May  5  : )



It's the birthday of philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen, Denmark (1813). His father - a pious Lutheran wool merchant who was 57 when Soren was born - had made a fortune early in life and then retired, at 40, devoting himself to intellectual pursuits. The house was filled with professors, clergymen, and writers. Soren, the youngest of seven children, was slightly deformed, sickly and frail, yet highly gifted. In bad weather his father took him for imaginary walks up and down his study, commenting on many make-believe sights, helping the boy develop an inexhaustible imagination.

He thought about becoming a Lutheran minister but decided against it, and he ended up living on an inheritance and publishing philosophical books with his own money. He argued that truth is subjective, and that it's not enough to believe in something if you don't live by your beliefs. He was almost unknown outside of Denmark in the 19th century, but in the early 20th century he was rediscovered by European writers and philosophers, and he had a huge impact on writers like Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus.

Kierkegaard said, "Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment."

            


                                                 existentialism

                              no one　　's gonna love you - band of horses





                                     

                                                       
                                                     March  22  : )

Today is the birthday of poet Billy Collins, born in New York in 1941. Collins is both a critically acclaimed and popular poet, a unique combination in the world of modern poetry. Collins began writing poems at age 12. He devoured all the poetry he read, especially the contemporary poems in Poetry magazine. In an interview, Collins explained, "I remember reading a poem by Thom Gunn about Elvis Presley, and that was a real mindblower because I didn't know you could write poems about Elvis Presley. I thought there was poetry - what you read in class - and then when you left class there was Elvis. I didn't see them together until I read that poem."

Collins began selling his poems to Rolling Stone for $35 a pop in the 1970s. He married Diane Olbright in 1977 and published his first book of poems, Pokerface, that year, but it wasn't until the publication of Questions About Angels in 1991 that he began drawing critical attention. His other major poetry collections are The Apple that Astonished Paris (1988), The Art of Drowning (1995), Picnic, Lightning (1998), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), Nine Horses: Poems (2002), and The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (2005). Collins' style is light, humorous, and fond of extended metaphor. He uses mundane situations as diving boards into the larger philosophical questions of life. His poem "Forgetfulness" starts this way:

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one　　 you have never read,
never even heard of,


as if, one　　 by one　　, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Collins said, "Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."

                    


                                                     March  12  : )




It's the birthday of Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts (1922). He was part of the "Beat Generation," and he came up with the name. He said, "To me, it meant being poor, like sleeping in the subways ... and yet being illuminated and having illuminated ideas about apocalypse and all that." Later, Kerouac decided that "beat" stood for "beatific."

His parents were from French-speaking Quebec, and he did not start learning English until grade school. He skipped second and third grades, and as a 16-year-old senior, he ditched class in order to go alone to the public library and read what he wanted: Hugo, Goethe, Hemingway, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, history books, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and books of chess problems. He was a good football player and received a scholarship to Columbia University, but he broke his leg in the first season and didn't play anymore. He dropped out of Columbia, joined the Merchant Marine and then the Navy, and was given a psychiatric discharge after onl　　y two months, having been labeled as a "schizoid personality." The next fall, he went back to Columbia where he dropped out again almost immediately, but kept his apartment near campus and it became a gathering place for young intellectuals. During that time, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Carl Solomon, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement.

He spent the next seven years hitchhiking around the United States and Mexico, and in 1949 he and his friend Neal Cassady drove a Cadillac limousine from California to Chicago, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke. In 1951, he sat at his kitchen table, taped sheets of Chinese art paper together to make a long roll, and wrote the story of Cassady and their trips. It had no paragraphs and very little punctuation. Allen Ginsberg called it "a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself." It took him onl　　y three weeks to complete and became his novel On the Road (1957).


                          
                   남정네들이 왜케 많은겨?? 분위기 심상치 않은되.... =3=3333




               

                                                 love & peace YO jack!

                                     the sun comes through - kelley stoltz






                            
                                    Paul Auster in Central Park



                                                    Feb  3  : )

It's the birthday of novelist Paul Auster, born in Newark, New Jersey (1947). He's the author of The Book of Illusions (2002), Timbuktu (2000), and many other novels. After he graduated from college, he got a job on an oil tanker, saved all the money he made, and then went off to Paris to become a writer. He started out translating French poetry and writing his own poems. After 10 years, he had published a few collections of poetry, but he barely had enough money to pay for food. For a year, he quit writing and started looking for other ways to make money. He even invented a card game and pitched it to toy companies.

Then, in December 1978, he had an epiphany while watching a dance recital in New York City. He later said, "The simple fact of watching men and women moving through space filled me with something close to euphoria." The next day, he started writing again, but instead of writing poetry he wrote fiction. His first novel, City of Glass (1985), was published six years later. It's the first novel in his "New York Trilogy," which also includes Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1987).

                                  don't stand so close to me - the police





                  


                                           Nov  3  : )

It's the birthday of André Malraux, born in Paris (1901), who dropped out of school when he was 16, taught himself about art by spending all his time in museums, and began writing art criticism for avant-garde magazines. He then went off to Southeast Asia to make a living smuggling stolen art works back to Europe and almost wound up in prison. But it was in Asia that he witnessed a series of communist uprisings that inspired his first few novels, including Man's Fate (1933). He went on to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, organizing a squadron of planes to help bomb Franco's fascist army, which he wrote about in his book Man's Hope (1937), and while he was living in besieged Catalonia, he made a feature film about the war, with bombs falling as his camera rolled. André Malraux, who said, "Youth is a religion from which one　 always ends up being converted."