CHARLIE'S BOOKS☺☺☺NOTE○WELL○PUBLISHERS small press runs & publisher of Charlie's Books:of poetry,novels and short stories.

—Accept this-that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
—Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
— Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
— Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
— If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
— If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
—It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
— Never buy a car you can't push.
— Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won't have a leg to stand on.
— Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
— Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.
— The second mouse gets the cheese.
— When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
— Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
— You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
— Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
— We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.
—A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
—Have a wonderful day and know that someone has thought about you today.
— Chas

 

 GEORGE S. KAUFMAN

"The kind of doctor I want is one who when he's not examining me is home studying medicine."
"I like terra firma; the more firma, the less terra."

"I understand your new play is full of single entendres."

"At dramatic rehearsals, the only author that's better than an absent one is a dead one."

"I thought the play was frightful but I saw it under particularly unfortunate ircumstances. The curtain was up.

"I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it."

"When they ask me how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem. I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing."

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MAXWELL ANDERSON

"A dramatist is usually thought of as a slightly benighted child of nature who somehow or other did it all on a Ouija board.
From the point of view of the playwright, then, the essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of his hero."
"Truth's like a fire, and will burn through and be seen."
"If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you. It may break your heart but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right."

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MORE GREAT WRITERS

Walt Whitman's First Grass 
In 1855, Walt Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, New York. The first edition was published seven weeks later, and over the next thirty-six years Whitman would revise, add many more poems, and publish seven more editions which would "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"
Cutting A Clockwork Orange 

In 1962 Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was published. Although many do not think it his best novel -- the vote seems to go to Earthly Powers (1980) -- A Clockwork Orange made Burgess internationally famous, largely due to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film and the controversy which arose concerning its violence and its missing last chapter. 

Daphne du Maurier & Cornwall

In 1907 Daphne du Maurier was born. She was raised in London and then Hampstead, but du Maurier always wrote as if her true home was Cornwall, and her true birthday the day when she first saw Fowey harbor and entered "the gateway to another world." With Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, etc. she would do for Cornwall what Hardy did for Wessex. 

Twain's Life on the Mississippi 
In 1883 Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was published. Much of the book had first appeared as a popular magazine series years earlier; Twain saw an opportunity not only for a profitable book but, after twenty-one years away, to revisit the world of his youth – to do research, and "to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left." 

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's, Animals 
In 2001 Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels have sold fifteen million copies, and his Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he was proudest of Last Chance to See, a documentary of his expeditions to observe a handful of near-extinct animal species. 

"Have you heard about the Toad?" 
In 1907 Kenneth Grahame wrote the first of a series of letters to his son, Alastair, describing the adventures of Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger; this became The Wind in the Willows. Grahame had been inventing such bedtime stories for several years; putting them on paper at this point was occasioned by his being separated from his son on his seventh birthday.

Lytton Strachey and Eminent Victorians 
In 1918 Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians was published. Its four essays -- on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold and General Gordon – are described by recent biographer Michael Holroyd as "one of the seminal Bloomsbury texts," a book which "let a genie, gleeful and irreverent, out of the bottle" of biography writing. 

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger 
In 1956 John Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger, opened at London's Royal Court Theatre. The press release for the play called the twenty-six-year-old Osborne "an angry young man," a phrase that would become a label for a generation. Critic Clive Barnes cites the opening night of Look Back in Anger as the "actual birthday...of modern British theatre." 

Richard Sheridan's School for Scandal
In The School for Scandal Sheridan aimed to lampoon the general hypocrisy of the time, and portray his Joseph Surface and Lady Sneerwell as types. That a contemporary politician saw himself specifically targeted, and demanded that the play be cancelled, is another way of saying that Sheridan's masterpiece has been popular for well over two centuries, and will likely remain so.

Faulkner Goes to the Movies 
In 1932 William Faulkner reluctantly arrived in Hollywood to begin work as a screenwriter, a labor that would last, on and off, for twenty years. Faulkner had already published The Sound and the Fury, and although far from a popular success he was regarded as one of America's most talented young writers; on the other hand, a local store had just refused his $3 check. 

Thoreau as Porcupine & Orchid 
In 1862 Henry David Thoreau died at the age of forty-four, from bronchial and respiratory problems. Thoreau was an integral but prickly member of the Transcendentalist community in Massachusetts -- as might be expected from the writer of "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude," and as reflected in Emerson's funeral eulogy. 

Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse 
In 1927 Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published. Many of the earliest reviews were lukewarm, compared to the modern view that the novel is one of the century's best, or to Woolf's own evaluation while working on it: "Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely. . . . Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time. 

Sinclair Lewis: Won't Pulitzer, Will Nobel
American literature in the 1920s did not belong to F. Scott Fitzgerald's glitterati, or to Ernest Hemingway's expatriates, but to Sinclair Lewis and SmallTown USA -- Main Street in 1920, and then at a two-year pace, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth. These books, and the little game Lewis played with the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes awarded for them, would become the most famous chapter in his controversial career. 

The Naked and the Dead, Tolstoy, and Me 
In 1948, Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead was published. A front-page editorial in the London Sunday Times called the language in the novel "incredibly foul and beastly," and lobbied to have the book withdrawn, but most reviewers ranked it among the best war novels, and conferred upon Mailer a celebrity status that he claimed to regret. 

Byron Swims the Hellespont 
In 1810, Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, in emulation of Leander's legendary swims to visit his beloved Hero. Byron was twenty-two, and not yet famous for his poetry or his profligacy – though he had just finished a draft of Childe Harold, and just ended an affair with a married woman who, while no Hero, had moved Byron to challenge another to a sunrise duel. 

Shakespere & Shrews
On this day in 1594, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew was entered in the Stationers' Register. Much of the main plot seems to come from a 1550 popular ballad called "Here Begynneth a Merry Jest of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe, Lapped in Morrelles Skin, for her Good Behaviour." By the endeth, this contribution to the shrew-taming canon was merry from only one perspective. . . . 

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