A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. [Darling Harbourish] Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.
— Isaac Babel, born on this date in 1894
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
— Marcel Proust, born on this date in 1871
Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing - Atlas Obscura
Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing - Atlas Obscura
One club, for instance, had 22 members (including Branwell Brontë, the sole brother of the literary siblings) and met for monthly dinners. “A broad hint of conviviality is given in the rules,” writes Kaufman, “which imposed fines for swearing, for being drunk ‘so that a member be offensive to the company,’ and for unseemly scrambling for books to borrow!”When reading a book was a group activity
The Lost Libraries of London
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan (1965)
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
Your empty handed armies, are all going home
Your lover who just walked out the door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
Your empty handed armies, are all going home
Your lover who just walked out the door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start a new
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start a new
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.
The poet Larry Fagin, who died in May, was twenty-one years old when he met a young man walking through Paris with a turtle on his shoulder. The year was 1958. The man was the poet and filmmaker Piero Heliczer. That night, Heliczer brought Fagin to a run-down hotel, at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, to meet some other American writers—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky—who had been living at the Beat Hotel.
Fagin booked a tiny room with two British students and stayed for a few weeks. As a young man, he looked like Dudley Moore, with narrow features and a mop of black hair. Fagin was born in Far Rockaway in 1937 but travelled Europe extensively after his father got a job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rebuilding Salzburg. Fagin wrote a few short stories and poems in his early twenties and studied avant-garde literature, art, music, film, and dance. He struck up a correspondence with Henry Miller when Fagin was twelve, asking the writer for relationship advice. (Miller, quoting Basho: “Throw away your crutches! Walk on!”) Ginsberg became Fagin’s lifelong friend and across-the-hall neighbor for two decades in New York City. He introduced Fagin to Hettie and LeRoi Jones and the writers they published in their magazine, Yugen. After a stint in San Francisco, in the early nineteen-sixties, Fagin returned to New York, in 1967, and fell in with the second generation of the New York School of poets, including Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and Aram Saroyan. By then, Fagin had achieved a distinct lyrical form, which Berrigan admired when he wrote: “whose formal concerns are powerful, whose elegance is self-effacing, and whose conclusions, however disastrous, are always accepted.”
The IRA Was Behind The Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist, Insists Investigator
“The 13 stolen masterpieces valued at around half-a-billion dollars included a Rembrandt and a Vermeer … ‘I’m 100 percent sure that they are in Ireland. Hundred percent sure. No doubt in my mind,’ art investigator Arthur Brand said. He’s described as the Indiana Jones of the art world. It’s an audacious claim to make after nearly three decades. But Brand alleges his leads point to the Irish Republican Army.”
How A Theatre Company Saved A Medieval Building And Museum In One Of England’s Most Historic Towns
“The Canterbury Heritage Museum has attracted fewer and fewer visitors in recent years, but a rescue plan involving the Marlowe Theatre is set to revitalise it. Janice McGuinness tells the story.”