A Date With... Halloween
| With Hallowe'en now only a lingering regret at having wasted your weekend watching appalling horror
movies and a rotting pumpkin cut into an extremely unrealistic face sitting in your bin, it is time to celebrate
the less gory things in life. Birthdays, perhaps, or the fact that November 1 saw the abolition of the Ottoman
Empire in 1922. Better still, raise a plastic glove for the first animal conceived by artificial insemination
this week in 1939. Can you guess which animal though? Answers to comments@bibliomania.com to
win a mention next time along with a copy of last week's featured poet John Keat's collected poems. The first of November also saw the first productions of two of Shakespeare's best plays, namely Othello in 1604 and The Tempest in 1611. Read them on Bibliomania or learn all about them in our study guide section. It is "Author's Day" today, too, so if you know any writers then give them a wink or offer to write a chapter for them (well, Author's Day has to have some purpose, surely?). Or become an author by writing the Great American Novel, though that is likely to take more than a day when you think about it. The second of November 1718 was the birthday of John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who would remain just a footnote in English aristocratic history if he had not seen fit to play cards quite so much. Hungry from hours of gambling, the Earl demanded his food be brought to him placed between two slices of bread. Quite unintentionally he had invented the sandwich (historians please note that the omwich, a combination of omelette and sandwich, was not in fact invented by the Earl of Omwich but by a marketing department somewhere in Idiotsville). Thanks to Montague, no one ever takes more than fifteen minutes over lunch any more. So, avoiding the bother of going to lunch he invented fast food and deprived everyone of a sensible lunch break. I am starting to wonder if we should be celebrating him at all. Grand old wit of English theatre George Bernard Shaw died on 2nd November 1950, aged 94. His dying words were: "Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die." And he did. He was funnier and even grumpier in his prime though. At one party the hostess asked him if he was enjoying himself to which he responded, "Certainly, there is nothing else here to enjoy." I must remember that one... Shaw was against censorship of author's works and so it is appropriate he should have said, "Obscenity can be found in every book except the telephone directory". It was on November 2nd 1960 that Britain finally allowed Lady Chatterley's Lover to be published. Read it on Bibliomania and see what all the fuss was about (namely rather explicit sexual detail, if you must know). The following satirical excerpt was from a contemporary review of the book attributed to the magazine "Field and Stream" and is funnier than a whole box of D. H. Lawrence voodoo dolls: "This fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping" R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island was published on 3rd November 1883, and gave us our first glimpse of Long John Silver and his fellow swashbucklers. If you're interested, the derivation of the word "swash" is the Swedish word "svasska" which means to smash something very hard as if making a splashing noise with your feet in water. In the case of a "swashbuckler", that meant hitting a shield with your sword as if jumping in a puddle. You start to wonder how these pirates ever made any money. Or these etymologists for that matter. Otherwise it is quite apparent from my records that absolutely nothing of interest has ever happened on 3rd November so if you are intending to do something like become famous and die, this would be a very good day to do it. As the week swashes along like a Swedish man in a monsoon, things start to perk up anniversary- wise. Gabriel Faure, of Faure's Requiem fame died on November 4th 1924, as did the great English war poet Wilfred Owen (in 1918). However, this is going to get extremely gloomy if we mourn the passing of a man who wrote music to rest the souls of the dead and a great writer killed in the First World War. So, moving swiftly on, the 4th November 1899 also saw the publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud single handedly made phrases like 'single-handedly' sexual and judged that the dreams we have about buying hymn books are actually proof of Oedipal complexes and fear of monkeys (or something... for a more detailed and less fatuous explanation read the book or visit out Study Guide section where Katy Guinness opens Freud up for intimate examination... oh dear). We are on safer turf with the 5th November. We wouldn't have been in 1605 if we had been friends with Guy Fawkes, though. Fawkes and various others planned to bomb James I, King of England. He failed and, as such, every |
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