In 1926 a recently opened letterpress shop in New York City named Spiral Press printed a book of poems for Frost. One of the owners of the press, Joseph Blumenthal, printed one of the poems as a Christmas card for his wife. Robert Frost loved the card and thus began a working relationship between Blumenthal and Frost and several woodcut artists and engravers.
Frost sent the cards out annually from 1934 to 1962. The last year they were mailed, the print run was over 17,000. Some of the cards ran up to 20 pages and included such well-known Frost poems as “The Gift Outright” and “The Wood-Pile.”
Examples of the cards from the Rauner Special Collections can be viewed here.
Dartmouth College’s Officce of Alumni Relations recently posted the following notice about the cards on their blog:
Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library has an extensive collection of the cards, including copies of the first-ever example—“Christmas Trees”—which was produced without Frost’s knowledge in 1929. Later, Frost expressed admiration for the card and he agreed to help produce them on an annual basis in 1934.
Rauner’s collection also includes cards with handwritten notes from Frost to librarians at Baker Library and other friends in Hanover. In 1951, Frost accompanied the “A Cabin in the Clearing” card with this note to Dartmouth bookstore employee Ruby Dagget: “in hopes that you will carry it like a lesson to your schoolhouse in the wilds of Vershire.” Vershire is a nearby town in Vermont.
In late 2000 I wrote a letter to Don DeLillo asking him what kind of typewriter he used. I’d read in the Paris Review interview that he used a manual typewriter. A page from said typewriter (from his novel Libra) was also reproduced in the article, and I found it fascinating because it showed evidence of hard labor — typing and lots of inked-in corrections. Plus, the type style was beautiful and I wanted that typewriter. So I wrote the letter. A few months later I received a letter (unfortunately damaged) in reply from this most reclusive literary genius, who identified his typewriter as an Olympia “SM-something.” The above photo clearly shows an Olympia SM9, manufactured in the early 1970s. A great and reliable machine, one of which I now own. Here’s a link to the manual.
Amazon.com Inc. plans to open two new fulfillment centers in California over the next year, a move in response to an online sales tax deal between the online retailer and the state of California.
The move comes after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law in September requiring large online retailers to begin collecting sales tax from state residents next year. Amazon won a postponement of the sales-tax collection requirement until next year after promising to build warehouses in the state, which will create at least 10,000 new full-time jobs and 25,000 seasonal jobs by the end of 2015.
As early as this fall, Amazon plans to take over a 950,000 square-foot facility in San Bernardino, in Southern California. Additionally, Amazon plans to open a 1-milion-square-foot fulfillment center in Patterson, just east of the San Francisco Bay area. That facility should open in the second quarter of 2013.
By the end of the second quarter of 2012 Amazon will create “hundreds of full time jobs with benefits” in Patterson, California, said Dave Clark, Amazon vice president, global customer fulfillment.
We appreciate USAA Real Estate Company’s hard work, the support from Governor Brown and state and local officials, and we look forward to creating hundreds of full time jobs with benefits in Patterson when the facility begins shipping to customers in 2013.
The two new fulfillment centers apparently represent only the initial warehouse moves by Amazon in California, coming as they do on the heels of a 34% sales increase in the first quarter for the online retail giant.
Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”
The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Times obituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”
Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,
His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.
“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”
After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.
He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of the deadliness of Beatrice, and inevitably of Giovanni himself, accumulate with a horrid insistence.
Beatrice’s father is Professor Rappaccini of Padua, who raised her from childhood among deadly plants and flowers of his own creation in order to endow her with “marvellous gifts against which no power or strength could avail an enemy.” Giovanni, a young student, unaware of the secrets of the garden, is deeply attracted to her extraordinary beauty and her intimate tending to the beautiful plants. Gradually he becomes aware of the deadliness of the garden, and despite the warnings of Rappaccini’s rival, Baglioni, Giovanni continues to pursue her until he eventually takes on her deadly power. When he finally realizes the extent of his contamination, he urges her to drink with him the antidote prepared by Baglioni. She drinks it first, and “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death.” The story ends with Baglioni’s horrified yet triumphant cry: “ ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?’ ”
Trailer for the German musical “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
At the time of his trial and execution in 399 BC, Socrates had reached the age of seventy. He had lived through the Periclean Age when Athens was at the pinnacle of Imperial power, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and Athens’ defeat in 404. He did, however, live to see the restoration of democracy. For most of that time he was a well-known character in the streets of Athens, speaking to anyone who’d listen to his philosophy of life. His mission, which he explains in the Apology, was to expound the idea that man was responsible for his own moral attitudes.
Benjamin Jowett’s translations in this volume give Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial and death. Euthyphro is a kind of introduction to Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech to the jury in his own defense. Crito gives the account of how Socrates could have escaped into exile but refused. Meno shows Socrates debating Meno on the nature of human virtue and questioning Meno’s slave boy on a question of geometry in order to prove the preexistence of the soul. Phaedo gives the account of Socrates’ last discussions with his friends on the immortality of the soul.
Three of the essays in this collection (“History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-soul”) sprang from the 1836 lectures on the philosophy of history Emerson delivered at the Boston Masonic Temple.
“History” really isn’t about history but how to convert the burden of the past into a survival kit for the future. “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.” Emerson believed that history could not be ignored, but for it to have currency we must imagine ourselves in it. “We . . . must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten images to some reality in our experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”
Also in this collection is “The Poet,” the finest piece ever penned about literature as a process, a form of expression as fundamental as any basic drive — like sex — but also one of the main purposes of human life. Poetry is not a skill or a trade, but a reflection of the human spirit, the inner fire: “For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.”
The last essay in this collection is “The Divinity School Address,” given July 15, 1838, to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. Emerson had not been invited by the officers of the school, but by the senior class. What he delivered that evening was so objectionable to the clergy that nearly thirty years passed before he was invited to speak again at Harvard. Emerson’s address was both an attack on formal historical Christianity and a proposition of a personal religious consciousness, a sort of declaration of the divinity of the human. Emerson ended his talk with advice that asked a lot of the young graduates: “Let me admonish you to go alone; to refuse the good models . . . and to love God without mediator or veil.” The address would be Emerson’s last face-off with organized religion, though he would remain a deeply religious and spiritual man throughout his life.
For “The Dead” James Joyce drew upon an incident in Galway in 1903. There a young man named Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin was courting Nora Barnacle (Joyce’s eventual wife), but he had tuberculosis and was soon bedridden. When Nora resolved to leave Galway for Dublin, the boy stole out of his sickbed and in the rain under an apple tree sang to Nora . Later, in Dublin, Nora learned that Bodkin was dead. When Nora first met Joyce, as she told her sister, what attracted her to him was his resemblance to “Sonny” Bodkin.
Apparently, Joyce was jealous of the dead suitor and grilled Nora ceaselessly about him. What bothered him was that her heart was still moved by the recollection of the boy’s love for her. This notion of a man in rivalry with a dead boy lying in a cemetery appears to be the genesis of Joyce’s most famous story.
Besides basing his story only on this incident, Joyce borrowed heavily from the ending of a book which is hardly read anymore, George Moore’s Vain Fortune. In that book a young bridal couple learn that a young woman whom the groom jilted has committed suicide. Both are tormented, and the bride asks her husband not to kiss her. She falls off to sleep, their marriage unconsummated, and the husband stares out the window at “the melancholy greyness of the dawn.” In that instant he realizes that his life is a failure and that his wife lacks the passion of the girl who killed herself. He does, however, achieve a sort of redemption through his agony: a resolution to try to make his wife happy. This is clearly the situation from which Joyce adroitly lifted: the dead lover who comes between the living lovers, the husband’s realization of his failure, his acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at least sympathetic — it all came from this other book. Nonetheless, Joyce rarefies the story by having it arise not from the suicide of a former love but from the simple memory of the young love itself.
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