Fun_People Archive
5 Oct
LIT BITS V3 #279

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Thu,  5 Oct 100 17:40:58 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #279

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #279
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Friday, 6 October 2000; on this day,

153 years ago (1847),

     Charlotte Bronte's _Jane Eyre_--appearing under the pseudonym Currer
     Bell--is published in London by Smith, Elder   it is an immediate
     success. Visit the Bronte Society homepage and Bronte Country.

105 years ago (1895),

     Caroline Gordon, novelist (_The Strange Children_) and critic (_How
     to Read a Novel_), is born in Todd County, Kentucky.

86 years ago (1914),

     Thor Heyerdahl, author of _Kon-Tiki_, is born in Larvik, Norway.

70 years ago (1930),

     William Faulkner's novel _As I Lay Dying_ is published.

21 years ago (1979),

     After writing a travel book, _Brazil_ (1962), translating from the
     Portuguese Alice Brant's Brazilian classic _The Diary of Helena Morley_
     (1957), editing and translating _An Anthology of Twentieth-Century
     Brazilian Poetry_ (1972), and teaching at Harvard University from 1970
     to 1977, American poet Elizabeth Bishop, dies in Boston.

Today's poem:

                     The Shampoo

     The still explosions on the rocks,
     the lichens, grow
     by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
     They have arranged
     to meet the rings around the moon, although
     within our memories they have not changed.

     And since the heavens will attend
     as long on us,
     you've been, dear friend,
     precipitate and pragmatical;
     and look what happens.  For Time is
     nothing if not amenable.

     The shooting stars in your black hair
     in bright formation
     are flocking where,
     so straight, so soon?
     -- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
     battered and shiny like the moon.

                                            Elizabeth Bishop

© 2000 Peter Langston