APRIL 25 -- FOR UNPUBLISHED WRITERS EVERYWHERE

A young Ella Fitzgerald,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1940

 

"Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."

 - Ella Fitzgerald, born on this day in 1917.

 

 

Ghost of Mark Twain, here --

 

On this date in 795, old Pope Leo III was attacked in a procession in Rome. 

 

His attackers commensed to try to blind him and cut out his tongue.

 

And folks have been trying to blind and muzzle those who they disagree with ever since.


On this date in 1719, ROBINSON CRUSOE was published.

Though the book is Daniel Defoe's most well-known work, he actually didn't write fiction until he was in his sixties. 

So you struggling writers out there don't give up and experiment with other genres, don't you know?

The book is based on the experiences of a Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk.

 

The guillotine was first used on this date in 1792:

  The iconic method of execution in the French Revolution got its start a few years earlier with the execution of a highwayman named Nicolas J Pelletier.

  Eyewitness accounts report that the crowd at the execution was dissatisfied with the guillotine since they found it too "clinically effective," and therefore not entertaining enough.

But folks got their heads together and come up with Reality TV and most seem pleased with the results!



Now some folks used claymation to make a cartoon of my "THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER" in 1986.

I worked on the book periodically from roughly 1890 up until 1910.

The body of work is a serious social commentary, addressing my ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race."

This here cartoon was banned from TV.  And truth to tell, children, it rather creeps me out my own self!

Watch at your own peril ...



 

 

My first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, was published on this day in 1867.

 

 

In my autobiography, I tell of first trying to pitch the book to a New York publisher, and being laughed out the door.

 

 

Twenty-one years later, while on holiday in Switzerland, I bumped into the publisher again, who introduced himself hat-in-hand:

 

"I am substantially an obscure person but I have a couple of such colossal distinctions to my credit that I am entitled to immortality—to wit:

I refused a book of yours and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century."
 

 

It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so,

and said it was a long delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be devised;

 

that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken his life several times every year,

and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways,

 

but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again.




Thinking on what author to pick for V that's got the same sharp wit as me --

Oh, don't go glaring at me like that Gore!  When we go at one another, the sparks fly, don't you know?

I pick you, Gore -- Gore Vidal!




“The unfed mind devours itself.” 

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President.

One hopes it is the same half.” 


“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” ― Gore Vidal