His maternal grandfather, named Rakin, was the rector of The Episcopal Church of Columbus, when Tennessee Williams was born in that Mississippi city on March 26 in 1911. His paternal grandfather, one Lanier Williams II, a man of accredited lineage, squandered a fortune trying unsuccessfully to become governor. His mother Edwina was capable of managing a man, a beast, or a storm. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was demeaned during his military career as a simple ne'er do well and wound up as a traveling salesman for a shoe company--a job which permitted him to visit the whorehouse of every place he worked.
Posts published by “Manuel Vicent (translated by Louis S. Bedrock)”
When you're born, your entire space amounts to the dimensions of the cradle: 80 x 60cm.
The compass will open.
After six months, you can crawl across the room. After one year, you learn to walk. As time envelops you, the space around you will begin to expand: the tricycle in the garden, the daycare center, the bicycle in the park, the first excursion to the ice cream parlor on the corner.
A long line has formed in front of La Basilica de Nuestro Padre Jesus de Medinaceli, a Roman Catholic Church, specifically a basilica, located in central Madrid. The line is spread across several blocks. Dejected…
The rich drop bombs, the poor plant bombs; armies crush their enemies en masse from above; terrorists counterattack from below in blind spasms. Above all this hatred lies The Milky Way. Missiles use it to…
The four Stephen brothers and sisters, children of the biographer, editor, and mountain climber Leslie Stephen, lived in Kensington and were educated in the mummified manners of Victorian society until, upon the death of their parents, as a form of repressed rebellion, they moved to the district of Bloomsberry, a decadent neighborhood full of impoverished students and divorced couples.
At night the band would play paso dobles in the square. When it was time for the tuba solo, the audience became quiet and in the absolute quiet the song of the cuckoo could be…
When Billie Holiday, whose real name was Eleonora, was born on April 7, 1915, her mother was 13 years old, and her father was still a kid in short pants who kicked cans down the street. It happened in Baltimore, a city then famous for its rats. Her mother split for New York where she scrubbed stairs; her father joined a jazz band and disappeared.
It was in that Paris of the spring in the 1960s, in the Latin Quarter, whose recently watered down streets in the early hours of morning smelled of freshly baked baguettes and croissants, when I…