Born 25 January 1874 – W. Somerset Maugham, English playwright and novelist. While “Of Human Bondage” is inarguably Maugham’s masterpiece, I recommend that everyone should also read “The Razor’s Edge,” since the novel will speak forcefully to people grown weary of living in a time when mindless consumerism, crackpot religion, and venomous politics have become cultural norms. No matter how old one might be, it is never too late to undertake the quest for a more meaningful existence.
Some quotes from the witty and uncommonly wise W. Somerset Maugham:
“An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.”
“Any nation that thinks more of its ease and comfort than its freedom will soon lose its freedom; and the ironical thing about it is that it will lose its ease and comfort too.”
“Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.”
“Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
“I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.”
“I’ll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell… their heart’s in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.”
“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.” “No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.” “Only a mediocre person is always at his best.”
“When you choose your friends, don’t be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
“The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.”
“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.”
Born 25 January 1882 – Virginia Woolf, English author, essayist, and publisher. I think that both “Mrs. Dalloway” and “Orlando” are great novels, but from the time I first read it in graduate school, “To the Lighthouse” has been one of my favorite books. Every time I reread it, I find more to appreciate among its brilliantly crafted complexities. I am also very glad that “Mrs. Dalloway” served as the inspiration for Michael Cunningham’s wonderful novel “The Hours,” as well as for the movie adaptation featuring music by Philip Glass and starring two of my favorite actresses: Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. I think that Virginia Woolf would be pleased with both book and film.
Some quotes from Virginia Woolf:
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”
“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
21 January 1983 – American writer Anthony Hecht wins the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Hecht, a schoolmate of Jack Kerouac in New York, became interested in poetry while attending Bard College. However, the defining moments for his life and art came during his experiences in combat during World War II, especially what he encountered while helping to liberate Flossenburg Concentration Camp on 23 April 1945: “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.” I recommend that people read Hecht’s “Third Avenue in Sunlight” and “More Light! More Light!,” as well as “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It,” which I have posted below.
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
And in their fairy tales
The warty giant and witch
Get sealed in doorless jails
And the match-girl strikes it rich.
I’ve made myself a drink.
The giant and witch are set
To bust out of the clink
When my children have gone to bed.
All frequencies are loud
With signals of despair;
In flash and morse they crowd
The rondure of the air.
For the wicked have grown strong,
Their numbers mock at death,
Their cow brings forth its young,
Their bull engendereth.
Their very fund of strength,
Satan, bestrides the globe;
He stalks its breadth and length
And finds out even Job.
Yet by quite other laws
My children make their case;
Half God, half Santa Claus,
But with my voice and face,
A hero comes to save
The poorman, beggarman, thief,
And make the world behave
And put an end to grief.
And that their sleep be sound
I say this childermas
Who could not, at one time,
Have saved them from the gas.
Died 21 January 1950 – George Orwell, an English author who wrote, “All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.” I invite you to consider Orwell’s statement in light of what are often incredibly misguided but widely-held views concerning (to name just a few examples) the environment, jobs, energy policy, science, education, and religion in the United States. Orwell’s point: The blame for the disparity between rhetoric and reality in American life cannot be placed on politicians, who are, after all, merely the spokesfools for the electorate that keeps sending them to office. Put bluntly, we are stuck with a slate of absurd candidates largely because they best articulate our collective delusions about the world and our place in it.
I have two recommendations: First, as soon as possible read Orwell’s ever-timely essay “Politics and the English Language.” Second, read and then ponder seriously the quotations from Orwell posted below. Doing so will help inoculate you against some of the more egregious expressions of intellectual and cultural nonsense currently being touted as “truth.”
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
“In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
“Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”
“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless it can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”
“Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”
“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
“Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”
“One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.”
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
Born 18 January 1892 – Oliver Hardy, an American comic actor who was, along with Stan Laurel, a member of the famous Laurel and Hardy team. Ollie and Stan were among the few movie stars to make a successful transition from the silent to the sound era, and I have three recommendations for my readers. First, watch everything Laurel and Hardy ever made; at their best, they are the greatest comedy team in film history. Second, from their silent film archive watch “Two Tars” and “Big Business.” In these two short features you will find the classic pattern that informs most of the work of Laurel and Hardy: A seemingly innocuous incident soon results in increasing conflict, until events descend into complete anarchy. Finally, from the sound era archive watch “The Music Box,” a brilliant comedic gem, which is, regrettably, the only Laurel and Hardy feature that won an Academy Award.
"Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into."
Died 18 January 1952 – Jerome “Curly” Howard, American comic genius and member of The Three Stooges. I spent many hours of my misspent youth in coffee shops, arguing over the respective comedic talents of Curly and Shemp with humor-challenged fools who championed the cause of the latter. Of course, there is no argument: Shemp is amusingly competent, but Curly is the peerless King of Slapstick.
Born 12 January 1876 – Jack London, American author, journalist, and social activist. I concede that there is some merit in the criticism that London was not especially adept at handling long narratives, such as the novel, but in his masterpiece, “The Call of the Wild,” he achieves a poetic grandeur that transcends the strictures of aesthetic form. There is something unabashedly primordial in the book’s stark appeal, something shadowy but also strangely familiar in its story, something that whispers to us from outside the sheltering walls of our increasingly virtual lives, reminding us of important matters that we have almost but not quite forgotten. I urge you to attend to that gently insistent call, as it addresses the reader in the Epigraph at the beginning of the novel:
“Old longings nomadic leap,
Chafing at custom’s chain;
Again from its brumal sleep
Wakens the ferine strain.”
And then read on, heading out with Buck into the vast uncharted heart of the world, which is the landscape of all true adventures.
Born 17 December 1947 – Wes Studi, a Cherokee actor who has received much-merited praise for his screen portrayals of Native Americans. Studi has appeared in “Dances with Wolves,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Geronimo: An American Legend,” and “Pow-Wow Highway.”
While most of these facts about Studi are well-known, few individuals recall that he was a cast member in one of the few indisputably great movies ever made: “Deep Rising.” I remind everyone that in order to achieve cinematic greatness a film must possess three elements: A devastatingly violent monster, a group of men with a variety of powerful weapons who nevertheless get murdered in graphic ways by aforementioned monster, and a cute Asian babe. These things are all present in “Deep Rising,” and it is therefore great.
And before people start complaining, please understand that I don’t make the cinematic rules, I merely enforce them.
Below – Uma Damon, Bestower of Cinematic Greatness, in “Deep Rising”
Died 13 December 1784 – Samuel Johnson, English poet, essayist, literary critic, biographer, and lexicographer. Johnson was the author of the first definitive dictionary in the history of the English language, and his contributions to our literary heritage are immense. One does not read Johnson merely to learn his opinions on various subjects, but rather to appreciate the stylistic elegance with which he expresses them. At a time when twitter is helping to accelerate the pace at which Americans are becoming a nation of inarticulate twits, Johnson’s prose, with its abundance of wit, irony, and complexity, provides a model for us to emulate and an antidote to stupidity. Whether we like it or not, our writing is the shadow of our thinking, and anyone who spends time reading what passes for discourse on the Internet knows that some people’s shadows are very pale, indeed. Finally, Johnson is the subject of what is arguably the greatest literary biography in history – “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,” by James Boswell, a book which has been at my bedside for decades and one that I heartily recommend people read in addition to Johnson’s publications.
Here are a few quotations from Dr. Samuel Johnson:
“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”
“A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.”
“Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?”
“Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.”
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
“Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.”
“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.”
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
“Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.”
“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”
“Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.”
“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
“What is easy is seldom excellent.”
“Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.”
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” Allen Ginsberg
7 October 1955 – Allen Ginsberg gives his first public reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The effect upon the audience was electric, and the poem was interpreted as a sharp rebuke to both unbridled American imperialism and pervasive socio-economic inequities in the United States. Its opening lines set the general tone of the work, which is a combination of outrage and awe, savagery and beauty:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .”
When “Howl” was published shortly after this reading, Ginsberg was arrested and tried for obscenity, though the articulate Judge Clayton W. Horn sensibly dismissed the charges and added, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”
Though he is generally regarded as the greatest and most innovative poet of the Beat Generation, a careful reading of “Howl” reveals that Allen Ginsberg was the spiritual and poetic heir of Walt Whitman, especially in the way that both men employed free verse forms to celebrate the self, champion individual liberty, and defend the cause of democracy in America against people and institutions that sought to undermine it. They also had in common a delight in the unabashedly erotic expressions of human life and a desire to investigate all manner of spiritual experiences. Finally, in much of their best poetry, both men admonished their fellow citizens to live up to the lofty ideals at the heart of their Great Republic.
At the close of “Part III” of “Howl,” his fury spent, Ginsberg addresses writer Carl Solomon, whom he had met in a psychiatric hospital and to whom the poem is dedicated, though the lines, which are among his loveliest lyrics, are also an implicit invitation to his readers:
“I’m with you:
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
Lovely lines, indeed, and a gentle summons to Americans, not just to read “Howl,” but to study and love their national literature, to study and love their nation’s history, beyond political cant, religious ideology, and corporate poltroonery, and thereby learn to respect and in some authentic and critical way, love themselves. Thank you, Allen Ginsberg
Congratulations to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who was today awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Academy said it recognized Transtromer “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” Here is Transtromer’s poem “Midwinter,” which is fairly typical of his bleak but elegant work:
“A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.”
Solomon Popli Linda (1909-1982), also known as Solomon Ntsele, was a South African Zulu musician, singer, and composer who wrote “Mbube,” which is better-known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Solomon first recorded the a cappella song with his group the Evening Birds in 1939 as “Wimoweh,” and, despite some claims to the contrary, he insisted that it was an original composition based on the traditional Zulu singing style.
Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds - 1941
There are 160 versions of Solomon’s song, including one by Miriam Makeba, but the most famous is “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” recorded by the Tokens in 1961 and which became a #1 hit. Solomon was paid just 10 shillings for recording his song, and though he eventually earned just over $8,000 in royalties, it is estimated that he should have been paid at least $15 million.
If your soul thirsts for beauty, that thirst will be slaked when you listen to Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds singing the original version of “Wimoweh”:
