Young Mailer burned brightly with his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, 1948…
“You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that’s the highest effectiveness man has achieved.” ― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Edward Abbey’s 1975 Cadillac in its natural habitat…
“Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.” - Abbey’s Road (1979)
Osip Mandelstam, Jewish-Russian poet: January 15, 1891 - 1938 (murdered in Stalin’s death camp in Vladivostok)…
—
Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.
Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease …
The ten-fold forest almost the same …
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.— January 16, 1937
(Source: lumpy-pudding)
Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist known for his extensive use of Western pop culture references which spin off into a crazy form of postmodern pastiche, turns 63 today…
A film based on his novel Norwegian Wood is in cinemas here right now…
“But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Photo: Marco Garcia
James Joyce, Irish author of the highest caliber - died this day in 1941, aged 58, from complications from a perforated ulcer…
“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.” ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(Source: agooddaytodie)
Still among the living, Jay McInerney, author of a number of comedies of manners from 1984’s Bright Lights, Big City to his latest The Good Life - 57 today…
“Everything becomes symbol and irony when you’ve been betrayed” ― Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
Isaac Asimov, the “Good Doctor” of science-fiction and popular science, born of Jewish stock in Petrovichi, Russia: Jan. 2, 1920 - d. 1992…
Asimov wrote and published over 500 books in his lifetime - most of them popularizations of principles of science, and a plethora of s-f stories and novels, many of which deal with the future life of humans and robots together in what some would call a neo-colonial serf-society…
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” ― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Photo: Isaac Asimov, pre-sideburns hunk…
Yes, let us not forget that.
Our other American writer is environmentalist and nature writer Aldo Leopold (Jan. 11, 1887 - 1948), author of A Sand County Almanac
“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.” ― Aldo Leopold
Photo: Aldo Leopold examining tamarack, presumably at his Sauk County, Wisconsin retreat, 1947
“
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
— Gustave Flaubert
Birthday of Argentinian novelist Manuel Puig (Dec. 28, 1932 - 1990), whose novels were a kind of literary pop-art, filled with references to mass culture. His debut, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth from 1968 is a case in point…
“The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you’ll never be unhappy again.” ― Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman: And Two Other Plays
Photo: Robert Giard, 1979 (The Beinecke)
