What does happen to a dream deferred ?

Big Wheels rolling through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

("Land of Hope and Dreams," Bruce Springsteen)

     Langston Hughes who asked the question about dreams in his poem "Dream Deferred" (also called "Harlem") answered with a series of questions: 

                                                                  Does it dry up 

                                                           like a raisin in the sun?

                                                            Or fester like a sore--

                                                                  And then run?

                                                        Does it stink like rotten meat?

                                                            Or crust and sugar over--

                                                                  like a syrupy sweet?

                                                                  Maybe it just sags

                                                                   like a heavy load.

                                                                  Or does it explode?

     What does happen to our put off, never explored dreams?   We all have them, desires never met.  Some of them we do allow to dry up. Many we regret that they were never fulfilled and some are simply out of our control.  Those we allow to dry up may be our  most unrealistic dreams.  When we allow a dream to get away, we have to be open to other avenues. If you wanted to be a player in Broadway musicals and you did little about it, you may find other outlets--community theater, directing high school productions, or viewing a lot of plays and movies, but that original desire is still there buried deep.  It does emerge from time to time causing you to cry or get teary watching the Tony awards.

      Some of our dreams can be an inspiration to others who can fulfill them for us.  Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" is a good example.  Like him, sometimes we can start the dream, but circumstances require others to finish it.  

    We can't live without dreams.  They give us hope that life can and will be different.  As Langston Hughes wrote in another poem, " Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."

Archy argues Beauty is privileged

  ". . . beauty gets the best of it in this world," says Archy.  Archy thinks, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.  He should know. As a cockroach, considered by many to be the ugliest insect, he has personal experience with beauty, or rather the lack of it.   Archy has a poet's sensitive soul since in a former life he was a poet.  archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis has been one of my very favorite books since 11th grade high school English when Mr. Pickens would occasionally read a chapter or two to us. 

In his newspaper column "The Sun Dial," back in 1916, Don Marquis first introduced archy the cockroach and his friend mehitabel, a cat who in a former life was Cleopatra,   Though nearly a century old, archy's philosophy and mehitabel's life style are very contemporary.  Archy records their observations and rhymes on "the boss's" typewriter late at night when the newspaper is closed.  He types by diving headfirst on the keys, but since he cannot hold down the shift key and jump, everything comes out in lower case with no punctuation.  

Archy and mehitable's comments are humorous, wry observations about life and society.  In the chapter about beauty titled "unjust."  Archy laments on the injustice of the favoritism shown to the beautiful.  He says that in the insect world only the moth and the butterfly are tolerated and that is because of their beauty.  He finds this particularly unfair because when he was a poet, he was not handsome.  It seems only fair to him that he should have transmigrated into the body of a butterfly to make up for it.

Archy observes in another chapter that a hen regrets having her neck wrung just as much as an oriole would, but nobody has sympathy for the hen because she is not beautiful.  Archy is distressed because a man almost squashed him when they were riding in an elevator . . . "if I had been a butterfly he would have said how did that beautiful thing happen to find its way into these grimy city streets do not harm the splendid creature."  He ends the account with advice to "boss."  

"Be beautiful boss and let who will be clever is the sad advice of your ugly little friend."

Archy seems to be saying that beauty equals worthiness.  Those who are not beautiful have little value.  There are those who act as if they accept this and like Archy devalue themselves if they lack beauty. This is the stuff of novels and movies.  How many have there been with some variation of this theme.

Mehitable's motto is toujours gai and there is the impression that she has been a good time girl in all of her nine lives.  One of her songs goes

                                                     there s a dance or two

                                                     in the old dame yet

                                                     believe me you

                                                     there s a dance or two

                                                     before i m through

                                                     you get me pet

                                                     there s a dance or two

                                                     in the old dame yet

She has a number of gentlemen friends, but she tells them she is wary of marriage.  She does have kittens though, which strangely disappear.  She tells Archy, ". . . 

                                                    the palaces I have

                                                    been kicked out of 

                                                    in my time 

                                                    exclamation point 

                                                    but wotthehell

                                                    little archy wot

                                                    thehell

                                                    it s cheerio

                                                   my deario

                                                   that pulls a

                                                   lady through

                                                  exclamation point

Both archy and mehitable are somewhat bohemian, and they are charming.  Aren't we lucky that Don Marquis and his newspaper companions saw Archy at work on the typewriter one night and so when they left for the day always left a blank sheet of paper in the machine for his use. (Well, that is Don Marquis's story) If not, we would never have heard about the lightning bug  named Broadway because he flashed like a neon sign, but sadly when he wore himself out, mehitabel the cat ate him.  Archy and mehitabel also have adventures in Europe.  Archy resides for a while in Westminster Abby in London and mehitabel lives in the Paris catacombs with several toms of questionable virtue.  

If you need a smile or a lift , buy or check out a copy of  archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis.  You won't be disappointed.

As Archy says, 

  " . . . the main question is 

   whether the stuff is  

   literature or not."

This old English teacher says it is.     

   

Worst Fiction Contest Deadline Approaches

           Got a first line or two for the Great American Novel?   If it is bad in a literary way, you might win the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  The contest deadline is April 15.  You can email or snail mail your entries.  Go to the official web site for the contest rules and submissions of electronic entries.
           The site gives the history of the contest which was instituted in 1982 by the English Department of San Jose State University.  The contest is roughly based on the first line of a novel by Edward George Lord Bulwer-Lytton, "It was a dark and stormy night . . ." The line is considered one of the worst in English literature because it rambles on for 50 more words.  Remember, Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy's
efforts at novel writing.  It was Charles Shultz joke to have Snoopy's novels always begin with the "dark and stormy night" line.  
        Try your hand at writing a bad novel opening and enter the contest.  The official web site offers some hints and tips and gives examples of winning lines from the past.  You'll probably discover that deliberately writing bad is not easy. 
       Molly Ringle of Seattle, WA was the winner in 2010 with this opening line:
"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."


      
           

Literary cats I have loved

                                              

Rusty

      No animal is as suitable for the dilettante as the cat.  Cats are intelligent, entertaining, and independent.  These characteristics also make them the favorite of many writers:

"I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course." ~ Mark Twain

      Many writers have included cats in their writings and some have made them the main character.  Following is a list of seven literary cats that I love and admire.  There are many others.  

Look for more literary cats in the future on this site. For more about cats including videos, quotations, pictures, gifts and just about everything cat, go to Cat Lover's Guide. 


1.  The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is one of the most famous literary cats.  He sits on a tree limb and taunts Alice with his wide smile and his wit.  Finally, his body fades away and only his smile gleams down at her from the tree. ". . . All right, said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone."
2.   Rum Tum Tugger, Old Deuteronomy, Macavity, Jennyanydots are some of the cats T.S. Eliot describes in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. These cats appear in poems and the poems were the inspiration for the long-running , Broadway musical "Cats."
3.  Mehitabel, currently in her ninth life, says she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra.  She is a cat who enjoys a good time.  Her motto is toujours gai. Her main confidante is Archy, a cockroach who in another life was a poet. He lives in a newspaper office where he types Mehitabel's stories and exploits.  Unfortunately, he can't reach the shift key and can't type capital letters or punctuation marks.  Archy is a philosopher, For example, " An optimist is a guy who has never had much experience."  Archy and Mehitabel tells their story.  It is a compilation of the newspaper columns of Don Marquis who wrote for several New York newspapers.  I have loved this book since high school.
4.  Dewey the Cat is the true story of Dewey, a yellow cat that appeared on the Book Return on a cold winter night in the Spencer Public Library in Spencer, Iowa.  Dewey became the library resident cat and a local celebrity. Vicki Myron wrote his biography and the book was a best seller in 2009.  It is possibly scheduled to become a movie. Isn't Dewey the perfect name for a library cat.
5.  Koko and Yum Yum are two Siamese cats belonging to detective James Qwilleran, the hero of mystery books by Lillian Jackson Braun.  The cats travel with Qwilleran, are fed delicacies, and frequently provide inspiration for crime solving.  
6.  Mrs. Murphy is another crime solving cat.  She appears in a series of novels by Rita Mae Brown and with another cat and a corgi often finds the clues to solve murders.  Rita Mae Brown's cat, Sneaky Pie Brown is credited as co-author of the books. 
7.  Hodge, a cat owned by Samuel Johnson, was immortalized by James Boswell in his extensive biography Life of Johnson.  A statue of Hodge was placed outside Johnson's London residence.

                                                    Bella, the sweetest cat!                                         


     

S. Pepys, dilettante extraordinaire

An English street

      Samuel Pepys ( peeps) is not just the man with the funny name.  He was a wonderful dilettante.  Though he lived in the 17th Century (1633-1703), we know all about his daily life.  He kept a secret diary from 1660 to 1669 and stopped writing only because he was going blind. He wrote the diary in code and left it by will to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it is still preserved in the Pepsian Library.  
      The diary is a complete picture of his time and his inner life.  He was in a position to know all that was going on in his world, and he had a great curiosity about people and experiences.  He rose from genteel poverty to become Secretary of the British Navy.  He was said to have served this office and all the ones leading to it with utmost integrity.  In his private life, he was a patron of the arts,  lover of the theater, skilled musician, collector of books and curiosities, and an interested friend to great minds of his day. He loved good food and wine and the companionship of women.
      He married the love of his life when he was 22 and she only 15.  The marriage was childless.  He wrote much about his wife and his marriage in the diaries, their fights, his infidelities, and their social lives.  
       His diary entries are straight forward.  There is no guile or attempt to hide the truth.  Of course, he was writing for himself.  It is a little strange that he wrote for himself and wrote in code, but willed the diaries, six bound volumes, to a college library.  The code was not a difficult one to decipher, but the ordinary person picking it up and his wife would not be able to read it.  
      You could say that Pepys was one of the first English bloggers.  Many books and articles have been written about Pepys.  There is one current blog about Pepys that you may like to examine.  It records much that is in the diaries:


Readers in the Mist, a blog of New Mountain City Library of  New South Wales, Australia