Charles Bukowski  lonely as a dry and used orchard spread over the earth for use and surrender. shot down like an ex-pug selling dailies on the corner. taken by tears like an aging chorus girl who has gotten her last check. a hanky is in order your lord your worship. the blackbirds are rough today like ingrown toenails in an overnight jail--- wine wine whine, the blackbirds run around and fly around harping about Spanish melodies and bones. and everywhere is nowhere--- the dream is as bad as flapjacks and flat tires: why do we go on with our minds and pockets full of dust like a bad boy just out of school--- you tell me, you who were a hero in some revolution you who teach children you who drink with calmness you who own large homes and walk in gardens you who have killed a man and own a beautiful wife you tell me why I am on fire like old dry garbage. we might surely have some interesting correspondence. it will keep the mailman busy. and the butterflies and ants and bridges and cemeteries the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics will still go on a while until we run out of stamps and/or ideas. don't be ashamed of anything; I guess God meant it all like locks on doors. |
The Blackbirds are Rough Today (Charles Bukowski)
The Aliens (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep.
you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.
but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there
and I am
here
Charles Bukowski
you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep.
you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.
but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there
and I am
here
Sway With Me (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
sway with me, everything sad --
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers steaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things --
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shell
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
I need you
I need you:
it has run away
like a horse or a dog,
dead or lost
or unforgiving.
Charles Bukowski
sway with me, everything sad --
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers steaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things --
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shell
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
I need you
I need you:
it has run away
like a horse or a dog,
dead or lost
or unforgiving.
splash (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar's knife.
this is a tulip.
this is a soldier marching
through Madrid.
this is you on your
death bed.
this is Li Po laughing
underground.
this is not a god-damned
poem.
this is a horse asleep.
a butterfly in
your brain.
this is the devil's
circus.
you are not reading this
on a page.
the page is reading
you.
feel it?
it's like a cobra. it's a hungry eagle circling the room.
this is not a poem. poems are dull,
they make you sleep.
these words force you
to a new
madness.
you have been blessed, you have been pushed into a
blinding area of
light.
the elephant dreams
with you
now.
the curve of space
bends and
laughs.
you can die now.
you can die now as
people were meant to
die:
great,
victorious,
hearing the music,
being the music,
roaring,
roaring,
roaring.
Charles Bukowski
the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar's knife.
this is a tulip.
this is a soldier marching
through Madrid.
this is you on your
death bed.
this is Li Po laughing
underground.
this is not a god-damned
poem.
this is a horse asleep.
a butterfly in
your brain.
this is the devil's
circus.
you are not reading this
on a page.
the page is reading
you.
feel it?
it's like a cobra. it's a hungry eagle circling the room.
this is not a poem. poems are dull,
they make you sleep.
these words force you
to a new
madness.
you have been blessed, you have been pushed into a
blinding area of
light.
the elephant dreams
with you
now.
the curve of space
bends and
laughs.
you can die now.
you can die now as
people were meant to
die:
great,
victorious,
hearing the music,
being the music,
roaring,
roaring,
roaring.
Something For The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks, And You
.
Charles Bukowski
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you . . .
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it --
one
two
three
and then you've got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it's always early enough to die and
it's always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker over
5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
to dismiss the frost . . .
they tell you nothing at all.
we have everything and we have nothing --
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss -- worse than shit;
checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
up a road where a madman sits waiting among
bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey
grey.
good days too of wine and shouting, fights
in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
your bowels buried in moans,
the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering
Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground
telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves
that robbed you.
days when children say funny and brilliant things
like savages trying to send you a message through
their bodies while their bodies are still
alive enough to transmit and feel and run up
and down without locks and paychecks and
ideals and possessions and beetle-like
opinions.
days when you can cry all day long in
a green room with the door locked, days
when you can laugh at the breadman
because his legs are too long, days
of looking at hedges . . .
and nothing, and nothing, the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who'd kill you
because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good . . .
and nothing, getting your last paycheck
at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an
aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a
barbershop, at a job you didn't want
anyway.
income tax, sickness, servility, broken
arms, broken heads -- all the stuffing
come out like an old pillow.
we have everything and we have nothing.
some do it well enough for a while and
then give way. fame gets them or disgust
or age or lack of proper diet or ink
across the eyes or children in college
or new cars or broken backs while skiing
in Switzerland or new politics or new wives
or just natural change and decay --
the man you knew yesterday hooking
for ten rounds or drinking for three days and
three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross
or a stone or under an easy delusion,
or packing a bible or a golf bag or a
briefcase: how they go, how they go! -- all
the ones you thought would never go.
days like this. like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through to you. what do you see today?
what is it? where are you? the best
days are sometimes the first, sometimes
the middle and even sometimes the last.
the vacant lots are not bad, churches in
Europe on postcards are not bad. people in
wax museums frozen into their best sterility
are not bad, horrible but not bad. the
cannon, think of the cannon, and toast for
breakfast the coffee hot enough you
know your tongue is still there, three
geraniums outside a window, trying to be
red and trying to be pink and trying to be
geraniums, no wonder sometimes the women
cry, no wonder the mules don't want
to go up the hill. are you in a hotel room
in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more
good day. a little bit of it. and as
the nurses come out of the building after
their shift, having had enough, eight nurses
with different names and different places
to go -- walking across the lawn, some of them
want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a
hot bath, some of them want a man, some
of them are hardly thinking at all. enough
and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges
gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper.
in the most decent sometimes sun
there is the softsmoke feeling from urns
and the canned sound of old battleplanes
and if you go inside and run your finger
along the window ledge you'll find
dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window
there will be the day, and as you
get older you'll keep looking
keep looking
sucking your tongue in a little
ah ah no no maybe
some do it naturally
some obscenely
everywhere.
Charles Bukowski
we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you . . .
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it --
one
two
three
and then you've got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it's always early enough to die and
it's always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker over
5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
to dismiss the frost . . .
they tell you nothing at all.
we have everything and we have nothing --
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss -- worse than shit;
checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
up a road where a madman sits waiting among
bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey
grey.
good days too of wine and shouting, fights
in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
your bowels buried in moans,
the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering
Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground
telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves
that robbed you.
days when children say funny and brilliant things
like savages trying to send you a message through
their bodies while their bodies are still
alive enough to transmit and feel and run up
and down without locks and paychecks and
ideals and possessions and beetle-like
opinions.
days when you can cry all day long in
a green room with the door locked, days
when you can laugh at the breadman
because his legs are too long, days
of looking at hedges . . .
and nothing, and nothing, the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who'd kill you
because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good . . .
and nothing, getting your last paycheck
at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an
aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a
barbershop, at a job you didn't want
anyway.
income tax, sickness, servility, broken
arms, broken heads -- all the stuffing
come out like an old pillow.
we have everything and we have nothing.
some do it well enough for a while and
then give way. fame gets them or disgust
or age or lack of proper diet or ink
across the eyes or children in college
or new cars or broken backs while skiing
in Switzerland or new politics or new wives
or just natural change and decay --
the man you knew yesterday hooking
for ten rounds or drinking for three days and
three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross
or a stone or under an easy delusion,
or packing a bible or a golf bag or a
briefcase: how they go, how they go! -- all
the ones you thought would never go.
days like this. like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through to you. what do you see today?
what is it? where are you? the best
days are sometimes the first, sometimes
the middle and even sometimes the last.
the vacant lots are not bad, churches in
Europe on postcards are not bad. people in
wax museums frozen into their best sterility
are not bad, horrible but not bad. the
cannon, think of the cannon, and toast for
breakfast the coffee hot enough you
know your tongue is still there, three
geraniums outside a window, trying to be
red and trying to be pink and trying to be
geraniums, no wonder sometimes the women
cry, no wonder the mules don't want
to go up the hill. are you in a hotel room
in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more
good day. a little bit of it. and as
the nurses come out of the building after
their shift, having had enough, eight nurses
with different names and different places
to go -- walking across the lawn, some of them
want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a
hot bath, some of them want a man, some
of them are hardly thinking at all. enough
and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges
gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper.
in the most decent sometimes sun
there is the softsmoke feeling from urns
and the canned sound of old battleplanes
and if you go inside and run your finger
along the window ledge you'll find
dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window
there will be the day, and as you
get older you'll keep looking
keep looking
sucking your tongue in a little
ah ah no no maybe
some do it naturally
some obscenely
everywhere.
Some People (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
some people never go crazy.
me, sometimes I'll lie down behind the couch
for 3 or 4 days.
they'll find me there.
it's Cherub, they'll say, and
they pour wine down my throat
rub my chest
sprinkle me with oils.
then, I'll rise with a roar,
rant, rage -
curse them and the universe
as I send them scattering over the
lawn.
I'll feel much better,
sit down to toast and eggs,
hum a little tune,
suddenly become as lovable as a
pink
overfed whale.
some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must lead.
Charles Bukowski
some people never go crazy.
me, sometimes I'll lie down behind the couch
for 3 or 4 days.
they'll find me there.
it's Cherub, they'll say, and
they pour wine down my throat
rub my chest
sprinkle me with oils.
then, I'll rise with a roar,
rant, rage -
curse them and the universe
as I send them scattering over the
lawn.
I'll feel much better,
sit down to toast and eggs,
hum a little tune,
suddenly become as lovable as a
pink
overfed whale.
some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must lead.
So Now? (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die.
I wish I could ring in some bravery.
it's a lousy fix
but the tree outside doesn't know:
I watch it moving with the wind
in the late afternoon sun.
there's nothing to declare here,
just a waiting.
each faces it alone.
Oh, I was once young,
Oh, I was once unbelievably
young!
Charles Bukowski
the words have come and gone,
I sit ill.
the phone rings, the cats sleep.
Linda vacuums.
I am waiting to live,
waiting to die.
I wish I could ring in some bravery.
it's a lousy fix
but the tree outside doesn't know:
I watch it moving with the wind
in the late afternoon sun.
there's nothing to declare here,
just a waiting.
each faces it alone.
Oh, I was once young,
Oh, I was once unbelievably
young!
small conversation in the afternoon with John Fante
.
Charles Bukowski
he said, "I was working in Hollywood when Faulkner was
working in Hollywood and he was
the worst: he was too drunk to stand up at the
end of the afternoon and so I had to help him
into a taxi
day after day after day.
"but when he left Hollywood, I stayed on, and while I
didn't drink like that maybe I should have, I might have
had the guts then to follow him and get the hell out of
there."
I told him, "you write as well as
Faulkner.:
"you mean that?" he asked from the hospital
bed, smiling.
Charles Bukowski
he said, "I was working in Hollywood when Faulkner was
working in Hollywood and he was
the worst: he was too drunk to stand up at the
end of the afternoon and so I had to help him
into a taxi
day after day after day.
"but when he left Hollywood, I stayed on, and while I
didn't drink like that maybe I should have, I might have
had the guts then to follow him and get the hell out of
there."
I told him, "you write as well as
Faulkner.:
"you mean that?" he asked from the hospital
bed, smiling.
Sleep (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
she was a short one
getting fat and she had once been
beautiful and
she drank the wine
she drank the wine in bed and
talked and screamed and cursed at
me
and i told her
Charles Bukowski
she was a short one
getting fat and she had once been
beautiful and
she drank the wine
she drank the wine in bed and
talked and screamed and cursed at
me
and i told her
Show Biz (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
I can't have it
and you can't have it
and we won't
get it
so don't bet on it
or even think about
it
just get out of bed
each morning
wash
shave
clothe
yourself
and go out into
it
because
outside of that
all that's left is
suicide and
madness
so you just
can't
expect too much
you can't even
expect
so what you do
is
work from a modest
minimal
base
like when you
walk outside
be glad your car
might possibly
be there
and if it is-
that the tires
aren't
flat
then you get
in
and if it
starts--you
start.
and
it's the damndest
movie
you've ever
seen
because
you're
in it--
low budget
and
4 billion
critics
and the longest
run
you ever hope
for
is
one
day.
Charles Bukowski
I can't have it
and you can't have it
and we won't
get it
so don't bet on it
or even think about
it
just get out of bed
each morning
wash
shave
clothe
yourself
and go out into
it
because
outside of that
all that's left is
suicide and
madness
so you just
can't
expect too much
you can't even
expect
so what you do
is
work from a modest
minimal
base
like when you
walk outside
be glad your car
might possibly
be there
and if it is-
that the tires
aren't
flat
then you get
in
and if it
starts--you
start.
and
it's the damndest
movie
you've ever
seen
because
you're
in it--
low budget
and
4 billion
critics
and the longest
run
you ever hope
for
is
one
day.
Short Order (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
I took my girlfriend to your last poetry reading,
she said.
yes, yes? I asked.
she's young and pretty, she said.
and? I asked.
she hated your
guts.
then she stretched out on the couch
and pulled off her
boots.
I don't have very good legs,
she said.
all right, I thought, I don't have very good
poetry; she doesn't have very good
legs.
Charles Bukowski
I took my girlfriend to your last poetry reading,
she said.
yes, yes? I asked.
she's young and pretty, she said.
and? I asked.
she hated your
guts.
then she stretched out on the couch
and pulled off her
boots.
I don't have very good legs,
she said.
all right, I thought, I don't have very good
poetry; she doesn't have very good
legs.
Shoes (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
when you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.
Charles Bukowski
when you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.
Rhyming poem (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
the goldfish sing all night with guitars,
and the whores go down with the stars,
the whores go down with the stars
I'm sorry, sir, we close at 4: 30,
besides yr mother's neck is dirty,
and the whores go down with the etc.,
the whrs. go dn. with the etc.
I'm sorry jack you can't come back,
I've fallen in love with another sap,
3/4 Italian and 1/2 Jap,
and the whores go
the whores go
etc.
Charles Bukowski
the goldfish sing all night with guitars,
and the whores go down with the stars,
the whores go down with the stars
I'm sorry, sir, we close at 4: 30,
besides yr mother's neck is dirty,
and the whores go down with the etc.,
the whrs. go dn. with the etc.
I'm sorry jack you can't come back,
I've fallen in love with another sap,
3/4 Italian and 1/2 Jap,
and the whores go
the whores go
etc.
Revolt In The Ranks (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
I have just spent one-hour-and-a-half
handicapping tomorrow's
card.
when am I going to get at the poems?
well, they'll just have to wait
they'll have to warm their feet in the
anteroom
where they'll sit gossiping about
me.
"this Chinaski, doesn't he realize that
without us he would have long ago
gone mad, been dead?"
"he knows, but he thinks he can keep
us at his beck and call!"
"he's an ingrate!"
"let's give him writer's block!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
the little poems kick up their heels
and laugh.
then the biggest one gets up and
walks toward the door.
"hey, where are you going?" he is
asked.
"somewhere where I am
appreciated."
then, he
and the others
vanish.
Charles Bukowski
I have just spent one-hour-and-a-half
handicapping tomorrow's
card.
when am I going to get at the poems?
well, they'll just have to wait
they'll have to warm their feet in the
anteroom
where they'll sit gossiping about
me.
"this Chinaski, doesn't he realize that
without us he would have long ago
gone mad, been dead?"
"he knows, but he thinks he can keep
us at his beck and call!"
"he's an ingrate!"
"let's give him writer's block!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
"yeah!"
the little poems kick up their heels
and laugh.
then the biggest one gets up and
walks toward the door.
"hey, where are you going?" he is
asked.
"somewhere where I am
appreciated."
then, he
and the others
vanish.
Raw With Love (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won't flinch and
I won't blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
I won't blame you,
instead
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and I won't use it
yet.
Charles Bukowski
little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won't flinch and
I won't blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
I won't blame you,
instead
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and I won't use it
yet.
Rain Or Shine (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
the vultures at the zoo
(all three of them)
sit very quietly in their
caged tree
and below
on the ground
are chunks of rotten meat.
the vultures are over-full.
our taxes have fed them
well.
we move on to the next
cage.
a man is in there
sitting on the ground
eating
his own shit.
i recognize him as
our former mailman.
his favorite expression
had been:
"have a beautiful day."
that day i did.
Charles Bukowski
the vultures at the zoo
(all three of them)
sit very quietly in their
caged tree
and below
on the ground
are chunks of rotten meat.
the vultures are over-full.
our taxes have fed them
well.
we move on to the next
cage.
a man is in there
sitting on the ground
eating
his own shit.
i recognize him as
our former mailman.
his favorite expression
had been:
"have a beautiful day."
that day i did.
Question And Answer (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.
Charles Bukowski
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.
Pull A String, A Puppet Moves (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand -
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ...
Charles Bukowski
each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand -
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ...
Poem For My 43rd Birthday (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
To end up alone
in a tomb of a room
without cigarettes
or wine--
just a lightbulb
and a potbelly,
grayhaired,
and glad to have
the room.
Charles Bukowski
To end up alone
in a tomb of a room
without cigarettes
or wine--
just a lightbulb
and a potbelly,
grayhaired,
and glad to have
the room.
Paris (Charles Bukowski) 1920 - 1994
.
Charles Bukowski
never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that
city
wearing a
beret
and
Camus
always
pissed
me
off.
Charles Bukowski
never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that
city
wearing a
beret
and
Camus
always
pissed
me
off.
One thirty-six a.m. (Charles Bukowski)
.
Charles Bukowski
I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.
Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.
Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won't have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it's those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.
Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn't know what a writer's block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.
and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.
he's not alone tonight
and neither am
I.
Charles Bukowski
I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.
Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.
Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won't have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it's those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.
Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn't know what a writer's block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.
and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.
he's not alone tonight
and neither am
I.
On Going Back To The Street After Viewing An Art Show
.
Charles Bukowski
They talk down through
the centuries to us,
and this we need more and more,
the statues and paintings
in midnight age
as we go along
holding dead hands.
And we would say
rather than delude the knowing:
a damn good show,
but hardly enough for a horse to eat,
and out on the sunshine street where
eyes are dabbled in metazoan faces
i decide again
that in theses centuries
they have done very well
considering the nature of their
brothers:
it's more than good
that some of them,
(closer really to the field-mouse than
falcon)
have been bold enough to try.
Charles Bukowski
They talk down through
the centuries to us,
and this we need more and more,
the statues and paintings
in midnight age
as we go along
holding dead hands.
And we would say
rather than delude the knowing:
a damn good show,
but hardly enough for a horse to eat,
and out on the sunshine street where
eyes are dabbled in metazoan faces
i decide again
that in theses centuries
they have done very well
considering the nature of their
brothers:
it's more than good
that some of them,
(closer really to the field-mouse than
falcon)
have been bold enough to try.
Oh Yes (Charles Bukowski) 1920 - 1994
.
Charles Bukowski
There are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.
Charles Bukowski
There are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.
Now (Charles Bukowski) 1920 - 1994
.
Charles Bukowski
I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word.
Charles Bukowski
I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word.
James Thurber Biography [U.S. writer and cartoonist] 1894–1961
Short Brief of full name James Grover Thurber: (born Dec. 8, 1894, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.—died Nov. 2, 1961, New York, N.Y.) U.S. writer and cartoonist. He attended Ohio State University before moving to New York City in 1926. He was on The New Yorker staff from 1927 to 1933 and thereafter remained a leading contributor. His drawings illustrated his first book, Is Sex Necessary? (1929; with E.B. White), and his cartoons became some of the most popular and recognizable in America. In 1940 his failing eyesight forced him to curtail his drawing; by 1952 he had to give it up altogether as his blindness became nearly total. His writings include My Life and Hard Times (1933), Fables for Our Time (1940), and the children's book The 13 Clocks (1950). He is noted for his vision of the befuddled urban man who, like the hero of his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1939; film, 1946), escapes into fantasy.
George Bernard Shaw Biography [Irish comic dramatist, literary] 1876 - 1950
Short Story: (born July 26, 1856, Dublin, Ireland—died November 2, 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England) Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
Early life and career
George Bernard Shaw was the third and youngest child (and only son) of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. Technically, he belonged to the Protestant “ascendancy”—the landed Irish gentry—but his impractical father was first a sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant, and George Bernard grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, which to him was more humiliating than being merely poor. At first tutored by a clerical uncle, Shaw basically rejected the schools he then attended, and by age 16 he was working in a land agent's office.
Shaw developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature as a result of his mother's influence and his visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. In 1872 his mother left her husband and took her two daughters to London, following her music teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, who from 1866 had shared households in Dublin with the Shaws. In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer, and he joined his mother and elder sister (the younger one having died) in London. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. He depended upon his mother's pound a week from her husband and her earnings as a music teacher. He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room, writing novels and reading what he had missed at school, and his evenings in search of additional self-education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities.
His fiction failed utterly. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled Immaturity (1879; published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. His next four novels were similarly refused, as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. Shaw's initial literary work earned him less than 10 shillings a year. A fragment posthumously published as An Unfinished Novel in 1958 (but written 1887–88) was his final false start in fiction.
Despite his failure as a novelist in the 1880s, Shaw found himself during this decade. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist, and tentatively a playwright. He became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society not through revolution but through “permeation” (in Sidney Webb's term) of the country's intellectual and political life. Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he also contributed two sections.
Eventually, in 1885 the drama critic William Archer found Shaw steady journalistic work. His early journalism ranged from book reviews in the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88) and art criticism in the World (1886–89) to brilliant musical columns in the Star (as “Corno di Bassetto”—basset horn) from 1888 to 1890 and in the World (as “G.B.S.”) from 1890 to 1894. Shaw had a good understanding of music, particularly opera, and he supplemented his knowledge with a brilliance of digression that gives many of his notices a permanent appeal. But Shaw truly began to make his mark when he was recruited by Frank Harris to the Saturday Review as theatre critic (1895–98); in that position he used all his wit and polemical powers in a campaign to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas. He also began writing his own plays.
First plays
When Shaw began writing for the English stage, its most prominent dramatists were Sir A.W. Pinero and H.A. Jones. Both men were trying to develop a modern realistic drama, but neither had the power to break away from the type of artificial plots and conventional character types expected by theatregoers. The poverty of this sort of drama had become apparent with the introduction of several of Henrik Ibsen's plays onto the London stage around 1890, when A Doll's House was played in London; his Ghosts followed in 1891, and the possibility of a new freedom and seriousness on the English stage was introduced. Shaw, who was about to publish The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), rapidly refurbished an abortive comedy, Widowers' Houses, as a play recognizably “Ibsenite” in tone, making it turn on the notorious scandal of slum landlordism in London. The result (performed 1892) flouted the threadbare romantic conventions that were still being exploited even by the most daring new playwrights. In the play a well-intentioned young Englishman falls in love and then discovers that his prospective father-in-law's fortune and his own private income derive from exploitation of the poor. Potentially this is a tragic situation, but Shaw seems to have been always determined to avoid tragedy. The unamiable lovers do not attract sympathy; it is the social evil and not the romantic predicament on which attention is concentrated, and the action is kept well within the key of ironic comedy.
The same dramatic predispositions control Mrs. Warren's Profession, written in 1893 but not performed until 1902 because the lord chamberlain, the censor of plays, refused it a license. Its subject is organized prostitution, and its action turns on the discovery by a well-educated young woman that her mother has graduated through the “profession” to become a part-proprietor of brothels throughout Europe. Again, the economic determinants of the situation are emphasized, and the subject is treated remorselessly and without the titillation of fashionable comedies about “fallen women.” As with many of Shaw's works, the play is, within limits, a drama of ideas, but the vehicle by which these are presented is essentially one of high comedy.
Shaw called these first plays “unpleasant,” because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.” He followed them with four “pleasant” plays in an effort to find the producers and audiences that his mordant comedies had offended. Both groups of plays were revised and published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). The first of the second group, Arms and the Man (performed 1894), has a Balkan setting and makes lighthearted, though sometimes mordant, fun of romantic falsifications of both love and warfare. The second, Candida (performed 1897), was important for English theatrical history, for its successful production at the Royal Court Theatre in 1904 encouraged Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne to form a partnership that resulted in a series of brilliant productions there. The play represents its heroine as forced to choose between her clerical husband—a worthy but obtuse Christian socialist—and a young poet who has fallen wildly in love with her. She chooses her confident-seeming husband because she discerns that he is actually the weaker. The poet is immature and hysterical but, as an artist, has a capacity to renounce personal happiness in the interest of some large creative purpose. This is a significant theme for Shaw; it leads on to that of the conflict between man as spiritual creator and woman as guardian of the biological continuity of the human race that is basic to Man and Superman. In Candida such speculative issues are only lightly touched on, and this is true also of You Never Can Tell (performed 1899), in which the hero and heroine, who believe themselves to be respectively an accomplished amorist and an utterly rational and emancipated woman, find themselves in the grip of a vital force that takes little account of these notions.
The strain of writing these plays, while his critical and political work went on unabated, so sapped Shaw's strength that a minor illness became a major one. In 1898, during the process of recuperation, he married his unofficial nurse, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and friend of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The apparently celibate marriage lasted all their lives, Shaw satisfying his emotional needs in paper-passion correspondences with Ellen Terry, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and others.
Shaw's next collection of plays, Three Plays for Puritans (1901), continued what became the traditional Shavian preface—an introductory essay in an electric prose style dealing as much with the themes suggested by the plays as the plays themselves. The Devil's Disciple (performed 1897) is a play set in New Hampshire during the American Revolution and is an inversion of traditional melodrama. Caesar and Cleopatra (performed 1901) is Shaw's first great play. In the play Cleopatra is a spoiled and vicious 16-year-old child rather than the 38-year-old temptress of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The play depicts Caesar as a lonely and austere man who is as much a philosopher as he is a soldier. The play's outstanding success rests upon its treatment of Caesar as a credible study in magnanimity and “original morality” rather than as a superhuman hero on a stage pedestal. The third play, Captain Brassbound's Conversion (performed 1900), is a sermon against various kinds of folly masquerading as duty and justice.
International importance
In Man and Superman (performed 1905) Shaw expounded his philosophy that humanity is the latest stage in a purposeful and eternal evolutionary movement of the “life force” toward ever-higher life forms. The play's hero, Jack Tanner, is bent on pursuing his own spiritual development in accordance with this philosophy as he flees the determined marital pursuit of the heroine, Ann Whitefield. In the end Jack ruefully allows himself to be captured in marriage by Ann upon recognizing that she herself is a powerful instrument of the “life force,” since the continuation and thus the destiny of the human race lies ultimately in her and other women's reproductive capacity. The play's nonrealistic third act, the “Don Juan in Hell” dream scene, is spoken theatre at its most operatic and is often performed independently as a separate piece.
Shaw had already become established as a major playwright on the Continent by the performance of his plays there, but, curiously, his reputation lagged in England. It was only with the production of John Bull's Other Island (performed 1904) in London, with a special performance for Edward VII, that Shaw's stage reputation was belatedly made in England.
Shaw continued, through high comedy, to explore religious consciousness and to point out society's complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara (performed 1905), Shaw has his heroine, a major in the Salvation Army, discover that her estranged father, a munitions manufacturer, may be a dealer in death but that his principles and practice, however unorthodox, are religious in the highest sense, while those of the Salvation Army require the hypocrisies of often-false public confession and the donations of the distillers and the armourers against which it inveighs. In The Doctor's Dilemma (performed 1906), Shaw produced a satire upon the medical profession (representing the self-protection of professions in general) and upon both the artistic temperament and the public's inability to separate it from the artist's achievement. In Androcles and the Lion (performed 1912), Shaw dealt with true and false religious exaltation in a philosophical play about early Christianity. Its central theme, examined through a group of early Christians condemned to the arena, is that one must have something worth dying for—an end outside oneself—in order to make life worth living.
Possibly Shaw's comedic masterpiece, and certainly his funniest and most popular play, is Pygmalion (performed 1913). It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system. The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment's success. The scene in which Eliza Doolittle appears in high society when she has acquired a correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is one of the funniest in English drama. Pygmalion has been both filmed (1938), winning an Academy Award for Shaw for his screenplay, and adapted into an immensely popular musical, My Fair Lady (1956; motion-picture version, 1964).
Works after World War I
World War I was a watershed for Shaw. At first he ceased writing plays, publishing instead a controversial pamphlet, “Common Sense About the War,” which called Great Britain and its Allies equally culpable with the Germans and argued for negotiation and peace. His antiwar speeches made him notorious and the target of much criticism. In Heartbreak House (performed 1920), Shaw exposed, in a country-house setting on the eve of war, the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the war's bloodshed. Attempting to keep from falling into “the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism,” Shaw wrote five linked plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1922). They expound his philosophy of creative evolution in an extended dramatic parable that progresses through time from the Garden of Eden to 31,920.
The canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920 reawakened within Shaw ideas for a chronicle play about her. In the resulting masterpiece, Saint Joan (performed 1923), the Maid is treated not only as a Catholic saint and martyr but as a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Joan, as the superior being “crushed between those mighty forces, the Church and the Law,” is the personification of the tragic heroine; her death embodies the paradox that humankind fears—and often kills—its saints and heroes and will go on doing so until the very higher moral qualities it fears become the general condition of man through a process of evolutionary change. Acclaim for Saint Joan led to the awarding of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature to Shaw (he refused the award).
In his later plays Shaw intensified his explorations into tragicomic and nonrealistic symbolism. For the next five years, he wrote nothing for the theatre but worked on his collected edition of 1930–38 and the encyclopaedic political tract “The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism” (1928). Then he produced The Apple Cart (performed 1929), a futuristic high comedy that emphasized Shaw's inner conflicts between his lifetime of radical politics and his essentially conservative mistrust of the common man's ability to govern himself. Shaw's later, minor plays included Too True to Be Good (performed 1932), On The Rocks (performed 1933), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (performed 1935), Geneva (performed 1938), and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). After a wartime hiatus, Shaw, then in his 90s, produced several more plays, including Farfetched Fables (performed 1950), Shakes Versus Shav (performed 1949), and Why She Would Not (1956), which is a fantasy with only flashes of the earlier Shaw.
Impudent, irreverent, and always a showman, Shaw used his buoyant wit to keep himself in the public eye to the end of his 94 years; his wiry figure, bristling beard, and dandyish cane were as well-known throughout the world as his plays. When his wife, Charlotte, died of a lingering illness in 1943, in the midst of World War II, Shaw, frail and feeling the effects of wartime privations, made permanent his retreat from his London apartment to his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence, a Hertfordshire village in which he had lived since 1906. He died there in 1950.
George Bernard Shaw was not merely the best comic dramatist of his time but also one of the most significant playwrights in the English language since the 17th century. Some of his greatest works for the stage—Caesar and Cleopatra, the “Don Juan in Hell” episode of Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan—have a high seriousness and prose beauty that were unmatched by his stage contemporaries. His development of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate, his revivifying the comedy of manners, his ventures into symbolic farce and into a theatre of disbelief helped shape the theatre of his time and after. A visionary and mystic whose philosophy of moral passion permeates his plays, Shaw was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift; the most readable music critic in English; the best theatre critic of his generation; a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects; and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature. By bringing a bold critical intelligence to his many other areas of interest, he helped mold the political, economic, and sociological thought of three generations.
Annie Oakley Biography [Sharpshooter, entertainer] 1860–1926
A short Story of original name Phoebe Anne Moses: Sharpshooter, entertainer. Born on August 13, 1860, in Darke County, Ohio. Annie Oakley is remembered as one of the leading women of the American West, especially known for her talent with a gun. She originally began shooting as a means of helping out her family. This skill turned out to be quite lucrative—she earned more than she could have imagined performing shooting tricks. After beating him in a shooting competition, Annie Oakley married Frank E. Butler, a top shooter and vaudeville performer. The couple started working together with Butler assisting Oakley with her stunning displays of marksmanship.
Annie Oakley became one of the top acts in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885. The couple toured with the show for years, and audiences were wowed by her abilities. She could shoot the ashes off a cigarette and punch a hole in a playing card. Oakley even entertained such royals as Queen Victoria and Kraiser Wilhelm II—and shot a cigarette out of his mouth. Not even a railroad accident in 1901 could slow her down for long. Despite being partially paralyzed, Oakley kept on delighting crowds with her tricks.
After retiring with her husband in the 1910s, Annie Oakley stepped out of the spotlight and pursued such hobbies as hunting and fishing. She died on November 2, 1926. The news of her death saddened the nation and brought forth a wave of tributes. Part of her lasting legacy is the Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946) based on her life story.
Nickolas Muray Biography [Photographer, fencer] 1892–1965
A Short Biography: Photographer, fencer. Born in Zseged, Hungary, on February 15, 1892. A talented photographer, Nickolas Muray is known for his commercial images and for his numerous portraits, of some of the twentieth century’s best-known performers on the stage and screen such as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Fred Astaire. He was also a championship-winning fencer who played on the U.S. team at the 1928 and 1932 Olympic Games. The son of a postal worker, Muray studied sculpture for a time before leaving school to go to work as an engraver.
After spending a few years in Germany, Muray moved to the United States in 1913, knowing about 50 words of English and carrying an International Engravers Certificate. He settled in New York City, finding work as a color separator and engraver for a Brooklyn company. In his own time, Muray began to study photography. Using a shared studio in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, he started to build his own photography business. Landing his first big break, Muray sold a portrait of actress Florence Reed to Harper’s Bazaar in 1920.
Nearly overnight, Muray became an in-demand celebrity photographer, handling assignments from many leading publications. In 1926, Vanity Fair sent him to Europe to photograph the likes of artist Claude Monet and writer George Bernard Shaw. Muray also captured many other famous faces for other projects, ranging from dancer and choreographer Martha Graham to Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, F.D.R. and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Working with public relations manager Edward L. Bernays, he created many iconic commercial images for Bernays' clients, such as Lucky Strike cigarettes. In 1930, he was given a contract with the publishing company behind the Ladies Home Journal, which resulted in his creation of the first natural color commercial photograph to appear in a U.S. magazine the following year.
Around this time, Muray met Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The two developed an on- and off-again relationship that spanned a decade. It outlasted his third marriage to Monica O’Shea, whom he married in 1930. In 1937, Monica divorced Muray on the grounds of cruelty according to a report in The New York Times.
During most of their relationship, Kahlo was married to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera who also had a number of extramarital affairs. When Kahlo divorced Rivera in 1939, Muray hoped that he would be able to marry her. Those hopes were soon dashed—she remarried Rivera the following year. Despite his disappointment, Muray remained on friendly terms with Kahlo. He took numerous portraits and photographs of Kahlo over years, some of which used the Carbro technique, a type of carbon pigment process for making color prints which he perfected.
During his career, Muray took more than 10,000 portraits and did countless commercial photography projects. He worked on advertisements for such companies as General Electric, Sara Lee, American Cyanamid, and Kraft.
In addition to photography, Muray excelled at the sport of fencing. Legend has it that he and artist Jacques La Salle were supposed to fight a duel with rapiers in 1920. On the day of the duel, the two met at the same site where Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr in a similar challenge. In this case, however, their alternates decided against bringing the necessary weapons for the duel, and the artists settled their conflict without any violence, according to The New York Times. While that match never happened, Muray was triumphant in numerous other fencing bouts. He was the U.S. saber champion from 1927-1928. In 1928, Muray competed at the Summer Olympic Games as part of the U.S. fencing team. He made the team again for the 1932 Olympics, which brought home the bronze medal in the team competitions in foil and épée events.
For the rest of his life, Muray remained active in the sport. He died on November 2, 1965, after collapsing during a fencing match at the New York Athletic Club. He was survived by his fourth wife, Margaret Schwab Muray, and their two children, Nicholas Christopher and Mimi.
In 1988, his daughter Mimi donated some of his papers to the Archive of American Art. His work is also part of the photography collection of the George Eastman House. Today, interest in his images remains strong. His portraits of Frida Kahlo are currently being featured in a traveling exhibit. A book published in 2004, titled "I Will Never Forget You...: Frida Kahlo to Nickolas Muray" by Saloman Grimberg, details their friendship from 1931 to Kahlo's death in 1954. It also serves as a catalog to the exhibition, and is the most thorough reference book to date on Muray's life.
Muray's work has served as inspiration for many later artists, such as Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, and Annie Leibovitz. With his own unique style and innovative techniques, Muray has earned his place in the history of photography.
Paul Tibbets [pilot, B-29 that dropped the first atomic weapon used in war] 1915–2007
Biography: Paul Tibbets, pilot and commander of the B-29 that dropped the first atomic weapon used in war, died Thursday (November 1, 2007 ) at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.
Tibbetts was at the controls of the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945 , when the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Tens of thousands of people were instantly killed. Japan surrendered nine days later, ending World War II.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. was born February 23, 1915 , in Quincy, Illinois, the son of Enola Gay and Paul Warfield Tibbets. He was raised in Cedar Rapids , Iowa, where his father was a confections wholesaler.
In 1927, the family moved to Florida. He attended the University of Florida in Gainesville and was an initiated member of the Epsilon Zeta Chapter of Sigma Nu Fraternity in 1934. His parents had wanted him to become a doctor, but he was determined to fly.
In 1937, Tibbets enlisted as a flying cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps at Fort Thomas , Kentucky . He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1938 and received his wings at Kelly Air Force Base in Kelly Field, Texas.
During World War II, Tibbets was named commanding officer of the 340th Bomb Squadron, 97th Heavy Bomb Group flying B-17 Flying Fortresses. He flew more than 25 combat missions over occupied Europe and led the first bombardment missions in support of the North African invasion in Algeria.
Tibbetts returned to the U.S. in March 1943 to test the combat capability of Boeing's new B-29 Super Fortress. In September 1944, he was placed in command of the newly form 509th Composite Group, whose mission was to drop the atomic bomb. He chose Wendover Air Base in Utah for the training.
In March 1945, the 509th moved overseas to Tinian Island in the Marianas chain. On the afternoon of August 5, 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman gave his approval to use the weapons against Japan. At 2:45 a.m. on August 6, the Enola Gay, named after Tibbetts's mother, and its crew of 14 lifted off North Field en route to Hiroshima.
At exactly 8:15:15 a.m. the world's first atomic bomb exploded. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and wounded countless others. The course of history and the nature of warfare was changed forever. When the Enola Gay and her crew landed at Tinian at 2:58 p.m., they were greeted by General Carl Spaatz, a large contingent of brass, and a crowd of GIs. Spaatz decorated Tibbets with the Distinguished Service Cross and the other crew members with Air Medals.
Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The Japanese surrendered six days later, ending World War II.
The film Above and Beyond (1952) depicted the World War II events involving Tibbets, with Robert Taylor starring as Tibbets and Eleanor Parker as his first wife, Lucy. An interview of Paul Tibbets can be seen in the 1982 movie Atomic Cafe. He was also interviewed in the 1970s for the British documentary series The World at War. Tibbets never expressed regret over his role.
In 1959, Col. Tibbets was promoted to Brigadier General. He retired from the U.S. Air Force on August 31, 1966 .
In the 1960s, Tibbets was posted as military attaché in India, but this posting was rescinded after all political parties in India protested his presence. In 1976, he and his wife, Andrea, moved to Columbus, where he was president of Executive Jet Aviation, an air taxi company, until he retired in 1985.
Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend.
Ezra Pound Biography [American poet and critic] 1885–1972
A Short Story Of full Ezra Loomis Pound: (born Oct. 30, 1885, Hailey, Idaho, U.S.—died Nov. 1, 1972, Venice, Italy) American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and confinement until 1958.
Early life and career
Pound was born in a small mining town in Idaho, the only child of a Federal Land Office official, Homer Loomis Pound of Wisconsin, and Isabel Weston of New York City. About 1887 the family moved to the eastern states, and in June 1889, following Homer Pound's appointment to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, they settled in nearby Wyncote, where Pound lived a normal middle-class childhood.
After two years at Cheltenham Military Academy, which he left without graduating, he attended a local high school. From there he went for two years (1901–03) to the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. He took a Ph.B. (bachelor of philosophy) degree at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y., in 1905 and returned to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work. He received his M.A. in June 1906 but withdrew from the university after working one more year toward his doctorate. He left with a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Provençal, and Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English literature and grammar.
In the autumn of 1907, Pound became professor of Romance languages at Wabash Presbyterian College, Crawfordsville, Ind. Although his general behaviour fairly reflected his Presbyterian upbringing, he was already writing poetry and was affecting a bohemian manner. His career came quickly to an end, and in February 1908, with light luggage and the manuscript of a book of poems that had been rejected by at least one American publisher, he set sail for Europe.
He had been to Europe three times before, the third time alone in the summer of 1906, when he had gathered the material for his first three published articles: “Raphaelite Latin,” concerning the Latin poets of the Renaissance, and “Interesting French Publications,” concerning the troubadours (both published in the Book News Monthly, Philadelphia, September 1906), and “Burgos, a Dream City of Old Castile” (October issue).
Now, with little money, he sailed to Gibraltar and southern Spain, then on to Venice, where in June 1908 he published, at his own expense, his first book of poems, A lume spento. About September 1908 he went to London, where he was befriended by the writer and editor Ford Madox Ford (who published him in his English Review), entered William Butler Yeats's circle, and joined the “school of images,” a modern group presided over by the philosopher T.E. Hulme.
Success abroad
In England, success came quickly to Pound. A book of poems, Personae, was published in April 1909; a second book, Exultations, followed in October; and a third book, The Spirit of Romance, based on lectures delivered in London (1909–10), was published in 1910.
After a trip home—a last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to make a literary life for himself in Philadelphia or New York City—he returned to Europe in February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany, and France. Toward the end of 1911 he met an English journalist, Alfred R. Orage, editor of the socialist weekly New Age, who opened its pages to him and provided him with a small but regular income during the next nine years.
In 1912 Pound became London correspondent for the small magazine Poetry (Chicago); he did much to enhance the magazine's importance and was soon a dominant figure in Anglo-American verse. He was among the first to recognize and review the poetry of Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence and to praise the sculpture of the modernists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. As leader of the Imagist movement of 1912–14, successor of the “school of images,” he drew up the first Imagist manifesto, with its emphasis on direct and sparse language and precise images in poetry, and he edited the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914).
A shaper of modern literature
Though his friend Yeats had already become famous, Pound succeeded in persuading him to adopt a new, leaner style of poetic composition. In 1914, the year of his marriage to Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Yeats's friend Olivia Shakespear, he began a collaboration with the then-unknown James Joyce. As unofficial editor of The Egoist (London) and later as London editor of The Little Review (New York City), he saw to the publication of Joyce's novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, thus spreading Joyce's name and securing financial assistance for him. In that same year he gave T.S. Eliot a similar start in his career as poet and critic.
He continued to publish his own poetry (Ripostes, 1912; Lustra, 1916) and prose criticism (Pavannes and Divisions, 1918). From the literary remains of the great Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, which had been presented to Pound in 1913, he succeeded in publishing highly acclaimed English versions of early Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915), and two volumes of Japanese Noh plays (1916–17) as well.
Development as a poet
Unsettled by the slaughter of World War I and the spirit of hopelessness he felt was pervading England after its conclusion, Pound decided to move to Paris, publishing before he left two of his most important poetical works, “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” in the book Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). “Propertius” is a comment on the British Empire in 1917, by way of Propertius and the Roman Empire. Mauberley, a finely chiseled “portrait” of one aspect of British literary culture in 1919, is one of the most praised poems of the 20th century.
During his 12 years in London, Pound had completely transformed himself as a poet. He arrived a Late Victorian for whom love was a matter of “lute strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales that blind me.” Within five or six years he was writing a new, adult poetry that spoke calmly of current concerns in common speech. In this drier intellectual air, “as clear as metal,” Pound's verse took on new qualities of economy, brevity, and clarity as he used concrete details and exact visual images to capture concentrated moments of experience. Pound's search for laconic precision owed much to his constant reading of past literature, including Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin classics, Dante, and such 19th-century French works as Théophile Gautier's Émaux et camées and Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary. Like his friend T.S. Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest standards of the past. Modernism for its own sake, untested against the past, drew anathemas from him. His progress may be seen in attempts at informality (1911):
Have tea, damn the Caesars,
Talk of the latest success. . .
in the gathering strength of his 1911 version of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer”:
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten,
fell on the stern
In icy feathers. . .
and in the confident free verse of “The Return” (1912):
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet. . .
From this struggle there emerged the short, perfectly worded free-verse poems in Lustra. In his poetry Pound was now able to deal efficiently with a whole range of human activities and emotions, without raising his voice. The movement of the words and the images they create are no longer the secondhand borrowings of youth or apprenticeship but seem to belong to the observing intelligence that conjures up the particular work in hand. Many of the Lustra poems are remarkable for perfectly paced endings:
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.
But the culmination of Pound's years in London was his 18-part long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which ranged from close observation of the artist and society to the horrors of mass production and World War I; from brilliant echo of the past:
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
to the syncopation of
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The Cantos
During his stay in Paris (1921–24) Pound met and helped the young American novelist Ernest Hemingway; wrote an opera, Le Testament, based on poems of François Villon; assisted T.S. Eliot with the editing of his long poem The Waste Land; and acted as correspondent for the New York literary journal The Dial.
In 1924 Pound tired of Paris and moved to Rapallo, Italy, which was to be his home for the next 20 years. In 1925 he had a daughter, Maria, by the expatriate American violinist Olga Rudge, and in 1926 his wife, Dorothy, gave birth to a son, Omar. The daughter was brought up by a peasant woman in the Italian Tirol, the son by relatives in England. In 1927–28 Pound edited his own magazine, Exile, and in 1930 he brought together, under the title A Draft of XXX Cantos, various segments of his ambitious long poem The Cantos, which he had begun in 1915.
The 1930s saw the publication of further volumes of The Cantos (Eleven New Cantos, 1934; The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 1937; Cantos LII–LXXI, 1940) and a collection of some of his best prose (Make It New, 1934). A growing interest in music caused him to arrange a long series of concerts in Rapallo during the 1930s, and, with the assistance of Olga Rudge, he played a large part in the rediscovery of the 18th-century Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. The results of his continuing investigation in the areas of culture and history were published in his brilliant but fragmentary prose work Guide to Kulchur (1938).
Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, he turned more and more to history, especially economic history, a subject in which he had been interested since his meeting in London in 1918 with Clifford Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, an economic theory stating that maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars. He became obsessed with monetary reform (ABC of Economics, 1933; Social Credit, 1935; What Is Money For?, 1939), involved himself in politics, and declared his admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 1935). The obsession affected his Cantos, which even earlier had shown evidence of becoming an uncontrolled series of personal and historical episodes.
Anti-American broadcasts
As war in Europe drew near, Pound returned home (1939) in the hope that he could help keep the peace between Italy and the United States. He went back to Italy a disappointed man, and between 1941 and 1943, after Italy and the United States were at war, he made several hundred broadcasts over Rome Radio on subjects ranging from James Joyce to the control of money and the U.S. government by Jewish bankers and often openly condemned the American war effort. He was arrested by U.S. forces in 1945 and spent six months in a prison camp for army criminals near Pisa. Despite harsh conditions there, he translated Confucius into English (The Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot, 1951) and wrote The Pisan Cantos (1948), the most moving section of his long poem-in-progress.
Returned to the United States to face trial for treason, he was pronounced “insane and mentally unfit for trial” by a panel of doctors and spent 12 years (1946–58) in Saint Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. During this time he continued to write The Cantos (Section: Rock-Drill, 1955; Thrones, 1959), translated ancient Chinese poetry (The Classic Anthology, 1954) and Sophocles' Trachiniai (Women of Trachis, 1956), received visitors regularly, and kept up a voluminous and worldwide correspondence. Controversy surrounding him burst out anew when, in 1949, he was awarded the important Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos. When on April 18, 1958, he was declared unfit to stand trial and the charges against him were dropped, he was released from Saint Elizabeth's. He returned to Italy, dividing the year between Rapallo and Venice.
Pound lapsed into silence in 1960, leaving The Cantos unfinished. More than 800 pages long, they are fragmentary and formless despite recurring themes and ideas. The Cantos are the logbook of Pound's own private voyage through Greek mythology, ancient China and Egypt, Byzantium, Renaissance Italy, the works of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and many other periods and subjects, including economics and banking and the nooks and crannies of his own memory and experience. Pound even convinced himself that the poem's faults and weaknesses, inevitable from the nature of the undertaking, were part of an underlying method. Yet there are numerous passages such as only he could have written that are among the best of the century.
Pound died in Venice in 1972. Out of his 60 years of publishing activity came 70 books of his own, contributions to about 70 others, and more than 1,500 articles. A complete listing of his works is in Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (1963; rev. ed 1983). Most of the writing on which Pound's fame now rests may be found in Personae (The Collected Poems; 1926, new ed. 1949), a selection of poems Pound wished to keep in print in 1926, with a few earlier and later poems added in 1949; The Cantos (1970), cantos 1–117, a collection of all the segments published to date; The Spirit of Romance (1910); Literary Essays (1954), the bulk of his best criticism, ed. with an introduction by T.S. Eliot; Guide to Kulchur (1938); and The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. by D.D. Paige (1950), an excellent introduction to Pound's literary life and inimitable epistolary style.
Walter Payton Biography [American football player] 1954–1999
Short Story of full Walter Jerry Payton , byname Sweetness: American football player. Born on July 25, 1954, in Columbia, Mississippi. Sometimes known by his nickname "Sweetness," Payton was equally admired for his off-the-field personality as well as for his football skills. He first began to attract attention as a halfback at Jackson State University, making the starting lineup in 1971 — his freeman year. Payton was selected for the All-American team and was named Black College Player of the Year for in 1973 and 1974. In his four years at Jackson State, he rushed for more than 3,500 yards and scored more than 450 points, showing fans and opponents alike just what a versatile and talented player he was. Off the field, Payton showed his interest in helping with others, studying education with an emphasis on working with the deaf.
Payton continued to excel once he became a professional player in 1975. Picked by the Chicago Bears, he became a running back who was known for his speed. During his 13 seasons with the team, Payton made nine Pro Bowl appearances and won the National Football League's (NFL) Most Valuable Player Award twice — in 1977 and 1985. Retiring after the 1987 season, he held the NFL rushing record with 16,726 yards and the single game rushing record of 275 yards. Payton was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1996.
After leaving the team, Payton explored business opportunities, including real estate, restaurants, and race cars. Living up to his nickname, Payton spent much of his time working make life better for other people. He formed the Halas Payton Foundation in 1988 to help inner-city kids in the Chicago area. He later established the Walter Payton Foundation, also dedicated to helping young people in the state of Illinois.
Payton became ill in early 1999 and died on November 1 of that year from cancer. He was survived by his wife Connie and two children, Jarrett and Brittney. His charitable organization is now called the Walter and Connie Payton Foundation with his wife continuing to support the causes and programs that Payton cared about.
Bob Lemon Biography [Professional baseball player] 1920–2000
Short Story Of Bob Lemon: Professional baseball player. Born September 22, 1920, in San Bernardino, California. Bob Lemon signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians in 1938, and spent several years in the minor-league system as an infielder-outfielder before joining the Navy during World War II. After his first full season in the major leagues in 1946, the Indians’ manager Lou Boudreau switched him to pitcher. In 1948, Lemon— who had at first resisted the change— threw a no-hitter against the Detroit Tigers and was named to the American League All-Star team. He also won Games 2 and 6 en route to the Indians’ World Series win over the Atlanta Braves.
A right-hander, Lemon became part of one of the most potent pitching staffs in history, alongside Bob Feller, Mike Garcia, and Early Wynn. He was named to seven All-Star teams in nine years, and he led the league in victories three times, in complete games five times, and in innings pitched four times. In 13 seasons, Bob Lemon compiled a record of 207-128 and an earned-run average of 3.23. A great all-around player, Lemon also hit 37 home runs, ranking second (behind Wes Ferrell) on the all-time list for pitchers. He finished his playing career in the minor league in San Diego, and went on to work as a scout and a manager for the Kansas City Royals and the Chicago White Sox. He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.
In 1978, Lemon was hired as the manager of the New York Yankees; the team staged a major league comeback to overtake the Boston Red Sox and went on to win the World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Lemon was replaced in mid-season 1979, then rehired in 1981, when he led the Yankees to an American League championship. In the middle of the 1982 season, Lemon was again fired by the volatile Yankees’ owner, George Steinbrenner, and retired from baseball.
Maeve Brennan Biography [Writer, journalist] 1917–1993
Short Brief of Maeve Brennan: Writer, journalist. Born January 6, 1917 in Dublin, Ireland. Maeve Brennan's parents were deeply involved in Ireland's political struggles during her youth, and her father, Robert Brennan, spent much of her childhood in prison and on the run. After her father was made the first Irish ambassador to the U.S., the family moved to America. Maeve Brennan studied English at the American University in Washington and later worked at Harper's Bazaar magazine in New York City.
In 1949, Maeve Brennan was offered a staff writing position at The New Yorker, and she stayed with the magazine for more than 30 years. She wrote social commentary as "The Long-Winded Lady" and short stories set in Dublin. She was well read and admired throughout the United States for her beauty, talent and glamor.
Maeve Brennan was married to The New Yorker's managing editor St. Clair McKelway for five years. During the 1970s, she succumbed to alcoholism and mental illness, eventually becoming homeless and destitute. She died at age 76 after being committed to Lawrence Hospital.
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