Begin and end each day with a prayer

An elderly Donegal man is stopped by the Gardai around 2am and is asked where he is going at this time of night.

The man replies, "I'm on my way to a lecture about alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the human body, as well as smoking and staying out late."

The Garda officer then asks, "Really? Who is giving that lecture at this time of night?"

The old man replies, "That would be my wife."

FLASH FICTION

I guess I should explain the following short story. (especially in light of the view that my wife dislikes it so much) It’s intended to be a flash fiction piece, which, as you know are difficult to write. What motivated me was that I recently read a short biography of the comedian Red Skeleton and was impressed to learn that he wrote one short story a week for decades along with his amazing output of art work. So I’ve decide to write much more than I do and this is a start, okay a creepy start but still…..   

Twisted Christmas

It had snowed heavily that Christmas Eve creating a wonderful silence outside the house. Inside the house the log fire in the parlor mantle was burning out but had made the large house crispy warm and cozy.

He heard the sleigh land gracefully on the roof and then there was the sound of Santa’s trumping through the house, up the stairs and into his parent’s room and then everything was silent again. 

After a while he could hear Santa’s boots again, landing heavily on the plush hallway carpet and the little boy covered his mouth and laughed with joy. His eyes widened when his bedroom door opened and was flooded with delight when Santa entered

Santa looked at the boy and winked, looked back towards his parents room and said with a big wide grin “You’ve got your Christmas wish”

“Oh thank you Santa, thank you so very, very much” the boy replied.

Then Santa reached in to his bag and took out a blood splattered axe and smiled benevolently.

“Your parents had a Christmas wish too”   

My November Guest

by Robert Frost

    MY Sorrow, when she's here with me,

    Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

    Are beautiful as days can be;

    She loves the bare, the withered tree;

    She walks the sodden pasture lane.

    Her pleasure will not let me stay.

    She talks and I am fain to list:

    She's glad the birds are gone away,

    She's glad her simple worsted gray

    Is silver now with clinging mist.

    The desolate, deserted trees,

    The faded earth, the heavy sky,

    The beauties she so truly sees,

    She thinks I have no eye for these,

    And vexes me for reason why.

    Not yesterday I learned to know

    The love of bare November days

    Before the coming of the snow,

    But it were vain to tell her so,

    And they are better for her praise.

Nikolai Dubovskoy - Evening in November. 1900. Gouache.

“November comes

And November goes,

With the last red berries

And the first white snows.

With night coming early,

And dawn coming late,

And ice in the bucket

And frost by the gate.

The fires burn

And the kettles sing,

And earth sinks to rest

Until next spring.”

― Clyde Watson

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, given November 19, 1863

on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA

The only real photo of the Gettysburg Address event. (Lincoln is pointed out with a white arrow)

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation:  conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure.  We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .we cannot hallow this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note, nor long remember,

what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion

to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . .that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . .and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . .shall not perish from this earth.

November Weather Lore

A warm November is the sign of a bad Winter.

Onion skins very thin,

Mild Winter coming in;

Onion skins thick and tough,

Coming Winter cold and rough.

Flowers bloomin' in late Autumn,

A sure sign of a bad Winter comin'.

As high as the weeds grow,

So will the bank of snow.

Thunder in the Fall foretells a cold Winter.

If there’s ice in November to bear a duck

There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.

On All Hallow's Day cut a chip from the beech tree;

If it be dry the winter will prove warm.

“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. 

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. 

Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

 Shakespeare in modern English; To be or not be?

 Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen said recently that reading Shakespeare is a waste of time, and people should instead celebrate Shakespeare by watching his plays in the theatre and that forcing people to read the works of the great bard served only to reinforce the notion that his plays were there to be studied, rather than enjoyed.

Good point and good thinking Mr. McKellen.

Further, he said that perhaps we should be commissioning playwrights to “translate” all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. And why not? We modernize Shakespeare’s setting and costumes, so not his words?  It’s not as if anyone is advocating getting rid of the original text. Nor do we have to modernize every word of the play. I want to hear Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in the traditional rendering.

AUTUMNAL

Pale amber sunlight falls across

The reddening October trees,

That hardly sway before a breeze

As soft as summer: summer's loss

Seems little, dear! on days like these.

Let misty autumn be our part!

The twilight of the year is sweet:

Where shadow and the darkness meet

Our love, a twilight of the heart

Eludes a little time's deceit.

Are we not better and at home

In dreamful Autumn, we who deem

No harvest joy is worth a dream?

A little while and night shall come,

A little while, then, let us dream.

Beyond the pearled horizons lie

Winter and night: awaiting these

We garner this poor hour of ease,

Until love turn from us and die

Beneath the drear November trees.”

― Ernest Dowson

NASA Released Photos of Pluto's Tiniest Moon

Kerberos is Pluto’s most recently found tiniest moon shown here in photos taken three months ago by the New Horizons spacecraft. The moon appears to have two lobes where the larger one is estimated to be 5 miles (8 km) in size, while the smaller one around 3 miles (5 km). Just like the other moons (Charon, Nyx, Hydra and Styx, Kerberos) in Pluto's satellite system that appeared to be shiny or reflective, Kerberos is also enclosed with a water icy surface. Although Kerberos is a two-lobed satellite, its name came from the guardian of the underworld, the three-headed dog Cerberus.

WRITERS ON THE RIVIERA: THE FITZGERALDS AND THE CÔTE D'AZUR

by Lanie Goodman

 “When your eyes first fall upon the Mediterranean you know at once why it was here that man first stood erect and stretched out his arms toward the sun. It is a blue sea; or rather it is too blue for that hackneyed phrase which has described every muddy pool from pole to pole. It is the fairy blue of Maxfield Parrish’s pictures; blue like blue books, blue oil, blue eyes, and in the shadow of the mountains a green belt of land runs along the coast for a hundred miles and makes a playground for the world.”

 When F Scott Fitzgerald sailed across the Atlantic to France in 1924, accompanied by his wife Zelda and daughter Scottie, the idea was to escape to a place where they could ‘live on practically nothing a year’. The reason was glaringly simple: four years after the publication of his best-selling novel, This Side of Paradise(1920), which catapulted the writer to literary stardom and rendered him the hero of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald found himself left with capital of just $7,000. No longer able to keep up with New York’s frenetic social life and the excessive partying that was keeping him from completing his third novel, The Great Gatsby, he made a decision. Fitzgerald and Zelda took temporary leave of their sumptuous home in Great Neck, Long Island, and their final destination would not be Paris, rather the “hot, sweet south of France”.

“We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm to our lives,” Fitzgerald wrote, in How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year, his article about the adventure for The Saturday Evening Post. “With a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever.”

Back then, life was still relatively cheap on the French Riviera, particularly during the summer, since, as Fitzgerald quipped, it was “something like going to Palm Beach for July”. Come April, the visiting aristocracy closed their villas and wouldn’t return until winter, fleeing the high temperatures, mosquitoes and insalubrious sea breezes.

In May, the Fitzgeralds took the train from Paris to the sleepy town of Hyères, knowing that Edith Wharton owned a house there. Finding it dreary and overrun with condescending British pensioners, their disappointment turned to joy when an agent showed them the Villa Marie, a charming property on a pine-shaded hillside in Saint-Raphaël, which Fitzgerald described as "a little red town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it”.

“I don’t see why everybody doesn’t come over here,” Fitzgerald rhapsodised, tongue-in-cheek, in How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year. “I am now writing from a little inn in France where I just had a meal fit for a king, washed down with Champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents. It costs about one-tenth as much to live over here. From where I sit I can see the smoky peaks of the Alps rising behind a town that was old before Alexander the Great was born…”

From June to October, Scott shut himself away in the Villa Marie, working on The Great Gatsby, while Zelda had a passionate but short-lived affair with a young French aviator, Edouard Jozan, whom she met on the beach.

“Saint-Raphaël marks the first real ‘crack’ in their marriage,” says Riviera-based Fitzgerald biographer, Jean-Luc Guillet. “Scott was haunted by Zelda’s betrayal, and his fear of losing his wife to someone else turns up both in The Great Gatsby and in Tender is the Night.”

At a dramatic moment in the former, Jay Gatsby tells Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, “Your wife does not love you. She’s never loved you. She loves me”.

Blame it on those long idle afternoons and the balmy climate. In Zelda’s semi-autobiographic novel, Save me the Waltz (1932), emotions run high because the Riviera “is a seductive place” where “the blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things”.

*********

For a much-needed distraction, the Fitzgeralds would take a jaunt in their little blue Renault, down the coastal road to the Cap d’Antibes – past the still spectacular red rocks of the Esterel and the Gulf of Napoule’s turquoise shallows – to visit their close friends, Sara and Gerald Murphy.

Best known as Fitgerald’s initial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night(1934), the Murphys’ charisma is summed up in the novel’s opening chapters, which are set on the Plage de la Garoupe, on the Cap d’Antibes’ eastern side. Talking about the Divers and the Riviera, alcoholic American musician Abe North tells the recently arrived film starlet Rosemary Hoyt that “they have to like it. They invented it”.

Gerald Murphy, a wealthy heir to the Mark Cross luxury leather goods company, had moved to Paris with his family in order to study painting. His trendsetting qualities also extended to his modern creative sensibilities, as he produced avant-garde canvases and décor that can clearly be seen as a precursor to Pop Art. Accompanied by his elegant wife, Murphy discovered the enchantment of the Cap d’Antibes in the summer of 1922, when their friend Cole Porter invited them to stay in his rented villa, the Château de la Garoupe.

Deciding that they wanted to settle amid the Cap’s sleepy fishing villages, the Murphys returned the following year and convinced the owner of the seaside Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc – the model for the Hôtel des Étrangers in Tender is the Night – to keep it open for them during the summer.

While their new home, Villa America, was under construction, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc became the Murphys’ headquarters and a place to invite their friends. Today, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, it’s one of Europe’s glitziest places to stay. Their charmed circle included the likes of neighbours the Count and Countess de Beaumont, who lived at the splendid Villa Eilenroc; Picasso and his mother, Senora Ruiz, and ballerina wife, Olga; the silent movie icon Rudolf Valentino; and Gertrude Stein.

*********

With their marriage under strain, Antibes was a welcome escape for the Fitzgeralds, whose notorious, alcohol-fuelled antics were on a par with the misbehaviour of rock stars at their most dissolute. On a mutual dare, they once disrupted the Murphys’ party at the Hôtel du Cap by diving off 35-foot-high rocks into the pitch-black Mediterranean.

On another night, Zelda stripped off her black lace panties and tossed them to her hosts, encouraging an impromptu skinny-dip in the pool with other inebriated guests. On a more sobering occasion, Zelda downed a large quantity of sleeping pills and then had to be walked around the hotel’s grounds until morning.

Although the Fitzgeralds returned to New York in the autumn, the enticing gaiety of the Riviera brought them back in the summer of 1926. In the wake of Gatsby’s success, Scott rented the Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins, bragging to his friends in New York that he’d found a house on the shore with a private beach, conveniently situated near the casino. It was there that Fitzgerald began working on Tender is the Night, which would take him seven years to finish.

In 1929, the Art Deco villa was transformed into the small, family-run Hôtel Belles-Rives. Its period furnishings, frescoes and fumoir have all been meticulously preserved by the current owner, Marianne Chauvin-Estène.

At the Villa America, the Murphys’ modernist, 14-room home – replete with a black-tiled living room, a sun deck on its flat roof and a exotic garden – the Fitzgeralds mingled with the most prominent figures of the European arts scene: Cocteau, Léger, Man Ray, Stravinsky, Diaghilev and many more. The literary names who were regular guests included Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley (later, also Pauline Pfeiffer, his second spouse), John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish and Robert Benchley.

“The air smelled of eucalyptus, tomatoes and heliotrope,” recalled Dos Passos, describing the languid summer evenings on Villa America’s terrace. Gerald Murphy, smartly dressed in spats or white ‘bucks’ and a striped sailor jersey, made elaborate cocktails for his guests, as Dos Passos put it, “like a priest preparing mass”, inventing concoctions “with the juice of a few flowers”.

At one of these famous soirées, which was later immortalized in Tender is the Night, Scott Fitzgerald behaved even worse than usual – he insulted guests, then picked up a sorbet-sodden fig and threw it at the bare shoulders of his hosts’ friend, the Princesse de Poix. Once, Fitzgerald started to smash Sara Murphy’s handblown wineglasses so he was escorted to the door and the couple banished him from the Villa American for weeks.

Monte Carlo was a perfect destination for the “excitement eaters”, as Zelda referred to herself and Scott. They’d take the winding Grande Corniche “through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling below” and spend the evening gambling at the Casino. If Scott had forgotten his passport, he’d pretend to faint in front of the gaming room’s guard, hoping that they’d still let him in.

Another glamorous hotspot was the art-filled restaurant La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which was already a celebrity haunt. One evening, while dining on the terrace, Scott spotted Isadora Duncan at the next table and went to pay his respects. Afterwards, Zelda was jealous and, in retaliation, threw herself down a flight of stone steps.

*********

When it came to dining, the Fitzgeralds avoided elaborate French cuisine and despised l’ail– “the only garlic that can be put over us must be administered in sleep”. Even in the most exclusive restaurants, Scott would wave away the waiter and order a club sandwich in his heavily-accented French.

During the couple’s last summer on the Côte d’Azur, in 1929, the US Stock Market had crashed and the mood shifted drastically. The Fitzgeralds holed up at a modest villa in Cannes, avoiding the Hôtel du Cap which, to Scott, had become a celebrity circus where silk pyjama-clad patrons used the pool “only for a short hangover dip”. Somerset Maugham would also satirize the hotel’s raging social scene in his short story, The Three Fat Women of Antibes.

Zelda, already showing signs of mental strain, was still determined to become a ballerina. Staying at the Hôtel Beau Rivage on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, they went “to the cheap ballets of the Casino on the jetée” while desperately trying to save money.

By the time that Tender is the Night was published, in 1934, the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds had long since returned to America, and both families endured a series of tragic events. The Murphys lost both of their young sons, Patrick and Baoth, to illness, while Zelda was in and out of sanatoriums, grappling with severe mental breakdowns.

What remained of those years, as evoked by Fitzgerald, was the glow of a golden era on the Riviera, when a handful of American expats invented an enduring lifestyle of sunbathing, swimming and partying on the Côte d’Azur.

Gerald Murphy later wrote to Fitzgerald, “I know now that what you said in Tender Is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life – the unreal part – has had any scheme, any beauty”.

American arts and travel author Lanie Goodman has been based in the South of France since 1988. She’s written for the likes of Condé Nast Traveler, the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.

From France Today magazine

CHASING THE SUN: WRITERS ON THE RIVIERA

by Lanie Goodman

March 28, 2015

“I’ve just been for a walk on my small boulevard and looking down below at the houses all bright in the sun and housewives washing their linen in great tubs of glittering water and flinging it over the orange trees to dry. Perhaps all human activity is beautiful in the sunlight.” -Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murray

 “I was only happy once; that was at Hyères.” -Robert Louis Stevenson

“Take her away, into the sun, the doctor said.” The opening line of Sun, a short tale by British novelist and poet DH Lawrence, which was published in 1925’s The Princess and Other Stories, sums up one of that eminent author’s most cherished themes. You could call it the Mediterranean myth of renewal – the promise of simple restorative pleasures: a gentle climate, a dazzling blue sea and villa life surrounded by a lemon-scented garden.

Although Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, travelled extensively throughout Italy, the writer spent his final years on the tranquil, palm-fringed Côte d’Azur, in search of a new Eden. Like many of the celebrated expatriate writers who took refuge on the Riviera between 1915 and the 1930s, to Lawrence the area must have provided an idyllic escape from chilly northern skies, urban rhythms and wartime strife.

Yet, it was not entirely by coincidence that one group of Anglo-Saxon writers – Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley and Cyril Connolly – ended up as near neighbours in a string of small coastal towns, including Menton, Hyères, Sanary-sur-mer, Bandol, La Ciotat and Cassis. They’d all started as a group of friends in England, and already shared an interwoven history of love, quarrels and estrangement, which continued to develop as the years went by.

However, for ailing writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield and Lawrence, the Riviera promised more than sheer inspiration and a change of lifestyle. As early as the 1860s, the area’s mild winters attracted a steady stream of wealthy consumptives from northern Europe. The word was out: British doctor, James Henry Bennet published Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean in 1861, claiming that Menton – snugly protected by wind and several degrees warmer – was indeed the perfect sanatorium city. Following Dr Bennet’s suggestion, in 1863 Robert Louis Stevenson first travelled to Nice and Menton with his family, as a frail 12-year-old with a recurrent cough.

Stevenson’s biographers have speculated that those happy memories may have prompted the Scottish writer – who was responsible for the likes of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – to return to the Côte d’Azur 20 years later, with his Californian wife, Fanny Osbourne. Hoping to improve his deteriorating pulmonary consumptive condition, Stevenson initially rented a château in Marseille, which turned out to be a sordid disaster. When Fanny found a dead body dumped on their doorstep, the couple packed up and decamped to Hyères, 85 kilometres down the coast. At the time, like Menton, this sleepy, palm-lined city was slowly becoming a hotspot for British aristos seeking ‘winter cures’, and later it was frequented by the likes of Queen Victoria.

The couple soon found their dream house and rented a tiny pseudo-Swiss chalet, La Solitude, perched on a cliff with a sweeping vista of the shimmering sea and the Îles d’Or. The house, which still stands today, on the present Rue Victor-Basch, was a kind of architectural folly, inspired by Chinese pagodas and Turkish mosques, which was first exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1878, then shipped to Hyères and rebuilt. Stevenson spent 16 blissful and productive months at La Solitude, mostly in the large, sun-dappledjardin, where he wrote A Child’s Garden of Verses.

“This spot, our garden, and our view, are sub-celestial,” wrote Stevenson. “I live in a most sweet corner of the universe, sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain: and at my back, a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins.”

The couple’s idyll ended when Fanny learned of an outbreak of cholera near Toulon and Stevenson fell gravely ill while visiting friends in Nice. They were forced to go back to England for medical treatment and later moved to Samoa, where Stevenson died, aged just 44.

*********

When New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield fled London and first journeyed to the south of France in 1915, it was partly to escape her grief. She’d just lost her dearly loved brother, Leslie Beauchamp, who was killed fighting on the Western Front in France. Her fragile health – a thwarted pregnancy, gonorrhoea and rheumatic fever – only added to Mansfield’s intense desire to settle in a warm climate, one with a landscape that reminded her of childhood years in Wellington.

Mansfield passed through Cassis – where Virginia Woolf often stayed a decade later, to visit her sister Vanessa and husband, Clive Belle – but decided to head to Bandol, a tiny port village, where she installed herself at the seafront Hôtel Beau Rivage, in a room on the top floor, second from the right, overlooking the sea. Mansfield’s haven still stands and currently operates as the Résidence Hôtelière Beau Rivage, offering weekly rental of three-star studio apartments.

By January 2, 1916, Mansfield had rented the tiny romantic Villa Pauline, boasting clifftop views and “an almond tree that tapped at the window of the salle à manger”. She stayed until April 1916, taking long walks by the port and writing what’s considered to be some of her best work, including Prelude. During this period, her lover, the literary magazine editor John Middleton Murray, often came down to visit. Mansfield’s chaotic love life would be too complex to summarise here, but she eventually wedded Middletown Murray in 1918, once the divorce with George Bowden, her estranged husband from a loveless marriage, had been finalised. Later on, Mansfield noted in her journals that those carefree months in Bandol had been the happiest moments of her life.

Once back in England, in 1917, Mansfield became ill with  pleurisy and dreamed about returning to sunny Bandol. When she recovered, her doctor advised a trip south, but the writer was unprepared for the hardships of the journey and the grim wartime changes that had altered the mood of her beloved Mediterranean town. Alone and in poor health, Mansfield immediately attempted to return to England but was held up in Paris, which was under heavy bombardment.

Disillusioned, Mansfield eventually made her way back to London, and in 1920, when her pleurisy had deteriorated into tuberculosis, decided to return to France with her care-taking companion, Ida Baker – this time to Menton. She moved into a small two-storey villa, the Isola Bella, which is set atop a hill in the neighbourhood of Garavan, just next to the Italian border, and is known for its exceptional gardens.

It was “the first real home of my own I’ve ever loved”, she enthused, in a letter to Middleton Murray, who visited sporadically. The sea and garden, filled with mimosa and tangerine trees, was the inspiration for her best novellas (Miss Brill, The Daughters of the Late Colonel), but this feverishly productive time ended abruptly when her health took a turn for the worse. She left for Switzerland and then went to Avon, to the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of the Mind, a monastery near  Fontainebleau, where she died on January 9, 1923 at the age of 34. Just before her death, she had written in her journal: “I simply pine for the S. of France.”

Today, Isola Bella, visible from the platform of the Gare de Menton-Garavan, is owned by the city of Menton. In collaboration with the Katherine Mansfield Society, the villa is used as a New Zealand writer’s guest residence.

********

The story of DH Lawrence’s wanderings in the south of France began five years after the death of Katherine Mansfield, a close friend – in a way, he was retracing her steps. In October 1928, the writer and his friend, Richard Aldington, rented an old stone fortress on the nearly deserted island of Port Cros, across from Hyères. At the time, Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, was having an affair with an Italian officer, Angelo Ravagli, which would have important consequences in the tragicomic saga that took place after the author’s death.

Finding that the Riviera’s climate suited him, Lawrence returned to Bandol the following winter, checking into the Hôtel Beau Rivage, where Mansfield had stayed earlier. Still in search of a publisher for his controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he and Frieda decided to rent the villa Beau Soleil. Emaciated and exhausted, Lawrence, who was in denial about his long-neglected tuberculosis, soon realised that the damp sea breezes had only made his condition worse. He longed to return to Taos, New Mexico but was too weak – instead his doctor dispatched him to a higher altitude, to the wooded hills of Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes département.

After a brief stay in a local sanatorium named Ad Astra, Lawrence demanded to be released but, sadly, died several days later at their newly-leased home, the Villa Rochermond near Vence, on March 2, 1930. Frieda and Lawrence’s close friends, Maria and Aldous Huxley, were present at his deathbed.

Lawrence was first buried in carré 7 of the old Vence cemetery, but his remains were exhumed and cremated five years later, a ceremony which was witnessed by a small group of friends. When Frieda – who was consoled by a series of lovers, including Middleton Murray – decided to transport Lawrence’s ashes with the intention of building a shrine in Taos, what happened next still isn’t exactly clear.

Various versions of the story of Lawrence’s ashes exist: one was that Frieda’s lover, Angelo Ravagli, who was in charge of transporting the urn, distractedly left it on a train and, instead, filled another receptacle with chips of burnt wood. Another version claims that Ravagli feared immigration hassles and, one night, drunkenly confessed that he’d dumped the original contents of the urn into the sea between Marseille and Villefranche, while sailing on a ship en route to New York.

Meanwhile, the Huxleys, appalled at the idea that Frieda might charge tourists money to visit the shrine, planned to steal the ashes and cast them to the desert winds. Frieda, who learned of their intentions, made it known that she would put the ashes in the concrete mixer immediately upon their arrival in Taos. It is still a mystery where the ashes may have actually been scattered, but the Taos shrine – since renamed a ‘memorial’ – still stands on the Lawrence Ranch, a site that’s only recently been reopened to the public.

After Lawrence’s funeral, the Huxleys went to Bandol and stayed, as their friends had done, at the Hôtel Beau Rivage. However, it wasn’t long before they bought a house in Sanary-sur-Mer, a tiny fishing port down the coast near Toulon, named the Villa Huley.

“Here, all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask,” Huxley wrote to his sister-in-law. The couple settled there for the next seven years. Living simply but well – Maria zipped around in a red Bugatti – Huxley wrote the visionary Brave New World and Eyeless in Gaza at the Villa Huley.

The ascent of fascism and anti-Semitism during the 1930s gave rise to a new era of expatriate writers and, strangely enough, the tiny, tranquil enclave of Sanary-sur-Mer suddenly became a refuge for a host of intellectuals, who ranged from Cyril Connolly, the British critic and novelist, to German author Thomas Mann and his son.

As Aldous Huxley’s friend and biographer, the novelist Sybille Bedford, recounted during a 1993 interview with the Paris Review, there were “so many people of wildly different ways of life there at the same time”, all with varied languages, incomes and tastes, that “Sooner or later everybody met, this was the point: Sanary was no city – one newspaper kiosk, one post office, one paint-shop, two chemists, three cafés.”

*********

Needless to say, the Riviera’s expatriate literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s didn’t begin and end in the Var département. Further east, down the coast, in the then-poky fishing village of Antibes, a group of American writers were forming a tight clique and inviting their New York friends to come and experience their own hedonistic version of ‘the good life’ – 

From France Today magazine

                                                       

An award winning full length play.

"Cyberdate.Com is the story of six ordinary people in search of romance, friendship and love and find it in very extraordinary ways. Based on the real life experiences of the authors misadventures with on line dating, Cyber date is a bittersweet story that will make you laugh, cry and want to fall in love again."   Ellis McKay  

Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play. The play was also given a full reading at The Frederick Playhouse in Maryland in March of 2007.

OTHER PLAYS BY JOHN WILLIAM TUOHY

  

HERE'S MY LATEST BOOK.....

This is a book of short stories taken from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia in southwestern Connecticut.

Most of these stories, or as true as I recall them because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child and are retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot it.     

The collected stories are loosely modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the contented and the discontented.

Conversely many of the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result of suicide (The Hanging Party, Small Town Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer) and natural occurring death. (The Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)

With the exception of Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)

Sal, the desperate and depressed divorcee in Things Change, changes his life in Lunch Hour when asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time, the last story in the book)

 In The Arranged Time, Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.

Although the book is based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is opened in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still inside the Diner. The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and much like my memories of that place, everything remains the same.

http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town

The Valley Lives

By Marion Marchetto, author of The Bridgewater Chronicles on October 15, 2015

Short Stores from a Small Town is set in The Valley (known to outsiders as The Lower Naugatuck Valley) in Connecticut. While the short stories are contemporary they provide insight into the timeless qualities of an Industrial Era community and the values and morals of the people who live there. Some are first or second generation Americans, some are transplants, yet each takes on the mantle of Valleyite and wears it proudly. It isn't easy for an author to take the reader on a journey down memory lane and involve the reader in the life stories of a group of seemingly unrelated characters. I say seemingly because by book's end the reader will realize that he/she has done more than meet a group of loosely related characters.

We meet all of the characters during a one-day time period as each of them finds their way to the Valley Diner on a rainy autumn day. From our first meeting with Angel, the educationally challenged man who opens and closes the diner, to our farewell for the day to the young waitress whose smile hides her despair we meet a cross section of the Valley population. Rich, poor, ambitious, and not so ambitious, each life proves that there is more to it beneath the surface. And the one thing that binds these lives together is The Valley itself. Not so much a place (or a memory) but an almost palpable living thing that becomes a part of its inhabitants.

Let me be the first the congratulate author John William Tuohy on a job well done. He has evoked the heart of The Valley and in doing so brought to life the fabric that Valleyites wear as a mantle of pride. While set in a specific region of the country, the stories that unfold within the pages of this slim volume are similar to those that live in many a small town from coast to coast.

HERE'S MY BIOGRAPHY

In 1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/

http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/

http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University.

He is the author of No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care and Short Stories from a Small Town. He is also the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."

His non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.

His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.

Contact John:

MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM

JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM

THE BEAT POETS

Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the west coast, although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politics and culture.

 A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets | Academy of American Poets https://www.poets.org/poetsorg

  

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was a poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing).

During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement. In 1955, Spicer moved to New York and then to Boston, where he worked for a time in the Rare Book Room of Boston Public Library. Blaser was also in Boston at this time, and the pair made contact with a number of local poets, including John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, and Joe Dunn.

Spicer returned to San Francisco in 1956 and started working on After Lorca. This book represented a major change in direction for two reasons. Firstly, he came to the conclusion that stand-alone poems (which Spicer referred to as his one-night stands) were unsatisfactory and that henceforth he would compose serial poems. In fact, he wrote to Blaser that 'all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus) looks foul to me.' Secondly, in writing After Lorca, he began to practice what he called "poetry as dictation".

His interest in the work of Federico García Lorca, especially as it involved the cante jondo ideal, also brought him near the poetics of the deep image group. The Troilus referred to was Spicer's then unpublished play of that name. The play finally appeared in print in 2004, edited by Aaron Kunin, in issue 3 of No - A Journal of the Arts.

In 1957, Spicer ran a workshop called Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College, which was attended by Duncan, Helen Adam, James Broughton, Joe Dunn, Jack Gilbert, and George Stanley. He also participated in, and sometimes hosted, Blabbermouth Night at a literary bar called The Place. This was a kind of contest of improvised poetry and encouraged Spicer's view of poetry as being dictated to the poet.

Spicer's view of the role of language in the process of writing poetry was probably the result of his knowledge of modern pre-Chomskyan linguistics and his experience as a research-linguist at Berkeley. In the legendary Vancouver lectures he elucidated his ideas on "transmissions" (dictations) from the Outside, using the comparison of the poet as crystal-set or radio receiving transmissions from outer space, or Martian transmissions.[citation needed] Although seemingly far-fetched, his view of language as "furniture", through which the transmissions negotiate their way, is grounded in the structuralist linguistics of Zellig Harris and Charles Hockett.

(In fact, the poems of his final book, Language, refer to linguistic concepts such as morphemes and graphemes). As such, Spicer is acknowledged as a precursor and early inspiration for the Language poets. However, many working poets today list Spicer in their succession of precedent figures

Spicer died as a result of his alcoholism.

“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”

BY JACK SPICER

         

        Any fool can get into an ocean   

But it takes a Goddess   

To get out of one.

What’s true of oceans is true, of course,

Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   

Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed

You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess

To get back out of them

Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly

Out in the middle of the poem

They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the

    water hardly moves

You might get out through all the waves and rocks

Into the middle of the poem to touch them

But when you’ve tried the blessed water long

Enough to want to start backward

That’s when the fun starts

Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural

You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown

Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth

But it takes a hero to get out of one

What’s true of labyrinths is true of course

Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

TODAY'S ALLEGED MOB GUY

Michael Zaffarano (? 1921 – February 14, 1980), also known as "Mickey" or "Mickey Z", was a capo in the Bonanno crime family who worked in the pornography industry.

Zaffarano handled porn theatres and national porn film distribution for the Bonanno family. He owned several pornographic movie theatres in Times Square in Manhattan and around the country. Zaffarano's office was in Times Square on the upper floor of The Pussycat Theatre located at 1600 broadway and 49th street. The Pussycat showed some of the biggest XXX movies of the 1970's such as Deep Throat. Zaffarano was a portly, heavyset, tall and handsome man with a brooding face. He had dark brown, piercing eyes, a broken nose, and a scar on his forehead.

Bonanno crime family boss Natale Evola in 1972 chose Zaffarano to initiate New York organized crime arbitration efforts with Paolo Violi in Montreal, Canada. Zaffarano had a long history of dealing with disputes and internal mob hostilities. Zaffarano survived the turbulent 1960s. His brother-in-law was Joseph Asaro, a made man in the Bonanno family and a second-generation mobster. Zaffarano's father had worked for Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone while Capone was still living in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Zaffarano eventually got caught up in the FBI investigation into illegal hardcore pornography in New York City. He was a mentor to gambino crime family caporegime Robert DiBernardo who ran the gambino pornography rackets and was closely associated with Gambino family capo Ettore Zappi in Florida.

On August 2nd, 1975 Zaffarano allegedly traveled to Los Angeles to murder Jacob Molinas. He was convicted of bribing New York basketball players and Molinas had told authorities that he was working for the Bonanno crime family so his death was ordered to prevent him testifying.

On February 14, 1980, Zaffarano died of a heart attack while evading FBI agents trying to arrest him. Anthony Mirra later became capo of his crew.

AND NOW, A BEATLES BREAK 

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings. Elizabeth Gilbert

Wild Writers Literary Festival features day of workshops

Waterloo Region Record

By Martin de Groot

Wild Writers is a project of The New Quarterly, Waterloo's "magazine of Canadian fiction, poetry, and conversation, primarily about the writer's craft." As host of what has now become "Waterloo Region's premier literary event," The New Quarterly has demonstrated, once again, an extraordinary capacity for balancing outstanding achievement on the national stage with maintaining a vital local presence.

The opening gala of the 2015 Wild Writers Literary Festival takes place Friday evening at the CIGI Campus Auditorium (Centre for International Governance Innovation, 67 Erb St. W.).

The headline feature is CBC-KW's Craig Norris in conversation with two major stars in the Canadian literary firmament, Nino Ricci and Don Gillmor, who happen to be friends and poker buddies.

The opening night program also includes the winners of The New Quarterly's fiction, non-fiction and poetry contests, plus Lynn Thomson, winner of the 2015 Edna Staebler Award presented by Wilfrid Laurier University.

Admission to the gala is $10, or free with the purchase of a print subscription to the magazine or one of the featured authors' new novels — Gillmor's "Long Change" or Ricci's "Sleep." It is at Words Worth Books in Waterloo.

The heart of the festival is an all-day program of workshops on Saturday, Nov. 7.

There are three streams: a series of six writer's craft classes on offer for $20 per session, plus conversations and panel discussions that are free and open to everyone. Topics covered include the spiritual memoirs, the prose poem, the art of the thriller and a panel on "race, immigration and belonging."

The location is part of the attraction. If you're not familiar with the facilities of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, which is also part of CIGI campus, this is a great opportunity to spend time in this latest addition to Waterloo's amazing concentration of award-winning architecture.

After the workshops, the festival unwinds with a "Saturday Night Speakeasy" at the Jazz Room in Waterloo ($15) and culminates with a Sunday morning "literary brunch" at Kitchener's The Boathouse ($35).

A platinum festival pass offers unlimited access to all events for $135.

As the name of the festival indicates, the tone is playful and unpretentious: "Here's to the wild ones — the unbridled lovers of the written word, embarking on a journey of discovery and experimentation ... Here's to the fearless readers and writers who open up new worlds ..."

The aim is to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible. As is the case with so many types of artistic endeavour, there are stereotypes that have to be overcome. As The New Quarterly editor Pamela Mulloy put it when I spoke with her this week, "people have an impression of how it might be, and then self -exclude."

So the organizers of the Wild Writers Literary Festival and its antecedents "do something different, to forget the academics and hear from the writers themselves."

It's a formula now has a proven record of success — some of the events are already close to being sold out. The recommendation is to book ahead. Tickets are available online and at Words Worth Books.

Martin de Groot writes about local arts and culture each Saturday. You can reach him by email atmdg131@gmail.com

It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then. Lewis Carroll

BOOK REVIEW

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926–1929

BY NICK MAFI

There isn't much that hasn't been said about Ernest Miller Hemingway. He was, after all, a literary titan of the 20th century, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature; a man who, through his short stories and novels, captured the imagination of the world by pinning his vulnerable, damaged characters in extraordinary situations and exotic locales. As The New York Times boasted in 1950, Hemingway was "the greatest writer since Shakespeare."

With the recent publication of, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926–1929 (Cambridge University Press, $45), the question begs to be asked, what more does any reader need to know about the boy from Oak Park, Illinois? The answer, quite frankly, is a hell of a lot.  

The years of this volume, 1926 through 1929, should apeal to any aspiring writer or ardent reader. Indeed, the book of letters commences with Hemingway on the cusp of international stardom, as his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is about to be released. Between those three tumultuous and prolific years, Hemingway's letters provide a startlingly candid voice on the divorce from his first wife, Hadley; his remarriage to Vogue writer, Pauline Pfeiffer; the birth of his second son; the writer's relocation to Key West and newfound fondness for big game fishing; completing his second book, Men Without Women (1927), and third novel, the now-iconic, A Farewell to Arms (1929). There's also the suicide of Hemingway's father, a tragic event the writer kept close to heart as expressed in a letter to his then-mother in law: "I was awfully fond of my father—and still feel very badly about it all and not able to get it out of my mind and my book into my mind."

At its core, the volume of 345 selected letters—70 percent of them previously unpublished—reveal a writer at times envious of others, unsure of his place in the world, fearful of the future, nostalgic of the past, eager for gossip, hungry for attention, but always earnest in his drive to be the best writer there ever was.

Hemingway's novels have come to be understood as the apogee in economical prose, works meant to be adored by high-minded reviewers as well as high school novices. In stark contrast to his tight, highly edited, carefully crafted published works, Hemingway's personal letters display little of his rigorous rewriting approach, reading more in the style of contemporary, and fellow literary juggernaut, William Faulkner, in a stream-of-thought technique the southerner made famous.

We see a man who would seemingly grab at anything (receipts, hotel stationary, or even the back of a discarded draft page from an original version of A Farewell to Arms, as he did in a 1929 letter to artist Henry Strater) to write any one of these now-famous recipients: Ezra Pound, Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, among others.

Smaller tidbits of interest for the loyal Hemingway enthusiasts are sprinkled throughout the volume. "Write me all the dirt," Hemingway prodded F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1927 letter, yearning for gossip. In a 1928 letter to his father containing an apology for his long silence from writing the family: "I am sorry not to have written more and oftener [sic], but it is almost impossible to write a letter when you are writing as hard as I am on this book."

In another letter that year to longtime friend Waldo Peirce: "My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can't write—never will be able to write a line—can't go on—can't get started—stuff is rotten—can't say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds." 

As fascinating as it is to read Hemingway's letters and see the pains he took in publishing such drum-tight prose, it's the fodder the writer extracted from his letters and used in his later fiction that makes The Letters so crucial for aspiring writers. While writing the first draft of A Farewell to Arms, his second wife, Pauline gave birth by Caesarean section to son Patrick. The surgery and subsequent birth of the boy nearly took Pauline's life.

In a July 1928 letter to his parents, Hemingway wrote of the episode, "He is very big strong and healthy. He is too big, in fact, as he nearly killed his mother." In the final pages of A Farewell to Arms, shortly after Catherine Barkley gives birth by way of Caesarean, and soon before her death, a nurse asks Frederic Henry (who nearly all but in name was a spinning image of Hemingway during World War I) if he is proud of his newborn son. Frederic's response comes straight from the letters: "'No,' I said. 'He nearly killed his mother.'"  

Though Hemingway never wanted his letters to be published, he knew the inevitable would happen. Hemingway once told his son, Patrick, "It doesn't really matter what you write to me, but it's very important what I write to you."

The fact remains that Hemingway was among, if not the most influential writer of the 20th century. As a result, readers are rightfully curious as to where and to what end his inspirations were drawn from. As his son, Patrick, commented on the role of his father's collected letters being published, "When we read a really fine work of fiction, I think we're always interested in the author. We think, how did this man gain the insights and the knowledge to write so well?"

Reading Hemingway's letters is to go back in time by stepping into the fascinating world of a revolutionary wordsmith; a voyage through decades to the very moments when literature was taking a sudden bend in the road; a shift that was being steered by the father of modern literature. Indeed, the value of these letters cannot be overstated.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. Ernest Hemingway

Sculpture this and Sculpture that

From the Smithsonian 

The miracle is walking on the earth, not walking on water or fire. The real miracle is walking on this earth. Thích Nhất Hạnh

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice. Thích Nhất Hạnh

DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?

                                            

“The Way I See You” by Eugenia Loli

DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY

HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................

Animals 

Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then

when we were still first rate

and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time

but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves

and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal

we didn't need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster

or greener than now if you were with me O you

were the best of all my days

HERE'S AN ANIMAL (I guess you would have figured that out on your own)

A wild boar has been accepted by cattle as part of the herd in Moerel, Germany.....I love reading stuff like this.

There is no fire like passion

No crime like hatred,

No sorrow like separation,

No sickness like hunger,

And no joy like the joy of freedom.

                                 Buddha

HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!

                                                   

I’m sure anybody in this room looking at these paintings would come up with their own little story. That’s one of the wonderful things about Vermeer. He allows all of us to engage in our own personal way.    Curator Arthur Wheelock on Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. John Steinbeck

             

I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM

St. Louis 1965

Your first task is to see the sorrow in you and around you; you’re next, to long intensely for liberation. The very intensity of longing will guide you; you need no other guide. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her. Oscar Wilde

             

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love. Khalil Gibran 

WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................

             

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes. Friedrich Nietzsche 

THE ART OF PULP

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

                                                                                                              Henry David Thoreau

             

Photographs I’ve taken

                                                      

The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost. Henry David Thoreau

THE ART OF WAR...............................

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. Albert Schweitzer

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.Ralph Waldo Emerson

MUSIC FOR THE SOUL

                                                                                   Gerry Mulligan 

                                                      

MISH MOSH..........................................

               

                                                     

Mish Mash: noun \ˈmish-ˌmash, -ˌmäsh\ A : hodgepodge, jumble “The painting was just a mishmash of colors and abstract shapes as far as we could tell”. Origin Middle English & Yiddish; Middle English mysse masche, perhaps reduplication of mash mash; Yiddish mish-mash, perhaps reduplication of mishn to mix. First Known Use: 15th century

                                                                     A child’s gas mask during WW2

GOOD WORDS TO HAVE………………..

Delectation \dee-lek-TAY-shun\ Delight, enjoyment. Delectation (which is from the Latin word for "delight") suggests a reaction to pleasurable experience consciously sought or provided. More than all the others, it connotes mere amusement or diversion.

What Love is…..

“I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, 'How many good things have you done in your life?' rather he will ask, 'How much love did you put into what you did?”  Mother Teresa

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other. Mark Hopkins

             

Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God. Soren Kierkegaard

             

Only the broken-hearted know the truth about love. Mason Cooley

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack. Rainer Maria Rilke

             

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.  

So, fall asleep love, loved by me... for I know love, I am loved by thee.

Robert Browning

             

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand. Blaise Pascal

             

DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE THE ENTIRE WORLD? 

I DO

Corfe Castle, Dorset, UK

                                         

FROM LLR BOOKS. COM

Litchfield Literary Books. A really small company run by writers.

AMERICAN HISTORY

The Day Nixon Met Elvis

Paperback 46 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/

Theodore Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918

Paperback 194 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/

THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND CIVILIZATIONS

The Works of Horace

Paperback 174 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/

The Quotable Greeks

Paperback 234 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Epictetus

Paperback 142 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings

Quo Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero

Paperback 420 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero

CHILDRENS BOOKS

The Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children

A Halloween play for young children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge, by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other not-for-profit-organizations.

A fun story with a moral

“I believe that Denny O'Day is an American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is a ongoing lesson isn't it?”

Paperback: 42 pages

http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children

It's Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the books contents

Paperback 94 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what

From the Author

I spent my childhood, from age seven through seventeen, in foster care.  Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."

In saying that, those very good people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were wrong.  It was not all right to be a foster kid.

During my time in the system, I was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age seventeen.

In the course of my stay in foster care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers" and separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only blocks away from where I was living.

I left the system rather than to wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family, means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had continuous problems with the law.

 Today, almost nothing about foster care has changed.  Exactly what happened to me is happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now.  The system, corrupt, bloated, and inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.

Something has gone wrong in a system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.  Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have lived through it.

Yet there is a suspicion among some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and is at odds with a satisfying life.  Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder of the public treasuries.

 None of that is true; in fact, all that sort of thinking does is to blame the victims.  There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked to be there.  Foster kids are in foster care because they had nowhere else to go.  It's that simple.  And believe me, if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are doing the plundering.

 We need to end this needless suffering.  We need to end it because it is morally and ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous wealth.

 Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world a better place.  And if we cannot accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of us "at least they tried."

You can change the tragedy of foster care and here's how to do it.  We have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to the world.  You have the power to improve the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves.  All you need is the will to do it.

 If the American people, as good, decent and generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and with their money, they would stop it.  But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster care system puts on our nation.

By tweeting the facts laid out in this work, you can help to change all of that.  You can make a difference.  You can change things for the better.

We can always change the future for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up (or tweet out) because it's your country.  Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these kids, because you are the other guy.

We cannot build a future for foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time to start that change is today.

BOOKS ABOUT FILM

On the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film

Paperback: 416 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/

BOOKS ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL

Scotish Ghost Stories

Paperback 186 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell

HUMOR BOOKS

The Book of funny odd and interesting things people say

Paperback: 278 pages

http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people

The Wee Book of Irish Jokes

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook

Perfect Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises

http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social

BOOKS ABOUT THE 1960s

You Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969

Paperback 122 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969

Baby Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties

Paperback

http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/

Baby Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s

http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s

IRISH- AMERICANA

The Connecticut Irish

Paper back 140 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

 The Wee Book of Irish Jokes

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes 

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/

 

 The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters

  http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/

 The Wee book of Irish Blessings... 

http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/

The Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words

http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/

Everything you need to know about St. Patrick

Paperback 26 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick

A Reading Book in Ancient Irish History

Paperback 147pages

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History

The Book of Things Irish

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/

Poets and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish

Paperback 158 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/

The History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated

Paperback 356 pages

http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/

BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND

The New England Mafia

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/

Wicked Good New England Recipes

http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/

The Connecticut Irish

Paper back 140 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

The Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers

Paperback 64 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion

The Life of James Mars

Paperback 54 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut

Stories of Colonial Connecticut

Paperback 116 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford

What they Say in Old New England

Paperback 194 pages

http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/

BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME

Chicago Organized Crime

Chicago-Mob-Bosses

http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook

The Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook

An Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000

http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/

The Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/

Shooting the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/

Shooting the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre

The Life and World of Al Capone in Photos

http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone

AL CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930 edition.Over 200 new photographs

Paperback: 340 pages

http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs

Whacked. One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit

Paperback: 172 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/

Las Vegas Organized Crime

The Mob in Vegas

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook

Bugsy & His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill

http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/

Testimony by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files Series)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook

Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime.

Paperback 264 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged

The Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.

Paperback 94 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor

The Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago

Paperback 200 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago

When Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos

Paperback 234 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos

Organized Crime in Hollywood

The Mob in Hollywood

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/

The Bioff Scandal

Paperback 54 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios

Organized Crime in New York

Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia

http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/

Mob Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/

The New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins

The New York Mob: The Bosses

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/

Organized Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate

http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook

Shooting the mob: Dutch Schultz

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)

http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City

Paperback 382 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York

THE RUSSIAN MOBS

The Russian Mafia in America

http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/

The Threat of Russian Organzied Crime

Paperback 192 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook

Organized Crime/General

Best of Mob Stories

http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/

Best of Mob Stories Part 2

http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/

Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters

http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook

Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos

http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

More Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs

http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

The New England Mafia

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook

Shooting the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.

http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/

The Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill each other"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/

The Mob across America

http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/

The US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987

http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated

http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated

Paperback: 128 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.

Paperback: 436 pages

http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/

The Mob and the Kennedy Assassination

Paperback 414 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters

BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST

The Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself

Paperback 152 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself

BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY

Chicago: A photographic essay.

 Paperback: 200 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas

STAGE PLAYS

Boomers on a train: A ten minute play

Paperback 22 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook

Four Short Plays

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy

Four More Short Plays

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/

High and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve

Cyberdate. An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/

The Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of Gangster Dutch Schultz.

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/

Fishbowling on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with Dutch Schultz

Print Length: 57 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/

American Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play

By John William Tuohy

http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook

She Stoops to Conquer

http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/

The Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play

Print Length: 14 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/

BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA

OUT OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police

http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/

McLean Virginia. A short informal history

http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/

THE QUOTABLE SERIES

The Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300 quotes

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes

The Quotable John F. Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/

The Quotable Machiavelli

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/

The Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/

The Quotable Henry David Thoreau

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Robert F. Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/

The Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook

The words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet

Paperback: 162 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated

Paperback: 128 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Quotable Popes

Paperback 66 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti

The Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran

Paperback 52 pages

Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet, and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In 1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in 1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/

The Quotable Dorothy Parker

Paperback 86 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Dorothy-Parker-Proxy-Algan/

The Quotable Machiavelli

Paperback 36 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer

The Quotable Greeks

Paperback 230 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotabe Oscar Wilde

Paperback 24 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/

The Quotable Helen Keller

Paperback 66 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby

The Art of War: Sun Tzu

Paperback 60 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Shakespeare

Paperback 54 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Gorucho Marx

Paperback 46 pages

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander

BLOGLAPEDIA’S BLOGS

 

ARCHITECTURE

Architecture for the blog of it

http://architecturefortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

THE ARTS

Art for the Blog of It

http://artfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Art for the Pop of it

http://artforthepopofit.blogspot.com/

Photography for the blog of it

http://photographyfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Music for the Blog of it

http://musicfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Sculpture this and Sculpture that

http://sculpturethisandsculpturethat.blogspot.com/

The art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)

http://theartofwarcleverhuh.blogspot.com/

Album Art (Photographic arts)

http://albumartsocheesyitsgood.blogspot.com/

Pulp Fiction Trash (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)

http://pulpfictiontrash.blogspot.com/

Admit it, you want to Read this Book (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)

http://goaheadadmitityouwanttoread.blogspot.com/

FILM

The Godfather Trilogy BlogSpot

http://thegodfathertrilogyblogspot.blogspot.com/

On the Waterfront: The Making of a great American Film

http://onthewaterfrontthefilm.blogspot.com/

FOOD

Absolutely blogalicious

http://absolutelyblogalicious.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)

http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

Good chowda (New England foods)

http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes (Book support site)

http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams (New England foods)

http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)

http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Wicked Cool New England Recipes (New England foods)

http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Old New England Recipes (New England foods)

http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

FOSTER CARE

Foster Care new and Updates

http://www.facebook.com/FosterCareNews

Aging out of the system

http://agingoutofthesystem.blogspot.com/

Murder, Death and Abuse in the Foster Care system

http://murderdeathandabuseinfostercare.blogspot.com/

Angel and Saints in the Foster Care System

http://angelsandsaintsinthefostercare.blogspot.com/

The Foster Children’s Blogs

http://fosterchildrensblog.blogspot.com/

Foster Care Legislation

http://fostercarelegislation.blogspot.com/

The Foster Children’s Bill of Right

http://thefosterchildrensbillofrights.blogspot.com/

Foster Kids own Story

http://fosterkidsownstory.blogspot.com/

The Adventures of Foster Kid.

http://theadventuresoffosterkid.blogspot.com/

HEALTH

Me vs. Diabetes (Diabetes education site)

http://mevsdiabetes-bloglapedia.blogspot.com/

HISTORY

The Quotable Helen Keller

http://thequotablehelenkeller.blogspot.com/

Teddy Roosevelt's Letters to his children (Book support site)

http://teddyrooseveltsletterstohischildren.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Machiavelli (Book support site)

http://thequotablemachiavelli.blogspot.com/

HUMOR

Whatever you do, don't laugh

http://whateveryoudodontlaugh.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Grouch Marx

http://thequotablegrouchmarx.blogspot.com/

IRISH-AMERICANA

A Big Blog of Irish Literature

http://abigblogofirishliterature.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Jokes (Book support blog)

http://theweeblogofirishjokes.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Recipes

http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster

http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

The Irish in their Own Words

http://theirishintheirownwords.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish

http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)

http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

LITERATURE

Following Fitzgerald

http://followingfitzgerald.blogspot.com/

Shakespeare

http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/

The Blogable Robert Frost

http://theblogablerobertfrost.blogspot.com/

Charles Dickens

http://charlesdickensfan.blogspot.com/

The Beat Poets of the Forever Generation

http://thebeatspoetsoftheforevergenera.blogspot.com/

Holden Caulfield Blog Spot

http://holdencaulfieldblogspot.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde

http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/

NEW ENGLAND BLOGS

The Quotable Thoreau

http://thequotablethenrydavidthoreau.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes

http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Wicked Cool New England Recipes

http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Emerson

http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/

The New England Mafia

http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams

http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener

http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Watch Hill

http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/

York Beach

http://yorkbeachfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut History Blog

http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut Irish

http://theconnecticutirish.blogspot.com/

Good chowda

http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

NOSTALGIA

God, How I hated the 70s

http://godhowihatedthe70s.blogspot.com/

Child of the Sixties Forever

http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/

The Kennedy’s in the 60’s

http://thekennedysinthe60s.blogspot.com/

Music of the Sixties Forever

http://musicofthesixtiesforever.blogspot.com/

Elvis and Nixon at the White House (Book support site)

http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/

Beatles Fan Forever

http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/

Year One, 1955

http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/

Robert Kennedy in His Own Words

http://rfkinhisownwords.blogspot.com/

The 1980s were fun

http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/

The 1990s. The last decade.

http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/

ORGANIZED CRIME

The Russian Mafia

http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/

The American Jewish Gangster

http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Hollywood

http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/

We Only Kill Each Other

http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/

Early Gangsters of New York City

http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/

Al Capone: Biography of a self-made Man

http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/

The Life and World of Al Capone

http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/

The Salerno Report

http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/

Guns and Glamour

http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/

Mob Testimony

http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/

Recipes we would Die For

http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/

The Prohibition in Pictures

http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Pictures

http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Vegas

http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster

http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

Roger Touhy Gangster

http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/

Chicago’s Mob Bosses

http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/

Chicago Gang Land: It Happened Here

http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland

http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

The Mob Across America

http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Mob Cops, Lawyers and Front Men

http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dutch Schultz

http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/

Bugsy& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill

http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/

After Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime

http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee (Book support site)

http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/

The US Government’s Timeline of Organized Crime (Book support site)

http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/

The Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)

http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/

Joe Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)

http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in the News

http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)

http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/

The Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)

http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in Black and White

http://mobstersinblackandwhite.blogspot.com/

Mafia Gangsters, Wiseguys and Goodfellas

http://mafiagangsterswiseguysandgoodfellas.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)

http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)

http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/

The Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)

http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/

PHILOSOPHY

It’s All Greek Mythology to me

http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychologically Relevant

http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/

SNOBBERY

The Rarifieid Tribe

http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/

Perfect Behavior

http://perfectbehavior.blogspot.com/

TRAVEL

The Upscale Traveler

http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

TRIVIA

The Mish Mosh Blog

http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

WASHINGTON DC

DC Behind the Monuments

http://dcbehindthemonuments.blogspot.com/

Washington Oddities

http://washingtonoddities.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish

http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/