Oscar Wilde Birthday

It’s the birthday of Irish writer Oscar Wilde (books by this author), born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, in Dublin (1854). He’s the author of the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895); and he’s one of the most quotable authors in the English language.

His mother was a famous poet, journalist, and Irish nationalist; his father was a noted ear and eye doctor. He went to college at Oxford, where he began affecting an aristocratic English accent and dressing in eccentric suits and velvet knee breeches.

He stayed in England after college and made a name for himself as a brilliant conversationalist in the high society of London. A movement in art and literature called Aestheticism was becoming popular at the time, and Wilde became known as one of its leading spokesmen. The movement’s motto was “Art for art’s sake.” Wilde began lecturing on the importance of art and beauty in people’s everyday lives. He said: “We spend our days looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is art.” And he said, “Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong.”

Wilde went on a sweeping lecture tour in the United States, stopping everywhere from Des Moines to Denver, from St. Paul to Houston. He visited Walt Whitman in Pennsylvania, where they drank elderberry wine and talked about poetry in America and England. He lectured to rich people and to coal miners. He said, “The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer.”

Soon after he returned to London in 1883, he set himself to writing poetry, plays, and essays. But he didn’t become well known as a serious writer until he came out with his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891, about a beautiful young man who remains young while a portrait of him grows old. Wilde then burst upon the British theater scene with four consecutive comedy hits: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

Happy Birthday Eugene O'Neill

It’s the birthday of American playwright Eugene O’Neill (books by this author), born in a Broadway hotel room in New York City (1888). His father was a famous actor, and O’Neill spent much of his childhood on trains and in hotels, following his father on tours. He went to Princeton, but he was expelled after a year. He got a series of odd jobs, then went off on a gold prospecting expedition in Honduras, where he contracted malaria. After he recovered, he tried out sailing, vaudeville acting, and writing for a small-town newspaper. In 1912, he fell sick again with tuberculosis and spent six months in a sanatorium. While he was there, he began to read classic playwrights and modern innovators like Ibsen and Strindberg.

When he was released, he began writing furiously, coming out with 11 one-act plays in just a few years. In 1916, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he fell in with a group that would become known as the Provincetown Players, which included writers like Susan Glaspell and Robert Edmond Jones. The group began producing O’Neill’s plays on a regular basis, and they helped to revolutionize American theater.

In 1920 his play Beyond the Horizon became a popular and critical success on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. He would go on to win two more Pulitzers in the next eight years, for Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928). He continued to write until 1944, when he was diagnosed with a crippling neurological disease called cortical cerebellar atrophy. In 1956, his work began to be revived, and his play Long Day’s Journey into Night — published posthumously in 1956 — won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.

After Shakespeare and Shaw, O’Neill is the most widely presented and translated dramatist in the English-speaking world. His were the first real tragedies of the American stage, the first to dispense with formal language in favor of slang, and the first to use special effects like masks and dramatic lighting. He won the Nobel Prize in 1936.

O’Neill wrote to a friend: “I am far from being a pessimist. … On the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life!”

And he wrote, “Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.”

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The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

by Vaslav Nijinsky, Joan Acocella (Editor)

In December 1917, Vaslav Nijinsky, the most famous male dancer in the Western world, moved into a Swiss villa with his wife and three-year-old daughter and started to go insane. This diary, which he kept in four notebooks over six weeks, is the only sustained, on-the-spot account we have by a major artist of the experience of entering psychosis. Nijinsky's diary was first published in 1936, in a heavily bowdlerized version that omitted almost half of his text. The present edition, translated by Kyril FitzLyon, is the first complete version in English, and the first version in any language to include the fourth notebook, written at the very edge of psychosis. It contains Nijinsky's last lucid thoughts - on God, sex, war, and the nature of the universe, as well as on his own broken life.
Published January 1st 1999 by Farrar Straus Giroux (first published 1953)

In his prime, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) was the most celebrated man in Western ballet--a virtuoso and a dramatic dancer such as European and American audiences had never seen before. After his triumphs in such works as The Specter of the Rose and Petrouchka, he set out to make ballets of his own, and with his Afternoon of a Faun and The Rite of Spring, created within a year of each other, he became ballet's first modernist choreographer. Then, still in his twenties, he began to go mad. For six weeks in early 1919, as his tie to reality was giving way, Nijinsky kept a diary--the only sustained daily record we have, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis. In some entries he is filled with hope. He is God; he will save the world. In other entries, he falls into a black despair. He is dogged by sexual obsessions and grief over World War I. Furthermore, he is afraid that he is going insane. The diary was first published in 1936, in a version heavily bowdlerized by Nijinsky's wife. The new edition, translated by Kyril FitzLyon, is the first complete and accurate English rendering of this searing document. In her introduction, noted dance critic Joan Acocella tells Nijinsky's story and places it in the context of early European modernism.

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To Strengthen and Make Steady

The word affirmation comes from the Latin affirmare, which means “to strengthen and make steady.” Affirmation statements are affirming that something is true for us. The purpose of positive affirmations is to affirm to ourselves that things are good even if we don’t necessarily feel that way at the time.

Positive affirmations have the power to transform lives. They play a significant role in many therapeutic models—including cognitive behavioral therapy, a treatment for depression. Positive affirmations are also at the forefront of many 12-step rehabilitation programs.

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It's no accident that this is the haunted time of year and the Jews have the day of atonement. Along with the orange trees we have shrinking daylight and introspection. We run around like squirrels and descend into the depths of our haunted souls. If we give in it's not as terrifying. Give in. Get cozy. Make soup. Read books. Stare at the fish tank or burning fireplace logs. Be hypnotized by falling leaves, rain or snowflakes. It's good for you. Walk miles until you forget what you were worried or angry about. Bake cookies and give them to the neighbors. Teach a four year old how to make a mini apple pie.

Safran Foer Sonar

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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“My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Buried Hurt

“There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.”
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Prism of Depair

“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.”
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It Takes a Life

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
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The House You Build out of Your Own Pain

The Shack is a metaphor for "the house you build out of your own pain", The Shack "is a metaphor for the places you get stuck, you get hurt, you get damaged...the thing where shame or hurt is centered."

Love at First Flight

By the time I fell in love with a passenger on a flight from San Francisco to J.F.K., back when I was a flight attendant, I knew I had my life all figured out. We would be artists in New York City, have children with quirky old-people names, and eat ethnic food with our fingers.
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105.5 FM in Queens

They would seem to make odd broadcasting bedfellows: the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Global Service Center for Quitting Chinese Communist Party. Yet the two organizations are partnering on the airwaves, with two radio stations starting next month at 105.5 FM in Queens.

Weekday mornings and early afternoons, the diocese’s WDMB will air daily Masses, rosary prayers and call-in shows. At 2 p.m., the Global Service’s WQEQ will take the microphone “to disseminate info about the Chinese Communist Party’s crimes against humanity” — as it declares in its mission statement.

The common thread? Both stations will broadcast solely in Mandarin, focusing on the growing Chinese community in Queens. “We have a similar target audience,” said Msgr. Kieran E. Harrington, the diocese’s vicar for communications.

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