Frank Beacham's Journal

Dorothy Richardson, English writer whose stream-of-consciousness style would later influence James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, was born on this day in 1873 — 149 years ago

Dorothy Richardson, English writer whose stream-of-consciousness style would later influence James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, was born on this day in 1873 — 149 years ago.

Richardson was widely read and discussed in her time. The daughter of a grocer who went bankrupt when she was 17, Richardson was well-educated and highly independent. After her father's economic catastrophe, she took a job as a teacher in Germany for six months, then taught in London and worked as a governess for two years.

In the late 1890s, Richardson devoted herself to caring for her severely depressed mother, who killed herself in November, 1895, while Richardson was out taking a walk.

Richardson moved to the Bloomsbury district in London, determined to support herself. She took a job as a dental assistant and earned extra money by writing essays and reviews. Unusually liberated for the time period, Richardson made friends with other young women who worked in offices. She attended public events and lived sparsely so she could afford concert tickets.

Richardson met H.G. Wells, the husband of an old school friend, in the early 1900s. She had an affair with Wells and in 1906 found herself pregnant with Wells' child. She broke off with him, hoping to raise the child herself, but miscarried.

She then moved to Sussex, where she wrote a monthly column for The Dental Record and sketches for The Saturday Review while working on the first volume of her stream-of-consciousness novel, Pilgrimmage. The novel, which eventually stretched to 12 volumes, traced the development of a young woman whose life paralleled Richardson's.

The first volume of the novel, called Pointed Roofs, was published in 1915, followed by two more volumes in 1916 and 1917. Richardson married an artist, 15 years her junior, in 1917 and supported him with her writing.

A review of her first three volumes published in 1918 first used the literary term "stream of consciousness" to describe her groundbreaking style. Many important 20th century writers adapted her techniques.

Richardson died in 1957 at the age of 84.

Above, Richardson photograph by Man Ray in 1930

Studs Terkel was born 110 years ago today

Studs Terkel was born 110 years ago today.

An author, historian, actor and broadcaster, Terkel received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for “The Good War” and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans. He hosted a long-running radio show for 45 years in Chicago.

Terkel was born to Samuel Terkel, a Russian Jewish tailor and his wife, Anna Finkelin, in New York City. At the age of eight, he moved with his family to Chicago, where he spent most of his life. From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that also served as a meeting place for people from all walks of life.

Terkel credited his understanding of humanity and social interaction to the tenants and visitors who gathered in the lobby there, and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square.

In 1939, he married Ida Goldberg (1912–1999), and the couple had one son, Dan. Although he received his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934, Terkel decided instead of practicing law, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel and he soon joined a theater group.

A political liberal, Terkel joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio. He did work that varied from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports, to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements.

His well-known radio program, titled The Studs Terkel Program, aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. The one-hour program was broadcast each weekday during those 45 years. On this program, he interviewed guests as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, Jean Shepherd and Alexander Frey.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Terkel was also the central character of Studs' Place, an unscripted television drama about the owner of a greasy-spoon diner in Chicago through which many famous people and interesting characters passed.

This show, along with Marlin Perkins's Zoo Parade, Garroway at Large and the children's show Kukla, Fran and Ollie, are widely considered canonical examples of the Chicago School of Television.

Terkel published his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1956. He followed it with a number of other books, most focusing on the history of the United States people, relying substantially on oral history. He also served as a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Chicago History Museum.

He appeared in the film, Eight Men Out, based on the Black Sox Scandal, in which he played newspaper reporter, Hugh Fullerton, who tries to uncover the White Sox players' plans to throw the 1919 World Series.

Terkel received his nickname while he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. To keep the two straight, the director of the production gave Terkel the nickname “Studs” after the fictional character about whom Terkel was reading at the time — Studs Lonigan of James T. Farrell's trilogy.

Terkel was acclaimed for his efforts to preserve American oral history. His 1985 book, "The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two,” which detailed ordinary peoples' accounts of the country's involvement in World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize.

For “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression,” Terkel assembled recollections of the Great Depression that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, through prison inmates to the wealthy.

His 1974 book, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” also was highly acclaimed. “Working” was made into a short-lived Broadway show of the same title in 1978 and was telecast on PBS in 1982.

In 1997, Terkel was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, he received the George Polk Career Award in 1999. In 2004, Terkel received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

In August, 2005, Terkel underwent successful open-heart surgery. At the age of 93, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of that advanced age. Terkel smoked two cigars a day until 2004.

On May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, including Quentin Young, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T Inc., to stop the telecommunications carrier from giving customer telephone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

“Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.”

The lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on July 26, 2006. The judge cited a "state secrets privilege" designed to protect national security from being harmed by lawsuits.

Terkel was a self-described agnostic, which he jokingly defined as "a cowardly atheist" during a 2004 interview with Krista Tippett on American Public Media's Speaking of Faith.

At his last public appearance, in 2007, Terkel said he was "still in touch — but ready to go.” He gave one of his last interviews on the BBC Hardtalk program on February 4, 2008.

Terkel died in his Chicago home on Friday, October 31, 2008 at the age of 96. He had been suffering ever since a fall in his home earlier that month.

In 1998, Terkel and WFMT, the radio station which broadcast Terkel's long-running program, had donated approximately 7,000 tape recordings of Terkel's interviews and broadcasts to the Chicago History Museum. In 2010, the Museum and the Library of Congress announced a multi-year joint collaboration to digitally preserve and make available at both institutions these recordings.

The Library of Congress called the recordings "a remarkably rich history of the ideas and perspectives of both common and influential people living in the second half of the 20th century."

Here, interviews by Studs Terkel

British writer Daphne Du Maurier, author of many romantic suspense novels, including the popular, Rebecca (1938), was born on this day in 1907 — 115 years ago

British writer Daphne Du Maurier, author of many romantic suspense novels, including the popular, Rebecca (1938), was born on this day in 1907 — 115 years ago.

Born in London and educated in Paris, Du Maurier’s father, a well-known actor and theater manager, introduced her to the artistic life. She visited the coast of Cornwall when she was 20. The region would later become her home and the setting for much of her work. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931, followed by several more novels.

Rebecca, the story of a young wife of a man whose first wife mysteriously died, was set at the fictional mansion of Manderley, modeled after her own 70-room home, Menabilly. The book was made into an Academy Award-winning picture in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock also directed the movie version of her short story, The Birds.

Du Maurier was granted the ceremonial title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969. She continued to publish fiction, as well as memoirs, histories and biographies, until her death in 1989 at the age of 81.

Thanks History.com

George Carlin was born 85 years ago today

George Carlin was born 85 years ago today.

A stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, actor and writer/author, Carlin was noted for his black humor as well as his thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion and various taboo subjects.

Carlin and his "Seven Dirty Words" comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5 – 4 decision by the justices affirmed the government's power to regulate what they considered indecent material on the public airwaves.

The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s, Carlin's routines focused on socio-cultural criticism of modern American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture.

Carlin was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decade Johnny Carson era, and hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live. His final HBO special, It's Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Born in Manhattan, Carlin was the second son of Mary (Beary), a secretary, and Patrick Carlin, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun. He was of Irish descent and raised a Roman Catholic. He called himself Irish Catholic.

Carlin grew up on West 121st Street, in a neighborhood of Manhattan which he later said, in a stand-up routine, he and his friends called "White Harlem," because that sounded a lot tougher than its real name of Morningside Heights.

Carlin spent many summers at Camp Notre Dame on Spofford Lake in Spofford, New Hampshire. He regularly won the camp's drama award, and specified that after his death a portion of his ashes be spread at the lake.

Carlin later joined the United States Air Force and was trained as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, Louisiana. He did not complete his Air Force enlistment.

Labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors, Carlin was discharged on July 29, 1957. During his time in the Air Force he was court-martialed three times, and also received many disciplinary punishments.

In 1959, Carlin and Jack Burns began as a comedy team when both were working for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas. After successful performances at Fort Worth's beat coffeehouse, The Cellar, Burns and Carlin headed for California in February, 1960 and stayed together for two years as a team before moving on to individual pursuits.

Within weeks of arriving in California in 1960, Burns and Carlin put together an audition tape and created The Wright Brothers, a morning show on KDAY in Hollywood. The comedy team worked there for three months, honing their material in beatnik coffeehouses at night.

Years later, when he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Carlin requested that it be placed in front of the KDAY studios near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street.

Carlin was present at Lenny Bruce's arrest for obscenity. As the police began attempting to detain members of the audience for questioning, they asked Carlin for his identification. Telling the police he did not believe in government-issued IDs, he was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the same vehicle.

In this period, he also perfected what is perhaps his best-known routine, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," recorded on Class Clown. On July 21, 1972, Carlin was arrested after performing this routine at Milwaukee's Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws.

The case, which prompted Carlin to refer to the words for a time as "the Milwaukee Seven," was dismissed in December of that year. The judge declared that the language was indecent, but Carlin had the freedom to say it as long as he caused no disturbance.

In 1973, a man complained to the Federal Communications Commission after listening with his son to a similar routine, "Filthy Words," from Occupation: Foole, broadcast one afternoon over WBAI, a Pacifica Foundation FM radio station in New York City. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC for violating regulations that prohibit broadcasting "obscene" material.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the FCC action by a vote of 5 to 4, ruling that the routine was "indecent but not obscene" and that the FCC had authority to prohibit such broadcasts during hours when children were likely to be among the audience.

The controversy increased Carlin's fame. He eventually expanded the dirty-words theme with a seemingly interminable end to a performance (ending with his voice fading out in one HBO version, and accompanying the credits in the Carlin at Carnegie special for the 1982-83 season) and a set of 49 web pages organized by subject and embracing his "Incomplete List Of Impolite Words.”

Carlin hosted the premiere broadcast of NBC's Saturday Night Live, on October 11, 1975, the only episode to date in which the host did not appear (at his request) in sketches.

Carlin unexpectedly stopped performing regularly in 1976, when his career appeared to be at its height. For the next five years he rarely performed stand-up, although it was at this time that he began doing specials for HBO as part of its On Location series. He later revealed that he had suffered the first of three heart attacks during this layoff period. His first two HBO specials aired in 1977 and 1978.

Carlin had a history of cardiac problems spanning several decades. He twice underwent angioplasty to reopen narrowed arteries. In early 2005, he entered a drug rehabilitation facility for treatment of addictions to alcohol and Vicodin.

He died on June 22, 2008 at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California of heart failure. He was 71 years old.

Here, Carlin does his classic monologue “Who Really Controls America”

John Sebastian wrote "Welcome Back," which became a #1 pop single on this day in 1976 — 44 years ago

John Sebastian, 2010

Photo by Frank Beacham

In 1975, John Sebastian, former member of the 60s group, The Lovin' Spoonful, was asked to write and record the theme song for a brand-new ABC television show with the working title, Kotter.

As any songwriter would, Sebastian first tried working that title into his song, but somehow the rhymes he came up with for "Kotter" — otter, water, daughter, slaughter — didn't really lend themselves to a show about a middle-aged schoolteacher returning to his scrappy Brooklyn neighborhood to teach remedial students at his own former high school.

So Sebastian took a more thoughtful approach to the task at hand and came up with a song about finding your true calling in a life you thought you'd left behind. That song, "Welcome Back," not only went on to become a #1 pop single on this day in 1976 — 44 years ago — but it also led the show's producers to change the show’s title to Welcome Back, Kotter.

What Sebastian's sweet, wistful and playfully nostalgic tune did not do, however, was influence the tone and content of the show. To listen to "Welcome Back," you'd think that Welcome Back, Kotter was a seriocomic slice-of-life program in the mold of, say, The Courtship of Eddie's Father — another 70s TV show with a theme song by Harry Nilsson, another 60s songwriter.

Instead, Welcome Back, Kotter was little more than a flimsy platform for catchphrase-spouting caricatures, albeit an insanely successful one.

Arnold Horshack's "Oooh, oooh, oooh," Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington's "Hi therrre," Vinnie Barbarino's "What? What?" and Gabe Kotter's "Up your nose with a rubber hose" were the pop-cultural coin-of-the-realm in 1975-76, and though they bore little relation in tone or spirit to the song that topped the charts on this day in 1976, the disconnect did nothing to hinder the popularity of all things Kotter-related.

Indeed, if you weren't wearing an Uncle Sam or King Kong T-shirt in the summer of America's bicentennial year, you were probably wearing one with a picture of "the Sweathogs" and a colorful phrase like "Off my case, toilet face" on it.

"Welcome Back" was the first and only television theme song that John Sebastian ever wrote.

Here, Sebastian performs his song, “Welcome Back” in 1976

Thanks History.com

Gary Snyder, San Francisco Renaissance poet, is 92 years old today

Gary Snyder, Gainesville, Florida, 1975, the day he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Turtle Island"

Photo by Frank Beacham

Gary Snyder, San Francisco Renaissance poet, is 92 years old today.

Also an essayist, lecturer and environmental activist (frequently described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology"), Synder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese.

For many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council.

Born in San Francisco to a family of German, Scots-Irish and English ancestry, Synder’s family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later. At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident.

"My folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he recalled in interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're eighteen. And I didn't stop."

Also during his ten childhood years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature. In 1942, following his parents' divorce, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon with his mother and his younger sister, Anthea.

Their mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy (born Wilkey), worked during this period as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of Gary's boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy boy, also at the Oregonian. Also, during his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor and went mountain climbing with the Mazamas youth group. Climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties.

In 1947, he started attending Reed College on a scholarship. Here he met, and for a time roomed with the education author, Carl Proujan, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. He also spent the summer of 1948 working as a seaman. He joined the now defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union to get this job and would later work as a seaman in the mid-1950s to gain experience of other cultures in port cities.

Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950. They separated after seven months and divorced in 1953. While attending Reed, Snyder did folklore research on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951. He spent the following few summers working as a timber scaler at Warm Springs, developing relationships with its people that were less rooted in academia.

This experience formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), later collected in his book, The Back Country. He also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some of the Far East's traditional attitudes toward nature.

He went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology, (Snyder also began practicing self-taught Zen meditation). He left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to “sink or swim as a poet.”

Snyder worked for two summers in the North Cascades in Washington as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain (both locations on the upper Skagit River) in 1953. His attempts to get another lookout stint in 1954 (at the peak of McCarthyism), however, failed.

He had been barred from working for the government, due to his above-mentioned association with the Marine Cooks and Stewards. Instead, he went back to Warm Springs to work in logging as a chokersetter (fastening cables to logs). This experience contributed to his Myths and Texts and the essay, Ancient Forests of the Far West.

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen. Snyder's reading of the writings of D.T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate student in anthropology. In 1953, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study Asian culture and languages.

Snyder studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Ch'en Shih-hsiang. He continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 and 1956 living in a cabin (which he dubbed "Marin-an") outside Mill Valley, California with Jack Kerouac.

It was also at this time that Snyder was an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburō Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among others, were teaching. Hasegawa introduced Snyder to the treatment of landscape painting as a meditative practice. This inspired Snyder to attempt something equivalent in poetry, and with Hasegawa's encouragement, he began work on Mountains and Rivers without End, which would be completed and published forty years later.

During these years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as embarking on the translation of the "Cold Mountain" poems by the eighth century Chinese recluse, Han Shan. This work appeared in chapbook-form in 1969, under the title, Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.

Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth. Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character, Japhy Ryder, in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road.

As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as “the Thoreau of the Beat Generation.”

Snyder read his poem, "A Berry Feast," at the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7, 1955) that heralded what was to become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, but rather entered the scene through his association with Kenneth Rexroth.

As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25, Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail-crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959.

Independently, some of the Beats, including Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan.

In 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan, but the State Department refused to issue him a passport, informing him that "it has been alleged you are a Communist."

A subsequent District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruling forced a change in policy, and Snyder got his passport. In the end, his expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, for whom he was supposed to work.

During the period between 1956 and 1969, Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan, studying Zen, working on translations with Sasaki, and finally living for a while with a group of other people on the small, volcanic island of Suwanosejima.

During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s.

Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter and itinerant poet.

In the early 1960s, he traveled for six months through India with his wife Joanne, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Snyder and Joanne Kyger separated soon after a trip to India and divorced in 1965.

In 1966, Snyder joined Allen Ginsberg, Zentatsu Richard Baker, Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center and Donald Wolters, aka "Swami Kriyananda," to buy 100 acres in the Sierra foothills, north of Nevada City, California. In 1970, this would become his home, with the Snyder family's portion being named Kitkitdizze.

He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the back-to-the-land movement in the Sierra foothills.

His 1974 book, Turtle Island, titled after a Native American name for the North American continent, won a Pulitzer Prize. It also influenced numerous West Coast Generation X writers, including Alex Steffen, Bruce Barcott and Mark Morford.

In 1986, Snyder became a professor in the writing-program at the University of California, Davis. Here he began to influence a new generation of authors interested in writing about the Far East, including Robert Clark Young, whom he mentored. Snyder is now professor emeritus of English. Snyder's life and work was celebrated in John J. Healy's 2010 documentary, The Practice of the Wild.

In a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, Snyder said: “I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats', but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

“Where we began to come really close together again, in the late '60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen's influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it's very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for awhile, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn't my main focus.

“It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities.”

Snyder added: "The term Beat is better used for a smaller group of writers ... the immediate group around Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, plus Gregory Corso and a few others. Many of us ... belong together in the category of the San Francisco Renaissance. ... Still, beat can also be defined as a particular state of mind ... and I was in that mind for a while.”

Here is the trailer for Snyder’s “The Practice of the Wild”

Thomas Pynchon, novelist, is 85 years old today

Thomas Pynchon, novelist, is 85 years old today.

A MacArthur Fellow, Pynchon is noted for his dense and complex novels. Both his fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

From Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixon (1997).

Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, was published September 17, 2013.

He is also known for being very private. Very few photographs of him have ever been published and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. He has carefully avoided contact with reporters for more than forty years.

Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in each of his novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll.

The character McClintic Sphere in V. is a fictional composite of jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

Younger contemporary writers who have been touted as heirs to Pynchon include David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, Richard Powers, Steve Erickson, David Mitchell, Neal Stephenson, Dave Eggers and Tommaso Pincio whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering of Pynchon's name.

A review of V. in the New York Times Book Review described Pynchon as "a recluse" living in Mexico, thereby introducing the media label with which journalists have characterized him throughout his career.

Pynchon's personal absence from mass media is one of the notable features of his life, and it has generated many rumors and apocryphal anecdotes. During the 1990s, Pynchon befriended members of the band, Lotion, and attended a number of their shows, culminating in the liner notes he contributed for the band's 1995 album, Nobody's Cool.

The novelist then conducted an interview with the band ("Lunch With Lotion") for Esquire in June, 1996 in the lead-up to the publication of Mason & Dixon.

More recently, Pynchon provided faxed answers to questions submitted by author David Hajdu and permitted excerpts from his personal correspondence to be quoted in Hajdu's 2001 book, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (Warner 2001).

Orson Welles was born 107 years ago today

Orson Welles in "F for Fake"

Orson Welles was born 107 years ago today.

An actor, director, writer and producer who worked in theater, radio and film, Welles succeeded in theatre, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaptation of Julius Caesar; in radio, the 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds," one of the most famous in the history of radio; and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films.

Welles directed a number of high-profile stage productions for the Federal Theatre Project in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock.

In 1937, he and John Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre, an independent repertory theatre company that presented an acclaimed series of productions on Broadway through 1941.

Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel, The War of the Worlds, performed for the radio anthology series, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although some contemporary sources claim these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to notoriety.

His first film was Citizen Kane (1941), which he co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in as Charles Foster Kane.

An outsider to the studio system, Welles directed only 13 full-length films in his career. Because of this, he struggled for creative control from the major film studios, and his films were either heavily edited or remained unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered and nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unusual camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur."

Welles followed up Citizen Kane with critically acclaimed films including The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942 and Touch of Evil in 1958. Although the three are generally considered his greatest works, some film critics have also argued other works of his, such as The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Chimes at Midnight (1966) and F for Fake (1973) are under-appreciated. The personal favorite of Welles was Chimes at Midnight.

In 2002, Welles was voted the greatest film director of all time in two British Film Institute polls among directors and critics. A wide survey of critical consensus, best-of lists and historical retrospectives call him the most acclaimed director of all time.

Well known for his baritone voice, Welles was a well-regarded actor in radio and film, a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor and an accomplished magician noted for presenting troop variety shows in the war years.

Welles died on Oct. 9, 1985 of a heart attack in Hollywood.

On this day in 1940 — 82 years ago — John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Grapes of Wrath

On this day in 1940 — 82 years ago — John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

The book traces the fictional Joad family of Oklahoma as they lose their family farm and move to California in search of a better life. They encounter only more difficulties and a downward slide into poverty.

The book combines simple, plain-spoken language and compelling plot with rich description. One of Steinbeck's most effective works of social commentary, the novel also won the National Book Award.

Like The Grapes of Wrath, much of Steinbeck's work dealt with his native state of California. He was born and raised in the Salinas Valley, where his father was a county official and his mother a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck was a good student and president of his senior class in high school.

He attended Stanford intermittently between 1920 and 1925, then moved to New York City, where he worked as a manual laborer and a journalist while writing stories and novels. His first two novels were not successful. He married and moved to Pacific Grove in 1930, where his father gave him a house and a small income while he continued to write.

His third novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), was a critical and financial success, as were his subsequent novels — In Dubious Battle (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937) — both of which offered social commentaries on injustices of various types. His work after World War II, including, Cannery Row and The Pearl, continued to offer social criticism but became more sentimental.

Steinbeck tried his hand at movie scripts in the 1940s, writing such successful films as Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata (1952). He also took up the serious study of marine biology and published a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941.

His book, Travels with Charlie, describes his trek across the U.S. in a camper truck with his poodle, Charlie, and his encounters with a fragmented America.

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in New York in 1968.

Thanks History.com

Michael Lindsay-Hogg is 82 years old today

Michael Lindsay-Hogg is 82 years old today.

Lindsay-Hogg is a director working in film, music video, stage and television. He was born in New York City to actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, and was educated at Trinity School in New York and at Choate School in Connecticut.

Fitzgerald and her husband, Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, 4th Baronet (1910–1999), led him to believe that he was their natural son. However, he was later told his biological father was Orson Welles, the actor and film director.

For years, rumors about his true parentage abounded, but Lindsay-Hogg was uninterested in them. He first met Welles as a teenager, acted with him in Ireland and continued to meet with him sporadically for the rest of Welles' life.

Lindsay-Hogg's step-father was Stuart Scheftel, who married Geraldine Fitzgerald when Michael was six, after she had divorced Sir Edward. His career began directing the 1960s British pop program, Ready Steady Go!, a forerunner of MTV-type programming. This work led to an unaired television special, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968), which was finally released in 1996.

In January, 2010 came word that Lindsay-Hogg was going to take a DNA test to determine if famed American filmmaker, Orson Welles, who was friend of the family, was in fact his father. The test gave no result, as the hair from Sir Edward that was used in the test did not contain a follicle.

Confirmation of his true parentage came after Lindsay-Hogg sent a copy of his unpublished autobiography to his mother's friend, Gloria Vanderbilt, who confirmed that Welles was his father.

Lindsay-Hogg's memoir, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, was published in the fall of 2011.

A 2015 Welles biography by Patrick McGilligan, however, reports the impossibility of Welles's paternity. McGilligan said that Fitzgerald left the U.S. for Ireland in May, 1939 and was pregnant at the time she returned in late October, while Welles did not travel overseas during that period.

Some of his notable films include Nasty Habits (film) (1977), The Sound of Murder (1982), The Object of Beauty with Andie MacDowell and John Malkovich (1991), Frankie Starlight (1995) and Waiting for Godot (2001).

In 1994, Lindsay-Hogg directed A Celebration: The Music of Pete Townshend and The Who, also known as Daltrey Sings Townshend. This was a two-night concert at Carnegie Hall produced by Roger Daltrey of the English rock band, The Who, in celebration of his 50th birthday. In 1994, a CD and a VHS video were issued, and in 1998 a DVD was released.

On May 19 and 20, 1966, Lindsay-Hogg directed two pairs of film clips (then known as "filmed inserts") to promote The Beatles’ single, "Paperback Writer." On September 4, 1968 at Twickenham Film Studios, Lindsay-Hogg directed the promotional film for the new single, "Hey Jude," with Paul McCartney himself designing the set. The event is also memorable as it marked Ringo Starr's return to the group after a two-week hiatus, during which he had announced that he had left the band.

The final cut was a combination of several different takes, twelve having been filmed during the entire days session, according to the actor Marc Sinden who was in the film along with his brother, Jeremy.

In 1969, Lindsay-Hogg directed the full-length documentary, Let It Be. In 2000, he directed the VH1 television movie entitled, Two of Us, named after the song of the same name, a track from The Beatles' final album, Let It Be.

The movie is a fictionalized account of April 24, 1976, (six years after the break-up of The Beatles) the day Lorne Michaels made a statement on Saturday Night Live in which he offered The Beatles $3000.00 to appear on his program. The story is told through a series of conversations between John Lennon (Jared Harris) and Paul McCartney (Aidan Quinn).

Above photo by Jonathan Becker