SEPTEMBER 1
Fri. 19 39. Had family picnic tonite. Went to scavenger hunt with B. tonite. Fannie and Foots, too.
Dark clouds over all.
Every body lisning to war news.
SEPTEMBER 2
Sat. 19 39. Frances came last nite.
SEPTEMBER 3
Sun. 19 39. England has declared war – France, too. Everybody hangs on radio for news. All family together – first time in ages.
[I haven't heard anybody in the media mention this anniversary. Maybe I don't listen to/read/watch enough media. I bet I would have heard about it if I lived in Europe.]
18 April 2024
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The central project is done. Double done, like double dutch, difficult.
Consider the word “liquidate.” To make a solid flow is to throw it out. To
wea...
1 day ago
2 comments:
The Writer's Almanac: It was on this day in 1939 that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began.
W.H. Auden (books by this author) wrote a famous poem about this day, called "September 1, 1939." It begins:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
Toward the end of the poem, he says, "We must love one another or die."
"September 1, 1939" became one of Auden's most famous poems, but in later years, he rejected it. He refused to give permission for it to be in anthologies, and when he did include it, he either changed "We must love one another or die" to "we must love one another and die," or he took out the stanza entirely.
It was on this day in 1773 that 20-year-old Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, (books by this author) in London. It was the first book of poetry published by an African-American. Phillis was born in West Africa and brought over as a slave when she was a young girl. She was purchased by a family in Boston, who taught her to read and write, and eventually gave her her freedom. She went to London when her book was published, and she met many important people there, including the Lord Mayor, who gave her a copy of Paradise Lost. George Washington praised her talents, and she published numerous poems in magazines. But her husband fell into debt and then abandoned her when she was pregnant, and she died in childbirth, in a boarding house, when she was 31 years old.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/nichols
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