Nov. 30 three birthdays...each of which deserve their own post!

 Three for one...Nov. 30 birthdays:

It’s the birthday of statesman Sir Winston S. Churchill, born at Blenheim Castle, England (1874). His long political career led to him becoming Prime Minister in 1940. He said, “I felt as if I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour.” He rallied the English people with his courage and great oratory. He wrote a six-volume history of World War Two.

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It’s the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri (1835). He left school at 12 to work as a printer, then as a riverboat pilot. During the Civil War, he went to Nevada where he tried gold mining and then edited a newspaper. When he was 29 he went to San Francisco as a reporter, and achieved his first success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865). He took a trip to Europe and the Holy Land, and described his experiences in The Innocents Abroad (1869). When he returned to America, he settled in the East, married Olivia Langdon, and had four children. They built a distinctive house in Hartford, Connecticut, and he won wide popularity with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and later, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

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It’s the birthday of satirist Jonathan Swift, born in Dublin, Ireland (1667), author of Gulliver’s Travels. He wrote, “I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities, and all my love is towards individuals.” While walking to London one day, he ducked under a tree during a cloudburst, and was soon joined by a man and a pregnant woman who told him they were going to London to be married. Swift informed them that he was a clergyman, and offered to perform the ceremony on the spot. They agreed, and afterwards, when the groom asked for a certificate of marriage, Swift obliged with a poem:

Under an oak, in stormy weather,

I joined this rogue and whore together;

And none but he who rules the thunder

Can put this rogue and whore asunder

From Writer's Almanac 2000

The Dallas Tragedy of '63

 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

Kennedy hadn’t formally announced that he was going to run for re-election in 1964, but he was laying the groundwork. He embarked on a tour out west to sound out potential themes — like education and national security — that he could center his future campaign on. Florida and Texas were key states that he would need to win, so he planned to visit both states. He and his wife Jackie, who had been out of the public eye since the death of their son Patrick in August, started in San Antonio, then moved on to Houston and Fort Worth, where they spent the night of November 21st. After a few public appearances in rainy Fort Worth on the morning of the 22nd, the Kennedys took a 13-minute flight to Dallas’s Love Field. The rain had stopped, so the plastic bubble was left off the top of the convertible limousine that carried the Kennedys, Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie. The party embarked on a 10-mile route that would take them to the Trade Mart, where the president was scheduled to speak at a luncheon.

But, of course, the motorcade didn’t make it to Trade Mart. As they drove through Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire from a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository. The president was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital with gunshot wounds to his head and neck. He was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m., and Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office at 2:38. President Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, November 25 — his son John Junior’s third birthday.

[In 2017] President Trump ordered the release of nearly 3,000 records related to the assassination. The National Archives will release them in batches over the next few months.

SOURCE: Writer's Almanac 2017

These are the last lines of the last speech ever typed for President Kennedy, intended for remarks on November 22, 1963.

“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.” 

It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.

That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.   

When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights. 

So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others. 

The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business meant preventing a man from making all the money he could; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss. 

That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party. 

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”

But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”

The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.” 

As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.” 

After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her own husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.” 

Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.” 

In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled. 

As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway. 

Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”

“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”

SOURCE: Letters from an American quoting...

https://www.discoverlbj.org/item/ctjd-19631122

Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

The letter didn't seem to make much difference.

 On this day November 22 in 1744, Abigail Adams was born. This is from her most famous letter to John Adams in 1776:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.”

Image: Statue of Abigail Adams dedicated November 10, 2022 in Quincy, Massachusetts and sculpted by Sergey Eylanbekov, photo by Robert Bosworth for the Quincy Sun.

Jamie Lee Curtis

•  born November 22, 1958
• received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Golden Globes, as well as nominations for a Primetime Emmy and a Grammy.
• youngest daughter of actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, 

• film debut and rose to prominence with her portrayal of Laurie Strode in John Carpenter's slasher film Halloween (1978)...established Curtis as a scream queen and led to starring roles in the horror films The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train (all 1980), and Roadgames (1981). She reprised the role of Strode in six of the Halloween sequels, concluding with Halloween Ends in 2022
• roles in comedies Trading Places (1983), for which she won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress, and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), for which she received a nomination for the BAFTA for Best Actress. Her role as a workout instructor in the film Perfect (1985) earned her a reputation as a sex symbol. She won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Helen Tasker in James Cameron's True Lies (1994). Her other notable film credits include Freaky Friday (2003), Knives Out (2019), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Her performance in the latter earned Curtis multiple accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
• received another Golden Globe for her portrayal of Hannah Miller on ABC's sitcom Anything but Love (1989–1992), and earned a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for the television film Nicholas' Gift (1998).^[ She also starred in the Fox series Scream Queens (2015–2016), for which she received her seventh Golden Globe nomination. 
• Curtis has written numerous children's books, including Today I Feel Silly, and Other Moods That Make My Day (1998), which made The New York Times's best-seller list. She is married to British-American filmmaker Christopher Guest, with whom she has two adopted children.
• In 2012, she appeared in five episodes of the military drama series NCIS, playing the role of Dr. Samantha Ryan, a potential romantic interest of Special Agent Gibbs (Mark Harmon).
• Curtis is a recovering alcoholic, and was once addicted to painkillers that she began using after a cosmetic surgical procedure. She became sober from opiates in 1999 after reading and relating to Tom Chiarella's account of addiction, and has called her own recovery the greatest achievement of her life. She is a fan of the video game World of Warcraft and the manga One Piece, and has worn disguises that allowed her to attend Comic-Con, EVO, and BlizzCon incognito.
• In 2021, Curtis received the Lifetime Achievement Award during the 78th Venice International Film Festival and said, "I feel so alive, like I'm this 14-year-old person just beginning their life. That's how I wake up every day with that sort of joy and purpose. I'm just beginning my work."

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

Margaret Atwood

 Happy 84th birthday to esteemed Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood! She is pictured here attempting to burn an 'unburnable' copy of her novel "The Handmaid's Tale" with a flamethrower. A single unburnable copy was created last year to raise awareness about increasing censorship; her dystopian science fiction novel, which centers around one woman's quest for freedom in a totalitarian theocracy where women's rights are completely suppressed, has been the subject of numerous censorship challenges since its publication in 1985. The unburnable copy was auctioned off after Atwood's flamethrowing attempt, raising $130,000 for PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization. As Atwood famously asserted in her poem "Spelling": "A word after a word after a word is power."

Born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1939, Atwood is the author of 15 books of poetry and numerous novels, including Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, The Edible Woman, and Oryx and Crake. She won the Booker Prize -- which honors the best original novel published that year -- for "The Blind Assassin" in 2000 and has been shortlisted several additional times. She has also won two Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor. This year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected Atwood as a Foreign Honorary Member of the Academy.

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ALSO:

Today is the birthday of Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood (1939), best known for her searing explorations of feminism, sexuality, and politics in books like The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), a dystopian novel that takes place in a United States, which has become a fundamentalist theocracy where women are forced to have children. She started writing the book on a battered, rented typewriter while on a fellowship in West Berlin. The book became an international best-seller. Atwood’s daughter was nine when it was published; by the time she was in high school, The Handmaid’s Tale was required reading. Atwood once said, “Men often ask me, ‘Why are your female characters so paranoid?’ It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”

Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario. Her father was an entomologist and the family lived for a long time in insect-research stations in the wilderness. She was 11 before she attended a full year of school. About growing up in near isolation, Atwood said: “There were no films or theatres in the North, and the radio didn’t work very well. But there were always books. I learned to read early, was an avid reader and read everything I could get my hands on — no one ever told me I couldn’t read a book. My mother liked quietness in children, and a child who is reading is very quiet.”

One day she was walking across a football field on her way home and began writing a poem in her head and decided to write it down. She says: “After that, writing was the only thing I wanted to do. I didn’t know that this poem of mine wasn’t at all good, and if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have cared.”

Her first novel was The Edible Woman (1969), about a woman who cannot eat and feels that she is being eaten. Atwood likes to write in longhand, preferably with a Rollerball pen, and is even the co-inventor of the LongPen, a remote signing device that allows a person to write in ink anywhere in the world using a tablet and the internet. Her books include Alias Grace (1996), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Heart Goes Last (2015).

About the writing life, Margaret Atwood says: “You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.” #TheWritersAlmanac

Ellen Swallow Richards, environmentalist and chemist

  

National Women's History Museum 

Ellen Swallow Richards was one of the first female environmentalists and chemists in the United States. She introduced the term ecology to the country in 1892. She was home schooled by her parents and then attended Vassar College, where she became interested in chemistry. Richards found environmental issues caused by urbanization particularly interesting. In 1871, she became the first woman to be admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a second degree. However, she was not allowed to get a graduated degree, because she was a woman. In 1884, Richards was appointed as the first instructor of MIT’s new laboratory of sanitary chemistry, it was also the first lab of its kind in the country. Richards co-authored Air, Water, and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint, published in 1900, which became a classic in the field of sanitary engineering. Richard also helped to create the field of home economics, which focused on applying scientific principles to domestic topics. #womenshistory #WomeninSTEM

Pearl S. Buck, author

 Today is the birth anniversary of

"... writer Pearl S. Buck, born in Hillsboro, West Virginia (1892). Her parents were Christian missionaries, and she was raised in China from the age of three months. She said: "I spoke Chinese first, and more easily. [...] I did not consider myself a white person in those days." She was tutored in the mornings by her mother, but spent the afternoons with her beloved Chinese nurse, who told her stories and took her to visit friends, where young Pearl listened to women gossip. She played with Chinese friends, joined their parties, and hid her blond hair underneath a hat.

She married an agricultural missionary. They lived in northern China and then Nanking, where she taught English literature. In 1920, she gave birth to a daughter, Carol, who had a severe developmental disability. Her husband did not know how to cope with Carol and withdrew from his family. At times, Buck doted on Carol, desperately hoping that her condition would improve. And other times, she was frustrated and embarrassed by the girl, who would scream and cry for hours on end. She said, "Sometimes I can scarcely bear to look at other children and see what she might have become."

By the winter of 1927-28, Buck was living in Shanghai, and she was unhappy. Earlier that year, they had been forced to evacuate their home in Nanking after a violent skirmish called the Nanking Incident — among those targeted were white foreigners, and their home was destroyed. She had just completed the manuscript of her first novel, working in her own private space in the attic, but the only copy was destroyed by looters. The Red Cross sent them to Japan with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, and they lived there for seven months before moving to Shanghai. Her husband returned to Nanking for work, so she was left caring for the children, sharing a run-down rental house in Shanghai with two other families. Her marriage was deteriorating. Her salary was tiny, and her husband forced her to sign it over to him and then ask for an allowance. She knew that the only hope of giving Carol long-term care was in the United States, but her husband didn't want to leave China. She realized that she might end up responsible for Carol and that she had to figure out a way to provide for her.

So she returned to writing, not out of passion but as a way to earn money. She had written a few stories here and there, and the novel that had been destroyed, and she felt it was her best chance of earning a living. She found an old trade magazine in a Shanghai bookstore, and it listed three literary agents, so she wrote to all three. Two of them told her there was no market in America for Chinese subjects. The third, David Lloyd, agreed to take her on, and remained her agent for 30 years.

In 1929, Buck took Carol back to America to find her long-term care. Touring institutions depressed her, and although she found a place she liked, she said that leaving Carol was the hardest thing she did in her life. She took out a loan from a member of the Mission Board to afford the care. At the same time, her first novel, East Wind, West Wind (1930), was accepted for publication by John Day Company. Her agent had sent it to 25 publishers, and John Day was the last on his list; if they refused it, he was going to withdraw the manuscript. John Day's president and publisher, Richard Walsh, later became Buck's lover, and eventually her husband. She started writing her second novel, The Good Earth (1931), as soon as she got back to China, and it took her just three months. Buck was floored when it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and she was sent a check for $4,000 — with that money she could pay for several years of Carol's schooling. The Good Earth sold nearly 2 million copies in its first year of publication, and was the best-selling book of 1931 and 1932. She earned more than $100,000 dollars in a year and a half, and put $40,000 toward Carol's care. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938.

Credits : Garrison Keillor

Around the world in 72 days

  The trailblazing American journalist Nellie Bly began her record-breaking 72-day journey around the world this week in 1889 -- a trip which made her the first person to ever complete the fictional journey depicted in Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days"! A minimalist traveler, the 24-year-old Pittsburgh native brought with her only the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, a wool cap, a few changes of underwear, and a small handbag with her toiletries and writing supplies. She started the 24,899-mile journey from a port near New York City and traveled by steamship to England. From there, she traveled by train across Europe and Asia, by ocean liner across the Pacific Ocean, and by train from San Francisco back to New York. In total, her journey lasted 72 days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, setting a new world record for fastest circumnavigation.

Bly, one of the earliest muckraking journalists, was also famous for her undercover investigative reports on corruption and social injustices. The year before her famous journey, Bly took an undercover assignment for the New York World where she feigned insanity to get herself committed to the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. Her work pioneered the realm of undercover journalism after she wrote an exposé on the horrific conditions and mistreatment of patients she found there. Bly's series of articles led to a grand jury investigation and, subsequently, to improved care for the patients and increased funding for the care of people with mental illness.

Nellie Bly told the story of her historic journey in her book "Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings" at https://www.amightygirl.com/around-world-seventy-two

Georgia O'Keeffe

  Happy anniversary of being born to...

"...artist Georgia O’Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). She had her first exhibition in 1916, at photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, without her knowledge. She had sent some of her charcoal drawings to a friend, who in turn showed them to Stieglitz, who hung them in his gallery.

Within two years, he had convinced her to move to New York from Texas, where she’d been living and teaching. He encouraged her to devote herself to painting, promising to support her for a year if she did so, and he promoted her work enthusiastically, mounting one-woman shows at least once a year. By 1918, they were in love, and in 1924, they were married. She painted lush flowers, dramatic cityscapes, and bleached bones; he photographed her, more than 500 times over the years, his intimate portraits of her graceful, angular face telling a pictorial love story. “He photographed me until I was crazy,” she later said.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe wrote each other letters, a great many letters, sometimes three or four a day: 25,000 pages passed between them from 1915 to 1946. “I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it sometimes scares me,” O’Keeffe wrote in 1916. “Having told you so much of me — more than anyone else I know — could anything else follow but that I should want you …” He wrote to her in 1917, “How I wanted to photograph you — the hands — the mouth — & eyes — & the enveloped in black body — the touch of white — & the throat — but I didn’t want to break into your time …” The first volume of their correspondence, titled My Faraway One and covering the years from 1915 to 1933, was published in 2011.

O’Keeffe’s other great love was the landscape around Taos, New Mexico. She took her first trip there in 1929, and returned every summer to paint. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946, she moved to New Mexico permanently. She gave up painting in oils when her eyesight failed in the mid-1970s, but continued to work in pencil and watercolor for several more years. In 1982, she began sculpting with clay, which she continued until two years before her death in 1986, at the age of 98.

Ruby Bridges

  

A Mighty Girl  from  Facebook Nov. 14, 2016

Today in Mighty Girl history, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader arrived at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on this day in 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her. This event was commemorated by Norman Rockwell in his famous painting, pictured here, "The Problem We All Live With."

One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who served on her escort team, recalls Bridges' courage in the face of such hatred: "For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn't whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier. We were all very proud of her."

Once Ruby entered the school, she discovered that it was devoid of children because they had all been removed by their parents due to her presence. The only teacher willing to have Ruby as a student was Barbara Henry, who had recently moved from Boston. Ruby was taught by herself for her first year at the school due to the white parents' refusal to have their children share a classroom with a black child.

Despite daily harassment, which required the federal marshals to continue escorting her to school for months; threats towards her family; and her father's job loss due to his family's role in school integration, Ruby persisted in attending school. The following year, when she returned for second grade, the mobs were gone and more African American students joined her at the school. The pioneering school integration effort was a success due to Ruby Bridges' inspiring courage, perseverance, and resilience.

Claude Monet

  Happy birth anniversary to...

"...the artist who said, “I would like to paint the way a bird sings”: Claude Monet, born in Paris in 1840. His father ran a grocery store and had hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps. The boy had other ideas and vowed to become an artist, much to his father’s dismay. Monet began his studies at the age of 10 in Le Havre, working first in charcoal. He drew caricatures, which he would sell to the locals for 10 or 20 francs apiece. About five years later, he befriended artist Eugène Boudin, who became his mentor and taught him oil painting. Boudin also encouraged him to paint en plein air [in the open air], or outside. “One day, Boudin said to me, ‘Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky,’” Monet later said. “I took his advice.”

In 1861, he joined the cavalry in Algeria, intending to serve for seven years. Two years later, he contracted typhoid, and his aunt arranged for him to be discharged; he returned to France to study art, rejecting the traditional École des Beaux-Arts in favor of the private Académie Suisse. It was there that Monet met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille; the four young artists became disillusioned with the meticulous detail that was fashionable in academic circles, and they began experimenting with a new style of landscape painting, producing rapid “sketches” using short, broken brushstrokes and trying to capture, above all, the fleeting quality of the light. Monet produced many paintings in the late 1860s, and although he hadn’t fully adopted the technique that he became known for, he did break from tradition by painting scenes from everyday, middle-class life. He received positive notice for his painting The Woman in the Green Dress in 1866; his model, Camille Doncieux, became his lover and, later, his wife.

His painting Impression, Sunrise, which he painted in 1872, was exhibited for the first time at an independent art show in 1874, and it was his first public showing of the sketch-like style he had been trying out. “I had sent a thing done in Le Havre, from my window, sun in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground,” he later wrote. “They asked me for a title for the catalog, it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: ‘Put Impression.’” The painting and the show were poorly received by the critics, including Louis Leroy, who dubbed the style “Impressionism.” Leroy was being derogatory, and wrote, “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” but Monet and his contemporaries adopted the name anyway. For his part, Monet felt he had finally come home. “I didn’t become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I have always been one.”

Camille died of tuberculosis in 1879, shortly after the birth of their second son. Monet painted a portrait of her on her deathbed, as a last tribute. He told his friend Georges Clemenceau: “Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.” He grieved her loss deeply, for several months, but felt a renewed passion for his art, and moved with his children to the home of his patron, Ernest Hoshedé. The patronage fell apart when Hoshedé ran into financial difficulties, but Hoshedé’s wife Alice provided patronage of a different sort; they began an affair, she paid Monet’s debts with her dowry, and eventually moved with him to Giverny, where the artist bought a small farmhouse surrounded by an orchard. They eventually married after the death of her husband in 1892; the following year, Monet bought a strip of marshland across the road from his house, and found great pleasure in designing a water-garden. “I am only good at two things, and those are: gardening and painting,” he wrote. He spent nearly 30 years in his gardens, planting and painting irises and tulips, wisteria and bamboo.

Later in his career, he became interested in painting the same subject at different times of day, and produced several series: water lilies, haystacks, poplars, the cathedral in Rouen, and the Houses of Parliament in London. As he grew older, he developed cataracts, which left him nearly blind and had a profound effect on his perception of colors. His tones became muddy and muted, and his paintings had a reddish or yellowish cast. He had to rely on the labels of his paint tubes to tell him what color they contained, but he was determined to carry on. In 1921, he told a journalist, “I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.” In a letter to a friend in 1922, he complained: “To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I’ve ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and abandon the rest; and on top of that, my poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog. It’s very beautiful all the same and it’s this which I’d love to have been able to convey. All in all, I am very unhappy.” He finally agreed to have surgery performed on his right eye in 1923, but he was disappointed with the results and refused to have the procedure repeated on his left eye. He was never again able to use both eyes together effectively, and was only able to read and write with the aid of special glasses. He died of lung cancer in 1926; his home and gardens in Giverny are now the property of the French Academy of Fine Arts, and host visitors from all over the world.

Writer's Almanac 2017

Whoopi Goldberg's birthday

Caryn Elaine Johnson (born November 13, 1955), known professionally as Whoopi Goldberg (/ˈwʊpi/), is an American actor, comedian, author and television personality. A recipient of numerous accolades, she is one of 18 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. In 2001, she received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Her film breakthrough came in 1985 with her role as Celie, a mistreated woman in the Deep South, in Steven Spielberg's period drama film The Color Purple, for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. For her role as an eccentric psychic in the romantic fantasy film Ghost (1990), she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a second Golden Globe Award. She starred in the comedy Sister Act (1992) and its sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), becoming the highest-paid actress at the time. She also starred in Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), Clara's Heart (1988), Soapdish (1991), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), and Till (2022). She also is known for voicing roles in The Lion King (1994), and Toy Story 3 (2010).

According to an anecdote told by Nichelle Nichols in Trekkies (1997), a young Goldberg was watching Star Trek, and on seeing Nichols's character Uhura, exclaimed, "Momma! There's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!" This spawned Goldberg's lifelong Star Trek fandom. Goldberg lobbied for — and was eventually cast — in a recurring guest starring role as Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

On television, Goldberg portrayed Guinan in the science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988-1993), and Star Trek: Picard (2022). Since 2007, she has co-hosted and moderated the daytime talk show The View, for which she won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. She has hosted the Academy Awards ceremony four times.

SOURCE: Wikipedia