Tumblng PhiloPoet

ALL LINKS ON THIS PAGE, INCLUDING MENU ITEMS, OPEN RIGHT BELOW THIS PARAGRAPH.  Artists and creative folks of all sorts, from anywhere and everywhere, in the world, should find this a congenial place visit, midst the many Writers Almanac posts, and various articles that strike my fancy, and yours too, I hope. . Many of my own poems, ekphrastic poems, based on artwork found on Tumblr, are also here, under Poems and Posts, on the Main Menu..

[literarydeor]

[theinturnetexplorer]

Poor Grandma

How To Cope With Death Full Video With Sound

[samueldeckerthompson]

At age 14, George Stinney Jr. became the youngest person ever sentenced to death in the United States.

In 1944 Stinney was accused of killing two white girls after their bodies were found near the house where the young teenager lived with his parents.

On June 16, 1944 at 7:25 pm, George Jr., standing just 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighing just over 90 lbs, was approached by three police officers who entered the cell where he was being held and pulled a screaming George Stinney into the hall. George yelled that he didn't want to be executed, but the officers escorted him to the execution room where they placed him in the electric chair, using a bible as a booster seat because George was so small. George was then restrained by his arms, legs, and body to the chair. His father was allowed to approach George to say his final words to his son. An officer asked George if he had any last words to say, but George just shook his head. George could only whimper and take big deep breaths as one of the officers pulled a strap from the chair and placed it over his mouth, causing George to break into tears, they then placed the face mask over his face, which did not fit him ... George continued sobbing.

When the lethal electricity was applied, the mask covering George's face slipped off, revealing George's burned scalp and the tears still streaming down his face.

George Stinney was declared dead after eight minutes of agony.

In 2014, 70 years after the incident, Stinney's innocence was finally confirmed by a judge in South Carolina when his conviction was vacated due to the inept investigation, coerced confession, and unfair trial.

[tumblngphilopoet]

This was really dreadful, and it shows racism at its worst. It’s important that it be read, posted and spread, and the fact recognized that racial injustice could occur on many different levels, and that it should be combatted wherever it occurs. 

[jareckiworld]

Sandy Chism (1957-2013) — Many as One  (acrylic on panel, 1999)

[huntingtonlibrary]

Illustrations from a 1933 French edition of Homer’s “Odyssey” from our library collections. The artist, François-Louis Schmied, first painted the compositions before they were reproduced into woodcuts and hand-colored. 

[tumblngphilopoet]

Study Philosophy Through a Novel turned 8 today!

[tumblngphilopoet]

Tumblng PhiloPoet turned 6 today!

[tumblngphilopoet]

Repression by C.K. Williams

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings, I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression, sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact, and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude, indifference, now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days, days when the idea alone of psychic peace, of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have meant inconceivable capitulation. “Repression” by C.K. Williams from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

[tumblngphilopoet]

It’s the birthday of soprano

Jenny Lind

, born in Stockholm, Sweden (1820). She is considered to be one of the most gifted sopranos ever. In 1840, she was appointed member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and official singer of the Swedish Court. She was known also as a great philanthropist.

Hans Christian Andersen fell in love with her, but she did not return his love. Among other stories, he wrote “The Nightingale” (1843) as a tribute to Jenny Lind. He said, “[S]he can never be mine … though her voice stays with me, forever, in my story.” Lind would later be known as “The Swedish Nightingale.”

In 1848 she spent a lot of time in London with Chopin, who wrote about Lind in letters to his family and friends. He wrote, “Yesterday I was at a dinner with J. Lind, who afterwards sang me Swedish things till midnight.” She came to Paris the next year to marry Chopin, but fled Paris a month later to get away from a cholera epidemic and political unrest. She wrote in a letter to a friend: “Things and experiences approached me which deeply affected my peace of mind … I was very near to marrying. But again it came to nothing.”

On October 11, 2003, “Nightingale Opus 24” premiered in Belgium. In this drama, the narrator introduces each act with original quotes from Chopin’s letters and quotes from the Nightingale story. It’s the story of the musical encounters of Chopin and Jenny Lind.

After parting with Chopin, Jenny Lind no longer performed in operas, only in concerts. She toured the U.S. for a few years, where she raised money for charity and married Otto Goldschmidt, her pianist. They settled in England, where she died in 1887. Her memorial is at Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, near that of Handel, and William Shakespeare.

[mischak420]

I have a rare inherent blood disease, ACUTE INTERMITTENT PORPHYRIA.  This disease is one of the more common forms of Porphyria and not fully understood by many physicians. My experience with AIP has NOT been fun at best.  I have undergone many tests, medication trials, diets, and addiction to pain medication and benzodiazepines.  When I was diagnosed, I had 37 different prescription medications. I also found that a HUGE majority of those medications triggered attacks.  These attacks usually require Panhematin treatments, hospitalization and generally a heavy dosage of pain medication. This disease is EXTREMELY PAINFUL!!! During an attack, I’ve had seizures, EXTREME ANXIETY, racing heart, am at risk of paralysis, even death.  My disease is not curable, just treatable.  Not everyone with my disease agrees with my choice to use marijuana and CBD’s. (ALWAYS CHECK WIYH YOUR PHYSICIAN!!!)  But I know my body!!! I made a conscious decision to make some drastic changes.  Today, my struggle is greater than wanting to legally smoke weed, it’s because I want to have quality of life each and every day I am here for this fight!!! I will continue my fight for my right to choose how I care for my body!!! Thank you for your support!!! 💚💚💚 MUCH LOVE!!! 💚💚💚

[tumblngphilopoet]

Mischak, I encourage you to check out this alternative healing website, www.criticalhealthnews.com and check out articles by Ben Fuchs who is a registered pharmacist and has a tremendous knowledge of alternative healing, which orients toward treating medical conditions through nutrition and natural supplements rather than drugs and surgery.  Dr. Wallach is excellent too, but he spends most of his time travelling and giving lectures. You could subscribe to the newletter on the website for free, and could contact  Ben via email too, I believe. I hope you give this a try. I worked through asthma through natural means - breathing exercises, without drugs, and I mention this as an example of the power of natural healing. Good luck to you! Paul

[tumblngphilopoet]

It’s the birthday of American novelist William Faulkner (books by this author)(1897), who once said, “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me.” Faulkner is best known for his long, lyrical, and often violent novels that explore Southern culture and history, like Absalom, Absalom! (1936), As I Lay Dying (1930), and The Sound and the Fury (1929). When President John F. Kennedy invited Faulkner, then teaching in Charlottesville, Virginia, to dine at the White House with other Nobel Prize laureates, Faulkner famously declined, saying, “Why, that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.”

Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he would spend most of the rest of his life, and was a voracious reader, though he didn’t do well in his studies, and never graduated his local high school. He enrolled as a special student at Ole Miss and worked as the postmaster at the university station, but was fired for reading on the job. A girl broke his heart, so he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, hoping to fight in World War I, and added a ‘u’ to his name to seem more English, but he never saw action. The war ended while he was in training in Toronto. Faulkner married that same girl several years later. He once famously claimed that he removed the doorknob to his writing room so his kids couldn’t get in while he was working.

His first few books, like Sartoris (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), didn’t make any money, so he wrote a book called Sanctuary (1931), which was a kind of potboiler, and a little salacious, and it was a hit.

William Faulkner wasn’t well known when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949. Most of his best works were already far behind him, like The Sound and the Fury, which focuses on several generations of the Compson family. The book takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Faulkner once called it “a splendid failure.” He said: “When I began the book, I had no plan at all. I wasn’t even writing a book. Previous to it I had written three novels, with progressively decreasing ease and pleasure, and reward or emolument. … One day it suddenly seemed as if a door had clapped silently and forever to between me and all publishers’ addresses and booklists and I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I can just write.”

Faulkner was famously snippy, and had a long feud with Ernest Hemingway, which started when Faulkner said: “Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway retorted: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” When an editor asked Faulkner if Hemingway should write a preface to Faulkner’s new collection, Faulkner spat: “It seems to me in bad taste to ask him to write a preface to my book. It’s like asking one race horse in the middle of a race to broadcast a blurb on another horse in the same running field.”

The Guinness Book of World Records lists Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! as having the longest single sentence in literature. It’s in chapter six.

When he was asked about writer’s block, William Faulkner answered: “I have no patience; I don’t hold with the mute inglorious Miltons. I think if he’s demon-driven with something to be said, then he’s going to write it. He can blame the fact that he’s not turning out work on lots of things. I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, if I were not married and had children, I would be a writer.’ I’ve heard people say, ‘If I could just stop doing this, I would be a writer.’ I don’t believe that. I think if you’re going to write you’re going to write, and nothing will stop you.”

He added, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

[tumblngphilopoet]

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (he is the father of the Supreme Court Justice, who is ...Jr.) quote is from Writers Almanac.org 9-29-17

[tumblngphilopoet]

It's the birthday of American sharpshooter

Annie Oakley

(1860), born Phoebe Ann Mosey in a log cabin just north of what is now Willowdell, in Darke County, Ohio. Her parents were Quakers from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Oakley's father died of pneumonia when she was six, which sent her mother into a financial tailspin. Oakley was the sixth of nine children, and she and her sister were sent to the Darke County Children's Infirmary, where they learned to cook and sew. After a few years, Oakley was "bound out" to a local family, who expected her to be able to cook, pump water, and care for their child. Oakley was small and the couple was unkind; they beat and starved her and left her outside in freezing weather without shoes. She called them "the wolves" and after two years, she ran away and returned to her mother.

Oakley had been trapping animals since she was seven and was shooting and hunting animals to support her family by the time she was eight. When she returned to her mother, she began selling her game to local shopkeepers, who shipped it to cities like Cincinnati. Oakley's shooting prowess became well known in Darke County and greater Ohio.

On Thanksgiving Day of 1875, the Baughman & Butler shooting act came to Cincinnati. Frank Butler, a charming Irish immigrant, bet $100 that no local could best him in a shooting match. Local shopkeepers presented Annie Oakley. Frank Butler said: "I almost dropped dead when a slim girl in a short dress stepped out to the mark with me. I was a beaten man the moment she appeared." Oakley won and she married Butler a year later.

For more than 50 years, Annie Oakley and Frank Butler traveled the world, wowing audiences with Oakley's marksmanship. From 30 paces, she could split a playing card held edge-on, hit dimes tossed into the air, and split cigarettes from between her husband's lips. When she joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West traveling show (1885), she was the star attraction, earning $100 a week, more than any man in the troupe. Buffalo Bill's troupe crossed the United States and did several European tours. Oakley met King Umberto of Italy and the Queen of England, who told her, "You are a very clever little girl." Lakota leader Sitting Bull nicknamed her "Little Miss Sure Shot."

Oakley campaigned for women's rights and even volunteered to train 50 women sharpshooters for the Spanish Civil War and World War I, though she was turned down both times. She said, "I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they handle babies."

Thomas Edison filmed Oakley and the Buffalo Bill troupe at his studio in West Orange, New Jersey, turning the film into nickelodeons. People paid five cents apiece to see Annie Oakley. She was the most famous woman in the world for a time.

Annie Oakley continued to shoot and perform into her 60s. When she died, Frank Butler was said to be so bereaved he stopped eating and died several days later. Annie Oakley is still the most famous cowgirl in history.

She said: "Aim at the high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, not the second time, and maybe not the third time. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting, for only practice will make you perfect. Finally, you'll hit the bull's-eye of success."

[tumblngphilopoet]

It's the birthday of poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (books by this author), born in Stratford, near London (1844). He was the eldest of nine children. The whole family drew pictures, wrote stories, and put on plays together. When Hopkins wasn't drawing or painting, he liked to climb trees, and especially loved the feeling of walking barefoot in the grass.

Hopkins attended a fancy boarding school, where he was a star student — he won prizes for his poetry, and he was a talented painter. He went on to Oxford to study classics, but he had a religious conversion. His parents were High Church Anglicans, but the young Hopkins decided to become Catholic, inspired by John Henry Newman, whose book Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) was a best-seller while Hopkins was at Oxford. Two years later, Hopkins decided to become a Jesuit priest and started his training. He burned all of his poems and announced that he was giving up poetry. He didn't write at all for seven years. In 1875, a German passenger ship called the SS Deutschland sank in a storm, and more than 75 passengers died, including five Franciscan nuns who were escaping harsh anti-Catholic laws. He wrote a long poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, in commemoration. Hopkins saw poetry as a way to express his faith, and started writing again. In 1877, the year he was ordained as a priest, he wrote most of his best-known poems, including "Spring," "The Windhover," "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame," and "God's Grandeur," which begins: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil."

Although Hopkins had graduated at the top of his class from Oxford, in July of 1877, he failed his final theology exam with the Jesuits. He was still ordained, but it seriously limited any chance of his ever advancing in the priesthood. Eventually, he was sent to University College in Dublin as a professor of Greek and Latin. The college was underfunded — he described it as "a ruin and for purposes of study very nearly naked." He hated it there, became profoundly depressed, doubting his own religious ideas, even contemplating suicide. During his years in Ireland, he wrote what are called his "terrible sonnets" because he was in such a dark place.

Hopkins died in 1889 of typhoid fever, at the age of 44. During his lifetime, he had published only a handful of minor poems, scattered through random publications. His friend Robert Bridges, who was now the poet laureate of England, edited and published the first book of Hopkins' poems in 1918.

[tumblngphilopoet]

It's the birthday of mystery writer Raymond Chandler (1888) (books by this author), born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, before his Irish mother took him to England so he could get a proper education. Chandler's novels explored the tough, lawless, and luxurious side of Los Angeles through the sharp narration of his most famous creation, wisecracking, chess-playing private eye Philip Marlowe, who made his debut in Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep (1939).

He was educated at preparatory school in England and studied international law in Germany and France before moving back to Britain. He mostly wrote poetry, managing to publish 27 poems and short story called "The Rose-Leaf Romance" before moving to Los Angeles (1912), where he found work as a tennis racket stringer and a bookkeeper at a creamery. Chandler enlisted in the Canadian air force and spent time on the front lines in France during World War I. When he returned to L.A., he took a well-paying job in the oil industry, but drank too much and had affairs with the office secretaries, so he was fired after a year.

Running low on money, he began reading pulp mystery magazines and studying the formula for stories. He said Americans were "a big, rough, rich, wild people, and crime is the price we pay for it." He liked the lack of pretension in the pulps and the tight restrictions on word length and subject matter suited his style. He published his first mystery story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot," in Black Mask magazine in 1933. It was popular, and he began churning out more stories.

It took him three months to write his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), which was made into a film, with William Faulkner writing the screenplay and Humphrey Bogart cast as Philip Marlowe (1946). When asked about the character of Philip Marlowe, he said: "He must be the best man in his world and good enough for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things."

Chandler's second novel was Farewell, My Lovely (1940). His clipped British upbringing mixed with American vernacular proved popular with readers, who ate up lines like "He had a heart as big as one of Mae West's hips" and "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window." Poet W.H. Auden and novelist Evelyn Waugh were big fans, but critics found his work somewhat distasteful. A reviewer from the Washington Post called his books "rambling at best and incoherent at worst," and others cited the "moral depravity" of a fictional L.A. filled with crime, prostitutes, cheating spouses, and murder.

Raymond Chandler wrote eight novels, including The Little Sister (1949) and The Long Goodbye (1953) before he died in 1959. All of his novels except for one have been made into films. Philip Marlowe has been portrayed onscreen by James Garner, Danny Glover, Powers Boothe, and Dick Powell.

Chandler was nearly penniless when he died. He'd returned to drinking after the long illness and death of his second wife, Cissy. He wrote The Long Goodbye while she was dying and many consider this his masterpiece, due to its blend of hard-boiled cynicism and lyrical sentiment.

Chandler worked hard to improve his writing style as he aged, but he couldn't catch a break from the critics, saying, "The thing that rather gets me down is that when I write something that is tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, I get panned for being tough and fast and full of mayhem and murder, and then when I try to tone down a bit and develop the mental and emotional side of a situation, I get panned for leaving out what I was panned for putting in the first time."

He and Cissy are interred side by side. Their shared gravestone reads, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts," a quote from The Big Sleep.

writersalmanac.org

[tumblngphilopoet]

It's the birthday of American novelist Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). He is known most for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), which tells the tale of a young Southern man named Binx Bolling who is so alienated from the world that he prefers movies and books to people. He undergoes a spiritual and philosophical quest that had its roots in Percy's time spent recovering from tuberculosis. Walker Percy had been working as a medical intern in Manhattan, performing autopsies on corpses, when he contracted the disease and had to spend two years in convalescence. That gave him plenty of time to read Russian novels and French philosophy, all of which he wrote into The Moviegoer. In the novel, when asked what the purpose of his journey is, Binx Bolling responds: "There is only one thing I can do. Listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along."

The novel didn't sell very well when it first came out, but it won the National Book Award, beating out more well-known books like Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. Walker Percy was already 45 years old when it was published, and he was mostly making a living by writing about Catholicism and spirituality and living off a small inheritance. The New York Times called him, "A medical doctor who didn't practice and a Catholic who did."

When Percy was 13, his father committed suicide and two years later, his mother drove off a cliff. He and his brother were adopted by an uncle, but the legacy of suicide and depression in his family would haunt him for the rest of his life. When he was a teenager, he and friend, a boy named Shelby Foote who grew up to be a famous playwright, took a car trip to see their literary idol, William Faulkner. Percy was so awestruck he couldn't even get out of the car, and sat inside while Foote and Faulkner gabbed it up on Faulkner's front porch.

After his bout with tuberculosis, Percy became a Roman Catholic (1946). When someone asked if his beliefs influenced his fiction, he said, "If a writer writes from a sense of outrage - and most serious writers do - isn't he by definition a moral writer?"

Walker Percy's other books include The Last Gentleman (1966) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1982). In his book Love in the Ruins (1971), a character named Dr. T. More invents an instrument called a "lapsometer" that measures the health of the human spirit.

[tumblngphilopoet]

When You Need the Gaze of the Other,  a philosophical haiku

unpunctured balloons punctuate her deflected pensive downward gaze.

When You Need the Gaze of the Other,  a philosophical haiku by Paul Dolinsky, inspired by an artwork (female nude) to write this ekphrastic poem.