye and wit for which she has been remembered these past centuries. Whether you personally enjoy Austen’s writings or not, the continued presence of her oeuvre on bookshelves worldwide, in academia, and in practically every corner of popular culture speaks to the virtues of the lady who should, by all standards of her time, have been insignificant and not worthy of any special notice.
Happy am I that she wrote, though, and that she was significant. And that we still read.
You see, the beauty of Austen’s novels lies in their total reality. True, barouches and assembly room balls and entailed estates are no longer really part of the common experience. But what about friendship? What about negotiating your place in the family unit, or in the neighborhood? What about working through conflicts between what you want and what is expected of you? What about the struggle of wanting to be an adult, and sometimes mis-stepping? What about having faith in yourself?
All of Austen’s characters experience at least one of these things, and for good reason—they are universal themes. We all experience them at some point. We all struggle to be kind to that one person who completely grates on our nerves. We all secretly want to smack upside the head that person who only thinly veils their boasts. And we all do boast, sometimes even when we know we shouldn’t. We all do all of the things that Austen’s characters do, and we encounter the same people (do you know a Miss Bates? a Mr. Collins? a Mrs. Bertram?). Sure, the mechanics of daily life have changed since the Regency period. But what we experience and feel as humans? That has remained remarkably constant.
My point, I suppose, is that reading Jane Austen is like peering through a window into our own lives, albeit dressed up with some finery and the sort of language we’d be so lucky to encounter. When all the waistcoats and muslins are stripped away (metaphorically, of course!), the stories have just as much place in the modern day as they did in the Austen’s time—Clueless, Bride and Prejudice, and the recently-published book The Cookbook Collector are all proof. The strength is in the story, in the wry observations of how people act, of what is in their nature.
It is in my nature to read Austen, and I hope that, in honor of her birthday, you’ll read something of hers as well. Two hundred-years’ worth of readers recommend it.
I want to close by attempting to answer a question posed to me at the library earlier this week: what do you think Jane Austen would have thought about the fact that people still read and discuss her novels so passionately?
I think, publically, Austen would have been properly embarrassed by all of the praise and attention.
In private, though? I think she would have laughed, turned to her sister, and very astutely characterized us all: “I am sure that they all fancy themselves an Elizabeth Bennet or an Anne Elliot, a Darcy or a Wentworth. If only they could see themselves as I see them, as they really are! But, if all human creatures were so handsome and well-principled, I would never have had anything to write about in the first place.”
Friday, September 24, 2010
Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!
114 years ago today, F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!
Fitzgerald has been my favorite writer since I was fifteen, but I've always had a complicated relationship with him and his work. He led an extremely imperfect life and had some real weaknesses as a writer. But when he was at his best, he was better than anyone else. His best novels and short stories remain classics of American literature simply because he wrote about Americans so deftly.
Recently, I read Patricia Hampl's great introduction to The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it really hits the nail on the head when it comes to Fitzgerald's complex view towards his roots. He claimed to hate St. Paul, and yet that particular Midwestern, American viewpoint holds in nearly all his work. I've always thought that the line separating great writers from merely good writers lies somewhere in the place of formative experience. Most of my favorite writers are people who write from a particular viewpoint informed by the homes and towns and places from which they came. Fitzgerald is one of these writers. And so, I leave you with another one of my favorite passages from The Great Gatsby that plays into this idea. Here, the narrator Nick Carraway talks about his youth in Minnesota and his the disillusionment he found in the East.
That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am a part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all - Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old - even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.
After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Happy Birthday, Philip Larkin!
Today is the birthday of my favorite English-language poet, Philip Larkin!
I have been obsessed with Larkin since I read his Collected Poems (a slim little collection, considering he only published four books in his lifetime) a couple years ago. He writes so beautifully about life inside its most mundane details. His work is always honest, sometimes funny, and often brilliant. A master of loneliness, Larkin worked as a librarian at a British University for most of his life, publishing poetry on the side. He's considered a sad poet writing sad poems, but I think the quiet despair of the daily grind is what makes his work so compelling and necessary in our world. The Writer's Almanac has a lovely little section about Larkin on its website today, complete with the story about how his hometown is celebrating him with a plethora of toads. Yay, Larkin!
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Happy Birthday, Erich Maria Remarque!
Today is the 112th birthday of one of my favorite fiction writers, Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque is famous for writing All Quiet on the Western Front, but his later works are just as tragically beautiful. I became a die-hard Remarque fan in high school, and All Quiet on the Western Front and its "sequel," The Road Back, are two of the most influential books I've ever read. There's only been a handful of writers who I can honestly claim have changed my life, and Remarque is one of them, introducing me to anti-war literature just as the Iraq War was starting. He's long been under-appreciated as a novelist, but he'll always have my vote as one of the best.
If you're interested in learning more about Remarque, his story is really quite fascinating. He survived World War I as a German soldier, took on the Nazis, and spent most of his life in exile from his home country.
Side Note: When F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Hollywood screenwriter at the end of his life, he only received screen credit for one movie: a film adaptation of Remarque's novel Three Comrades. I love this random connection between two of my favorite writers!
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Happy Birthday, Carson McCullers!
Tomorrow is the birthday of one of my literary heroes - Carson McCullers (1917-1967). McCullers is best known for her Southern gothic novels, but she is also one hell of a short story writer (check out "The Sojourner," "Poldi," or "The Haunted Boy," and tell me your heart doesn't break in the final lines). I first read McCuller's most famous novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (which she published at the age of 23!!!) when I was in middle school, and I've been hooked on classic American literature ever since. Her work is dark, a little disturbing, drenched in atmosphere, and very beautiful.
But my real love of Carson McCullers lies in her perseverance. She suffered from neurological problems her entire life, and by the time she hit middle age, she was almost completely paralyzed on her left side. But writing was more important to her than anything in the world, and she forced herself to write at least one page a day even when she was in unbelievable pain. I can only hope to continue loving writing like that for the rest of my life. When people ask why I'm a writer, I often toss out my favorite Carson McCullers quote: "I wouldn't want to live if I couldn't write."
So, happy birthday, Carson McCullers! You've been an enormous inspiration in my life. In celebration, here is the opening section of her wonderful novel The Member of the Wedding.
From: The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers
It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie's feet, and also she got herself in trouble. She was in so much secret trouble that she thought it was better to stay at home - and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass.
But my real love of Carson McCullers lies in her perseverance. She suffered from neurological problems her entire life, and by the time she hit middle age, she was almost completely paralyzed on her left side. But writing was more important to her than anything in the world, and she forced herself to write at least one page a day even when she was in unbelievable pain. I can only hope to continue loving writing like that for the rest of my life. When people ask why I'm a writer, I often toss out my favorite Carson McCullers quote: "I wouldn't want to live if I couldn't write."
So, happy birthday, Carson McCullers! You've been an enormous inspiration in my life. In celebration, here is the opening section of her wonderful novel The Member of the Wedding.
From: The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers
It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. In June the trees were bright dizzy green, but later the leaves darkened, and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun. At first Frankie walked around doing one thing and another. The sidewalks of the town were gray in the early morning and at night, but the noon sun put a glaze on them, so that the cement burned and glittered like glass. The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie's feet, and also she got herself in trouble. She was in so much secret trouble that she thought it was better to stay at home - and at home there was only Berenice Sadie Brown and John Henry West. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange. The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer. At last the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Birthday Musings and Some Notes
Well, today I turn 23, which is exciting I guess. Truth is, I don't put much stock in the importance of my own birthday anymore, although I am always happy to celebrate it with friends and family. My birthday also gives me time to reflect on all the great reading I did the year before. And the age of 22 was a great year of reading. I encountered two of the best books I have ever read: War and Peace and Gilead, and I explored the poetry of Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Overall, it was a successful reading age. To celebrate, I am including another passage from Gilead, even though you've heard about the book a million times here before. I can't help it; it's genius.
From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson:
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping into the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
Note: Sorry my posts have been more erratic lately; they may stay that way for awhile. My new job currently has me on a six-day work week, and I will be extremely busy with graduate school applications for the next month or so. I will always post a Poem of the Week, and I will update you all on anything I read or recommend. For example, you will soon hear about Pete Dexter's new novel, Spooner, which I am set to finish in the next 24 hours. It's been a fantastic read so far. Otherwise, I will try to update as often as possible and stay on schedule as time allows. Thanks for being understanding! Happy Reading, everyone!
From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson:
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping into the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
Note: Sorry my posts have been more erratic lately; they may stay that way for awhile. My new job currently has me on a six-day work week, and I will be extremely busy with graduate school applications for the next month or so. I will always post a Poem of the Week, and I will update you all on anything I read or recommend. For example, you will soon hear about Pete Dexter's new novel, Spooner, which I am set to finish in the next 24 hours. It's been a fantastic read so far. Otherwise, I will try to update as often as possible and stay on schedule as time allows. Thanks for being understanding! Happy Reading, everyone!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Happy Fitzgerald Day!
Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!!!
As I am sure you are all aware by now, today is officially Fitzgerald Day, Beth's official holiday for celebrating reading and writing. The festivities today started off nicely with a shoutout to Fitzgerald on NPR's Writers Almanac, and I could have sworn my beloved framed Fitzgerald poster over my desk looked happier today also. I hope you all enjoy this glorious day where we celebrate 113 years of awesomeness from America's best (okay, one of America's best) novelists.
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