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“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”
—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter
Born in August of 1914, Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter, illustrator, and comic strip author. She studied art at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1930-1933, the Graphic School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1933-1937, and finally at L’ École d’ Adrein Holy and École des Beau-Arts in Paris in 1938. She exhibited in a number of shows during the 1930s and early 1940s, and had her first solo exhibition in 1943.
Besides producing artwork, Tove Jansson was also writing short stories and articles for publication, as well as creating the graphics for book covers. Starting in 1945, she wrote the “Moomin” book series for children, publishing books in 1945, 1946, and 1948 which were highly successful. For her work as a children’s writer, Jansson received the Hans Christian Anderson Medal in 1968. She later wrote six novels and five books of short stories for adults.
Tove Jansson worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for the Swedish satirical magazine “Garm” from the 1930s to 1953. She produced many political cartoons during that period which achieved international fame. In one of Jansson’s early cartoons, Hitler is seen crying in diapers while European leaders try to calm him down. During the 1930s, Jansson produced illustrations for Christmas magazines and several comic strip series.
Tove Jansson had several male lovers, including political philosopher Atos Wirtanen, a Finnish socialist intellectual and a member of the Finnish Parliament. However, she later met and developed a secret love affair with the married theater director Vivica Bandler, daughter of Helsinki’s mayor Erik von Frenckell.
In 1956, Jansson met her lifelong partner Tuulikki Pietilä, the American-born Finnish graphic artist and professor, who became one of the most influential graphic artists in Finland. In Helsinki, the two women lived separately in neighboring blocks, visiting each other privately through an attic passageway. In the 1960s, they built a house on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where they lived together for the summer months until Jansson’s passing.
Tove Marika Jansson died from cancer in June of 2001 at the age of eighty-six. Tuulikki Pietilä died at her home in February of 2009 at the age of ninety-two.
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
Constantine P Cavafy, “The City”, 1894, Alexandria, Egypt, Published 1910
Born in Alexandria, Egypt in April of 1863, Constantine Petrou Cavafy, upon the death of his father in 1870, moved with his family to Liverpool, England, where the eldest sons assumed control of the family’s import-export business. He spent most of his adolescence in England, developing in those seven years both a command of the language and a preference for the writings of William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.
After the older brothers mismanaged the family’s business, Cavafy’s mother moved the family back to Alexandria, living there until 1882 when the British bombarded the city. The family moved to safety in Constantinople where Cavafy remained with his mother until 1885. Although living in great poverty and discomfort during this period, he was writing his first poems, and had his first love affairs with other men.
After he reunited with his brothers back in Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy found work initially as a newspaper correspondent. He obtained a position in the late 1880s as an assistant at the Egyptian Stock Exchange, working there for a few years before clerking, at the age of twenty-nine, at the Ministry of Public Works. Cavafy stayed at the ministry for the next thirty years, eventually becoming the ministry’s assistant director. Much of his ambition during those years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.
Constantine Cavafy lived with his mother until her death in 1899, and then with his unmarried brothers. For most of his mature years, he lived alone. Although his social circle was unusually small, Cavafy did maintain an influential twenty-year literary relationship with English fiction writer and essayist Edward Morgan Forster. Cavafy, himself, identified only two apparently brief love affairs. His one intimate, long-standing friendship was with Alexander Singopoulos, whom Cavafy designated as his heir and literary executor, ten years before his death from cancer in April of 1933.
During his lifetime, Constantine Cavafy was an obscure poet, publishing little of his work and living in seclusion. A short pamphlet collection of fourteen poems was printed in the early 1904, and reprinted a few years later with new verse. Cavafy’s poems were first published in book form ,without dates, before World War II and reprinted in 1949. The only evidence of his public recognition in Greece was his receiving, in 1926, the Order of the Phoenix from the Greek dictator Pangalos.
One third of Constantine Cavafy’s work was never printed in his lifetime. His lack of concern for publication might be due to the highly personal aspect of many of his poems. Cavafy was gay and wrote many sexually explicit poems, making no attempt to conceal anything. The erotic world he depicted was one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs, moments of pleasure not unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.
An avid student of ancient civilizations and history, Cavafy wrote a great many of his poems treating life during the Greek and Roman empires. The style of his poems were not typical of the times; his language was flat and direct, whether he was talking about beauty, despair, eroticism, the past, or present anxieties. Among Cavafy’s most acclaimed poems are “Waiting for the Barbarians, “Ithaca” which stresses the importance of the journey over the destination, and “The Battle of Magnesia, emphasizing that decadence in a civilization leads to destruction.
Cavafy’s erotic poems have similar themes to those in his historical poems. The lovers work in dull offices, or for shopkeepers; they meet “On the Stairs”, “At the Theater”, “At the Cafe Door”, or in front of “The Windows of the Tobacco Shop”. They often are forced to beg and give their bodies for the worldly rewards. Cavafy’s erotic poems are his personal vision, one which explores the gratifications and the ramifications of the pursuit of pleasure.
Notes: “The City” zeroes in on the notion of human error and the places that remind us of the folly of our judgment. The speaker is addressing a friend, reiterating the friend’s declarations in the first stanza, and then offering the hard truths in the second stanza. The city triggers memory, keeps receipts, and preserves the details of personal tragedy and transgression, until the demons are exorcised. There will be no erasure of the past, expect the permanency of scars; but those are indicators of healing.
It is recorded that C. P Cavafy’s last motion before dying was to draw a circle on a sheet of blank paper, and then to place a period in the middle of it.
The video clip is from the Greek television series “Thus Spake the City- Episode Five, Alexandria” directed by Yannis Smaragdis.
Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Ten
“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”
—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Born in New York City in August of 1924, James Arthur Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States and through western Europe.
Disillusioned by the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin emigrated in November of 1948, at the age of twenty-four, to Paris where he became involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, an area of artists, writers, and philosophers. In 1949, he met and fell in love with the young Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, becoming life-long partners.
While staying at the Happersberger family chalet in Switzerland with Lucienduring the winter of 1951-1952, James Baldwin completed his first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, which was published in early 1953. Over the next two years, while living mostly in France, he worked on his second novel “Giovanni’s Room”. In 1956 after Knopf Publishers decided not to publish this second book, Baldwin allowed Dial Press to publish the novel, dedicated to Happersberger, in the United States, and publisher Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom.
James Baldwin made his home primarily in the southern section of France, but often returned to the United States to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began to spend half of each year in New York City. Baldwin and Happersberger lived together in their house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence, France, for many years until Baldwin’s death, with Happersberger by his side, from cancer in November of 1987. James Baldwin was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.
“Giovanni’s Room”, with its complex narrative of love and desire, became James Baldwin’s most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. Due to its explicit homoerotic content, it caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956. The book is noteworthy for bringing complex representations of homosexuality and bisexuality to the reading public with artistry and empathy, lacking in most of the contemporary literary treatments, and thus broadening the public discussion regarding same-sex desire.
“Giovanni’s Room” focuses on events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings, and his frustrations, in the relationships he has with other men in his life, particularly Giovanni, a bar keep at a Parisian gay bar. In this novel, Baldwin explores themes of social alienation, self-identity, masculinity, and manhood, expressed through relationships and learned public behavior. Though it is considered a gay novel,Baldwin has stated on occasion that the novel is not so much about homosexuality, but about what happens if you are so afraid that you finally can not love anybody..
For additional information from the National Museum of African American History and Culture:
“As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, aesthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”)”
—-Erik Pevemagle
“Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s Nightsong)” is the title of two famous poems written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The manuscript of the first, “Der du von dem Himmel bist”, was among Goethe’s letters sent in February of 1776 to his friend Charlotte von Stein. The second poem, “Uber allen Gipfein”, is often considered the most perfect lyric in the German language. It is believed, according to a letter sent to Charlotte von Stein, that Goeth wrote it on the evening of September 6th in 1780, while spending the night in a gamekeeper lodge at the top of Kickelhahn Mountain on the edge of the Central Thuringian Forest.
German poet and translator Karl Ludwig von Knebel, a friend of Wolfgang von Goethe, mentions the “Uber allen Gipfein” manuscript in his diary; and the manuscript was documented by other friends, Johann Herder and Louise von Göchhausen. This manuscript was later published in 1800 and 1803, without authorization, by writer and publicist August von Hennings. An English version of “Uber allen Gipfein” appeared in London’s “Monthly Magazine”in February of 1801.
These two poems were first published together in Goethe’s 1815 “Works Volume One” under the headings “Wandrers Nachtlied” and “Ein Gleiches (Another One)”. Both works were set to classical music by Austrian composer Franz Schubert: the first “D 224”, published in 1821 as “Op. 4 No. 1” and the second “D 768”, published in 1822 as “Op. 96 No. 3”.
“Über allen Gipfein ist Ruh, In allen Wipfein Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.”
-Wolfgang von Goethe
“O’er all the hilltops is quiet now, in all the treetops hearest thou hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait, soon like these thou too shalt rest.”
Photographers Unknown, In the Midst of the Everyday
“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.”
—-Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore
Born in January of 1949 in Kyoto to parents both of whom were teachers, Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe as an only child. Since childhood he was heavily influenced by Western culture, reading a wide range of European and American literature, such as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jack Kerouac. He moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University, studying drama and graduating in 1973. After college, Murakami married andopened a small jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, in Tokyo,which he and his wife ran for seven years.
Hanuki Murakami’s first novel “Hear the Wind Sing” initially appeared in the June 1979 issue of literary magazine Gunzo, and was published in book form the following month. This first book of the “Trilogy of the Rat” won the Gunzou Literature Prize for new writers in 1979 and was adapted by director Kazuki Ōmori for the 1981 film “Hear the Wind Sing”. Murakami followed this success with two sequels “Pinball, 1973”, published in 1960, and “A Wild Sheep Chase”, published in 1962.
Murakami achieved national recognition in 1987 with the publication of “Norwegian Wood”, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality, which sold millions of copies among the young Japanese. He is also the author of the novels “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”; “Dance Dance Dance”; “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle””, and “Sputnik Sweetheart”, among others. He has also written three short story collections: “The Elephant Vanishes”; “After the Quake”; and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”.
Most of Murakami’s works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese “I-novel”, a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life. With the family being a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, a central character who is independent becomes one who values freedom and solitude over close connections.
After Japan’s Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, Murakami interviewed survivors, as well as the Aum religious cult responsible for the subway attack. From these interviews, he published two non-fiction books, forming the series entitled “Underground” in 1997 and 2000. While the book consisted mainly of narratives from individuals, it contained common themes revealing aspects of the psyche and values of the Japanese society as a whole.
Hanuki Murakami’s work has received numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose work deals with themes of human freedom, society and government. In 2011, Murakami donated his eighty-thousand Pound winnings from the International Catalunya Prize to the victims of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the fukushima nuclear disaster.
—Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode, Poems of Arthur O’Shaughnessy
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was a British poet, born in March of 1844 in London to Irish parents. In June, 1861, he became a transcriber in the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of English writer and politician Sir Edward Lytton. Two years later, O’Shaughnessy became a herpetologist in the museum’s zoological department.
Always having a true passion for literature, O’Shaughnessy published his first collection of poetry “Epic of Women” in 1870, followed in 1872 by the poetry collection “Lays of France”.In 1873 he married, at the age of thirty, Eleanor Marston, the daughter of author John Westland Marston. After the 1874 publishing of “Music and Moonlight”, his third poetry collection, O’Shaughnessy and his wife wrote and published a volume of children stories entitled “Toyland” in 1875.
After the publishing of “Toyland”, O’Shaughnessy did not produce any more volumes of poetry during the rest of his life. His last collection of poetry ,“Songs of a Worker”, was published posthumously in 1881. Both of the children of the marriage died in infancy; his wife Eleanor died in 1879. Arthur O’Shaughnessy died in London on January 30, 1881, at the age of thirty-seven from a fever. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy was strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers, among whom were his friends, painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and novelist Ford Madox Brown. He was also influenced by the contemporary French poetry translations of Paul Verlaine, the poetry of Sully Prudhomme, and the works of Algarnon Charles Swinburne, known for the use of alliteration in his verse.
Known for his much anthologized poem “Ode”, Arthur O’Shaughnessy is chiefly remembered for his later transcendental work that was influenced by the French Symbolist movement. His “Epic of Women”, with its poems using repetitive initial consonant sounds and rhythmic pace, is considered by many to be his best work.
Photographers Unknown, (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous)
“That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Born in October of 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong (born Vuro’ng Quóc Vinh) is a Vietnamese American post, essayist and novelist. Raised by his grandmother, he and the family fled Vietnam due to discrimination, and settled in a Philippine refugee camp, where after time, they achieved asylum in the United States and settled in Hartford, Conneticutt.
After an initial education in Glastonbury, Conneticutt, Vuong searched for an educational venue which would suit him. He first studied marketing at Pace College in New York, and finally enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. There Vuong studied nineteenth-century English literature, under poet and novelist Ben Lerner, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Vuong received his B.A. in English from Brooklyn College and his M.A. in poetry from New York University.
Ocean Vuong’s first small publication “Burnings”, published by Sibling Rivalry Press, was a 2011 “Over the Rainbow” selection for notable books on non-heterosexuality by the American Literary Association. His first full-length collection “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2016, with a second printing the following year. Vuong’s first novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” was published by Penguin Press in June of 2019.
Openly gay and practicing Zen Buddhist, Ocean Vuong is an assistant professor in the MFA Program for Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was awarded fellowships from Poets House, Kundiman, the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Vuong’s awards include the Pushcart Prize in 2014, the Whiting Award for Poetry in 2016, the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017, the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2020, and the NAAAP Pride Award in 2020.
“Besides being a vehicle for the poem’s movement, I see form as … an extension of the poem’s content, a space where tensions can be investigated even further. The way the poem moves through space, its enjambment or end-stopped line breaks, its utterances and stutters, all work in tangent with the poem’s conceit.”
—Ocean Vuong, Discussing the relationship between form and content in his work.
“No one [Islanders] trod easily upon the emotions of another where the sea licked everywhere against an endless shoreline. And this was excellent and poor at the same time- excellent because it meant most people took care, poor because it meant an inbreeding of the spirit, too much held in, regret and silent brooding, a world whose inhabitants walked in trepidation, in fear of opening up…They could not speak freely because they were cornered: everywhere they turned there was water and more water, a limitless expanse of it in which to drown. They held their breath and walked with care, and this made them who they were inside, constricted and small, good neighbors.”
—-David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars
Born in Seattle, Washington, it n 1956, David Guterson is an American novelist, journalist, poet and essayist. He attended the University of Washington where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and his MFA in Creative Writing. Guterson wrote “Snow Falling in Cedars” in the early morning hours over a ten year period, after which he began writing full time.
The story is set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the Puget Sound region of the Washington coast in 1954. The plot revolves around a murder case in which Japanese-American Kabuo Myamoto is accused of killing Carl Heine, a respected fisherman in the close-knit community. Told in mostly flashbacks, the interactions of the characters over the previous decades is explored.
The majority of the novel, including the trial of Myamoto, occurs during a severe snowstorm on the island during a time of deep anti-Japanese sentiments following World War II. The issues of former loves and family feuds are mixed with the bitter effects of the war and one’s sense of conscience.
Published in September of 1994, “Snow Falling on Cedars” became an immediate best-seller and won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I was adapted in 1999 into a film of the same name which was nominated for the Best Cinematography Academy Award. Due to the book’s sexual content, it has been challenged, banned or restricted in several US school systems.
“The Earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations.”
—Mervyn Peake
Born in July of 1911, Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the “Gormenghast” series of books. The three works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. Sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R.R. Tolkien, Peake’s surreal fiction was influenced by his childhood love for Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than mythology and the structure of languages.
Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, and short stories for adults and children, including the 1948 “Letters from a Lost Uncle”. He also wrote stage and radio plays, and in 1953 “Mr. Pye”, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the hero.
During the 1930s and 1940s when he lived in London, Peake made his reputation as a painter and illustrator, receiving commissions for portraits. At the end of World War II, he received commissions by newspapers for illustrations depicting war scenes.
Peake gained little popular public success during his lifetime; however, his work was highly respected by his peers and friends which included Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas and English novelist Graham Greene. Peake’s works are now included in the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom. In 2008, the British daily newspaper “The Times” named Peake among the list of ”The Fifty Greatest British Writers Since 1945”.
“One Thousand and One Nights” , a collection of Mid-Eastern folk tales, was compiled during the Islamic Golden Age, a period of culture, economic and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam.This period is traditionally dated from the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid in 786 to 809 and extended, by some scholars’ estimate, as late as the end of the 15th to 16th centuries. The tales have their roots in Arabic, Persian, Indian, Greek, Jewish and Turkish folklore and literature. Collected by various authors and scholars, the stories have been presented in many editions; some contained a few hundred tales and others included a thousand in poem or prose form.
There are two main Arabic manuscript traditions of the “One Thousand and One Nights”. The Syrian tradition includes the oldest manuscripts, with shorter and fewer tales. Believed the purest expression of the style of the medieval “Arabian Nights”, it has been republished most recently in 1984 and is known as the Leiden Edition. The Egyptian tradition emerged after the Syrian tradition and contains more tales of more varied content, collected over the centuries, including up to the 19th century. This tradition includes 1001 tales and is known as the “Calcutta II” or the “Macnaghten” edition, published between 1839 to 1842.
The first European version, translated into French by Antoine Galland from the Syrian tradition and other sources, was a twelve-volume work entitled “Les Mille et Une Nuits, Contes Arabes Traduits en Francais”. This work included stories not found in the original Arabic manuscripts but which later became traditionally associated with “Nights”, such as the well-known “Aladdin’s Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”. Since this first European version published from 1704 to 1717, many other editions have appeared through the years. In 2008, a translation of the Calcutta II edition was made by Malcolm and Ursula Lyons and published in three volumes by Penguin Classics. Although not a complete translation, it contains the standard text of the “1001 Nights”, includes the Ali Baba and Aladdin tales, and all the poetry.
The genre of the “One Thousand and One Nights” tales varies widely. They include tragedies, comedies, poems, historical tales, tales of love, and tales of erotica. Mixed with real people and geographic locations are sorcerers, jinns, apes, magicians, and places of legend. Probably the best known translation to English is Sir Richard Francis Burton’s “The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night”, a ten-volume version published in 1885. Printed during the Victorian era in England, it contained all the erotic nuances of the original material, complete with sexual imagery and gay allusions added as appendices. Sir Richard Burton avoided the strict obscenity laws of the Victorian era by printing an edition for subscribers only instead of a formal publishing.
The exotic atmosphere of “One Thousand and One Nights” lent itself easily to film, influencing Fritz Lang’s “Der müde Tod”, a parable fantasy of love and death with the figure of Death transporting the heroine to Persia, Venice of the 15th century, and China. In 1924, Raoul Walsh’s “The Thief of Bagdad” starred Douglas Fairbanks on a magical journey to win the hand of the Caliph of Bagdad’s daughter. The collection of tales also influenced the 1926 feature-length animated film “The Adventures fo Prince Achmed” by Lotte Reiniger The oldest surviving animation feature film, it contained exotic lands, magical adventures, flying horses, and a handsome prince meeting Aladdin.
The gif images of Nyle DiMarco are from Ariana Grand’s “7 Rings”, the ASL Version, located at this site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTkIsqdBCtk. This production was directed by Jake Wilson with cinematography by Matthew Tompkins. The ASL Version’s translation is by Nyle DiMarco, co-produced by Nyle DiMarco and Sami Housman.
On December 20, 1812, “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is published.
Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, both poets and novelists, were good friends of the Grimm brothers and wanted to publish folk tales. So they asked the brothers to collect oral tales for publication. The Grimm’s collected many old books and asked friends and acquaintances in Kassel to tell tales and to gather stories from others. Jacob and Wilhelm sought to collect these stories in order to write a history of old German Poesie and to preserve history.
The first volume of the first edition was published in 1812, containing 86 stories; the second volume of 70 stories followed in 1815. For the second edition, two volumes were issued in 1819 and a third in 1822, totaling 170 tales. The third edition appeared in 1837; fourth edition, 1840; fifth edition, 1843; sixth edition, 1850; seventh edition, 1857. Stories were added, and also subtracted, from one edition to the next, until the seventh held 211 tales. All editions were extensively illustrated, first by Philipp Grot Johann and, after his death in 1892, by German illustrator Robert Leinweber.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of folktales contains some of the best-known children’s characters in literary history, from Snow White and Rapunzel to Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Yet the brothers originally filled their book, which became known as “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” with gruesome scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in an R-rated movie. The Grimm brothers never even set out to entertain kids. The first edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” was scholarly in tone, with many footnotes and no illustrations. Only later, as children became their main audience, did they take out some of the more adult content.
December 3, 1857 was the birthdate of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad.
Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzenlowski, was a member of the second generation of the intelligentsia, a social class that was at that time starting to play an important role in Central and Easter Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native Poland to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to his adoptive country of Britain. it was the tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and grew in his adulthood abroad that gave rise to Conrad’s literary achievements.
Joseph Conrad started a merchant-marine career in 1874, serving for four years on French ships before joining the British merchant-marines. He spent a total of nineteen years working in ships, including long periods in ports, for over ten years and just over eight years at sea. Most of Conrad’s stories and novels. as well as his characters, were drawn from his seafaring career.
In 1894, aged 36, Joseph Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. His first novel “Almayer’s Folly”, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895, marking the first use of his pen name “Joseph Conrad”. While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the inhabitants of Maritime Southeast Asia, the area figures prominently in his early works. he was intrigued by the struggles of its people aimed at preserving their national independence.
The literary critic Edward Garnett urged Conrad to begin a second novel, and so “Almayer’s Folly” was followed in 1896 by “An Outcast of the Islands”, which repeats the theme of a foolish and blindly superficial character meeting the tragic consequences of his own failings in a tropical region far from the company of his fellow Europeans. Conrad was interested in writing about the feelings of mankind: its feelings of guilt, responsibility, and insecurity.
It was this purpose, rather than a taste for the outlandish or exotic locations, that distinguishes Conrad’s work from that of many novelists of the 19th and early 20th century. Conrad’s work was aimed at the isolation and concentration of tragedy. Conrad’s view of life is indeed deeply pessimistic. In every idealism are the seeds of corruption, and the most honorable men find their unquestioned standards totally inadequate to defend themselves against the assaults of evil. This despairing vision gains much of its force from the feeling that Conrad accepted it reluctantly, rather than with morbid enjoyment.
Joseph Conrad’s life as an author was plagued with poor health developed from his travels abroad, near poverty, and difficulties of temperament. It was not until 1910, after he had written what are now considered his finest novels that his financial situation became relatively secure. These novels were: “Lord Jim” published in 1900; “Nostromo” published in 1904; the 1907 “Secret agent”; and “Under Western Eyes” published in 1911; the last three were novels of political intrigue and romance.
December 1, 1887 marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in print.
The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes was in the detective novel “A Study in Scarlet” written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It appeared in the magazine “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” on December 1st of 1887, published by Ward Lock and Company of London. Although Sir Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, “A Study in Scarlet” is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon.
Sir Conan Doyle, a general practice doctor, wrote “A Study in Scarlet” at the age of twenty-seven in less than three weeks. The novel was originally entitled “A Tangled Skein” but changed for publication in the Christmas Annual. Doyle received twenty-five pounds for the novel, but no royalties.
“A Study in Scarlet” begins with a heading which establishes the role of Dr. John Watson as narrator, setting up the point that the work to follow is not fiction but fact, being a reminiscence of Dr. Watson. The novel introduces Holmes to Watson, establishes their friendship, and brings in the character of Inspector Lestrade. It is also the first work of detective fiction to incorporate the magnifying glass as an investigative tool.
There are only eleven complete copies of the 1887 “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” known to exist; each now having considerable value. Ward Lock and Company published “A Study in Scarlet in a book form in July of 1888 with featured illustrations by Charles Doyle, Conan’s father. A second edition was published in the following year, this time illustrated by George Hutchinson. In 1890 the first American version was published by Philadelphia-based J.B. Lippincott and Company.
As the first Sherlock Holmes story published, “A Study in Scarlet” was among the first to be adapted to the screen. In 1914, Conan Doyle authorized a silent film to be produced by G. B. Samuelson. Holmes was played by James Bragington, an accountant who worked as an actor for the only time of his life. He was hired for his resemblance to Holmes, as presented in the sketches originally published with the story. Due to the nature of film at that time and the rarity of archiving, it is now a lost film. The success of the film allowed for a second version to be produced that same year by Francis Ford, which has also been lost.
The novel “A Study in Scarlet” has rarely been adapted in full: the 1933 film entitled “A Study in Scarlet” with Reginald Owen actually bears no plot relation to the novel. The most notable instance closest to the novel is the episode in the second season of the BBC television series “Sherlock Holmes” with Peter Cushing as Holmes and Nigel Stock as Dr. Watson, which put more detail into the screenplay.
Bottom Insert Image: Sidney Paget, “Holmes Gives Me a Sketch of the Events”, 1892, Illustration for “Silver Blaze”, Strand Magazine, December, 1892, Private Collection
November 13, 1850 was the birthdate of author Robert Louis Stevenson.
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a noted lighthouse builder and harbor engineer. Though healthy at birth, Stevenson soon became a victim of constant breathing problems that later developed into tuberculosis. These persistent health problems made him extremely thin and weak most of his life.
By the time Stevenson entered Edinburgh University at the age of sixteen, he had fallen under the spell of language and had begun to write. For several years, he attended classes irregularly, developing a bohemian existence. At the age of twenty-one, he openly declared his intention of becoming a writer, against the strong opposition of his father. Having traveled to the European mainland several times for health and pleasure, he now traveled between Scotland and a growing circle of artistic and literary friends in London and Paris.
Stevenson’s first book, “An Inland Voyage” published in 1878, related his adventures during a canoe trip on Belgium and France’s canals. In 1879, Stevenson stayed in an abandoned mining camp in the United States, later recounted in the 1883 “The Silverado Squatters”. A year later, he was back in Scotland; however, the climate in Scotland proved to be a severe hardship on his health. Stevenson and his wife soon moved and lived in Switzerland and the south of France. Despite his health, these years proved to be productive. The stories Stevenson collected at that time, ranging from detective stories to Scottish dialect tales, were published as “The New Arabian Nights” and “The Merry Men”.
“Treasure Island”, first published as a series in a children’s magazine, ranks as Stevenson’s first popular book, and it established his fame. A perfect romance, according to Stevenson’s formula, the novel tells the story of a boy’s involvement with murderous pirates. “Kidnapped” published in 1886, set in Scotland during a time of great civil unrest, has the same charm. In the 1886 “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde”, Stevenson dealt directly with the nature of evil in man and the hideous effects that occur when man seeks to deny it. This work pointed the way toward Stevenson’s more serious later novels.
In 1889 Stevenson and his family set out on a cruise of the South Sea Islands. When it became clear that only there could he live in relatively good health, he settled on the island of Upolu in Samoa. He bought a plantation, built a house, and gained influence with the natives, who called him Tusifala or “teller of tales”. By the time of his death on December 3, 1894, Stevenson had become a significant figure in island affairs. His observations on Samoan life were published in the 1896 collection “In the South Seas” and in the 1892 “A Footnote to History”.
November 8, 1847 was the birthdate of Irish author Bram Stoker.
Born in Clontarf, County Dublin, Ireland, Bram Stoker was an invalid in early childhood; he could not stand or walk until he was seven. Stoker outgrew his weakness to become an outstanding athlete and soccer player at Trinity College in Dublin, where he earned a degree in mathematics. He was employed for ten years in the civil service at Dublin Castle, during which he was also an unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail.
Stoker made the acquaintance of his idol, the actor Sir Henry Irving, in 1878 and, until Irving’s death twenty-seven years later, Stoker acted as his manager, accompanying him on his American tours. Bram Stoker also managed the business of the Lyceum Theater which Irving owned.
While acting as Irving’s manager, Bram Stoker was writing his first book. His “The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland”, a handbook in legal administration, was published in 1879. Turning to fiction late in life, Stoker published his first novel, “The Snake’s Pass”, a romantic thriller with a bleak western Ireland setting, in 1890.
Stoker was a deeply private man with an intense adorations of Henry Irving, Walt Whitman and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, leading to scholarly speculation that he was a repressed gay man who used his fiction as a possible outlet for his frustrations. Possibly fearful, and inspired by the monstrous image and threat of otherness that the press coverage of his friend Oscar’s trials generated, Stoker began writing “Dracula” only weeks after Wilde’s conviction.
His masterpiece, “Dracula”, appeared in 1897. The novel is written chiefly in the form of diaries and journals kept by the principal characters: Jonathan Harker, who made the first contact with the vampire Count Dracula; Wilhelmina Murray, Jonathan’s eventual wife; Dr. John “Jack” Seward, a psychiatrist and sanatorium administrator; and Lucy Westenra, Mina’s friend and a victim of Dracula who herself becomes a vampire.
The story is that of a Transylvanian vampire who, using supernatural powers, makes his way to England and victimizes innocent people there to gain the blood on which he survives. Led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, Seward’s mentor and an expert on “obscure diseases”, Harker and his friends are at last able to overpower and destroy Dracula. The immensely popular novel enjoyed equal success in several versions as a play and later as a film.
