This Day in History poem by: T.S. Eliot

Birthday's:
Sinclair Lewis: 1885, the first American to win the nobel prize in literature.
1966: Chris Rock


In 1964 the British Invasion was on with The Beatles making their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, which the following day Steve Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen have said "We put our baseball bats down and wanted picked up guitars."


Cousin Nancy
By: T.S. Eliot

Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them, 
Rode across the hills and broke them-
The barren New England hills-
Riding to hounds 
Over the cow-pasture. 

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it, 
But they knew that it was modern. 

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, 
The army of unalterable law. 




Sources:
The Encyclopedia Brittanica
T.S. Eliot "Collected Poems 1909-1962"

This Day in History with a poem by: James Joyce

Birthday's:
1882: Irish novelist and poet James Joyce
1895: American NFL coach and american football pioneer George "Papa Bear" Halas.
1927: Jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.

1653: New Amsterdam (New York City) was incorporated as a city.
1848: The United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
1876: The National League, the oldest existing major-league professional baseball organization in the United States, began play as the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.
1912: Frederick Rodman Law performed what was considered the first motion-picture stunt, parachuting from the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
1943: The Battle of Stalingrad in World War II ended with the surrender of German troops to the Soviets.
1971:  Idi Amin declared himself president of Uganda and for the next eight years headed a regime that was noted for its brutality.
1979: Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, early proponents of British punk rock, died of a drug overdose in New York City.
1990: South African President F.W. de Klerk lifted the 30-year ban on the African National Congress, resulting in the release from prison of Nelson Mandela and marking the beginning of the end of apartheid.
2014: American Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who fully inhabited the characters he played and was renowned for his scene-stealing work in supporting roles, died of a heroin overdose in New York City.


Alone

By: James Joyce

(From the Poetry Foundation – poetryfoundation.org)

The moon’s soft golden meshes make
All night a veil;
The shore-lamps in the sleeping lake
Laburnum tendrils trail.

The sly reeds whisper in the night
A name-her name,
And all my soul is a delight,
A swoon of shame.


Sources:
Encyclopedia Brittanica
Poetry Foundation
On this day

This Day in History poem by Langston Hughes

Birthday's:
John Napier, Scottish mathematician/ inventor (logarithms), 1550 Edinburgh, Scotland.
1895: American director (Stagecoach, Air Mail, Quiet Man) John Ford, Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
1901: American actor Clark Gable
1902: American writer Langston Hughes
1918: Muriel Spark, Scottish writer (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) born Edinburgh Scotland.


1790: The first session of the Supreme Court of the United States was held, in New York City.
1820: In a battle fought in Cepeda, Argentina, federalist forces defeated unitarios, who were advocates of strong central government.
1884: The first ten volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in London, the final volume being published in April 19, 1928.
1896: Giacomo Puccini premiered his opera La Boheme at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy.
1923: The private army of Blackshirts that had helped Benito Mussolini come to power in Italy was officially transformed into a national militia, the Voluntary Fascist Militia for National Security.
1960: Protesting a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, four African Americans began a sit-in; its success led to a wider sit-in movement throughout the South.
1979: The spacecraft Voyager 1 photographed Jupiter form a distance of 32.7 million km (20.3 million miles).
2003:  Space shuttle Columbia was destroyed while returning to Earth.

Blues in Stereo

By: Langston Hughes

Your number’s coming out!
Bouquets I’ll send you
And dreams I’ll send you
And horses shod with gold
On which to ride if motor cars
Would be too tame-
Triumphal entry send you-
Shouts from the Earth itself
Bare feet to beat the great drum beat
Of glory to your name and mine-
One and the same:
You barefoot, too,
In the quarter of the Negroes
Where an ancient river flows
Past huts that house a million blacks
And the white god never goes
For the moon would white his
Whiteness
Beyond its mask of whiteness
And the night might be astonished
And so lose its repose.

In a town named after Stanley
Night each night comes nightly
And the music of music’s
Borrowed for the horns
That don’t know how to play
On LPs that wonder
How they ever got that way.

What time is it, mama?
What time is it now?
Makes no difference to me-
But I’m asking, anyhow. 
What time is it, mama?
What time now?

Down the long hard ro that I been
Hoeing
I thought I hear the horn of plenty
Blowing
But I got to get a new antenna, Lord-
My TV keeps on snowing.

This Day in History: Poem by John Martin

Birthday's:
Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797), lead singer of the punk band The Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten (1956), and musician Justin Timberlake (1981).
In 1919 a boy was born in Cairo, Georgia who had no idea that he would later become the First African-American to play professional baseball for the Brooklyn/ Los Angeles Dodgers. That boy was Jack "Jackie" Roosevelt Robinson.

1606: Guy Fawkes was executed in London
1943:  German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered to the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad (now Volgograd), his troops surrendering tow days later.
1958:  Explorer 1 was the first artificial space satellite orbited by the United States, marking the country's entry into the space race.
1966: The Soviets launched Luna 9, the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon.
1977: The Pompidou Centre, a French national cultural centre named for former president Georges Pompidou, opened in Paris.
2001: Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted in the 1988 Pan Am flight 103 bombing, in which 270 people were killed; in 2009 the Scottish government released Megrahi from prison after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Bear in Mind
By John Martin

A bear is chasing me through a meadow
and I'm running as fast as I can but
he's gaining on me-it seems
he's always gaining on me.
I'm running and running but also
thinking I should just
turn around and say,
"Stop it! Stop chasing me. We both
know you aren't going to catch me.
All you can ever do is chase me. So.
think about it-why bother?"

The bear does stop,
and he sits on his haunches and thinks,
or seems to think. And then
the bear says to me,
"I have to chase you, you know
that. Or you should. And, sure,
we both know I'll never catch you.
So, why not give us both a break and
just stop thinking about me?"

But, with that said, he gets back on four feet,
sticks his long pink tongue out, licks down
both sides of his snout, Then he sighs, looks
behind himself, then at me and says, "Okay,
ready when you are."

On this day

Birthday's: American trumpeter Roy Eldridge was born on this day in 1911.Barbara Tuchman one of the foremost popular historians in the United States in the second half of the 20th century and a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, was born on this day in 1912.
American politician Dick Cheney was born on this day in 1941.

9bce: The Roman emperor Augustus dedicated the shrine Ara Pacis ("Altar of Peace.")

1649: King Charles I of England was executed.
1667: The Truce of Andrusovo ended the Thirteen Years' War between Russia and Poland.
1933: The fictional character the Lone Ranger was introduced on radio station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.
1933: President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.
1948: Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by an orthodox Hindu Brahman.
1995: Flooding forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from low-lying areas of the Netherlands.
2011: California became the first state to celebrate Fred Korematsu Day, which honoured the Japanese American  activist who was convicted in 1942 of violating an exclusion order requiring him to relocate, his subsequent legal appeals were denied.

Tender Buttons [A Little Called Pauline]

By: Gertrude Stein

A little called anything shows shudders.

Come and say what print all day.

A whole few watermelon.

There is no pope.

No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.

A little lace makes boils.

This is not true.

Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean on the top.

If it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head.

A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon.

A letter a cold sleeve a blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window.

Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight,

show a stitch of ten.

Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning.

I hope she has her cow.

Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading mention nothing.

Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for.

Please could, please could, jam it not plus more sit in when.

The Blood Curse of Abraham Wesley Walters

The Blood Curse of Abraham Wesley Walters

By: Moose 

            The cool night air was comforting as Abraham Wesley Walters stood immersed in blood. His black fedora was cocked to one side due to the thorough stabbing ten minutes ago which had made the hat fall to one side, A.W. straightened it. He was older now, road weary, and haggard from two decades of killing. Standing in this home he could see that his own demise was becoming much closer while his guitar rested comfortably soaking in the blood.

            Twenty years ago he had come home to find his family tortured and murdered. His wife tied up at the ankles and wrists and wounds so deep at points that they went straight through her torso. His two children were each stabbed once deeply to their heart, while sleeping in their beds. Abraham was a blues man, and that night, much to his wife’s chagrin, had gone to play across town. They needed the money though, and he would only be gone the night and be back “before the sun came up.” He was true to his word and back before that sun came up. He, in bliss, lit a cigarette and with zero haste managed to polish off the bottle of lightning he was given that night reveling in a wash of gratitude. He made some decent bread, more than he had any previous night before, and riding the high he sat on his porch. Unaware of the horror inside, and oblivious to the metallic smell lingering in the home due to the amount blood shed from upstairs, and tired as hell he sat in his chair in the living room and drifted off to sleep.

            He awoke a few short hours later to the sun shining through the front window, and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and caught a whiff of that metallic smell. He was finding it odd as well not to hear the kids playing or smelling something Grace was cooking up for breakfast in the kitchen. It was when he made his way to go up the short flight of stairs to check on everybody when he stopped and saw that the downstairs mirror was shattered the way it does when someone punches it. Worried and a little scared he walked up the stairs and saw the horror that had befallen his family. He slunk down the door jamb to the children’s bedroom and watched with tears in his eyes as the blood gathered within the wood grain of the floor boards. Trauma can do some horrific things to people sometimes, and this time was no different. He stayed in that house for a little over a week mourning and plotting. His anger and grief swelling within him like a volcano ready to burst, and yet he managed to remain calm.

            Pastor Williams lived not too far away and Abraham had reached out to him to come by after the horror. They sat for a while. The pastor telling him they will have a proper funeral for Abraham’s family, and if there was anything he needed to stop by the church anytime. The pastor questioned Abraham if he had killed them, but those accusations were put to bed once Abraham showed him the sixty dollars he had made from playing the night before the murders along with the bottle of lightning. The pastor asked if Abraham knew who it was that killed them Abraham had no idea. What the pastor didn’t see was the brewing volcano of hurt and anger that Abraham needed to release. The way in which he would release this pain and anger was forming within his traumatized brain. Revenge, pain, and anger all boiling in the cauldron of his mind and the violent day dreams were relentlessly poking at him like needles to skin. With the brewing stew of violence endlessly rotating in his mind sleep had decided it would not be a part of Abraham’s life.

            Abraham settled things at home, and figured it best if he went on his way. ‘A new town and a fresh start” at least that is what he told the pastor. While the fresh start was true there was no settling into a new town. Home was taken away from him the night his family was violently murdered. Home was wherever the bloodletting could simmer his pain. The first of the twenty year murders happened in a flurry. A.W, which is what he was going by, now, played a show and a woman came up to him after he finished. They got to talking and buying each other drinks. AW throwing on his charm and charisma. Turning it on or off like a light switch. A trick he picked up while playing shows. She however had no idea what his true intentions were and would be. Trusting him and her being lonely she told him of a place to get a room for the night that was cheap, and by the morning he would be gone. As they began kissing AW grabbed her throat and held till she went unconscious. He opened his guitar case and within a secret compartment he pulled out his hunting knife, he cut a piece of a pillow case and tied that around her eyes. Then proceeded to stab, viciously violent, so violent and brutal that mid-way through he had to stop because his arms were sore. After what seemed like an hour he finished. He took a shower and changed his clothes, but as he sat in the chair having a cigarette the tormenting voice that had now took up residence within his head said “welcome home.” He grabbed his guitar from under the bed and was off to the next town his twenty year murder spree now on its way.  

            As A.W. stood in this home immersed in blood twenty years later he knew his end was near as it had been resting upon him like a blanket. The voices in his head were getting louder, and he was tired. Death himself or one of his cohorts had been lingering around AW for the past two weeks. AW would see him at the grocery or while he was sitting on the porch. A man in a hat and black suit standing against the tree in his front yard or sitting a few tables away at the diner AW would frequent for breakfast in the early morning hours. Right across from him in the other chair in the living room or following him around the house, and watching him while he slept. AW could see him quite clearly, and it wasn’t until the man in the hat whispered “it’s time” that AW understood his own demise was underway. With the killing of this family of three all finished AW bought a boarding pass for the next train out of town with the man in the hat right by his side watching him as they sat in the train car. A few days later AW’s body was found inside a boarding house that he was staying at by the 21 year old son of the woman that owned the place. He had come by to do some maintenance and the smell hit him when he opened the front door to the building. AW’s room was on the ground floor and Bill Walters, the son, opened the room and saw the fly and maggot filled corpse of AW. The fedora lying on the floor behind the chair AW was sitting in, AW’s throat slit, and his guitar case on the floor at AW’s feet resting with its lid opened and resting comfortably in the blood.   

            Bill phoned the police, but before he did he took the guitar and put it in his truck. Once all of the questioning was over Bill brought the guitar home with him. Bill opened the case gently and found the deep red of the wood entrancing. He ran a cloth over the body to clean it up a little, checking for any cracks, and getting used to the feel of it. By the next afternoon he was found by his mother when he did not show up to the building. His mother told the police that she found him sitting in his chair with a belt around his neck. The police questioned her for a while and told her they would keep investigating. The police knew full well that Bill had committed suicide and knew that was in direct conflict with the mother of Bill. Bill’s mother went back to Bill’s house to clean things up and found the guitar. She had no need for it, but she figured she could sell it. William Fitsimmons came calling for the guitar after seeing the ad in the paper. He bought it for twenty dollars.  William kept the guitar in its case for about a week. Then curiosity got the best of him and he opened it up. The red on the body caught his eye, and he too ran his hands along the body and neck of the guitar, gave it a quick tuning, and strummed a few chords. His wife arrived home from work and cooked some Brussel sprouts and roast beef. William sat at the table across from his wife, smiled at her, and during that smile his face changed to terror as he began choking on one of the Brussel sprouts. His wife within a fit of panic could not dislodge the sprout, and William choked to death. The wife sold off the guitar to a family member. Who died, much in the same way as everyone else. Shortly after receiving it the family member merely looked at it and was found the next morning strangled by a belt.

            The trail went cold for a few years. Nobody is sure what happened to the guitar or where it went after the wife sold it to the family member. Then in the spring many years later it made its arrival in New Orleans. A music historian and guitar aficionado named Lawrence Dupree bought it at a local auction of all kinds of things. He saw the instrument up for bidding and won it for sixty five dollars. Lawrence being the inquisitive and curious type was not interested in how it sounded but of its history. He kept a meticulous journal of all his instruments and findings of said instruments. He had a shop of sorts that was filled with all kinds of instruments from violins to tubas. Each instrument with a record and file kept in a file cabinet. When Lawrence came upon this instrument though something struck him as odd, something that simply did not feel right about the instrument, there was darkness to it that Lawrence became fascinated with. Lawrence wrote that he noticed the case was “handmade” and “etched into the lid of the case were the initials A W W.” Then, as he always does, he put on a fresh pair of white linen gloves and began his inspection.

            He started with the case. He took the guitar out and set it aside as the craftsmanship of the case, the time this would have took, and the sweat and care that went into building this was, for Lawrence, was a piece of art. He found a compartment underneath where the neck of the guitar would rest. To his dismay it was empty, however, somebody loved this guitar as the inside was custom fit to it and protected the guitar from any damage. Lawrence moved onto the guitar. During his inspections of any instrument Lawrence would use black lights to illuminate the things you cannot see, much like a crime scene investigator. Once he turned on the black light he noticed blotches in random spots on the guitar. On the neck, front of the body, the backside, inside, and along the body being the inquisitive one that he is he took a sample and passed it along to a friend who worked in the DNA lab at the New Orleans police department. It was then that the sample Lawrence sent along was soon found to be blood and all of the blotches and spots that glowed through the black light were blood as well.

             Lawrence soon found himself unrelentingly enthralled by the guitar. It was all he could think about. He would go to sleep thinking about it and wake up with it as the first thing on his mind. Obsession can do strange things and soon Lawrence was not eating correctly nor sleeping well as the guitar had sunk its teeth deep into Lawrence.   

            While working late one night on the guitar Lawrence completely immersed in the little discoveries, slipped and hit his head on the corner of the table then split his head on the linoleum floor from the fall. He was found by his co-worker Daniel the next morning. Daniel, along with the Police, wondered how he could have slipped when there was nothing for him to slip on where Lawrence had been standing. Fortunately, Daniel and Lawrence installed a security system within their shop. Lawrence is standing at the table inspecting the guitar then falls.  Over and over again they watched it, and over and over again the same thing happens. There was nothing to suggest anything else other than a slip and fall.

            The police went no further with it, however for Daniel it wasn’t over. Before he could even get started on his own investigation into how Lawrence had passed he too was inspecting the guitar, and during the inspection he too fell in the manner Lawrence did. Daniel is inspecting the guitar scratches his head then slips and hits his head both on the table and the floor. Arriving in the mail that day was a letter from the DNA lab on the blood that was tested in the hopes of finding a match.

            The letter went unopened and unread, and the guitar had one last trick up its sleeve. A fire broke out in the restaurant that was next door. Nobody was sure how the grill was left on, but when the owner and his son opened up in the morning and Phil Thompson lit his morning cigarette the fire engulfed everything. Killing Phil and his son Thomas, meanwhile, the guitar was safe, in its case, and unharmed.

            “Carl look what I found!”

            “What do you think we should do with it?”

            “I’ve always wanted to learn how to play guitar.”

           

“The world’s funny. Take care of what I’ve done, and I’ll see you, on my way home.”

-Abraham Wesley Walters 1937 (note found inside his guitar case.)

             

            

On this day

In 1860 Russian author Anton Chekhov, 1880 playwright W.C. Fields, and in 1966 Brazilian footballer Romario were all born.

1819: British East India Company administrator Sir Stamford Raffles established the port of Singapore.

1886: German mechanical engineer Karl Benz patented the first practical automobile powered by an internal - combustion engine.
1900: The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs was organized in Philadelphia
1919: The Prohibition (Eighteenth) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and went into effect the following year.
1924: The first machine for rolling ice cream cones was patented by Carl Rutherford Taylor of Cleveland, Ohio.
1936: Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were among the first players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
2002: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea called "Axis of Evil" by former U.S President George W. Bush.
2004: Author Janet Frame who created a unique body of work that presents perhaps the most-recognized voice of New Zealand outside of her native country, died.

Drunk (an excerpt)
By: Anton Chekhov

Drunk

by Anton Chekhov

---

A MANUFACTURER called Frolov, a handsome dark man with a round beard, and a soft, velvety expression in his eyes, and Almer, his lawyer, an elderly man with a big rough head, were drinking in one of the public rooms of a restaurant on the outskirts of the town. They had both come to the restaurant straight from a ball and so were wearing dress coats and white ties. Except them and the waiters at the door there was not a soul in the room; by Frolov's orders no one else was admitted.