“I write for a species of man
that does not yet exist: the masters of the earth.” F. Nietzsche, The Will to
Power
Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
And he should know, having shot himself and all
WORRY
A LITTLE BIT EVERY DAY AND IN A LIFETIME YOU WILL LOSE A COUPLE OF YEARS. IF
SOMETHING IS WRONG, FIX IT IF YOU CAN. BUT TRAIN YOURSELF NOT TO WORRY: WORRY
NEVER FIXES ANYTHING.- Ernest Hemingway
Richard Brautigan Poem: A Boat
BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark water
out on the dark water
You Can Sleep Over in This 130-Year-Old Library
By Emma Cubellis|January 18, 2019
Have you ever dreamt of spending a night in a cozy library? Gladstone’s Library in Northern Wales, UK is making those dreams come true. This 130-year-old library doubles as an adorable bed and breakfast — as well as a retreat for writers, readers, and curious thinkers.
Gladstone’s Library, named after William Gladstone, houses the former UK politician’s personal collection of 150,000 books. Before his death, Gladstone wished that his collection of books be made available to the public, and that the library he proudly owned be transformed into a haven for writers and thinkers to engage in intelligent and stimulating discussion.
One-hundred and thirty years later, the library has fulfilled the goal set out by Gladstone and is a place where thinkers can both stay and learn. The library has 26 boutique style rooms, and each comes with its own collection of books. Guests can stay at the library for one short night, or months at a time!
It wouldn’t be hard to stay at Gladstone’s for months with their incredible array of activities. The library is famous for their ‘Writers in Residence’ program, in which Gladstone’s hosts prestigious writers for several months to teach courses. These course offerings include workshops like ‘The Art of The Short Story’ and ‘Writing Animals’. Courses proffer attendees the chance to learn from – and write alongside – authors while gaining invaluable feedback about their work. The best part? Courses are open to anyone at any skill level!
If you find yourself lucky enough to be at Gladstone’s in either November or February not only will you be able to go to an amazing class, but you’ll also be able to attend Hearth. Hearth is a daylong, biannual event where attendees sit around the library’s cozy fire with four distinguished authors. Authors share tips and tricks of the trade, like how to get your work published. Then, together, the group writes, reads, and critiques one another’s pieces.
If you find yourself feeling a bit peckish after all the writing and reading, then grab yourself some Food For Thought. Food For Thought, Gladstone’s Library’s bistro, offers locally sourced food from the surrounding Welsh villages, all homemade daily for guests. In addition to their delicious daily offerings, the bistro also hosts classic Afternoon Tea Monday through Friday and traditional Celtic lunch on Sundays so customers can get a taste of classic Welsh cuisine.
So what are you waiting for? Great food, opportunities to learn, and the chance to sleep nestled amongst books await you in the Welsh countryside!
Words are the writers business
Cumulate and its far more common relative accumulate both come from the Latin word cumulare, meaning "to heap up." Cumulare, in turn, comes from cumulus, meaning "mass." (Cumulus functions as an English word in its own right as well. It can mean "heap" or "accumulation," or it can refer to a kind of dense puffy cloud with a flat base and rounded outlines.) Cumulate and accumulate overlap in meaning, but you're likely to find cumulatemostly in technical contexts. The word's related adjective, cumulative, however, is used more widely.
Art and love
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
— Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
Good writing
The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Jane Austen
I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
Great sentence on a dozen different levels
There is just something special about walking on snow that no one else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special. Carol Brunt
I know who I was when I got up this morning
I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.
16 Fun Facts About Noah Webster, the Dictionary Writer Who Was Slightly Nuts
Noah Webster was an odd duck, a famously fussy lexicographer who not only Americanized the English language but created the idea of American patriotism.
He wrote the first real American dictionary, called, appropriately, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which took him 28 years to finish. His goal: to standardize American speech.
He couldn’t afford law school after he graduated from Yale in 1778, so he taught schoolchildren. His students used books published in England, sometimes pledging allegiance to King George III. They didn’t learn American geography or American history. Noah Webster decided to change all that.
Noah Webster did way more than publish a dictionary. He advised Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, co-founded Amherst College, started America’s first daily newspaper and pushed Congress to pass copyright laws.
He was quirky and odd, thought highly of himself and didn’t always get along with people. But the qualities that made him annoying also made Noah Webster a Founding
NOAH WEBSTER IN 16 TAKES
1. He personally counted all the houses in every town he visited. Traveling across America in 1785 and 1786, he tallied 20,380 houses in 22 cities. He exchanged that information with other people who counted houses.
2. He had the cheek to chastise George Washington over dinner at Mount Vernon in 1785. Washington mentioned he wanted a Scottish tutor for his step-grandchildren. Webster, then all of 26, told the 53-year-old hero of the Revolution that he should find an American for the job. Washington actually considered Webster, who didn’t want to do it.
3. A lot of people didn’t like him because of his vanity. When he met Dr. Benjamin Rush at a dinner party in Philadelphia, Rush congratulated Webster on his safe arrival in the city. Webster replied, "Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia on the occasion." (Eventually, Rush and Webster became friends.)
4. He was dumped twice, the first time by a woman who found him too boring, the second time by a woman whose minister told her to marry someone else. Rebecca Greenleaf finally said ‘yes’ to his marriage proposal. "I suspect I am not formed for society," he wrote to her before their marriage.
5. He probably had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (see No. 1), often mentioning in his diary his ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety’ and ‘nervous affectations.’ He wrote his famous Blue-Backed Speller and later his dictionaries as a form of therapy.
6. Webster hated Shakespeare, complaining his language was ‘full of errors.’
7. He was often broke and in debt, though his wife was rich, his speller sold nearly 100 million copies and he landed America’s first blockbuster book deal, $42,000 over 14 years. He borrowed $1,500 from Alexander Hamilton so he could move to New York and start the country’s first daily newspaper, American Minerva.
8. He wrote the first American dictionary in 1806, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Critics complained it had too many vulgar words. Noah Webster replied he took out two-thirds of the vulgar words in Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, leaving out arse, bum, fart and turd. He did keep piss, boghouse, buggery, sodomy and catamite.
9. Noah Webster got a good deal on a mansion in New Haven because Benedict Arnold had lived in it. (It cost him only $2,666.66.)
10. Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster wanted to reform American spelling. Unlike Franklin, he succeeded, at least in part. He took out excess letters, like the ‘u’ in colour and honour, the extra ‘l’ in traveler, the ‘e’ on ax and the ‘ough’ in plow. He also reversed the ‘re’ in theater and center. Some of his changes didn’t make it, like bred for bread, wimmen for women, tung for tongue and dawter for daughter.
11. When he turned 20, his father gave him a nearly worthless $8 bill, and told him he was on his own.
12. It took him 28 years to complete his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language. It included 70,000 words, and one in every six words had never been listed in a dictionary before. They included emerging Americanisms like squash, applesauce, hickory, chowder and skunk, as well as words of his own invention: afterwise (wise afterwards or too late); vernate (become young again); zuffalo (a little flute... especially that which is used to teach birds.)
To write his dictionary, he learned 26 languages, including Old English, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit.
13. He founded Amherst College with Emily Dickinson’s grandfather, and Emily went to school with Noah Webster’s grandfather. She later wrote that her lexicon (Webster’s dictionary) was her only companion.
14. He was an 18th century sock puppet who anonymously praised his own work and trashed his critics. The phrase 'sock puppet,' meaning ‘false online identity,’ didn’t make it into Merriam-Webster until 2009.
15. Though his blue-backed speller had no religious content, Noah Webster had a religious experience at age 40 and became a pious blowhard. As he was about to turn eighty, he declared that he would rather be a bear and hibernate in winter than “be under the tyranny of our degenerate rulers,” describing Americans as “a degenerate and wicked people.”
Writers Aliments
THE GREAT WRITERS WHO SUFFERED GREATLY FROM PHYSICAL AILMENTS
By Sean Braswell
Great art often comes from great suffering, but some artists suffer more than others.
Writers are an odd and often long-suffering bunch. Most of us know all too well the tales of psychological turmoil and depression affecting some of literature’s biggest names, from Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin to F. Scott Fitzgerald. And, naturally, some of history’s most accomplished drunks were also scribes, like William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway. But less discussed are the number of well-known authors who endured chronic physical illnesses — ailments that had a notable impact on their writing and the course of their careers, sometimes spurring them to embark on their paths to becoming literary legends.
Let’s start with asthma. “[A]sthma often correlates, sometimes fatally, with high literary achievement,” John Sutherland quips in Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers. And when you start down the list of literature’s great asthmatics, it’s hard not to agree: John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli and Marcel Proust, among many others. Was this just the byproduct of so many future writers being raised in overly sanitized upper-middle-class worlds? We now know that children with low exposure to infections are more likely to develop asthma.
Edith Wharton fits this mold: She was tutored in her wealthy family’s New York home after a bout of typhoid fever as an infant. The wheezing Proust was also educated at home, with any “outings in the air” minimized — a lifestyle that might have contributed to the later writer’s reclusive nature. On the other hand, the asthmatic Charles Dickens labored in a filthy factory as an impoverished child and lived most of his life in London, a city where soot often fell from the sky like snow. Incidentally, Dickens is thought to be the first novelist to introduce an expressly asthmatic character into his works: the shopkeeper Mr. Omer in David Copperfield.
Another famous British writer with chest problems — and often bleak works — was George Orwell. Orwell suffered from damaged bronchial tubes as the result of a childhood bacterial infection, and he contracted tuberculosis as an adult. His final and fatal attack of TB came while working long hours on his masterpiece, 1984, a book that grew darker the sicker Orwell became. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness,” Orwell himself once reflected. “This was intended as metaphor,” says John J. Ross, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the author of Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough, “but was literally true of 1984, which was written by a man who was coughing up blood, struggling for breath, wracked with fever and wasting away.”
MANY WRITERS EMERGE AS HEROIC AND INSPIRING FIGURES WHO OVERCAME ASTONISHING OBSTACLES.
JOHN J. ROSS, AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH
Sometimes a physical ailment, however, can push a budding writer in a new and positive direction. “Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James’ bowels,” the literary critic Peter Kemp once observed. The young James suffered from chronic constipation, and so his parents sent him on a grand tour of Europe in an effort to help with his “hideous repletion.” The future American novelist began writing lengthy letters to his family while traveling, making observations about his journey. “Rippling through these letters,” said Kemp, “are the first imaginative stirrings of one of the greatest fiction and travel writers in the language.”
Eye problems have also afflicted many famous writers. John Milton went blind in middle age, likely from a detached retina, and experimented with all manner of unproven remedies, from cat ointment to “mummy” (ground-up human bones), in a failed attempt to improve his vision. James Joyce began having eye problems after undergoing a radical treatment for gonorrhea at the behest of his doctor. He would later suffer through 11 surgeries in an attempt to save his vision. “Joyce and Milton produced some of their best work when they were legally blind,” says Ross, who points out that “many writers emerge as heroic and inspiring figures who overcame astonishing obstacles, and were often poorly served or actively harmed by their physicians.”
Finally, some of the literary world’s biggest figures had to overcome multiple physical and psychological ailments. For example, in addition to likely suffering from bipolar disorder, depression and alcoholism, Herman Melville endured chronic pains in his joints, back and eyes, symptoms consistent with ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease. “His depression and physical illness fed on each other, and he struggled to complete his subsequent novels [after Moby-Dick], which were weird, bleak, brilliant and commercially suicidal,” says Ross. “His mental and physical breakdown finished off his career as a professional writer.”
Great art may be possible without great suffering, but for many of history’s greatest writers, the two go hand in hand. “Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer,” the English novelist Aldous Huxley once wrote. “Can an artist do anything if he’s happy?” Huxley himself had wanted to be a doctor — a dream he had to abandon in favor of literature after a childhood illness left him partially
Create
Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.
Now in public domain
“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Day”
by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
–
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
–
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
–
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
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