The Garden of Love
by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.


"The Garden of Love" by William Blake. Public domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the writer Pietro Aretino (books by this author), born in Arezzo, Italy (1492). He was banished from Arezzo after writing a satirical sonnet, but that didn't stop him from writing satire. He wrote poems, pamphlets, and gossip-filled letters, more than 3,000 in all, which he published and circulated widely. Unlike most of his predecessors, he wrote these letters in Italian instead of Latin, which gave them a much wider readership. He took particular pleasure in sharing the sex lives of famous people, including members of the Church. He was also happy to discuss his own sexual preference for boys. He became known as the "Scourge of Princes" because he blackmailed the wealthy and powerful with the threat of publishing satires about them. He supported himself with the money he was given as a bribe for keeping his gossip to himself.

He also wrote some of the earliest pornography, including mock-Platonic dialogues that took place in brothels, and 16 erotic sonnets. In his satirical book The School of Whoredom (1535) a woman instructs her daughter in how to be a courtesan. It is filled with advice like: "Men want to be duped, and while they realize they're being conned and that, when you've left their side, you'll mock them and brag about it even to your maids, they still prefer fake caresses to real ones without the sweet talk." He also wrote comic plays and sacred texts.

He died at the age of 64 and legend has it that he died of suffocation from laughing too much.

He said, "I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies."

It's the birthday of fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle (books by this author), born in New York City (1939). He's best known for The Last Unicorn (1968), the story of a unicorn who realizes she is the last unicorn who is not imprisoned and sets out on a quest to free the others. He said, "It's hard for me to do anything but marvel at the impact the story has had. It was the hardest, least fun thing I've ever had to write, and back when I finished it I was convinced I'd utterly failed to do justice to the idea." The Last Unicorn has sold more than 5 million copies.

His other books include The Innkeeper's Song (1993), The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances (1997), Mirror Kingdoms (2010), and Sleight of Hand (2011).

It's the birthday of novelist Sebastian Faulks (books by this author), born in Donnington, England (1953).

When he was 14 he read novels by Dickens and D.H. Lawrence and decided that he would be a novelist. He graduated early from high school and before he went on to Cambridge he spent a year studying in Paris. He said:

"At that time, France was a terribly old-fashioned, unmodernized country. You could branch off any main road in any of the provinces and in five minutes you would be back in the 1930s. I have this tremendous greed for the experience of the near past. I never wanted to be a centurion on Hadrian's Wall or to live in 18th-century London but I would fantastically like to be alive in the 1930s and '40s and France offered me that imaginative access to the past."

When he started writing novels, he wrote a trilogy set in France, mostly in the era between World War I and World War II: The Girl at the Lion d'Or (1989), Birdsong (1993), and Charlotte Gray (1999).

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ian Watson (books by this author), born in Tyneside, England (1943), who said, "I see science fiction now as a survival strategy generally — a metaphorical tool for thinking about the future flexibly and boldly."

His books include The Embedding (1973), The Jonah Kit (1975), Deathhunter (1981), and The Great Escape (2002). His latest work is a novella, The Trouble with Tall Ones (2019).

On this day in 1926 the phrase "grace under pressure" was used for the first time in print. Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) used the phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author). The two met a year earlier in a Parisian bar called Dingo and began a tumultuous, alcohol- and envy-fueled friendship, which Hemingway wrote about in his memoir A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in 1964).

Hemingway was a prolific correspondent and he probably wrote six to seven thousand letters in his lifetime, perhaps because he was an informal letter writer who believed letters should never be written for posterity. Write letters "for the day and the hour," said Hemingway in a May, 1950, letter to English professor and author Arthur Mizener. "Posterity will always look after herself." In his letters he regularly ignored apostrophes, rarely crossed a t or dotted an I, and, while he frequently boasted that he was a better speller than Fitzgerald, he almost always misspelled certain words, including apologize (apoligize), responsibility (responsability), and volume (volumne). He would also drop pronouns and common articles (an and the) from his letters (and sometimes even from conversation). He might have been mimicking the language of cables and telegraphs, which he loved, but he also thought the shortened, abrupt style was manly and down-to-earth.

In this particular letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway gossips, talks about what he's getting paid, offers facetious money advice, badmouths other writers, and asks Fitzgerald to read his new manuscript, The Sun Also Rises. He uses the phrase "grace under pressure" to describe what he means when he uses the word "guts": “was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers."

It was on this day in 1939 that Billie Holiday recorded the song "Strange Fruit" which describes the lynching of a black man in the South. The song began as a poem written not by Holiday but by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx named Abel Meeropol (using the pseudonym Lewis Allan) who was deeply disturbed by a picture he saw of a lynching. Meeropol set the song to music with his wife, Laura, and performed it at venues in New York City. (Meeropol and his wife are also noteworthy for adopting the orphaned Rosenberg children, Robert and Michael, after their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed for espionage.)

Holiday met Meeropol through a connection at a nightclub in Greenwich Village. She wanted to record the song but her record label refused to produce something so graphic and she was forced to record it on an alternative jazz label.

Holiday's recording of "Strange Fruit" is unique in American music for its unflinching look at one of the darkest periods in national history.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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