Category Archives: Datebook
A Toast to Brendan Behan
We guiltily glossed over St. Patrick’s Day here—but what better way to celebrate, albeit a bit belatedly, than to commemorate a fine Irish writer who died of the drink a few days after? Today marks the 46th anniversary of the death of Brendan Behan: poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, IRA foot soldier, pornographer, and [...]
“In Love Over Both Ears”
Happy Valentine’s Day to all our Like Fire friends and readers. True, it’s a Hallmark holiday guaranteed to make a large swath of the population feel underappreciated or inappropriate. But then again, it’s also all about love and chocolate, both of which we wholeheartedly endorse.
My favorite link of the day is a sweetly unironic piece [...]
“Be Just and If You Can’t Be Just, Be Arbitrary.”
Today is the birthday of William S. Burroughs: writer, performer, critic, painter, wife-shooter, cat-lover, addict, bunker-dweller.
That last point recently caught the attention of photographer Peter Ross. Throughout most of the ’70s Burroughs lived in The Bunker, a partially renovated YMCA locker room on New York’s Lower East Side. He moved out in 1981, and the [...]
Another Sad Day
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
… Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. He was best known for his dozens and dozens of novels about what he [...]
A Sad Day in the World of Words
Erich Segal: author of Love Story, at 72
… It was short and simply told, famously beginning: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” By the end of those opening sentences he had many readers in [...]
Happy Birthday Kenneth Rexroth
Today is the birthday of poet Kenneth Rexroth, born in 1905 in South Bend, Indiana. He was a lifelong activist, naturalist, translator of Japanese and Chinese poetry, critic, and iconoclast. He refused to be labeled a Beat poet. And he wrote some of the sexiest love poetry around—discovering him in high school set the [...]
Mark Twain on YouTube
I’ve become so accustomed to seeing Mark Twain being done by actors, mostly Hal Holbrook, that it’s somewhat strange to see the man himself caught on film—who is that walking like Charlie Chaplin? But it is indeed him, strutting around his Connecticut home and taking tea with his daughters Clara and Jean, a hundred years [...]
Poems for the Table
Whether in addition to or instead of saying Grace, you can’t go wrong with a good poem at the Thanksgiving table. It’s one of those few occasions when declaiming isn’t totally inappropriate, so go for it! Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver would not be out of place, and the Poetry Foundation has been kind [...]
Tearing It Down
Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell, the boundary that had been in place between East and West Germany since 1961 trampled literally, metaphorically, politically, emotionally. Like just about everyone else back then I had no internet, but I also had no TV, and remember compulsively scrolling up and down the radio [...]
The Lineup: Spooky Books
Yes indeedy, it’s that time of year when bibliophiles such as I compulsively compile lists of spooky reads. But this isn’t your ordinary seasonal list featuring the usual Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Washington Irving, no sirree, [apple] Bob! This is your up-to-date, postmodern list of fiction and non-, guaranteed to [...]
