English Mysteries Club discussion

Thanks Jean-Luke
I love trivia

Jean-Luke wrote: "August 12, 1827 - William Blake, Romantic poet and painter, dies at the age of 69."

Is Blake the poet who wrote "Tiger, tiger, burning bright"?

BTW, Jean-Luke, I second Kimberly in saying I love trivia! Thanks...

If I may: August 15, 1858 - E. Nesbit is born. One of her best known creations, Oswald Bastable, also shares her birthday.

Also, Will Rogers (“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.”) died August 15, 1935 in a plane crash.

Tracey wrote: "If I may: August 15, 1858 - E. Nesbit is born. One of her best known creations, Oswald Bastable, also shares her birthday..."

Growing up, I loved Five Children and It

Leslie wrote: "Tracey wrote: "If I may: August 15, 1858 - E. Nesbit is born. One of her best known creations, Oswald Bastable, also shares her birthday..."

Growing up, I loved Five Children and It"

I still do. :) E. Nesbit's wonderful.

August 22, 1920 -- Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, was born

Leslie wrote: "August 22, 1920 -- Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, was born"

I'm due for a re-read of this one. Thanks for the reminder.

August 23, 1939 Sidney Coe Howard, playwright & winner of the 1925 Pulitizer prize, died at the age of 48

August 25, 1984 author Truman Capote dies at age 59

August 26, 1884 Earl Biggers (author of the Charlie Chan mysteries) is born

Like I said, I like trivia! :)

Leslie wrote: "August 2, 1884 Earl Biggers (author of the Charlie Chan mysteries) is born"

Just discovered Bigger's Chan series last year - really fun series. It's a shame Biggers died with only 6 Chans under his belt - I would have loved to read more of them.

August 28 430 Saint Augustine, author of Confessions, dies at the age of 75

August 29, 1992 Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers and other children's books, dies at the age of 88

August 30, 1904 - Henry James returns to the United States after two decades abroad.

August 31, 1932 - Robert Franklin Adams, American science fiction author (Castaways in Time), is born.

Jean-Luke wrote: "Something I found online that I thought was interesting. Everyday (or most days) I will post something that happened that affected the world of Literature on that day somewhere in history. Even if ..."

This is a great thread!! Thanks! I love it!

Wonderful poem by one of my favourite poets- W H Auden- ' 1st September 1939'.

Sonali wrote: "Wonderful poem by one of my favourite poets- W H Auden- ' 1st September 1939'." And here it is!

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

On this day in 1802 (3 Sept) William Wordsworth completed "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," one of his best known short poems. Wordsworth was crossing Westminster on his way to France in order to see for the first time his nine-year-old daughter, Caroline, and her mother, Annette Vallon, with whom he had had an affair in 1791.

On this day in 1607 (5 Sept), Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship, "Red Dragon," anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone; scholars regard this amateur production by the ship's crew as the first staging of a Shakespearean play outside of Europe, and one which predates any New World Hamlet by about 150 years.

Leslie wrote: "On this day in 1607 (5 Sept), Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship, "Red Dragon," anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone; scholars regard this amateur production by the shi..."

Very cool.

On this day in 1890 (6 Sept), thirty-two year-old Joseph Conrad took command of a small stern-wheeler for the trip down the Congo river from Stanley Falls (now Boyoma Falls) to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Though Conrad was not exposed to the full horror that Marlow witnessed and felt beckon, these experiences were the genesis of Heart of Darkness, published twelve years later.

7 September 1962 - Isak Dinesen, Danish author (Out of Africa), dies at age 77

7 September 1889 - Start of Sherlock Holmes serial "Adventure of Engineer's Thumb"

On 10 Sept. in 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke "On the Affairs in Kansas" at a Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. Two years earlier, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had repealed the Missouri Compromise banning slavery in the new territories and granted residents the right to choose for themselves on the issue. Pro-slavery gangs had been shooting and even scalping Abolitionists, and the Cambridge Relief Meeting was one of many such, as was Emerson's appeal: "The people of Kansas ask for bread, clothes, arms, and men, to save them alive, and enable them to stand against these enemies of the human race."

On this day (12 Sept) in 1943 Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

13 September 1916 Roald Dahl is born.

On this day (17 Sept) in 1954 William Golding's first novel, The Lord of the Flies, was published. It was rejected by twenty-one publishers and poorly reviewed, but by the 60s it was a cult novel and a career-maker. If it confirms Golding's view that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," it is not the whole story: "I am a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist," he said in his Nobel Acceptance Speech.

On this day (18 Sept) in 1940, Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again was published, two years after his death from tubercular meningitis at the age of thirty-seven:

"Something has spoken to me in the night,
burning the tapers of the waning year;
something has spoken in the night, and told me
I shall die, I know not where. . . ."

19 September 1796 Hartley Coleridge, English poet, is born.

20 September 1878 Upton Beall Sinclair, author of "The Jungle" and other works, was born in Baltimore MD

Is anyone reading these?

I do as well. I think they are great - and the Auden poem, oh my gosh thank you.

I read them too :-).

I read them too! Your work is not in vain...

On this day (21 Sept) in 1947 Stephen King was born. As told in On Writing, his 2000 "memoir of the craft," King's childhood was formative, both "a kind of curriculum vitae" and a "a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees -- the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you."

Thanks for the feedback! I will continue posting.

I read and appreciate them!

And speaking of Mr.King, I just heard that he's writing a sequel to The Shining.

On this day (Sept 22) in 1991 the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library in California. The first Scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran by Bedouin shepherds in 1947, but decades of delay in deciphering them prompted this controversial release of a microfilm version of "the greatest archeological find in history."

On this day (23 Sept) in 1819, twenty-five-year-old John Keats wrote to his friend, Charles Brown, to say that he was giving up poetry for journalism. This is also the first day of autumn; four days earlier in 1819 Keats had written "To Autumn," now one of his most popular poems, and one which many critics regard as "flawless in structure, texture, tone, and rhythm."

Leslie wrote: "On this day (23 Sept) in 1819, twenty-five-year-old John Keats wrote to his friend, Charles Brown, to say that he was giving up poetry for journalism. This is also the first day of autumn; four day..."

Lovely poem to remind us that autumn has arrived. Thank you.

On this day (3 October) in 1896 William Morris died at the age of sixty-two. Morris was one of the most talented and respected figures in the Victorian Era, but the superhuman range and pace of his vocations -- painter, architect, designer, craftsman, writer, book-maker, socialist crusader -- caused one physician to attribute his death to "simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men."

I love what some of the Victorian and Edwardian doctors attribute 'cause of death' to for some people!

Jemidar wrote: "I love what some of the Victorian and Edwardian doctors attribute 'cause of death' to for some people!"

Never knew before how multi-talented he was. Thanks!

In honor of UK's National Poetry Day:
On this day (4 October) in 1937 Wallace Stevens published his fourth book of poetry, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Stevens was halfway through his poetry-writing career at this point -- halfway between the early complaints that his poems were "a glittering edifice of icicles," and the Pulitzer in 1955, the year of his death.

On this day (5 October) in 1978 the Polish-American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Singer emigrated from Poland in 1935, but he continued to write mostly in Yiddish, on a forty-three-year-old Yiddish typewriter, of a culture which "sneaks by, smuggles itself amid the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning...."

On this day (6 October) in 1921 the first branch of the now worldwide writers' organization, PEN, was founded in England by Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott. Its first president was John Galsworthy, and early members included Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence. The acronym derives from Poets and playwrights/Editors/Novelists, but today the organization includes critics, translators, journalists, etc. Besides operating in the usual ways of professional organizations, PEN is especially active in supporting writers who are politically oppressed, and for promoting freedom of expression. Their web site features the 4-line poem by assassinated Algerian writer Tahar Djaout that has rallied and inspired many:

"Silence is death.
If you are silent you are dead,
And if you speak you are dead,
So speak and die."

On this day (7 October) in 1929, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury was published. Faulkner said it was "a splendid failure," but he also said that "the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much" was the image upon which the book was based: "Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandfather's funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers."

A splendid failure? Transcendent is more like it. I didn't know he felt that way. Thanks for the post.

On this day in 1937*, Lord Peter Wimsey finally married Harriet Vane. Happy 75th anniversary to Lord and Lady Peter!

(* - At least, the book was published in 1937...)

I read Faulkner back in high school, when, frankly, I'd read just about anything! I remember him being wordy, but in a beautiful sort of way...
I think I'll now go bake an anniversary cake for the Wimseys!

Tracey wrote: "On this day in 1937*, Lord Peter Wimsey finally married Harriet Vane. Happy 75th anniversary to Lord and Lady Peter!

(* - At least, the book was published in 1937...)"

Yes! Happy anniversary. Can't believe it's been so long...