Fun_People Archive
18 Feb
LIT BITS V3 #48

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 100 09:43:17 -0800
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #48

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #48

Today is Friday, 18 February 2000; on this day,

151 years ago (1849),

	Novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist, one of "the four great
     ones" (with Henrik Ibsen, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and Jonas Lie),
     Alexander Kielland, is born in Stavanger, Norway. He will move to
     Paris in 1878 and begin publishing his short stories.

141 years ago (1859),

	Sholem Aleichem, popular Yiddish classical author, is born in
     Pereyaslav, Ukraine. Drawn to writing from youth, he will first write
     in Russian and Hebrew, but from 1883 until his death, he will publish
     more than 40 volumes of novels, stories, and plays in Yiddish. His
     best-known character, Tevye the diaryman, will eventually be adapted
     for the Yiddish stage and cinema in the musical comedy _The Fiddler
     on the Roof_ (1964).

117 years ago (1883),

	Novelist Nikos Kazantzakis (_Zorba the Greek_) is born in Heraklion,
     Crete.

116 years ago (1884),

	The Moscow police seize all copies of Count Leo Tolstoy's _What I
     Believe In_ at the printers.

104 years ago (1896),

	French poet, essayist, critic, and chief promoter of the Surrealist
     movement, Andre Breton, is born in Tinchebray, France. His 1924
     _Manifeste du surrealisme_ will provide the definition of Surrealism
     which will be followed by Paul Eluard, Yosef Agnon, Luis Bunuel, Dali,
     Aragon, Jean Cocteau, and others.

69 years ago (1931),

	Editor, novelist (_Song of Solomon_), Nobel-prize winner Toni
     Morrison  is born in Lorain, Ohio.

Today's poem:

                 always for the first time

    Always for the first time
    Hardly do I know you by sight
    You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my
     window
    A wholly imaginary house
    It is there that from one second to the next
    In the inviolate darkness
    I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
    The one and only rift
    In the facade and in my heart
    The closer I come to you
    In reality
    The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
    Where you appear alone before me
    At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
    The elusive angle of a curtain
    It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity
     of Grasse
    With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
    Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
    Before them a T-square of dazzling light....
    There is
    By my leaning over the precipice
    Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
    My finding the secret
    Of loving you
    Always for the first time

                                                Andre Breton

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© 2000 Peter Langston