SHAKPËRDAR
Art Neuendorffer
>>>>
>>>>Anyone who has actually read Ford's poems could not
>>>>believe that this was the author of the Elegy. W.S.
>>>>is the far superior poet. Ford thinks in small units,
>>>>one or two 6 line stanza's, with much repetition,
>>>>while W.S. thinks in much longer periods. Here is
>>>>a catalog of the use of repetition and list-making
>>>>that I could find in Shakespeare's V&A, Lucrece,
>>>>and A Lover's Complaint and the Funeral Elegy.
>>>>Both Shakespeare and W.S. use both techniques
>>>>sparingly, but Ford uses them to excess.
...
>>Robert Stonehouse wrote:
<<The population at the time was a few milliion. Why should
it be easier to prove that Ford, and not any of the other
few million, wrote the Funeral Elegy, than to prove that
Shakespeare, and not any of the others, wrote it? If,
stylistically, the Elegy is more like Ford than like
Shakespeare, that is not enough to make the case.>>
...
.
>Richard Kennedy wrote:
>>
>>Don Foster says that "only three writers can be shown to have read
>>W.S.'s ELEGY: William Shakespeare, John Ford, and Simon *WASTRELL* ."
>>As to Shakespeare, that's to be proved or disproved. As to Ford, being
>>a family friend, I grant that he read the thing. As to Simon Wastrell,
>>I've not yet read anything by the man, but Foster says he stole lines
>>from the ELEGY. Of these three, John Ford seems an obvious suspect
>>as the author of the ELEGY....
----------------------------------------
*WASTREL* , n. 1. Any waste thing or substance; as:
(a) Waste land or common land. [Obs.] --Carew.
(b) A profligate. [Prov. Eng.]
(c) A neglected child; a street Arab. [Eng.]
.
2. Anything cast away as bad or useless,
as imperfect bricks, china, etc.
-------------------------------------
*WASTREL* : *SHAKPËRDAR* (Albanian)
-----------------------------------
.
Richard Kennedy wrote:
>>
>>Don Foster gives the proof himself: here are some comparisons,
>>the ELEGY with John Ford's CHRIST'S BLOODY SWEAT.
>....................
>>Elegy: by seeming reason underpropped
>>CBS: which life, death underprops
>....................
>>Elegy: Now runs the method of this doleful song
>>CBS: Set then the tenor of thy doleful song
>....................
>>Elegy: A rock of friendship figured in his name.
>>CBS: A rock of torment, which affliction bears
>....................
>>Elegy: That lives encompassed in a mortal frame
>>CBS: For whiles encompassed in a fleshly frame
>....................
>>Elegy: Unhappy matter of a mourning style
>>CBS: The happy matter of a moving style
>....................
>>Elegy: So in his mischiefs is the world accurs'd:/
>. It picks out matter to inform the worst.
>>
>>CBS: For so is prone mortality accursed/
>. As still it strives to plot and work the worst
>....................
>>Elegy: But tasted of the sour-bitter scourge/
>. Of torture and affliction
>>CBS: Drew comfort from the sour-bitter gall/
>. Of his afflictions
>....................
>>But I need not afflict ourselves with more of this. Don Foster
>>gives some twenty examples, some of them not too well- chosen,
>> but the mediocrity is very similiar, I agree with him,
>> neither one of the poets had much to say.
.
Robert Stonehouse wrote:
>
>This does not sound much like an argument for Ford,
>when there is an indefinite number of competitors.
It sounds like an excellent argument for Ford/William Stanley.
.
>Richard Kennedy wrote:
>>
>>Foster presents these examples to help his case, to
>>explain how John Ford borrowed from the ELEGY when he wrote CHRIST'S
>>BLOODY SWEAT a year later. It would seem to me that John Ford wasn't
>>so much borrowing, but wrote the ELEGY himself, and was stuck somewhat
>>in the same rut when he wrote CHRIST'S BLOODY SWEAT. I say it's
>>a very reasonable theory, Ford being a friend of the Peter family.
>>Has the Shaxicon program been run against John Ford?
.
Robert Stonehouse wrote:
>
> It seems obvious that it must be done before going
>any further with theories more removed from Devonshire.>>
----------------------------------
Must be? Don't be silly!
We can't be left hostage to Shaxicon.
----------------------------------
JOHN FORD ______ (c.1586-1640)
[W]illiam [S]tanley (c.1561-1642)
----------------------------------
"JOHN FORD." 1911 Encyclopedia.
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/John_Ford
.
<<FORD, JOHN (1586c. 1640), English dramatist, was baptized on the 17th
of April 1586 at Ilsington in north Devon. He came of a good family;
his father was in the commission of the peace and his mother was a
sister of Sir John Popham, successively attorney-general and lord chief
justice. The name of John Ford appears in the university register of
Oxford as matriculating at Exeter College in 1601. Like a cousin and
namesake (to whom, with other members of the society of Grays Inn,
he dedicated his play of Th. Lovers Melancholy), the future dramatist
entered the profession of the law, being admitted of the Middle Temple
in 1602; but he seems never to have been called to the bar. Four years
afterwards he made his first appearance as an author with an elegy
called Fames Memorial, or the Earl of Devonshire deceased, and
dedicated to the widow of the earl (Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy,
'coronized' , to use Fords expression, by King James in 1603 for
his services in Ireland) a lady who would have been no unfitting
heroine for one of his own tragedies of lawless passion, the famous
Penelope, formerly Lady Rich. This panegyric, which is accompanied
by a series of epitaphs and is composed in a strain of fearless
extravagance, was, as the author declares, written unfeed ; it shows
that Ford sympathized, as Shakespeare himself is supposed to have
done, with the awkward fate of the countesss brother, the earl
of Essex. Who the flint-hearted Lycia may be, to whom the poet seems
to allude as his own disdainful mistress, is unknown; indeed, the
record of Fords private life is little better than a blank.
To judge, however, from the dedications, prologues and epilogues
of his various plays, he seems to have enjoyed the patronage of
the earl, afterwards duke, of Newcastle, himself a muse after
a fashion, and Lord Craven, the supposed husband of the ex-queen
of Bohemia. Fords tract of Honor Triumphant, or the Peeres
Challenge (printed 1606 and reprinted by the Shakespeare Society
with the Line of Life, in 1843), and the simultaneously published
verses The Monarcises Meeting, or the King of Denmarkes Welcome
into England, exhibit him as occasionally meeting the festive
demands of court and nobility; and a kind of moral essay by him,
entitled A Line of Life (printed 1620), which contains references
to Raleigh, ends with a climax of fulsome praise to the address
of King James I. Yet at least one of Fords plays (The Broken Heart,
iii. 4) contains an implied protest against the absolute system of
government generally accepted by the dramatists of the early Stuart
reigns. Of his relations with his brother-authors little is known;
it was natural that he should exchange complimentary verses with
James Shirley, and that he should join in the chorus of laments
over the death of Ben Jonson. It is more interesting to notice an
epigram in honor of Ford by Richard Crashaw, morbidly passionate
in one direction as Ford was in another. The lines run:
.
Thou cheatst us, Ford; makst one seem two by art:
What is Loves Sacrifice but the Broken Heart?
.
It has been concluded that in the latter part of his life he
gratified the tendency to seclusion for which he was ridiculed
in The Time Poets (Choice Drollery, 1656) by withdrawing from
business and from literary life in London, to his native place;
but nothing is known as,to the date of his death. His career as
a dramatist very probably began by collaboration with other authors.
With Thomas Dekker he wrote The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe
Merchant (licensed in 1624, but both unpublished), with John
Webster A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother (licensed in 1624).
A play entitled An ill Beginning has a good End, brought on the
stage as early as 1613 and attributed to -Ford, was (if his) his
earliest acted play; whether Sir Thomas Overburys Life and untimely
Death (1615) was a play is extremely doubtful; some lines of indignant
regret by Ford on the same subject are still preserved. He is also
said to have written, at dates unknown, The London Merchant (which,
however, was an earlier name for Beaumont and Fletchers Knight of
the Burning Pestle) and The Royal Combat; a tragedy by, him, Beauty
in a Trance, was entered in the Stationers Register in 1653 but
never printed.
These three (or four) plays were among those
destroyed by Warburtons cook.
The Queen, or the Excellency of the Sea, a play of inverted passion,
containing some fine sensuous lines, printed in 1653 by Alexander
Singhe for private performance, has been recently edited by W. Bang
(Materialienz-ur Kunde d.dlteren engi. Dramas, 13, Louvain, 1906),
and is by him on internal evidence confidently claimed as Fords.
Of the plays by Ford preserved to us the dates span little more
than a decade the earliest, The Lovers Melancholy, having been
acted in 1628 and printed ill 1629, the latest, The Lady's Trial,
acted in 1638 and printed in 1639.
When writing The Lovers Melancholy, it would seem that Ford had
not yet become fully aware of the bent of his own dramatic genius,
although he was already master of his powers of poetic expression.
He was attracted towards domestic tragedy by an irresistible desire
to sound the depths of abnormal conflicts between passion and
circumstances, to romantic comedy by a strong though not widely
varied imaginative faculty, and by a delusion that he was possessed
of abundant comic humour. In his next two works, undoubtedly those
most characteristically expressive of his peculiar strength,
Tis Pity shes a Whore (acted c. 1626) and The Broken Heart
(acted c. 1629), both printed in 1633 with the anagram of his
name Fide Honor, he had found horrible situations which required
dramatic explanation by intensely powerful motives. Ford by no
means stood alone among English dramatists in his love of abnormal
subjects; but few were so capable of treating them sympathetically,
and yet without that reckless grossness or extravagance of
expression which renders the morally repulsive aesthetically
intolerable, or converts the horrible into the grotesque.
For in Fords genius there was real refinement, except when the
suprasensually sensual impulse or the humbler self-delusion
referred to came into play. In a third tragedy, Loves Sacrifice
(acted C. 1630; printed in 1633), he again worked on similar
materials; but this time he unfortunately essayed to base the
interest of his plot upon an unendurably unnatural possibility
doing homage to virtue after a fashion which is in itself an
insult. In Perkin Warbeck (printed 1634; probably acted a year
later) he chose an historical subject of great dramatic promise
and psychological interest, and sought to emulate the glory
of the great series of Shakespeares national histories. The
effort is one of the most laudable, as it was by no means one
of the least successful, in the dramatic literature of this
period. The Fancies Chaste and Noble (acted before 1636,
printed 1638), though it includes scenes of real force and
feeling, is dramatically a.failure, of which the main idea
is almost provokingly slight and feeble; and The Lady's Trial
(acted 1638, printed 1639) is only redeemed from utter
wearisomeness by an unusually even pleasingness of form.
There remain two other dramatic works, of very different kinds,
in which Ford co-operated with other writers, the mask of
The Suns Darling (acted 1624, printed 1657), hardly to be
placed in the first rank of early compositiofis, and
The Witch of Edmonton (printed 1658, but probably acted
about 1621), in which we see Ford as a joint writer with
Dekker and Rowley of one of the most powerful domestic
dramas of the English or any other stage.
.
A few notes may be added on some of the more remarkable of
the plays enumerated. A wholly baseless anecdote, condensed
into a stinging epigram by Endymion Porter, asserted that
.
The Lovers Melancholy was stolen by Ford from Shakespeares papers.
.
Undoubtedly, the madness of the hero of this play of Fords
occasionally recalls Hamlet, while the heroine is one of the
many, and at.the same time one of the most pleasing,
parallels to Viola. But neither of them is a copy, as Friar
Bonaventura in Fords second play may be said to be a copy
of Friar Lawrence, whose kindly pliability he disagreeably
exaggerates, or as DAvolos in Leves Sacrifice is clearly
modelled on Iago.. The plot of The Lovers Mela-ncholy,
which is ineffective~ because it leaves no room for suspense
in the mind of the reader, seems original; in the dialogue,
on the other hand, a justly famous passage in Act i. (the
beautiful version of the story of the nightingales death)
is translated from Strada; while the scheme of the tedious
interlude exhibiting the various forms of madness is avowedly
taken, together with sundry comments, from Burtons Anatomy of
Melancholy. Already, in this play Ford exhibits the singular
force of his pathos; the despondent misery of the aged
Meleander, and the sweetness of the last scene, in which his
daughter comes back to him, alike go to the heart.
A situation hazardous in spite of its comic substratum between
Thauniasta and the pretended Parthenophil is conducted, as
Gifford points out with real delicacy; but the comic scenes
are merely stagy, notwithstanding, or by reason of,
the effort expended on them by the author.
.
Tis Pity shes a Whore has been justly recognized as
a tragedy of extraordinary power. Mr Swiuburne, in his
eloquent essay on Ford, has rightly shown what is the
meaning of this tragedy, and has at the same time indicated
wherein consists its poison. He dwells with great force upon
the different treatment applied by Ford to the characters
of the two miserable lovers brother and sister. The sin
once committed, there is no more wavering or flinching
possible to him, who has fought so hard against the demoniac
possession; while she who resigned body and soul to the
tempter, almost at a word, remains liable to the influences
of religion and remorse. This different treatment, shows
the feeling of the poetthe feeling for which he seeks to
evoke our inmost sympathyto oscillate between the belief
that an awful crime brings with it its awful punishment
(and it is sickening to observe how the argument by which
the Friar persuades Annabella to forsake her evil courses
mainly appeals to the physical terrors of retribution),
and the notion that there is something fatal, something
irresistible, and therefore in a sense self-justified,
in so dominant a passion. The key-note to the conduct of
Giovanni lies in his words at the close of the first scene
All this Ill do, to free me from the rOd Of vengeance;
else Ill swear my fates my god.
.
Thus there is no solution of the conflict between passion
on the one side, and law, duty and religion on the other;
and passion triumphs, in the dying words of the student
struck blind and mad by passion 0, I bleed fast!
.
Death, thourt a guest long lookd for; I embrace Thee
and thy wounds: 0, my last minute comes!
Whereer I go, let me enjoy this grace Freely
to view my Annabellas face.
.
It has been observed by J. A. Symonds that English poets
have given us the right key to the Italian temperament.
... The love of Giovanni and Annabella is rightly depicted
as more imaginative than sensual. It is difficult to allow
the appositeness of this special illustration; on the other
hand, Ford has even in this case shown his art of depicting
sensual passion without grossness of expression; for the
exception in Annabellas language to SoranzO seems to have
a special intention, and is true to the pressure of the
situation and the revulsion produced by it in a naturally
weak and yielding mind. The entire atmosphere, so to speak,
of the play is stifling, and is not rendered less so by
the underplot with Hippolita.
.
Tis Pity shes a Whore was translated into French by Maurice
Maeterlinck under the title of Annabella, and represented
at the Theatre de l'Ouvre in 1894. The translator prefixes
to the version an eloquent appreciation of Fords genius,
especially in his portraits of women, whose fate it is
to live "dans les tenebres, les craintes et les larmes."
.
Like this tragedy, The Broken Heart was probably founded
upon some Italian or other novel of the day; but since
in the latter instance there is nothing revolting in
the main idea of the subject, the play commends itself
as the most enjoyable, while, in respect of, many excellences,
an unsurpassed specimen of Fords dramatic genius. The
complicated plot is constructed with greater skill than
is usual with this dramatist, and the pathos of particular
situations, and of the entire character of Pentheaa woman
doomed to hopeless misery, but capable of seeking to obtain
for her brother a happiness which his cruelty has condemned
her to foregohas an intensity and a depth which are all
Fords own. Even the lesser characters are more pleasing
than usual, and some beautiful lyrics are interspersed
in the play.
.
Of the other plays written by Ford alone, only
The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck. A Strange Truth,
appears to call for special attention. A repeated perusal
of this drama suggests the judgment that it is overpraised
when ranked at no great distance from Shakespeares
national dramas. Historical truth need not be taken into
consideration in the matter; and if, notwithstanding
James Guirdners essay appended to his Life and Reign of
Richard III., there are still credulous persons left
to think and assert that Perkin was not an impostor,
they will derive little satisfaction from Fords play,
which with really surprising skill avoids the slightest
indication as to the poets own belief on the subject.
That this tragedy should have been reprinted in 1714
and acted in 1745 only shows that the public, as is
often the case, had an eye to the catastrophe rather,
than to the development of the action. The dramatic
capabilities of the subject are, however, great, and
it afterwards attracted Schiller, who, however, seems
to have abandoned it in favor of the similar theme
of the Russian Demetrius. Had Shakespeare treated it,
he would hardly have contented himself with investing
the hero with the nobility given by Ford to this
personage of his play,for it is hardly possible to
speak of a personage as a character when the clue to
his conduct is intentionally withheld. Nor could
Shakespeare have failed to bring out with greater
variety and distinctness the dramatic features in
Henry VII., whom Ford depicts with sufficient
distinctness to give some degree of individuality
to the figure, but still with a tenderness of touch
which would have been much to the credit of the
dramatists skill had he been writing in the Tudor age.
The play is, however, founded on Bacons Life, of which
the text is used by Ford with admirable discretion,
and on Thomas Gainsfords True and Wonderful History
of Perkin Warbeck (1618). The minor characters of the
honest old Huntley, whom the Scottish king obliges
to bestow his daughters hand upon Warbeck, and of her
lover the faithful Dalyell, are most effectively drawn;
even the men of judgment, the adventurers who surround
the chief adventurer, are spirited sketches, and the
Irishman among them ha~ actually some humour; while the
style of the play is, as befits a Chronicle History,
so clear and straightforward as to make it easy as well
as interesting to read.
.
The Witch of Edmonton was attributed by its publisher
to William Rowley, Dekker, Ford, &c., but the body of
the play has been generally held to be ascribable to Ford
and Dekker only. The subject of the play was no doubt
suggested by the case of the reported witch, Elizabeth
Sawyer, who was executed in 1621. Swinburne agrees with
Gifford in thinking Ford the author of the whole of the
first act; and he is most assuredly right in considering
that there is no more admirable exposition of a play
on the English stage. Supposing Dekker to be chiefly
responsible for the scenes dealing with the unfortunate
old woman whom persecution as a witch actually drives
to become one, and Ford for the domestic tragedy of
the bigamist murderer, it cannot be denied that both
divisions of the subject are effectively treated,
while the more important part of the task fell to
the share of Ford. Yet it may be doubted whether
any such division can be safely assumed; and it may
suffice to repeat that no domestic tragedy has ever
taught with more effective simplicity and thrilling
truthfulness th~ homely double lesson of the folly
of selfishness and the mad rashness of crime.
.
With Dekker Ford also wrote the mask of The Suns Darling;
or, as seems most probable, they founded this production
upon Phaeton, an earlier mask, of which Dekker had been
sole author. Gifford holds that Dekkers hand is perpetually
traceable in the first three acts of The Suns Darling,
and through the whole of its comic part, but that the
last two acts are mainly Fords. If so, he is the author
of the rather forced occasional tribute on the accession
of King Charles I., of which the last act largely consists.
This mask, which furnished abundant opportunities for the
decorators, musicians and dancers, in showing forth how
the seasons and their delights are successively exhausted
by a wanton darling, Raybright the grandchild of the Sun,
is said to have been very popular. It is at the same time
commonplace enough in conception; but there is much that
is charming in the descriptions, Jonson and Lyly being
respectively laid under contribution in the course of
the dialogue, and in one of, the incidental lyrics.
.
Ford owes his position among English dramatists to
the intensity of his passion, in particular scenes
and passages where the character, the author and
the reader are alike lost in the situation and in
the sentiment evoked by it; and this gift is a
supreme dramatic gift. But his plays with the
exception of The Witch of Edmonton, in which he
doubtless had a prominent share too often disturb
the mind like a bad dream which ends as an unsolved
dissonance; and this defect is a stipreme dramatic defect.
It is not the rigid or the stolid who have the most
reason to complain of the insufficiency of tragic poetry
such as Fords; nor is it that morality only which,
as Ithocles says in The Broken Heart, is formed of books
and school-traditions, which has a right to protest
against the final effect of the most powerful creations
of his genius. There is a morality which both Keeps
the soul in tune, At whose sweet music all our actions
dance, and is able to physic The sickness of
a mind Broken with griefs.
.
Of that morality or of that deference to the binding
power within man and the ruling power above him tragedy
is the truest expounder, even when it illustrates by
contrasts; but the, tragic poet who merely places the
problem before us, and bids us stand aghast with him
at its cruelty, is not to be reckoned among the great
masters of a divine art.
--------------------------------------------
http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/apr17.html
.
April 17 is the 107th day of the year
(108th in leap years), with 258 days remaining.
Feast day of St Fortunatus
Feast day of St Elias
--------------------------------------------
Richard I returned at once to England and
was crowned for the 2nd time on April 17, 1194.
[1st Sunday after Easter]
.
FORD, JOHN (1586c. 1640),English dramatist, was
baptized at Ilsington, Devon, on April 17, 1586.
[2nd Sunday after Easter]
-----------------------------------------
. Born on April 17:
.
1539 Tobias Stimmer, Swiss painter, cartoonist (Comedia)
.
1598 Giovanni Battista Riccioli, astronomer born.
.
<<Riccioli (b.April 17, 1598, Ferrara, Italy ? d. June 25, 1671,
Bologna, Italy) was an Italian astronomer. He was a Jesuit who
entered the order in 1614. He was also the first person to
measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body.
y necessity, he opposed the Copernican heliocentric theory
though praising its value as a simple hypothesis.
.
He devoted his career to the study of astronomy, often working with
Francesco Maria Grimaldi. He wrote the important work Almagestum novum
in 1651. He & Grimaldi extensively studied the Moon, of which Grimaldi
drew a map. Much of the nomenclature of lunar features still in use
today is due to him and Grimaldi. He also observed Saturn,
and was the first to note that Mizar was a double star.
.
Interestingly, despite his stated opposition to Copernicus's theory
he named a very prominent crater (Copernicus crater) after him, and
other important craters were named after other proponents of the
theory Kepler, Galileo & Lansbergius. Craters that he and Grimaldi
named after themselves are in the same general vicinity, while
some other Jesuit astronomers have craters named after them
in a different part of the Moon, near Tycho crater.>>
.
1786 Dr William King (d. October 19, 1865), British physician and
philanthropist known as an early supporter of the Cooperative Movement.
King's overriding rationale for the movement is best illustrated by
the phrases repeated on the masthead of every issue of The Cooperator:
.
"Knowledge and union are power. Power, directed by knowledge
is happiness. Happiness is the end of creation."
.
1837 JP Morgan, American financier, art collector, philanthropist
-------------------------------------
1854 Benjamin Tucker (Benjamin R Tucker; d. June 22, 1939), American
publisher, journalist, propagandist, theorist, leading proponent of
individualist anarchism in the 19th century, born at South Dartmouth,
Massachusetts, USA. Tucker translated into English Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon?s classic work What is Property?
.
"His magazine was the first to publish George Bernard Shaw in the U.S.,
and to translate Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Tucker published other radical
works considered at the time, such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass,
Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, and Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol."
.
"I have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection, only that
its results are vastly more preferable to those that follow authority."
-------------------------------------
1863 Constantine Cavafy (Kafavis) (d.1933), homosexual Greek poet
born in Alexandria, Egypt. He published only about 200 poems,
but is well known to English readers from the many references
to his work in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
.
1880 Sir Leonard Woolley, British archaeologist who discovered
the Biblical city of Ur of the Chaldees (in modern day Iraq).
.
Ur means ?city? in ancient Iraq?s Sumerian and Akkadian languages. The
Bible says Ur of the Chaldees was the birthplace of Abraham but many
scholars did not believe it existed until Woolley?s discoveries.
?Woolley first started working as Assistant Keeper of the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford where he remained from 1905 until 1907. He worked with
TE Lawrence [Lawrence of Arabia ? PW] from 1912 to 1914. From 1922
through 1934 he was in charge of the joint venture between the British
Museum and the University of Pennsylvania excavating at Ur of the
Chaldees where he made his greatest discovery.
?The Ur of Chaldees, found in present-day Iraq, was the royal burial
site of many Mesopotamian royalties. Woolley discovered tombs of great
material wealth. Inside these tombs were large paintings of ancient
Mesopotamian culture at its zenith, along with amazing pieces of
gold and silver jewelry, cups and other furnishings ??
1882 Artur Schnabel, pianist (d. 1951)
1885 Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen (d. 1962), Danish author,
aka Pierre Andrezel, born at Rungsted, Denmark. She was a writer whose
stories incorporated themes of Eros, supernaturalism and dreams. She was
born into a Unitarian aristocratic family in Rungsted, and was schooled
in art at Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome. She began publishing fiction in
various Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pen name Osceola.
Blixen?s years in Kenya are depicted in Out of Africa, adapted as an
Oscar-winning film directed by Sydney Pollack. Blixen wrote her books in
English and rewrote them in Danish. In her late years, Blixen dressed
sometimes as commedia dell'arte character Pierrot. She died in Rungsted,
Denmark, apparently from malnutrition. She had suffered for many years
from syphilis contracted from her husband, her cousin,
Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who she divorced in 1921.
.
"Every human being whom we meet and get to know is, after all,
something in our minds, like a tree planted in our gardens or
a piece of furniture within our house. It may be better to keep
them and try to put them to some use, than to cast them away
and have nothing at all there in the end."
.
1891 George Adamski (d. April 23, 1965), Polish-born American who
claimed to have seen and photographed ships from other planets, met
people from other planets and to have gone on flights with them.
He wrote several books relating to his experiences, including the
best-selling Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953). He enjoyed some
popularity as perhaps the most prominent contactee, but this gradually
diminished as his claims became more questionable, and he was mostly
considered a crackpot when he died. His adventures commenced
on November 20, 1952 (qv) in the Mojave Desert.
1894 Nikita Khrushchev
1897 Thornton Wilder, dramatist & narrator (d. 1975)
1918 William Holden (d. 1981), born William Franklin Beedle, Jr
--------------------------------------------
*The fairest flower that EVER bloomed among TRUE men*
Epitaph of Kateri Tekakwitha,
Native American nun who died on April 17, 1680
.
"A dying man can do nothing easy." - Last words
of Benjamin Franklin; an abscess in Franklin's lung burst
and he passed into a coma. He died April 17, 1790 with
his grandsons William TEMPLE & Bennie at his side.
------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer