Pynchon, Anderson & Stallings, Byron, Thompson

Gravity's Rainbow Appears Feb. 28, 2011 On this day in 1973 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow appeared, causing among the critics the sort of wonder and mayhem which begins the novel, as a V-2 rocket slams into 1944 London: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…." The final verdicts ranged from "unreadable" to "masterpiece." [full story] Please use these links when purchasing books (or anything else): Amazon Books  Maxwell Anderson died on this day in 1959 and Lawrence Stallings died on this day in 1968. The two collaborated on What Price Glory? (1924) a hit on stage and then at the movies, first as a 1926 silent film and then with James Cagney in 1952. Both movies downplayed the antiwar aspect of the original play, the 1926 film so successful with its glorification of the wine-women-fighting aspects of military life that it reputedly boosted the enlistment figures. Right, from the silent film, Dolores del Rio as Charmaine de la Cognac, trying to please her soldiers, played by Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen. …And since six o'clock there's been a wounded sniper in the tree by that orchard angle crying "Kamerad! Kamerad!" [Comrade] Just like a big crippled whippoorwill. What price glory now? Why in God's name can't we all go home? Who gives a damn for this lousy, stinking little town but the poor French bastards who live here? God damn it! You talk about courage, and all night long you hear a man who's bleeding to death on a tree calling you "Kamerad" and asking you to save him. God damn every son of a bitch in the world who isn't here! Byron's letter of February 28, 1817 from Venice to his friend Thomas Moore included one of his most popular lyrics, "So We'll Go No More A-Roving," and some background on its inspiration. In his letter to Moore, Byron says that he is "on the invalid regimen," having spent too many late nights during Venice's Carnival season with "the sword wearing out the scabbard." In a letter to another friend on this topic, Byron specified his Carnival nights as "fiddling — masquing — singing and t'other thing." Click the three photos for three different musical versions of the poem, spanning a century: a scratchy, 78rpm recording by the English tenor Gervase Elwes, a sixties folk version by Joan Baez, and Leonard Cohen doing his thing in 2004. So we'll go no more a-roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we'll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon. To carry on with the moonlight theme…: Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond opened on Broadway on this day in 1979 for a ten-and-a-half month run, followed by the hit movie: Our minds are clear and our hearts are strong. We are dancing here, but we won't be long. There will soon be deer where there now are fawns. But we'll remember our years on Golden Pond, On Golden Pond….