APRIL 19TH -- YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE INSANE BUT IT HELPS

 

Lord Byron in Albanian dress painted by Thomas Phillips in 1813.

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” ― George Gordon Byron

Our Outlaw of the day --

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know was a phrase used by Lady Caroline Lamb to describe George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. 

Ghost of Mark Twain here -- I knew his daughter and she was quite the same way! 

1506 -- Mobs in Lisbon, Portugal slaughter 2,000 Jews.   Makes you think Jesus might have wondered why He even bothered on "Good" Friday, don't it?

  
Marie Antoinette, at the age of thirteen; this miniature portrait was sent to the dauphin, so he could see his bride before he met her, by Joseph Ducreux (1769)

 1770 -- Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI married by proxy. The marriage was the result of diplomatic exchanges, 

during which poor Antoinette even had to undergo oral surgery to be deemed pretty enough for Louis.


Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth, pilgrims!


Her brother stood in as the groom of the wedding.  

Reminds me of some piney-woods marriages I heard tell of.

Little Antoinette didn't actually meet Louis until May of that year!  

1775 -- The American Revolution started on this day. 

"The shot heard round the world" took place early in the morning in Lexington, Massachusetts on this date

when 700 British soldiers clashed with 77 American revolutionists.

It was the beginning of 7 years of conflict between the two countries that eventually led to American independence.

And it seems the politicians have been trying to undo it ever since. 

1928 -- On this date, the final volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) was published.

The original estimate was that the complete four-volume set would take ten years;

when it took five years to get to "ant," the editors knew they had underestimated spectacularly.

They did not know that they were being significantly helped by a contributor from the insane asylum.

 

William Chester Minor, also known as W. C. Minor (June 1834 – March 26, 1920)

was an American army surgeon and one of the largest contributors of quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.

He was held in a lunatic asylum at the time for the shooting of a man his paranoia convinced him had broken into his room. 

"Churchill's Grave" was written near the end of another April — that of 1816, as Byron was waiting at Dover to leave England for the last time.

Delayed by unfavorable winds, he visited the grave of Charles Churchill, a poet whom he admired,

and also one who had attracted much controversy, and died young.


The poem begins with Byron standing

“Beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season” 


It ends with Byron reflecting on a life

"In which there was Obscurity and Fame -
The Glory and the Nothing of a Name."

"And is this all? I thought, —
 And do we rip The veil of Immortality? and crave
I know not what of honour and of light

Through unborn ages, to endure this blight?
So soon, and so successless? "
— from Byron's poem, "Churchill's Grave"



1824 -- Lord Byron died on this day in Messolonghi, Greece, while attempting to serve the cause of Greek independence at age 36.  He became a Greek national hero.


Lord Byron on his deathbed, by Joseph-Denis Odevaere c. 1826.

(Note the sheet covering his club right foot.)

 

Despite the idealized portraits — above, "Lord Byron on his Death Bed," by Joseph-Denis Odevaere (c. 1826) —


the poet-soldier's last weeks were as full of indifference and doubt as heroism. The following is taken from a letter of February 5:

"As for me, I am willing to do what I am bidden, and to follow my instructions. I neither seek nor shun that nor any thing else they may wish me to attempt; and as for personal safety,

besides that it ought not to be a consideration, I take it that a man is on the whole as safe in one place as another; and, after all, he had better end with a bullet than bark in his body."

1882 -- Charles Darwin died of a heart attack in Downe, Kent, England.  He was 71

1942 -- The New Vichy Government headed by Pierre laval at the bidding of his German masters

 in an attempt to bring the insurgent French people back into line with Nazi ruling

by promising to protect the people from the Nazi Regime by gaining concessions.


1956  --   Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier start their honeymoon on Deo Javante II 138ft Yacht but due to heavy seas spent the night in the harbor. 



1987 -- THE SIMPSONS premiered, children, and I still do not understand the appeal of Homer!

The popular TV show started off as a cartoon short on the The Tracey Ullman Show.

It ran as shorts for 3 years before being adapted into the 30 minute format.  Time magazine once named it the best TV show of the 20th century.

Oh, you heathen thought you had me flummoxed by the letter Q, did you?
 

Ever hear of Quintilian?
 

A first century A.D. Roman who came to prominence under Emperor Vespasian,

Quintilian wrote about education and rhetoric, exerting a strong influence in the schools the Romans spread throughout the Empire.

His influence on education continued from his day until the 5th century.

The Humanists at the end of the 14th century renewed interest in Quintilian and a complete text of his Institutio Oratoria was found in Switzerland.

It was first printed in Rome in 1470.

"For hope is but the dream of those that wake."

So there!

APRIL 17TH -- WHAT WOULD BE YOUR LIFE'S MOTTO?

 

Benjamin Franklin is an undead agent for Abigail Adams in my THE NOT SO INNOCENTS ABROAD with Mark Twain and a host of other unsavory characters. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EUFRKKI

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin -- branded Outlaw by the King for aiding the Revolution.
 

 

1790 -- On this date, Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at age 84. 

 

He took his own advice,

making many scientific discoveries, helping draft the Declaration of Independence, securing French economic and military aid during the Revolutionary War.

 

As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions.  

He facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia's fire department and a university.
 

 

1894 -- On this date Nikita Khrushchev was born:

 

"Politicians are the same the world over.  They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river." 

 1885 -- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) was born on this day in Rungsted, Denmark.  She had such determined pride that many in Africa addressed her as "Lioness" rather than Baroness.

 

 

 The result was one of the most adventurous lives in modern literature --

Here is an excerpt from her writings:

 

ON THE MOTTOS OF MY LIFE --

 

"The family of Finch Hatton, of England, have on their crest the device Je responderay, “I will answer.” …

I liked it so much I asked Denys … if I might have it for my own.

 

He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular.

 

The first was its high evaluation of the idea of the answer in itself.

 

For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined.


There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them.

 

 Secondly, I liked the Finch Hatton device for its ethical content.

 I will answer for what I say or do; I will answer to the impression I make. I will be responsible."

 {Wolf Howl quotes this passage to his preternatural students in END OF DAYS.} 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NGS52V7

I pick O to stand for that grand lady, Flannery O'Connor, who wrote:

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

 

 

On this day, in 1970 the severely damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft returns safely to Earth 4 days after an explosion aborted its mission to land on the moon.
 

 

APRIL 16TH -- THE ECHOES OF YOUR MEMORY WILL BE WHAT?

 

There are Outlaws that deserve to be hanged.  Ask ...

Bat Masterson

"There are many of us in this old world of ours who hold that things break
about even for all of us.

I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice.

The rich get it in the summer, and the poor get it in the winter."
                           -- Bat Masterson

1178 B.C.  The eclipse mentioned in Homer's Odyssey occurs on this day.

1746 -- On this day, 5,000 valiant Highlanders fought the Duke of Cumberland in the last battle fought in Great Britain.

A few stanzas from Robert Burns's "Ye Jacobites By Name," a traditional and pro-James ballad which Burns turns into a protest against war:

"What is right and what is wrong
By short sword or by long
A weak arm or a strong for to draw

 What makes heroic strife famed afar
 To whet the assassain's knife
Or haunt a parent's life wi' bloody war….

1881 -- On this date on the streets of Dodge City, lawman Bat Masterson fought the last gun battle of his life.  He turned to newspaper work.  He died at his desk in 1921 in New York City.

{Seeking copy in Gunnison, Colorado, a reporter asked Dr W.S. Cockrell about mankillers.

Dr. Cockrell pointed to a young man nearby and said it was Bat Masterson and that he had killed 26 men.

 Cockrell then regaled the reporter with several lurid tales about Bat's exploits and the reporter wrote them up for the New York Sun.

The story was then widely reprinted in papers all over the country and became the basis for many more exaggerated stories told about Bat over the years.}

1943 --  On this day, Albert Hoffman, accidently ingests LSD-25 in his medical research, becoming the world's first LSD "Tripper."

1947 -- This day, former Auschwitz commandant, Rudolph Hoss, is hanged at Auschwitz. 

In his memoirs was found this written statement: "History will mark me as the greatest mass murderer of all time."

1972 -- This day, Apollo 16 lifts off for the moon.



2009 -- On this day, President Obama ruled out prosecutions against those C.I.A. operatives 

who participated in the torture of terrorists suspects at the Guantánamo Bay and other secret detention centers.



N stands for Friedrich NIETZSCHE:

#1 Nietzsche was a failure during his lifetime

Nietzsche achieved the impressive feat of becoming a professor by the age of 24.

However, he was alienated by his peers and forced to retire by the age of 35.

Nietzsche also wanted to abandon philosophy in favor of gardening.

It wasn’t until after his death that Nietzche’s work began to be read widely.

#2 His mustache frightened women

Nietzsche was sadly incompetent at romance. Apparently, Nietzsche’s epic mustache “scared” women at the time.

 And that’s probably for the better, because Nietzsche also managed to contract syphilis at a brothel while he was still in college.


#3 He had a mental breakdown when he saw a horse being beaten

After seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, Nietzsche had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Nietzsche is reported to have run over to the horse and held it in his arms to protect it before he collapsed to the ground.

The scene was also the subject of a movie by Bela Tarr (whom Jacques Ranciere wrote a book about)

called The Turin Horse.

After the horse incident Nietzsche returned to his boarding house.

 In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings—known as the Wahnbriefe ("Madness Letters")—to a number of friends.

Nietzsche commanded the German emperor to go to Rome to be shot

and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.

Nietzsche’s mother, Franziska, first placed in a clinic, and then dissatified with his treatment, brought him to her home in Naumburg.

After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar,

where Elisabeth, his sister,  cared for him and allowed visitors to meet her uncommunicative brother.

After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had a stroke during the night of 24–25 August and died at about noon on 25 August.


“I'm not upset that you lied to me.  I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

APRIL 15TH -- BEWARE THE IDES OF APRIL

RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912
 

This is the date when the IRS become Outlaws.  :-)

On this date in 1861 -- Abraham Lincoln, expecting the Civil War to be a short conflict, calls for only 75,000 volunteers to serve for 3 months.


On this date in 1865 -- Abraham Lincoln dies from the bullet wound inflicted by John Wilkes Booth, six days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

In an alternate universe, he survives, though his wife does not --- for which he blames the Texas Ranger, Samuel McCord --

sending him on a lifelong quest for revenge.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EUFRKKI



The RMS Titanic went down 112 years ago today.  Though polished by a century of narratives, the tragedy retains its impact in the eyewitness records:

(Notice how tiny the man appears at the bottom of the rudder.)


An account dictated to the New York Times by the Titanic’s twenty-two-year-old junior wireless operator, Harold Bride:

Bride’s description begins in humor, he and the senior wireless operator cracking jokes about the mishap.

Then the bow tilts, the “great scramble aft” begins, and Phillips, the senior man, begins hours of urgent messaging:

"He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night, and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody was raging about….

…I saw a stoker leaning over Phillips from behind. He was too busy to notice what the stoker was doing. The man was slipping the lifebelt off Phillips’s back. I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die a decent sailor’s death.

I wished he might have stretched rope or walked a plank. I took a lead pipe and did my duty. I hope I finished him. I don’t know."

Then chaos:
The Captain giving the ‘abandon ship,’
Phillips refusing to leave his post,
Bride jumping, eventually being rescued,
And helping to hand up from the floor of his life-raft the body of a dead sailor — Phillips. 

Just in 2013 -- those terrible bombings at the Boston Marathon.


2014 -- Total Lunar Eclipse. This year we missed matching it by only a few days.


1923 -- Insulin became widely available. Insulin had only been proven to work the year before; before that, diabetes was essentially a death sentence, especially for children. 

1955 -- Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, on this day.

Within five years, there were over 100 McDonald's in the US, and less than 20 years later the company passed the $1 billion US Dollars (USD) profit mark. 

1942 -- The George Cross is the highest civil award given in the United Kingdom, and is rarely awarded.

The island of Malta and all its residents were awarded the George Cross because of their behavior during a long-term siege in World War II,

and the cross is now sewn into the Maltan flag.

The "Oliver Twist" of my SAME AS IT NEVER WAS is awarded it by King George himself:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNR5T9DW


M could stand for Christopher Moore:

“If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.”   

  ― Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping    

 

 

M could stand for John D MacDonald

"The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit."

 

APRIL 13TH -- THE LONELIEST & THE BRIGHTEST BURN FROM THE INSIDE

 

"As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well.  

For all serious daring starts from within."

 (The concluding sentences of One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty, born on this day in 1909.)

Eudora Welty would find it amusing that the first elephant arrived in America on this date in 1796.

 She would not find its fate amusing at all:


The elephant, named Old Bet, was brought back from India to America by a sea captain who hoped to sell her.

Old Bet was eventually bought by Hackaliah Bailey, one of the founders of Barnum and Bailey, and stayed with the circus

 until she was shot and killed by a boy who had heard that her hide was bulletproof, and wanted to see if it was true.

Mankind is often not very kind, but it can be sparked to do the right thing for the wrong reason:

On this day in 1360 a massive hail killed British troops in France.  

A massive hailstorm killed over 1,000 British troops fighting in the Hundred Year's War in France.

The hailstorm was seen as a divine sign, and the King of England negotiated with peace for France. 

Was Eudora Welty an Outlaw

In Meilori's, her ghost deals off the bottom of the deck when playing poker with the ghost of Mark Twain.

But that scoundrel cheats, too!

Consider the following images of the woman generally deemed to be the finest Southern short-story writer of the 20th century:


Eudora Welty nightclub-hopping until all hours in Paris and New York.

Or paying visits to her "feather-boa-ed bootlegger" in her hometown, Jackson, Miss.

Or enjoying nighttime skinny-dipping in a friend's swimming pool.

Eudora Welty, decades later, venturing off to see "A Hard Day's Night."

Or writing to a friend to complain, "Oh, God! I had to meet Pres. Nixon!"

Eudora Welty, at age 70, visiting friends with whom she "danced and cavorted." 

None of this quite tallies with the image the reading public had of Welty in her later years as "the Benign and Beamish Maiden Aunt of American Letters"

(as her friend Reynolds Price tartly put it).


It underscores the adventurous nature of Welty's life and notes the frustration she felt when her independent spirit was constrained by family duty.

It draws plausible links between the dramas of her life and the vigor of her fiction.

It also makes clear that Welty's decision to stay in Jackson, Miss., even during its tensest racial conflicts,

wasn't an act of complacency but one of endurance,

during which she did what she could — while caring for her ailing mother — to help create a multi-racial, liberal oasis in Jackson. 

 And there was Kenneth Millar (the real name of thriller-writer Ross Macdonald),

with whom Welty had an intense long-distance affair punctuated with occasional visits in the flesh.

Whether it was a sexual affair or not remains uncertain — but it was enough to trigger jealous reactions from Millar's wife. 

Her father had died when she was 21; the rest of her immediate family — mother, two brothers — were gone by the time she was 56.

The life-loving Welty cherished her friends and used lecture opportunities and fellowships to see as much of them as she could. Hence all the travel.

Still there is mystery to Eudora since all her correspondence with her mother is sealed until 2025

“We are the breakers of our own hearts”
― Eudora Welty
 

APRIL 12TH -- TO BE INFAMOUS IS NOT ALWAYS TO BE RICH

 

"I would rather be right than president."
- Henry Clay -- who was born on this date in 1777.

In the theme that to be an outlaw is not always to be rich:


On this day in 1857, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was published. 

The serialization of the novel in the Revue de Paris the previous winter earned Flaubert almost nothing

and generated one of the most famous literary trials in French history.

It also made the author's reputation and vindicated a new style of writing based on the attempt to portray "ignoble reality."
 

The impish author, Chrys Fey, was born on this day.  What year you ask?  Silly rabbit, you never ask what year a fae was born!


The ghost of Ogden Nash has written a birthday verse for Chrys: 

"As through the calendar I delve
I pause to rejoice in April twelve.
Yea, be I in sickness or be I in health
My favorite date is April twealth.     

     It comes upon us, as a rule,
Eleven days after April fool,
And eighteen days ahead of May Day,
When spring is generally in its heyday.

     Down in New Mexico the chapparal
Is doing nicely by the twelfth of Apparal,
And Bay State towns such as Lowell and Pepperell
Begin to bloom on the twelfth of Epperell.

     But regardless of the matter of weather,
There isn't any question whether.
No, not till the trumpet is blown by Gabriel
Shall we have such a day as the twelfth of Abriel."- Ogden Nash ("Lines in Praise of a Date Made Praiseworthy Solely by Something Very Nice That Happened to It")



The beginning and ending of the American Civil War

(the 4 bloodiest years in American history)

 is tied to this week —


the opening shots fired at Fort Sumter on this day in 1861, 

General Robert E. Lee surrendering to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.


1633 -- Galileo was convicted of heresy. 

 Foundational scientist and astronomer Galileo was convicted of heresy because he refused to recant his statement that the Earth revolved around the sun, instead of vice versa.

He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.  Sometimes being an outlaw is no fun at all!


 

1945 -- President Franklin Roosevelt died on this date. 

 Roosevelt died while on vacation, leaving Truman to take over.

Though sometimes controversial, he had brought America through the Great Depression and World War II,

and was one of the most influential presidents.

My hero, Major Richard Blaine, gate-crashed one of his infamous Children Hours get-togethers in a chapter of SAME AS IT NEVER WAS

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNR5T9DW

1954 -- on this day Bill Haley and the Comets recorded Rock Around the Clock:

Often called the first rock and roll record, Rock Around the Clock

became sensationally popular after it was used as the opening song in Blackboard Jungle,

and sold more than 1 million records in one month in 1955 alone.




1981 -- The first space shuttle was launched.  

The Columbia, the first reusable manned spacecraft, was launched for the first time on this day.

It was a major step forward for NASA, and was eventually used to help build the International Space Station. 

Tom Clancy was born on this day in 1947.

In 1984, the Naval Institute Press paid Tom Clancy an advance of $5,000 for The Hunt for Red October. 

There matters might have rested, except that someone handed a copy to the Fortieth President, who (then at the zenith of his great parabola) gave it an unoriginal but unequivocal blurb.

“The perfect yarn,” he said, and the Baltimore insurance agent was on his way to blockbuster authorship.


I say K represents KAFKA -- 

On JULY 3,1883, Franz Kafka was born in Prague.

Few writers have been so closely linked to their home and city, or made so much from it, as Kafka.

But for the months spent in sanitariums and a half-year with a girlfriend, and despite the psychological torture it inflicted, he lived at home with his parents all his life:

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

― Franz Kafka