APRIL 27 -- For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson



Emerson in 1857


Hello, readers ... I am the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ah, I see your eyes rolling up now.  "That old stuff-shirt" you groan. 

I have heard it all before ...

and from no less a luminary than Mark Twain in his mocking of Whittier, Wordsworth, and myself as we listened in 1877.

He left for Europe not long afterwards,  the critics howling for his blood.  I thought it mildly amusing, not insulting at all.


But Samuel McCord found my company tolerable aboard the Demeter in 1853. {RITES OF PASSAGE} 

But I digress:


On this day in 1882, I died at the age of seventy-eight.

Although my last decade was one of increasing debility it was also one of international accolade and local adulation.

 When the "Sage of Concord" as critics uncomfortably called me returned from my last trip abroad,

I found the band playing, the schoolchildren singing and my burned home rebuilt by the community. 

"…the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought."

—from my essay on “Self-Reliance” 

 

Speaking of Milton ...

 The epic status of Milton’s Paradise Lost can obscure the fact that, when published, it was a controversial and risky venture — so risky for the publisher that, on this day in 1667,

Milton signed a contract to receive only 5£ for his work (with an additional 5£ after the sale of 1,300 copies). 


I hear this strange book firm, Amazon, is much the same way.

Part of the controversy was over the anticipated religious outcry over the way Milton had portrayed this figure or that doctrine.

Ever the voice of liberty, Milton saw his epic as an attempt to deliver poetry from “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” 

Hart Crane is another who, in The Bridge, aimed for an epic.

 He is also another who struggled with addictions, and who jumped to his death, from a boat between Cuba and America on this day in 1932.

"Follow your arches to what corners of the sky
they pull you
Where marble clouds support the sea
Wreck of dreams." 

Oh, that wily Clemens thought to snare me with the challenge of selecting an author whose name begins with X. 

Hardly a feat for one with a classical education.  I choose Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and social and religious critic.

I even wrote a poem entitled, Xenophanes: 

"If oxen had hands, they would sculpt their gods to look like oxen."

"God is one eternal being, spherical in form, comprehending all things within himself, is intelligent,

and moves all things, but bears no resemblance to human nature either in body or mind."


Samuel McCord listens to this in the dark of Meilori's and mourns his lost love: 

Gentle readers, do your senses a favor and listen to this healing melody:

 

 

APRIL 26 -- FATE KEEPS HAPPENING

 

On this day in 1893 I, Anita Loos, was born.


Anita Loos and John Emerson
by Edward Steichen for VANITY FAIR (1928)

“I've always loved high style in low company.” - Anita Loos

So of course that rascal, Clemens, suggested I take over today's posting. 

So what dreary dross does he leave me to talk about?


In 1865 on this date,

John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, is surrounded by federal troops in a barn in Virginia.

He ends up dead, although there remains some doubt as to whether he took his own life.

And in dealing with the government, darlings, when there is doubt ... there is no doubt.

On this date in 1986, an explosion and fire at the No. 4 reactor of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

results in a nuclear meltdown sending radioactivity into the atmosphere.

And Russia is still making things "hot" for the Ukraine.  At least those boys are consistent!

I joke to blunt my memory of those poor souls who entered the Shadowlands from that terrible accident.

Let us have a moment of silence for those two brave volunteers who jumped into certain radioactive death to prevent an even worse disaster:

In 1989, a deadly tornado destroys all structures in an area of 2.3 sq mi in Saturia, Bangladesh

leaving 80,000 homeless and a reported death toll of 1,300.

And there is simply nothing funny about shattered lives and anguish no matter the distance from your front porch.


In 1982, Rod Stewart, that awful singer who must sandpaper his vocal chords every night,

was mugged in broad daylight in Central Park.  If you are wondering why I am smiling -- I was that broad.

Oh, who am I you ask? 


You darlings are just so wonderful for a dead girl's ego.  I started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in my teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films,


but my most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as "a masterpiece of comic literature."  (Even if I do the quoting myself!)

The family has always used the correct French pronunciation of our last name which is lohse.

 However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them ...

And watching them try to say it correctly made them look as if they were on the verge of a seizure! 

In his journal entry for this day in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a pleasant afternoon spent

with Henry David Thoreau, and a lesson learned:

"Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau.

At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say,

"Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience.

Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Niagara."



The two old dears were new friends at this point, Emerson’s nearby journal references to Thoreau just as delighted:

“My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity & clear perception.

How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing quacking world."


All I can say is that old Emerson must have been acquainted with the world of agents and Hollywood!


“It isn't that gentlemen really prefer blondes, it's just that we look dumber.”
― Anita Loos

Excuse me, Anita, my dear -- but I must interrupt.  I can brook no one else to be chosen for the letter W in authors.

Allow me to introduce myself, readers. 

I am the ghost of Oscar Wilde and the star of the 1895 Egyptian supernatural thriller: DEATH IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE.

"Is the story about me? If so, I will listen to it, for I am extremely fond of fiction."
 - Oscar Wilde

 

APRIL 25 -- FOR UNPUBLISHED WRITERS EVERYWHERE

 

"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 commenced 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 

APRIL 24 -- Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

 Hello, seekers of oddities ...

A 1766 portrait of Rousseau

 

I am Jean-Jacques Rousseau ... or rather his ghost

My friend, Samuel Clemens, is morose this day for on this date in 1066,

Halley's Comet appeared in the night sky over the English Channel and was seen as a harbinger of national disaster --

which it was as William the Conqueror defeated English forces at the Battle of Hastings and the rest, pun intended, was history.

Why is my friend, Samuel, morose over Halley's Comet?  His spirit is tied to that celestial object, but that is a tale for him to tell. 

On this date in 1800, President John Adams approved legislation to appropriate $5,000 to establish the Library of Congress. 

The first books were bought from Great Britain. 

And so like the British,

their troops promptly burned them when they burned down a great deal of Washington, D.C. in 1814. 

What Britain gives, it eventually takes away.

Ah, but to be sane in a world of mad men is in itself madness.


Take my friend, Oscar Wilde ...



On this day in 1891 his The Picture of Dorian Gray was published.

The novel caused an uproar for

 "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity,"

but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing ...

until the British in their hypocrisy imprisoned him for having loved too well if not too wisely.

Only in France could he find refuge. 

You might accept that a man of my sensibilities would roam the Library of Congress,

a brilliant witness to the alliance of literature and architecture against the transforming and destructive forces of time.

But I wager you will find it odd that I return again and again to the Bob Hope archive, anchored by a career file of some 85,000 jokes, many of these tied to the politics of the day.

“Kennedy looked a little nervous,” Hope quipped after one of the1960 presidential debates. “He’d never been allowed to stay up that late before.”

“If you criticize Gorbachev too much,” he warned during the last years of the Cold War, “you’re kaputski. Kaputski — it’s an Old Russian word meaning, ‘Siberia is lovely this time of year.’ ”

Many of Hope’s political jokes can resonate beyond their original era: “No one party can fool all of the people all of the time. That’s why we have two parties.”

On this date in 1908, Ralph DePalma made his debut in New York.  In 25 years of racing, he would win 2000 times, including the Indy 500.

 

But the Frenchman in me applauds most his pushing his car over the finish line in 1912 when,

while leading by five and half laps, his car broke down.  He may have lost but he won the hearts of every Frenchman who watched. 

The romantic in me weeps on this day, for on this date in 1942 Lucy Maud Montgomery died.

 Montgomery spent her first three decades in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, the place which she and her Anne of Green Gables books have made famous.

After almost three more decades in the Toronto area, she was buried back in Cavendish, though in town rather than in the sort of spot described in “A Request”:

"When I am dead
I would that ye make my bed
On that low-lying, windy waste by the sea,
   
Where murmurs creep
From the ancient heart of the deep,
Lulling me ever, I shall most sweetly sleep.
While the eerie sea-folk croon
On the long dim shore by the light
                                    of a waning moon…."

Fellow Frenchman, Gustave Flaubert, had his Three Tales published on this day in 1877.

It contains “A Simple Heart,” one of his most famous stories, especially since Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984).

Criticized by George Sand for his detached style,

Flaubert created the servant Félicité, whom he describes as “a poor country girl, pious but mystical, quietly devoted, and as tender as freshly baked bread.”

His aim, he said, was the furthest thing from irony: “I want to arouse people's pity, to make sensitive souls weep, since I am one myself.”


Well, I must depart. 

My friend, Samuel Clemens, and I intend to deflate the ever-growing ego of Winston Churchill ...

especially on this day when in 1953, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

The ghost of Bob Hope intends to join us.  Last year, he told Churchill:

“I'm surprised the Queen knighted you, Winny.  What with your ambition that's like asking Morris the Cat to watch your tuna salad."  

Are you wondering which author I will pick for the letter U?

A most erudite, under-appreciated one: Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov

He was also renowned as a filmmaker, theatre and opera director, stage designer, author, screenwriter, comedian, humorist, newspaper and magazine columnist.

A noted wit and raconteur, he was a fixture on lecture circuits for much of his career.

He was also a respected intellectual and diplomat who, in addition to his various academic posts, 

served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and President of the World Federalist Movement.

In 2003 Durham University changed the name of its Graduate Society to Ustinov College 

in honor of the significant contributions Ustinov had made as chancellor of the university from 1992 until his death.

“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.”
― Peter Ustinov

APRIL 23 -- YOU LIVING TAKE GREAT CARE

 

Self portrait, J W M Turner, oil on canvas, circa 1799

Ghost of Rupert Brooks here:

	Rupert Brooke

I died on this day in 1915, while serving in the British Navy on the Mediterranean during that War which was heralded as the war to end all wars. 

I do believe the history of the world is but the bloody path of one long war with only momentary pauses while everyone reloads.


My poetry is said to have either reflected or affected the mood of the British public between late 1914 and late 1915.


I was also - and often still am - criticized. For some, the 'idealism' of the war sonnets is actually

a jingoistic glorification of war, a carefree approach to death which ignored the carnage and brutality.

 Such comments usually date from later in the war, when the high death tolls and unpleasant nature of trench warfare became apparent,

events which I wasn't able to observe and adapt to. 

My critics would be surprised to discover that I agree with them.  I saw hollow-eyed spirits of my slain brothers tramp endlessly into the Shadowlands their souls broken --

And my conceit and heart broke with the sight.

So please, you living, take great care what you write, for your words will linger on after you in hollow accusation should they not be wise ones.



Twain in 1867

Ghost of Mark Twain, here --

Tarnation! Thank you there, Rupert, for stripping the silver lining from the clouds of today!

Feeling put upon, pilgrims, 'cause of your writing?  Take note of this: 

On this date in 1849 Fyodor Dostoyesvsky (try writing that last name with a few Bourbons in you, children)

was arrested with other members of the revolutionary Petrashevsky (I gotta stop drinking Bourbon a'fore I write these posts!)

He spent 8 months in prison and experienced a dramatic release when the group was lined up to be shot ...

then let go at the last minute.

{Seems Captain Sam had his Colt aimed at a certain important head at the time.}

Shakespeare is guessed to have been born on this day in 1564.

  No sure date is recorded.  But the caterwauling infant he was happened to be baptized three days earlier --

and 3 days after the birth was the customary time of dousing those poor young-uns in that time.

Old Shakes' plays are performed and read today more than ever before, seeing as how he managed to capture

the full range of human emotion and inner conflict with a perception that remains sharp to this very day.

So since he was born on this date and old Wordsworth checked out on the same date in 1850,

folks decided to celebrate WORLD BOOK DAY on this date as well. 

But for all the caterwauling about these poets above, I, myself, like the painting of J.M.W. Turner better even  though the old cuss will never tell me what J. M. W. stands for! --

 "…And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things…."

  - Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (William Wordsworth)
 

 A'wondering who I'll pick for T?

Well, now, I will not pull a Hemingway, and nominate myself!
 

Me and J.R.R. are friends here in the Shadowlands, so of course, I'm picking Tolkien.

He was a patriot during WWI -- but a smart one.  He delayed joining until he finished the last year of his studies.  Then, he joined.

In a letter to Edith, his wife, Tolkien complained, "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."

That's the way of it in war no matter what century I reckon.
 

 Tolkien was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the British Expeditionary Force, arriving in France on 4 June 1916.

His departure from England on a troop transport inspired him to write his poem, The Lonely Isle.

 He later wrote, "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then ... it was like a death."

Although Kitchener's army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together.

Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him, 'a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy:

especially the plain soldier from the 'agricultural counties.' 

He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time, he had been imprisoned in a tower, not of pearl, but of ivory.


"By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead," he once told me.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

APRIL 22 -- AN OUTLAW EVEN TO TIME

 

"Money is the fruit of evil as often as it is the root of it!"
 - Mark Twain

Ghost of Mark Twain here again:

In 1056 on this date, 

a supernova in the Crab Nebula fades from the sight of the naked eye and folks began predicting dire consequences --

and weathermen have been spinning tales ever since.

In 1616, brave Miguel de Cervantes died in Madrid on this date.


Not so brave Adolf Hitler sees Soviet forces close in Berlin on this date in 1945

and admits defeat to his inner circle, saying suicide is his only recourse ---

In Roland's GHOST OF A CHANCE you find out the truth of the matter. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534981861

Seeing as how I was a newspaper man for decades, I like Rebecca West's definition  of Journalism

she wrote in the New York Herald Tribune on this date in 1956:

"An ability to meet the challenge of filling the space." 

Old Vladimir Nabokov was born on this day in 1899

(or tomorrow, depending on how you heathens convert leap year days from the old to the modern Russian calendar).

Below, a passage from his memoir Speak, Memory:

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.

A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."


As for those of you wondering what author I would pick for the letter S:

1. An early draft of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men was eaten by his dog.

It was Max, one of several dogs Steinbeck owned during his life, who devoured the novel’s draft and so became, in effect, the book’s first critic.

Which is why I, Mark Twain, always preferred cats.  You never saw any of them eating my manuscripts! 

This is probably Steinbeck’s most famous novel, and draws on his own experiences as a ‘bindlestiff’ (or migratory worker) in the US in the 1920s.

The novel’s title famously comes from the Robert Burns poem ‘To a Mouse’:

‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley’ (or ‘go often awry’). 

2. He wrote one of the finest love letters in all of literature – a letter about falling in love.

In this letter of 1958, Steinbeck responds to a letter his son Thom had written to him.

Thom had told his father that he had fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan

(at this time, Thom was away at boarding school).

Steinbeck’s tone is supportive and honest throughout, taking his son’s feelings into account but also offering advice on ‘what to do about it’ –

surely what every teenager in the first pangs of a love affair wants to know. ‘

The object of love is the best and most beautiful,’ he tells Thom. ‘Try to live up to it.’

He ends the letter by assuring his son,

‘And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.’

You can read the letter in full here.

"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable."

-- John Steinbeck