Fun_People Archive
16 May
LIT BITS V3 #137

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Tue, 16 May 100 23:53:37 -0700
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #137

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #137
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Wednesday, 17 May 2000; on this day,

118 years ago (1882),

	Dorothy Richardson (the 12-volume _Pilgrimage_) is born in Abingdon,
     Oxfordshire. Her use of the stream-of-consciousness technique will
     predate Joyce's and Woolf's.

92 years ago (1908),

	In Madison, Wisconsin, American writer Frederic Prokosch is born.
     He will receive a master's degree from Haverford College by the age
     of 18, later a Ph. D. from Yale and a second M.A.  from the University
     of Cambridge. His first novel, _The Asiatics_ (1935), is a picaresque
     story of a young American who travels from Beirut, Lebanon to China.
     This work will be followed by several other travel adventures,
     including _The Seven Who Fled_ (1937) and _Night of the Poor_ (1939).

72 years ago (1928),

	Evelyn Waugh writes to _The Times Literary Supplement_ to protest
     a review of his book, in which he is referred to repeatedly as "Miss
     Waugh." Nineteen years later, in 1947, Waugh, after having tea with
     Max Beerbohm, sums up: "A delicious little old dandy.... Much of what
     he said would have been commonplace but for his exquisite delivery."

Today's poem:

                          Nocturne

     Close my darling both your eyes,
     Let your arms lie still at last.
     Calm the lake of falsehood lies
     And the wind of lust has passed,
     Waves across these hopeless sands
     Fill my heart and end my day,
     Underneath your moving hands
     All my aching flows away.

     Even the human pyramids
     Blaze with such a longing now:
     Close, my love, your trembling lids,
     Let the midnight heal your brow,
     Northward flames Orion's horn,
     Westward th' Egyptian light.
     None to watch us, none to warn
     But the blind eternal night.

                                           Frederic Prokosch

© 2000 Peter Langston