Happy Birthday to Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche!

Interesting that these two dynamos share the same birthday, eh? Never knew that before today...

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline. Mortimer Jerome Adler

Mortimer Jerome Adler (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches inNew York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Henry Miller

The author of Tropic of Cancer was born on this day in 1891.

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.^[1] His most characteristic works of this kind areTropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. William Blake

The English poet was born on this day in 1757.

From Wikipedia:

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".^[1] His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".^[2] Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham^[3] he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God",^[4] or "Human existence itself".^[5]

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic",^[6] for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions,^[7] as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg.^[8] Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary,"^[9] and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".^[10]

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads. François Mauriac

The Nobel laureate died on this day in 1970.

From Wikipedia: François Mauriac (11 October 1885 – 1 September 1970) was a French author, member of the Académie française(from 1933), and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958.

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.” — Philip Pullman

"G*dd*mn but that's a good one! -sky

Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is a British writer born in Norwich. He is the author of severalbest-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writerssince 1945".

The first book of His Dark Materials (Northern Lights) won the 1995 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. For the 70th anniversary of the Medal it was named one of the top ten winning works by a panel, composing the ballot for a public election of the all-time favourite. Northern Lights won the public vote from that shortlist and was thus named the all-time "Carnegie of Carnegies" on 21 June 2007. It has been adapted as a film under its U.S. title, The Golden Compass.

Stewart Brand: The Last Prankster - Stewart Brand was by Ken Kesey's side when things got freaky. Then he stepped off the bus and brought the hippies and the computer geeks together. That's when he really changed the world.

Lifted in its entirety from, http://www.mensjournal.com/. One of my heroes. -sky

Stewart Brand, techno guru, counterculture impresario, inspects my ragtag clothes, spots the cotton long-underwear shirt I've layered beneath a fleece.

"Cotton is the stupidest thing you can wear on the mountain," he says matter-of-factly. We're hiking Mount Tamalpais, Marin County's highest peak, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge and not far from where Brand lives. Luckily, it's 45 degrees out, with little chance of hypothermia. "You could die," he tells me.

We break for water sometime later, at a clearing overlooking the San Francisco Bay, which this morning is enveloped in a mossy blue fog. The 74-year-old Brand, who has long, angular features and in his safari hat resembles a craggier Crocodile Dundee, demonstrates in a blur of motion how fast he can shed his GoLite pack and draw a knife from a sheath on his right hip. Other hikers sometimes don't follow the rules, he explains, and let their dogs run off-leash.

"Have you ever, you know, had to put one down?" I ask, curious to plumb the depths of Brand's practicality. It is no great shock that the editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog – the atlas-size compendium of "tools" that Brand started in 1968, a publication Steve Jobs once called a "Google in paperback" and "one of the bibles of my generation" – would outfit himself with an array of useful instruments. But I didn't anticipate his wielding one with such martial purpose.

Brand says a dog did charge him once, and – knees bent, his left arm crooked into a shield – he had reached with his right hand for the blade. But it came up empty. He had left the knife on his dresser.

"The aggressive act was enough to show him who was alpha," he says. The dog slunk away, tail tucked.

Brand first came to national attention in his twenties, promoting – and enjoying – the liberating powers of LSD as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. Over the next half-century, Brand proved to be an endless purveyor of information and invention, a constant catalyst of activity and surprising assemblies. A Sixties icon, he has also shaped our culture in each successive decade.

With the Whole Earth Catalog, which was filled with thousands of short appraisals covering everything from hydroponic farming practices to electronic music, stretching techniques, windmills, and even early personal computers, Brand defined a countercultural ethos that became what is now, essentially, the mainstream. Today, practically all the items covered in the Catalog are available at the click of a mouse; back then, it was an invaluable resource for the country's growing ranks of environmentalists, do-it-yourselfers, and back-to-the-landers. Maybe more revolutionary was that the Catalog combined ecological mindfulness with a belief in the transformative power of technology. In its pages, Brand showed that entrepreneurship and consumerism could also bring power to the people. After all, the kind of activities for which the Catalog provided in-depth instruction – building your own cabin or starting a commune – might just require the purchase of a few products, and that was going to take cash. "Whether you survive in those circumstances," Brand says, explaining his view of self-reliance, "very much depends on your understanding of money." The Catalog didn't simply ground the era's "turn on, tune in, drop out" ideals in the real world – it provided the millions whose minds had been blown open the practical tools to make that world anew. "What we were really was counter-counterculture," Brand says as we continue our ascent.

There were always computer guys hanging out at the epochal Bay Area parties, drawn, no doubt, to the psychedelics but also to Brand. "That Stewart was so at home in the world of computers baffled us," says Brand's friend Gurney Norman, a former Merry Prankster as well as the 2010 Kentucky Poet Laureate. "The rest of us sat around trashing IBM and big business, believing computers symbolized something evil," he adds. "We were so dumb."

Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of 'Wired' magazine, credits Brand with finally turning hippies on to the computer, showing it to be another human-scale tool, a better means than drugs to human augmentation and expanded consciousness. "Stewart brought together personal enlightenment and the personal computer," Kelly says. "Today, the Bay Area is all about the fusion of those two things. What seemed so contradictory in the Sixties is now so obviously complementary."

In the 1990s, Brand helped create the Long Now Foundation, a think tank that adopts a 10,000-year outlook to foster responsible future behavior. The group continues to hold seminars each month, with talks by Silicon Valley executives, academics, futurists, and historians; the foundation is also developing an online archive of the world's 7,000 known human languages. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is letting Brand build, on his West Texas estate, the "Clock of the Long Now" – which is, well, an actual 200-foot clock that will keep time and sound a unique chime in a different sequence each day for the next 10 millennia as a physical incarnation of the group's ideals. Brand believes that the 10,000-year time frame holds, perhaps, an unlikely appeal to the captains of dot-com industry. "These are the people surfing Moore's Law," he explains, citing the notion that computer processing power doubles every two years. "They're intensely convinced that things are moving faster and faster. So they feel the need to balance their lives and thoughts with something large-scale and long-frame."

At 2,350 feet, we take a break beside the remnants of "The Crookedest Railroad in the World," a 19th-century train that once brought sightseers up the mountain's switchbacks to this very spot. By now, I expect Brand to wow me with yet another gadget. He does not disappoint, placing on a picnic table before us what looks like a miniature rocket launcher. He twists it onto a thermal mug rigged with a French press, fires up a tiny propane tank, and, minutes later, pours me a cup of coffee.

As we sip our drinks, I bring out my notebook and read a question from a long list I've prepared. Brand raises his face to the sun and closes his eyes, remaining like that for nearly a half-minute without uttering a word. He looks so convincingly becalmed that I wonder if he's nodded off. I'm about to nudge him when Brand's eyes pop open, and he delivers a well-considered reply to my query, the subject of which I have by then forgotten.

"I'm allergic to repeating myself," he says, by way of explaining his not-uncommon reflective silences. "I'm going to raise awareness about, say, the importance of nanotechnology, but I'm not going to be 'Mr. Nanotech' the rest of my life." Which makes sense. You don't amass a résumé befitting the most interesting man in the world by being consistent. Rather, Brand has abandoned successful projects, radically revised his opinions, and broken with orthodoxies he helped create. He stopped regularly publishing the Whole Earth Catalog in 1972, the same year he wrote one of the first articles in a national magazine on computer hackers – "Spacewar," for 'Rolling Stone.' He co-founded the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a primordial dial-up internet-service provider and influential online forum for Deadheads, techies, reporters, and often a compelling mix of Bay Area freethinkers. He organized the first Hackers Conference, in 1984, bringing together MIT computer geeks, 1970s-era hardware freaks, and a new clique of hardcore gamers, whom Brand recognized as part of the same creative continuum. It was at this conference that he coined the phrase "information wants to be free." Prophetically, he said it also "wants to be expensive." From 1974 to 1984, he edited another eclectic publication, CoEvolution Quarterly, which introduced ideas many of his admirers must have found unconventional, if not outright heretical: cybernetics, space colonies, ecogenetics, even the flat tax. Since 1988, he has helped run Global Business Network, a scenario-planning consultancy (think risk assessment, forecasting models, and something called "visioning") that brings the futurist outlook to Bechtel, General Electric, Siemens Westinghouse, the Pentagon – clients one certainly wouldn't associate with the Whole Earth Catalog. Then, in 2009, Brand published 'Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,' in which he declared nuclear energy, genetically modified foods, and increased urbanization essential "green" solutions to global warming. Needless to say, some of those who considered Brand a fellow environmental traveler found these "solutions" troubling. Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute and a longtime friend of Brand's, said the book's advocacy of nuclear energy ran contrary to "Stewart's reputation and prior contributions to clear thinking" and "can only worsen climate and security risks."

Still, I searched and found no trail of bitter ex-associates who felt betrayed or abandoned by Brand. He has an uncanny way of consoling those who don't see eye to eye with him. He wants his mind changed and is without ideology or ego. The open-source software activist Tim O'Reilly describes Brand as an "intellectual Renaissance man, interested in all aspects of human knowledge." Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who founded the WELL with Brand and later went on to run several companies and major philanthropic organizations (Brilliant also helped eradicate polio in India and spent time living on Wavy Gravy's commune, the Hog Farm), says, "Stewart's gift, his genius, is that he has given birth from his fertile, polymath mind to a dozen different cultural phenomena that have shaped our times."

The satirist Paul Krassner lived with Brand in the early 1970s, moving from New York to San Francisco to co-edit a supplement of the Catalog with Ken Kesey. Krassner could recall only one incident in which the roomies had any real tension, a conflict prompted by Krassner and his girlfriend "borrowing" Brand's bed. Not only did the woman in question turn out to have her period, but the two of them breakfasted on the sheets, leaving the bed, as Krassner put it, "bloody and granola-y." Brand was pissed when he returned home, but peace and understanding were restored through the use of a tool advertised in the Catalog: The two men brandished foam bats called "boffers" and harmlessly thrashed each other.

As Brand dries our REI coffee mugs with a Lycra headband he has been wearing around his neck, I ask him about the moments in his life when he felt he had a clear sense of the future. He does another one of his reflective pauses and then finally says, "An interesting question to ask is what predictions have I been wrong about in my lifetime." These would include, among others, Fuller domes, the geodesic shelters designed by futurist Buckminster Fuller, whose work inspired the first Whole Earth Catalog. "They leaked and made terrible homes," Brand says. The "no hope without dope" thing, he says with a laugh, seemed promising back when he was hanging with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, but turned out to be a dead end. There was the Whole Earth Software Catalog, which was almost wholly obsolete by the time it reached publication. Brand predicted that he'd live to see space colonies and nuclear fusion (he remains hopeful about the latter). He opposed the adoption of the metric system. More recently, the Long Now Foundation launched something called Long Bets, an online venue where people can wager on the accuracy of opposing viewpoints. In 2008, Warren Buffett used the site to bet a group of hedge-fund traders $1 million that the S&P would outperform their picks over a 10-year period. Brand thought Long Bets would take off, becoming a locus for the big debates of our time. "I don't get it," he says, sounding still surprised. "The site is totally lame and half-assed."

After our hike, Brand takes me to Sausalito, where he lives on a refurbished tugboat with his wife of 28 years, Ryan Phelan. (Brand has a grown son from an earlier relationship.) He describes Phelan as a "serial entrepreneur," which he means as a term of ardent endearment. The two bought the 100-year-old boat, the Mirene, in 1982 for $8,000. It now has a fresh coat of black-and-white paint with shiny red trim and sits in Richardson Bay amid 400 other houseboats. A low-rider bicycle covered in shaggy fur is tied up on the dock. It's a relic from Burning Man, the annual gathering in the Nevada desert that Brand describes, accurately, as a grandchild of the experiments in community that he organized.

"Life on a boat is environmentally sound," Brand says. "In California, it better protects you from earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. It even will buffer you from global warming's rising tides."

The Whole Earth Catalog used to keep its offices just off the dock here, and Brand shows me the area where he and the staff played volleyball every day at noon. (The entire Googleplex/tech-start-up notion that a hard-driving workplace should also be a source of merrymaking and healthful recreation owes a debt to Brand as well.) When he lived across the bay, in Belvedere, he rowed to work each day. He now keeps two offices nearby, one in a cramped prefabricated building and another on a rickety fishing boat propped up on land. Farther down is a small industrial-design shop, where guys Brand has known since they were kids are building marine-radar systems and robotically navigated submarine vessels that map the ocean floor. At the Mexican diner a block away, where we eat lunch, Brand simply tells the owner, "I'll have the usual."

Brand served in the Army as an officer from 1960 to 1963. I'm initially puzzled by how early and often in our conversations Brand praises his time in the military, but I come to see how much this period in his life defines him. He credits the Army with teaching him how to judge character, how to accomplish goals. "I learned how to back the fuck off and let the 'sergeants' do their work," he says. Although in some respects a flower child, Brand never grew a beard or long hair, last dropped acid in 1969, calls Zen boring, and dismisses the New Left activists of his youth as all talk and no action – a failing Brand clearly cannot abide. In 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,' Tom Wolfe's book on the psychedelic peregrinations of Kesey and his hippie companions, Brand is identified as the "restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters." (Krassner describes his time rooming with Brand as "a New Age Odd Couple," with Brand as Felix.) It was Brand who organized the Merry Pranksters' famous Trips Festival, a music-and-light show attended by 10,000 people, many of whom saw their first (of many) Grateful Dead shows there.

Maybe most famously, during an LSD-induced vision in 1966, Brand wrote in his journal, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" The first space launch was more than a decade old, and Brand believed the image would transform how humans conceived of the planet. He began distributing buttons displaying his question – they quickly became popular in the Haight, in Oakland, and eventually at NASA. Photographs from space were released in 1968 and soon appeared on the covers of both the first Whole Earth Catalog and 'Life' magazine (and later on your Mac screen), providing just the jolt to environmental consciousness that Brand had envisioned. Two years later, more than 20 million Americans attended rallies for the inaugural Earth Day.

One night, I go with Brand and his wife to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco for one of the Long Now Foundation's seminars on long-term thinking. The speakers at these events can range wildly, everyone from Michael Pollan to Brian Eno, with many points in between. As the theater fills to capacity, Brand notes that Long Now doesn't attract only Silicon Valley folk. It draws in a younger, less established crowd as well. "The 10,000-year clock gives them a sense of – a belief in – a better future," he says.

I think about how the younger people in the audience perceive Brand, as he takes the stage that night. He is not cool in any conventional sense, nor is he slick in presentation or attire, like some Timothy Ferriss type. Nor does he possess the laid-back vibe of, say, Steve Jobs, with his faded Levi's and mock turtles. Brand has dressed that evening in a moisture-wicking, triple-stitched 5.11 tactical shirt with a half-dozen pockets, including ones hidden along the chest that are specifically marketed as just right for a small backup piece. Brand informs me that he has 10 of these shirts, presumably all in tan, gray, or pea green, the only colors I see him wearing. Two knives hang conspicuously from Brand's belt – not just a practical Swiss Army but also his "dress knife," an ornate specimen reserved for formal occasions. "If there's a rumble," a guy seated behind me remarks, "I'm sticking with him." A woman in her twenties, her hair emerging from a modish hat in several long braids, tells me Stewart Brand is one of the reasons she moved to the Bay Area. It's a statement one could have heard almost verbatim in San Francisco back in the 1960s, or really in any decade since. I mention Brand to a recent Reed College graduate at the seminar, and he suddenly dashes off, returning moments later holding a hardbound copy of his senior thesis, partly written about Brand, which he had stashed in the movie house's recesses. He thought about returning to San Antonio after college, he says, but realized he needed to be here, among people dedicated to the same dreams. "Brand showed us that technology wasn't a malevolent or necessarily a positive force," the Reed guy tells me. "Like Steve Jobs, he demonstrated that it's another tool in the toolbox."

Michael Phillips, a MasterCard company creator, helped Brand run the foundation that seeded out the earnings from the Whole Earth Catalog. "Underlying everything Stewart does is an optimism and experimentation," Phillips says. "He's always testing radical alternatives, believing that the best ideas will win out and lead to a better future."

Brand is still seeking new ways to bring people together, to shape what lies ahead. His latest venture: using genetics to re-create extinct species. There's the passenger pigeon for starters, the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger. Brand says the technology to reconstitute these animals is already rushing forward, and he hopes to ensure that the process is carried out responsibly. The project is a suitable one for a person who apparently transcends time. All of us dinosaurs fossilized in our own pursuits – Stewart Brand will show us the way. He may even help undo a bit of the ecological havoc we've wreaked on the planet, never mind that some will consider it, as Brand puts it, "the ultimate trespass on the natural world."

"When you think and act long-term, you keep your options open for the future," he says. "You open up the past and the present."

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.[1] Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby—his most famous—and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

The Great Gatsby has been the basis for numerous films of the same name, spanning nearly 90 years; 1926, 1949,1974, 2000, and an upcoming 2013 adaptation. In 1958 his life from 1937–1940 was dramatized in Beloved Infidel.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions. Lillian Hellman

February 15, 1980: In the final stroke of a legendary 20th century literary feud, playwright Lillian Hellman sued novelist Mary McCarthy for libel. Hellman died before the case went to court.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. --Mark Twain

We are always the same age inside. Gertrude Stein

The author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was born on this day in 1874.

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was a noted American art collector of seminal modernist paintings and an experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays, which eschewed the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th century literature. She was born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, and moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. For some forty years, the Stein home on the Left Bank of Paris would become a renowned Saturday evening gathering place for expatriate American artists and writers, and others noteworthy in the world of vanguard arts and letters. Entrée and membership in the Stein salon was a sought-after validation, signifying that Stein had recognized a talent worthy of inclusion into a rarefied group of gifted artists. Stein became combination mentor, critic, and guru to those who gathered around her. A self-defined "genius", she was described as an imposing figure with a commanding manner whose inordinate self-confidence could intimidate. Among her coterie she was referred to as “Le Stein” and with less laudatory deference as “The Presence.” ^[1][2][3]

In 1933, Stein published the memoirs of her Paris years titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which became a literary bestseller. The advent of this book elevated Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure, into the light of mainstream attention.^[4]

Near the end of her life Stein pronounced: "I always wanted to be historical from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it..." ^[4]

My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing. Osip Mandelstam

The Russian poet was born on this day in 1891.

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam^[1] (Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м; IPA: [ˈosʲɪp ɪˈmʲilʲjɪvʲɪt͡ɕ məndʲɪlʲˈʂtam]; January 15 [O.S. January 3] 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp inSiberia. He died that year at a transit camp.

If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter. Anchee Min

The author of Red Azalea was born on this day in 1957.

Anchee Min (閔安琪; Mín Ānqí; born January 14, 1957) is a Chinese-Americanpainter, photographer, musician, and author who lives in San Francisco andShanghai. Min has published a memoir, Red Azalea, and six historical novels. Her fiction emphasizes strong female characters, such as Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, and Empress Dowager Cixi, the last ruling empress of China.

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart. Haruki Murakami

The author of Kafka on the Shore was born on this day in 1949.

Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹 Murakami Haruki^?, born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer and translator.^[1] His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prizeand the Jerusalem Prize, among others.

Murakami's fiction, often criticized by Japan's literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, focusing on themes ofalienation and loneliness.^[2] He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his works and achievements.^[3]

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” — Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and another for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat".

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution. Jasper Fforde

The author of The Eyre Affair was born on this day in 1961.

Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is a British novelist. Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. Fforde is mainly known for his Thursday Next novels, although he has written several books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series and has begun two more independent series, The Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. Alan Wilson Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology(1962).

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and by many of his recorded talks and lectures that have found new life on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."^[1]

She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal. Simone de Beauvoir

The author of The Second Sex was born on this day in 1908.

Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, commonly known as Simone de Beauvoir (French: [simɔn də bovwaʁ]; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986), was a French writer, intellectual,existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. While she did not consider herself a philosopher, Beauvoir had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.^[1] Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is best known for her novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony. Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland (pronounced kohp-lənd) (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob andGeneration X. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. Coupland has been described as "...possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today." and "one of the great satirists of consumerism". A specific feature of Coupland's novels is their synthesis of postmodern religion, Web 2.0 technology,human sexuality, and pop culture.

Coupland lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia with his partner David Weir. He published his twelfth novel Generation A in 2009. He also released an updated version of City of Glass and a biography on Marshall McLuhan forPenguin Canada in their Extraordinary Canadians series, called Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. He is the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, and a companion novel to the lectures, Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been longlisted twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, respectively., was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.