Ruthless

‎"Pan me, don't give me the part, publish everybody's book but this one and I will still make it!...Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, face the facts" Ruth Gordon 1896-1985

So, because I wrote a couple of books about our 2nd President and his family and because these sorts of facts seem to stick in my head, I knew perfectly well [if not the names of people I knew in high school] that today's John Adams's birthday, by way of the 'new' calendar, adopted by the Brit. Empire in 1752, when John was 17, seeing as he was born in Braintree [later incorporated into Quincy, Mass, in 1735, a very different America. But I didn't know until I googled about this morning that this is the anniversary of the day that Ruth Gordon was born in 1896. May I only note two things, maybe three - certainly no more than four:

1. Well I remember, will always remember, how I loved Ruth Gordon's performance in "Harold & Maude.'

2. I'll remember her, too, in that bit o' silly-terrific Clint Eastwood movie, 'every which way but loose' and her gossiping about poor old Dorothy Parker in that swellegant documentary about the Algonquin Hotel gathering: The Ten Year Lunch' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094119/

3. Today's also the birthday of poet Ezra Pound, [I very much like the cake named after him.] who once wrote that "A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." That's for damned sure.

4. "A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man." John Adams 1735-1826 Amen to that! http://www.nps.gov/adam Splendid books there are about THE Adams Family, but my introduction to them was Irving Stone's fine Those Who Love. I'd surely recommend it. [I.S.'s Agony & the Ecstasy is a treat, too, absolutamenté ]

L.O.C. – 210 Years & Counting

"The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education." David McCullough

So, 'twas on this day 210 years ago that the 2nd President signed off on a law that'd let the legislators order $5,000's worth of books from London. Thus, the U.S. Government acquired its first library: 740 books and three maps. (Do check out www.loc.gov for this and voluminous lists, piles, and stacks of other information - you won't be sorry!) Thank you, John Adams, who once wrote that liberty could not "be preserved without a general knowledge among the people." Thank you, brilliant, book-loving John Adams, who advised his son, JQA, to keep a poet in his pocket so he'd "never be alone."

Of course, that first "Library of Congress" was caught up in the flames when British troops torched the Capitol in the summer of 1814. www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jefflib.html And of course, ex-President Thos. Jefferson offered to sell his personal collection of 6,487 volumes (!) in order that the nation might replace and recommence its library - and as a delightful bonus, the Bookaholic of Monticello could go buy more books. Yup. Understand that addiction. Still, must the tubby New Englander always languish in the shadow of the Virginian(s)?

G.H. of the P.

What you read here below is an excerpt from my new little book, Grab Hold of the Past. What's it about? I'm glad you asked. It's my personal take on history, the writing of it, envisioning long-lost moments, as I've done in many a picture book and illustrated biography of such people as the remarkable naturalist, historian, writer, rancher, explorer, soldier, civil servant, big game hunter (don't much approve of that), dad, youngest President ever, diplomat, Theo. Roosevelt; and brilliant, talkative, and tubby John Adams, mighty under-appreciated, Founding Father-wise, stuck as he was between those tall, taciturn, handsome Virginians. You know who I mean. I stuffed this little book with useful, informative, and/or amusing, time-sucking weblinks, plus loads of quotations. Here's my favorite:

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." L. P. [Leslie Poles] Hartley (1895-1972)

Oh wait - I love this one, too:

"There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday."

Robt. Nathan (1894-1985)

AIl of our moments and stories are part of us, how and who we are. Might as well dance with the tales that took us here.
We embody the memories of friends, conversations, the books we’ve read, the movies that have spilled over us in the dark; home-places, classroom embarrassments, the scents of bread baking, pencils sharpened. Being woke up by howling night-owl babies, sitting with little brothers in the back of a station wagon, watching stars appear in a deepening blue night sky framing the Technicolor rectangle of a drive-in movie. That’s history, too.
I can’t help thinking of all those people back upstream, who played their scenes earlier on. They lived out their lives in worlds where flame was all there was to keep them from freezing in the dark. They depended on horses or their own two legs to get them from one place to another. Maybe they got dressed up once or twice to get their photographs taken. We look at them looking back at us from across a canyon of years that gets wider with every tick of the clock. … You are – we are – in fact, a symphonious concoction of elements, a complex, nature-nurture combo reflecting your place and time. So it is for every individual who’s ever drawn breath. And so it is for a country. More than borders and banners, any nation is a combination of all of the stories of all of the people who’ve lived in that land all down the years of the living past.