Fun_People Archive
30 Oct
LIT BITS V3 #303

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 100 03:11:31 -0800
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #303

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #303
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Monday, 30 October 2000; on this day,

249 years ago (1751),

     Richard Brinsley Sheridan (_The School for Scandal_) is born in Dublin.

189 years ago (1811),

     _Sense and Sensibility: A Novel_ (in three volumes) By a Lady, is
     published by Thomas Egerton. Jane Austen, who uses small pieces of
     paper that can easily be slipped under a blotter in the family drawing
     room if a visitor arrives, takes special pains to hide the fact that
     her first novel is in print.

115 years ago (1885),

     Ezra Pound--"humane, but not human" claims fellow poet e. e. cummings
     -- is born in Hailey, Idaho. Gertrude Stein will write of him, "A
     village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were
     not, not."

54 years ago (1946),

     Eric Kimmel is born this day in New York City and as an adult will
     become a teacher and "tell stories" as he works his way across the
     United States to his current home in the Northwest.  His version of
     the _Gingerbread Boy_ will have a nontraditional ending as will many
     of the folk stories he retells for young readers. (SM)

Today's poem:

                    Portrait D'une Femme

     Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
     London has swept about you this score years
     And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
     Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
     Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
     Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else.
     You have been second always. Tragical?
     No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
     One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
     One average mind--with one thought less, each year.
     Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
     Hours, where something might have floated up.
     And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
     You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
     And takes strange gain away:
     Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
     Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
     Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
     That might prove useful and yet never proves,
     That never fits a corner or shows use,
     Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
     The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
     Idols and ambergris and rare inlays.
     These are your riches, your great store; and yet
     For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
     Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
     In the slow float of differing light and deep,
     No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
     Nothing that's quite your own.
	     Yet this is you.

                                                  Ezra Pound

© 2000 Peter Langston