Posts about “authors”

Today is the birthday of T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888. At the age of 27, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), and at 34, wrote “The Waste Land” (1922). At the height of his career, when he was writing poetry, plays, and literary criticism, and serving as director of the British publisher Faber & Faber, he was the 20th century’s single most influential writer. He was dry and enigmatic, and he spoke very, very slowly. Yet, he loved the Marx Brothers and was said to harbor a weakness for squirting buttonholes and exploding cigars. Somebody once said to Eliot that most editors are failed writers. Eliot said: “Yes. So are most writers.”
via The Writer’s Almanac

On Loving Sports

On Loving Sports

“Almost winning is almost the best. But you’ve got to win once in a while.”

1984

1984

The future is always closer than you think.

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif — books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined — to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can’t imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you’d longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is.
Louise Erdrich

On Pride and Prejudice

On the anniversary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice

a thousand thousand slimy things

a thousand thousand slimy things

He had a habit of starting enormous projects that he could not then finish.

Happy Birthday, W. Somerset Maugham

Happy Birthday, W. Somerset Maugham

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. W. Somerset Maugham, January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965

Notes from History

Notes from History

Can you imagine opening a book and finding a note from Hemingway inside?

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.