Fun_People Archive
2 Feb
LIT BITS V3 #34

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed,  2 Feb 100 16:29:15 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #34

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #34

Today is Thursday, 3 February 2000; on this day,

126 years ago (1874),

	Gertrude Stein , writer and mentor to the Lost Generation of writers
     in Paris after World War I, is born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She
     will boast: "I have been the creative literary mind of the century,"
     although Clifton Fadiman will deliver a more circumspect judgment: "A
     past master in making nothing happen very slowly."

125 years ago (1875),

	In Amsterdam, Dutch prose writer and poet, Everhardus Johannes
     Potgieter, dies. His later work includes many subtle and often humorous
     sketches such as _Onder weg in den regen_ (1864, "On the Way in the
     Rain").

113 years ago (1887),

	Georg Trakl, Expressionist poet whose personal and wartime torments
     will make him Austria's foremost elegist of decay and death, is born
     in Salzburg.

93 years ago (1907),

	James A. Michener is born in New York City. His _Tales of the South
     Pacific_ will win the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

84 years ago (1916),

	Opening of Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Cafe) Voltaire, in Zurich,
     Switzerland, a meeting place for artists of the newly forming Dada
     movement (and you thought it was just another music group [Dave's
     note]). The most widely accepted account of the naming of the movement,
     which flourished until about 1920, is an incident at the cabaret when
     a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the
     word _dada_, a child's word for a horse, and the members seized upon
     it for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which
     in turn had been engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair
     over World War I.

69 years ago (1931),

	The Arkansas state legislature passes a motion to pray for the soul
     of H. L. Mencken after he calls the state the apex of moronia.
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