Also the death day of Beethoven, Walt Whitman, Alex Comfort and Raymond Chandler... shit... busy day.

Thanks, as usual, to Recollection Books and their fabulous Daily Bleed.


1827 - German classical composer Ludwig von Beethoven
begins de-composing.
______________________
1892 - Great American poet Walt Whitman mows no more, age 72, Camden, New Jersey. Constantly revising & augmenting his Leaves of Grass, he receives the final, ninth, edition on his deathbed.

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator
  & eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each:
  Who killed the pork chops?
  What price bananas?... (From Allen Ginsberg's Poem 'A Supermarket in California')

____________________
1959 - Raymond Chandler dies.

   Master of hard-boiled school of crime fiction. His best
   known character is the tough but honest private detective
   Philip Marlowe (from the violent tempered 15th  century
   writer Christopher Marlowe). Wrote for "Black Mask",
   which also published Dashiell Hammett.

____________________
2000 -- Alex Comfort dies. British physician, sexologist,
anarchist, poet, novelist, etc.

   "You have only to speak for once —
   they will melt like the dust:
   you have only to spit in their faces — they will go
   howling like devils to swindle somebody else..."

           — Alex Comfort (1920-2000),
           excerpt from "The Soldiers"