!['It's the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico GarcÃa Lorca, born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada in 1898. His father was a successful farmer, and his mother was a gifted pianist. GarcÃa Lorca published his first book, Impressions and Landscapes, in 1918, and then moved to Madrid the following year, enrolling in the Residencia de Estudiantes (Student Residence), a cultural center that provided a stimulating, dynamic, and progressive environment for university students. It was at the Residencia that GarcÃa Lorca met and befriended a group of artists, including composer Manuel de Falla, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and painter Salvador DalÃ; he also became interested in Surrealism and the avant-garde. During the 1920s, he wrote and staged a couple of plays; the first (The Butterfly's Evil Spell [1920]) was laughed off the stage, and the second (Mariana Pineda [1927]) received mixed reviews. He also collected folk songs and wrote a great deal of poetry; much of it — like Poem of the Deep Song, published in 1931, and Gypsy Ballads, 1928 — inspired by Andalusian or gypsy culture and music.
He also had an intense relationship with Salvador Dalà from 1925 to 1928, which forced him to acknowledge his homosexuality. He became a national celebrity upon the publication of Gypsy Ballads, and was distressed at the loss of privacy this caused; he chafed at the conflict between his public persona and his private self. He grew depressed, and a falling out with Dalà and the end of another love affair with a sculptor only made things worse. In 1929, his family arranged for him to take an extended trip to the United States. It was in New York that he began to break out of his pigeonhole as a "gypsy poet." He wrote A Poet in New York (published posthumously in 1942), a collection that was critical of capitalism and focused on urban decay and social injustice.
He turned back to drama when he returned to Spain in 1930. He wrote and premiered the first two plays in his Rural Trilogy: Blood Wedding (1933) and Yerma (1934), and completed the first draft of the third, The House of Bernarda Alba (1945).
In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the Nationalists didn't look favorably on his work or his liberal views. They dragged him from his home on August 16 and imprisoned him without a trial; two or three days later, they drove him to a hill outside of town and shot him. His body was never found.
GarcÃa Lorca is honored by a statue prominently located in Madrid's Plaza de Santa Ana. Political philosopher David Crocker reports that "the statue, at least, is still an emblem of the contested past: each day, the Left puts a red kerchief on the neck of the statue, and someone from the Right comes later to take it off."
Here is the first part of his poem Lament For Ignacio Sánchez MejÃas:
1. Cogida and death
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone.
The wind carried away the cottonwool
at five in the afternoon.
And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel
at five in the afternoon.
Now the dove and the leopard wrestle
at five in the afternoon.
And a thigh with a desolated horn
at five in the afternoon.
The bass-string struck up
at five in the afternoon.
Arsenic bells and smoke
at five in the afternoon.
Groups of silence in the corners
at five in the afternoon.
And the bull alone with a high heart!
At five in the afternoon.
When the sweat of snow was coming
at five in the afternoon,
when the bull ring was covered with iodine
at five in the afternoon.
Death laid eggs in the wound
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
At five o'clock in the afternoon.'](https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p100x100/102424673_10220433909589714_6428178552715786963_o.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_ohc=txQAVvJqD18AX9WBlTz&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-1.xx&_nc_tp=6&oh=aab025ce8d0a265161c9e78c46877b23&oe=5F17D58A)
!['now nana now now
now now now now nana now now
now now now NUH nuh
nuh nuh nuh
It's the birthday of Ian Lancaster Fleming, an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. Fleming came from a wealthy upper-crust family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father, Valentine, was the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva.
In May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, to become his personal assistant with the codename "17F." Fleming's biographer, Andrew Lycett, notes that Fleming had "no obvious qualifications" for the role.
Fleming proved invaluable as Godfrey's personal assistant and excelled in administration. Godfrey was known as an abrasive character who made enemies within government circles. He frequently used Fleming as a liaison with other sections of the government's wartime administration.
On 29 September 1939, soon after the start of the war, Godfrey circulated a memorandum that, "bore all the hallmarks of ... Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming", according to historian Ben Macintyre. It was called the Trout Memo and compared the deception of an enemy in wartime to fly fishing. The memo contained several schemes to be considered for use against the Axis powers to lure U-boats and German surface ships towards minefields. Number 28 on the list was an idea to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy, a plan used in to Operation Mincemeat, the 1943 plan to conceal the intended invasion of Italy from North Africa The recommendation in the Trout Memo was titled: "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)" and continued: ". . . a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one."
Operation Ruthless, a plan aimed at obtaining details of the Enigma codes used by the German Navy, was instigated by a memo written by Fleming to Godfrey on 12 September 1940. The idea was to "obtain" a Nazi bomber, man it with a German-speaking crew dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms, and crash it into the English Channel. The crew would then attack their German rescuers and bring their boat and Enigma machine back to England. Much to the annoyance of Alan Turing and Peter Twinn at Bletchley Park, the mission was never carried out. According to Fleming's niece, Lucy, an official of the Royal Air Force pointed out that if they were to drop a downed Heinkel bomber in the English Channel, it would probably sink rather quickly.
Admiral Godfrey put Fleming in charge of Operation Goldeneye between 1941 and 1942; Goldeneye was a plan to maintain an intelligence framework in Spain in the event of a German takeover of the territory.
In 1942 Fleming formed a unit of commandos, known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU), composed of specialist intelligence troops. 30AU's job was to be near the front line of an advance—sometimes in front of it—to seize enemy documents from previously targeted headquarters. They were trained in unarmed combat, safe cracking and lock picking. The success of 30AU led to the August 1944 decision to establish a "Target Force", which became known as T-Force, to fulfill the same role after Normandy that 30AU had in the Mediterranean. It was responsible for securing targets of interest for the British military, including nuclear laboratories, gas research centres and individual rocket scientists. The unit's most notable discoveries came during the advance on the German port of Kiel, in the research centre for German engines used in the V-2 rocket, Messerschmitt Me 163 fighter, and high-speed U-boats.
If some of this is starting to sound familiar, that's because it is. Fleming had first mentioned to friends during the war that he wanted to write a spy novel after demobilization, an ambition he achieved within two months with Casino Royale, marking the first appearance of James Bond. Fleming took the name for his character from that of the American ornithologist James Bond, an expert on Caribbean birds and author of the definitive field guide Birds of the West Indies. Fleming, himself a keen birdwatcher, had a copy of Bond's guide, and later told the ornithologist's wife, "that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed". In a 1962 interview in The New Yorker, he further explained: "When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument ... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard."
Fleming envisaged that Bond would resemble the composer, singer and actor Hoagy Carmichael. He modeled aspects of Bond's character on Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, a spy whom Fleming had met while skiing in Kitzbühel in the 1930s, Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served with distinction in 30AU during the war, and Bill "Biffy" Dunderdale, station head of MI6 in Paris, who wore cufflinks and handmade suits and was chauffeured around Paris in a Rolls-Royce.Fleming also endowed Bond with many of his own traits, including the same golf handicap, his taste for scrambled eggs, and his love of gambling.
Twelve Bond novels and two short-story collections were published between 1953 and 1966, the last two (The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy and The Living Daylights) posthumously. The character of Bond changed considerably after Sean Connery was hired to make 5 films, acquiring a previously absent sense of humor.
Much of the background to the stories came from Fleming's previous work in the Naval Intelligence Division or from events he knew of from the Cold War. The plot of From Russia, with Love uses a fictional Soviet Spektor decoding machine as a lure to trap Bond; the Spektor had its roots in the wartime German Enigma machine. The novel's plot device of spies on the Orient Express was based on the story of Eugene Karp, a US naval attaché and intelligence agent based in Budapest who took the Orient Express from Budapest to Paris in February 1950, carrying papers about blown US spy networks in the Eastern Bloc. Soviet assassins already on the train drugged the conductor, and Karp's body was found shortly afterwards in a railway tunnel south of Salzburg.
The exploits of T-Force, described above, should remind you of the plot of Moonraker. Many of the names used in the Bond works came from people Fleming knew: Scaramanga, the principal villain in The Man with the Golden Gun, was named after a fellow Eton schoolboy with whom Fleming fought; Goldfinger, from the eponymous novel, was named after British architect ErnÅ‘ Goldfinger, whose work Fleming abhorred; Sir Hugo Drax, the antagonist of Moonraker, was named after Fleming's acquaintance Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax who should have been a Monty Python character; Drax's assistant, Krebs, bears the same name as Hitler's last Chief of Staff; and one of the homosexual villains from Diamonds Are Forever, "Boofy" Kidd, was named after one of Fleming's close friends—and a relative of his wife—Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran, known as Boofy to his friends. His red haired secretary, Joan Howe, was the model for Miss Moneypenny.
The first five books received broadly positive reviews, but that began to change in March 1958 when Bernard Bergonzi, in the journal Twentieth Century, attacked Fleming's work as containing "a strongly marked streak of voyeurism and sado-masochism" and wrote that the books showed "the total lack of any ethical frame of reference". After the publication of Dr. No, Paul Johnson of the New Statesman, in his review "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism", called the novel "without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read". Johnson went on to say that "by the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away". Johnson recognised that in Bond there "was a social phenomenon of some importance", but this was seen as a negative element, as the phenomenon concerned "three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult." But in 2008 The London Times ranked Fleming fourteenth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
On 17 March 1961, four years after its publication and three years after the heavy criticism of Dr. No, an article in Life listed From Russia, with Love as one of US President John F. Kennedy's ten favourite books.This accolade and the associated publicity led to a surge in sales that made Fleming the biggest-selling crime writer in the US.
In April 1961, Fleming, always a heavy smoker and drinker, had a heart attack during a regular weekly meeting at The Sunday Times. While he was convalescing, one of his friends, Duff Dunbar, gave him a copy of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and suggested that he take the time to write up the bedtime story that Fleming used to tell to his son Caspar each evening. Fleming attacked the project with gusto and wrote to his publisher. The result was Fleming's only children's novel, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which was published in October 1964, two months after his death. It soon became a Dick van Dyke vehicle and one of the most execrable movies of my childhood, despite having a script by Roald Dahl.
Fleming had struggled to recuperate from the heart attack. On 11 August 1964, while staying at a hotel in Canterbury, Fleming went to the Royal St George's Golf Club for lunch and later dined at his hotel with friends. The day had been tiring for him, and he collapsed with another heart attack shortly after the meal. Fleming died at age 56 in the early morning of 12 August 1964—his son Caspar's twelfth birthday. His last recorded words were an apology to the ambulance drivers for having inconvenienced them, saying "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days."
He referred to Casino Royale, the first Bond book, as his "dreadful oafish opus" and to Bond generally as “the pillow fantasies of an adolescent mind” and "just some bit of nonsense I dreamed up."'](https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p100x100/99295410_10220360037222951_7459755398786973696_o.jpg?_nc_cat=104&_nc_sid=8024bb&_nc_ohc=RLcCBwN_LA4AX9Itq6L&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-1.xx&_nc_tp=6&oh=b2810a331e6d937da442df6c995068cd&oe=5F1610B2)
now nana now now
now now now now nana now now
now now now NUH nuh
nuh nuh nuh
now now now now nana now now
now now now NUH nuh
nuh nuh nuh
It's the birthday of Ian Lancaster Fleming, an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. Fleming came from a wealthy upper-crust family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father, Valentine, was the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva.
In May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, to become his personal assistant with the codename "17F." Fleming's biographer, Andrew Lycett, notes that Fleming had "no obvious qualifications" for the role.
Fleming proved invaluable as Godfrey's personal assistant and excelled in administration. Godfrey was known as an abrasive character who made enemies within government circles. He frequently used Fleming as a liaison with other sections of the government's wartime administration.
On 29 September 1939, soon after the start of the war, Godfrey circulated a memorandum that, "bore all the hallmarks of ... Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming", according to historian Ben Macintyre. It was called the Trout Memo and compared the deception of an enemy in wartime to fly fishing. The memo contained several schemes to be considered for use against the Axis powers to lure U-boats and German surface ships towards minefields. Number 28 on the list was an idea to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy, a plan used in to Operation Mincemeat, the 1943 plan to conceal the intended invasion of Italy from North Africa The recommendation in the Trout Memo was titled: "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)" and continued: ". . . a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one."
Operation Ruthless, a plan aimed at obtaining details of the Enigma codes used by the German Navy, was instigated by a memo written by Fleming to Godfrey on 12 September 1940. The idea was to "obtain" a Nazi bomber, man it with a German-speaking crew dressed in Luftwaffe uniforms, and crash it into the English Channel. The crew would then attack their German rescuers and bring their boat and Enigma machine back to England. Much to the annoyance of Alan Turing and Peter Twinn at Bletchley Park, the mission was never carried out. According to Fleming's niece, Lucy, an official of the Royal Air Force pointed out that if they were to drop a downed Heinkel bomber in the English Channel, it would probably sink rather quickly.
Admiral Godfrey put Fleming in charge of Operation Goldeneye between 1941 and 1942; Goldeneye was a plan to maintain an intelligence framework in Spain in the event of a German takeover of the territory.
In 1942 Fleming formed a unit of commandos, known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU), composed of specialist intelligence troops. 30AU's job was to be near the front line of an advance—sometimes in front of it—to seize enemy documents from previously targeted headquarters. They were trained in unarmed combat, safe cracking and lock picking. The success of 30AU led to the August 1944 decision to establish a "Target Force", which became known as T-Force, to fulfill the same role after Normandy that 30AU had in the Mediterranean. It was responsible for securing targets of interest for the British military, including nuclear laboratories, gas research centres and individual rocket scientists. The unit's most notable discoveries came during the advance on the German port of Kiel, in the research centre for German engines used in the V-2 rocket, Messerschmitt Me 163 fighter, and high-speed U-boats.
If some of this is starting to sound familiar, that's because it is. Fleming had first mentioned to friends during the war that he wanted to write a spy novel after demobilization, an ambition he achieved within two months with Casino Royale, marking the first appearance of James Bond. Fleming took the name for his character from that of the American ornithologist James Bond, an expert on Caribbean birds and author of the definitive field guide Birds of the West Indies. Fleming, himself a keen birdwatcher, had a copy of Bond's guide, and later told the ornithologist's wife, "that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed". In a 1962 interview in The New Yorker, he further explained: "When I wrote the first one in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument ... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard."
Fleming envisaged that Bond would resemble the composer, singer and actor Hoagy Carmichael. He modeled aspects of Bond's character on Conrad O'Brien-ffrench, a spy whom Fleming had met while skiing in Kitzbühel in the 1930s, Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served with distinction in 30AU during the war, and Bill "Biffy" Dunderdale, station head of MI6 in Paris, who wore cufflinks and handmade suits and was chauffeured around Paris in a Rolls-Royce.Fleming also endowed Bond with many of his own traits, including the same golf handicap, his taste for scrambled eggs, and his love of gambling.
Twelve Bond novels and two short-story collections were published between 1953 and 1966, the last two (The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy and The Living Daylights) posthumously. The character of Bond changed considerably after Sean Connery was hired to make 5 films, acquiring a previously absent sense of humor.
Much of the background to the stories came from Fleming's previous work in the Naval Intelligence Division or from events he knew of from the Cold War. The plot of From Russia, with Love uses a fictional Soviet Spektor decoding machine as a lure to trap Bond; the Spektor had its roots in the wartime German Enigma machine. The novel's plot device of spies on the Orient Express was based on the story of Eugene Karp, a US naval attaché and intelligence agent based in Budapest who took the Orient Express from Budapest to Paris in February 1950, carrying papers about blown US spy networks in the Eastern Bloc. Soviet assassins already on the train drugged the conductor, and Karp's body was found shortly afterwards in a railway tunnel south of Salzburg.
The exploits of T-Force, described above, should remind you of the plot of Moonraker. Many of the names used in the Bond works came from people Fleming knew: Scaramanga, the principal villain in The Man with the Golden Gun, was named after a fellow Eton schoolboy with whom Fleming fought; Goldfinger, from the eponymous novel, was named after British architect ErnÅ‘ Goldfinger, whose work Fleming abhorred; Sir Hugo Drax, the antagonist of Moonraker, was named after Fleming's acquaintance Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax who should have been a Monty Python character; Drax's assistant, Krebs, bears the same name as Hitler's last Chief of Staff; and one of the homosexual villains from Diamonds Are Forever, "Boofy" Kidd, was named after one of Fleming's close friends—and a relative of his wife—Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran, known as Boofy to his friends. His red haired secretary, Joan Howe, was the model for Miss Moneypenny.
The first five books received broadly positive reviews, but that began to change in March 1958 when Bernard Bergonzi, in the journal Twentieth Century, attacked Fleming's work as containing "a strongly marked streak of voyeurism and sado-masochism" and wrote that the books showed "the total lack of any ethical frame of reference". After the publication of Dr. No, Paul Johnson of the New Statesman, in his review "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism", called the novel "without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read". Johnson went on to say that "by the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away". Johnson recognised that in Bond there "was a social phenomenon of some importance", but this was seen as a negative element, as the phenomenon concerned "three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult." But in 2008 The London Times ranked Fleming fourteenth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
On 17 March 1961, four years after its publication and three years after the heavy criticism of Dr. No, an article in Life listed From Russia, with Love as one of US President John F. Kennedy's ten favourite books.This accolade and the associated publicity led to a surge in sales that made Fleming the biggest-selling crime writer in the US.
In April 1961, Fleming, always a heavy smoker and drinker, had a heart attack during a regular weekly meeting at The Sunday Times. While he was convalescing, one of his friends, Duff Dunbar, gave him a copy of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and suggested that he take the time to write up the bedtime story that Fleming used to tell to his son Caspar each evening. Fleming attacked the project with gusto and wrote to his publisher. The result was Fleming's only children's novel, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which was published in October 1964, two months after his death. It soon became a Dick van Dyke vehicle and one of the most execrable movies of my childhood, despite having a script by Roald Dahl.
Fleming had struggled to recuperate from the heart attack. On 11 August 1964, while staying at a hotel in Canterbury, Fleming went to the Royal St George's Golf Club for lunch and later dined at his hotel with friends. The day had been tiring for him, and he collapsed with another heart attack shortly after the meal. Fleming died at age 56 in the early morning of 12 August 1964—his son Caspar's twelfth birthday. His last recorded words were an apology to the ambulance drivers for having inconvenienced them, saying "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days."
He referred to Casino Royale, the first Bond book, as his "dreadful oafish opus" and to Bond generally as “the pillow fantasies of an adolescent mind” and "just some bit of nonsense I dreamed up."
Comments
Post a Comment