“When people say, ‘She’s got everything’, I’ve got one answer – I haven’t had tomorrow.”~ Elizabeth Taylor

RIP Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor. 27 February 1932 – 23 March 2011

{Also}

Jane Russell “Bye Bye Baby”

{obituary}

Don’t Fence me in. Just Put me out.

{Via}

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Image via Wikipedia

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”

Take the austere little paperbacks down from the shelf and you can hold the collected works of J.D. Salinger — one novel, three volumes of stories — in the palm of one hand. Like some of his favorite writers — like Sappho, whom we know only from ancient fragments, or the Japanese poets who crafted 17-syllable haikus — Salinger was an author whose large reputation pivots on very little. The first of his published stories that he thought were good enough to preserve between covers appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. Sixteen years later he placed one last story there and drew down the shades.

From that day until his death on Jan. 27 at age 91, at his home in Cornish, N.H., Salinger was the hermit crab of American letters. When he emerged, it was usually to complain that somebody was poking at his shell. Over time Salinger’s exemplary refusal of his own fame may turn out to be as important as his fiction. In the 1960s he retreated to the small house in Cornish, and rejected the idea of being a public figure. Thomas Pynchon is his obvious successor in that department. But Pynchon figured out how to turn his back on the world with a wink and a Cheshire Cat smile. Salinger did it with a scowl. Then again, he was inventing the idea, and he bent over it with an inventor’s sweaty intensity.{Read on} {Also}

“Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phoney. I could puke every time I hear it”

{Archive}

Related articles by Zemanta

• JD Salinger: A guy you’d want to call up (but he wouldn’t take calls) (guardian.co.uk)
• J.D. Salinger Reviews: The New York Review Of Books On The Legendary Author (huffingtonpost.com)
• Catcher in the Rye novelist dies (news.bbc.co.uk)
• J.D. Salinger dies at 91 (boingboing.net)
• A Sad Day For Bananafish: J.D. Salinger Dies (losanjealous.com)

“Bhopal, MP, India – The worst industrial disaster of all time – The gas leak from Union Carbide (Dow Chemicals) plant on December 3, 1984 has caused an estimated 25,000 deaths till date, and over 500,000 people have been directly or indirectly affected. I was a week old at that time, and in that very town.” ~ Terry McKee

{Via}

Look, We Found The Awesomeman.

{Via}

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” ‘Love Story’ author Erich Segal passes on at age 72.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘Love Story’ author Erich Segal dies at 72 (pbpulse.com)
• Love Story author Erich Segal dies (cbc.ca)

Many,many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them-if you want to. Just as someday if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.~ J.D Salinger

I kept waiting for the sentence saying he started the Levi jeans company, it never came…

Image via Wikipedia

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.” {Read on} and {Here}

Cry, Laugh, Cry.

This reminded me of my friend who died a few years ago.

He was the wildest guy I had ever been friends with. He was always pushing his limits and shocking people into laughing. He would never back down from a dare which made him a blast to hang out with. (One even included him wearing a wedding dress to the movie theatre, and watch an entire movie) On top of that, he was a great friend.

Sadly his funeral was the dullest thing I had ever been to. No one was allowed to get up and speak or tell stories, but instead they turned it into a promotion of their church, and how if you join it you can live forever.

I even asked his family if I could get up and say some things but they said it wasn’t going to be that kind of funeral.

I sat there during the funeral thinking how my friend would have loved if I just stood up in the middle and started telling stories anyways. If I got kicked out, oh well.

I still kick myself for not doing it whenever I think about it.

This guy really is a true friend for fulfilling his promise.

{Read the real story}