I just heard on BBC-3

that today is the 150th Anniversary

of Rudyard Kipling.

As a child in the Bronx,

we certainly weren't rich

but I didn't know that.

Though I rarely had a toy

and Mother wasn't a very good cook ,

there was a lovely large garden in back of my parent's store

where I often liked to sit and read a book.

HzL

12/30/15

PS: I wish i could say that it was written by Rudyard Kipling

but it was usually about someone called Tom Swift

or "Bomba the Jungle Boy"

PPS: " A Tom Swifty" is a kind of "wellerism"

which I looked up to see its roots---

and I found that it was Dickens,

not the Duke of Wellington's boots.

Anyway, I fear

that's more than enough literary learning for today,

so, Happy New Year

to y'all, and G'day.

Feedback

Tom swifty | Define Tom swifty at Dictionary.com

dictionary.reference.com/browse/tom-swifty

Dictionary.com

noun. a play on words consisting of a made-up quotation followed by a punning adverb; also written Tom Swiftie. "I know who turned off the lights," Tom hinted darkly - is an example of a Tom Swifty. Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon.

Tom Swifty - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty

Wikipedia

A Tom Swifty (or Tom Swiftie) is a phrase in which a quoted sentence is linked by a pun to the manner in which it is attributed. Tom Swifties may be considered a type of wellerism.

Feedback

Wellerism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellerism

Wikipedia

Wellerisms, named after Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, make fun of established clichés and proverbs by showing that they are wrong in ...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More images

Tom Swift

Fictional Character

Tom Swift is the main character of five series of American juvenile science fiction and adventure novels that emphasize science, invention and technology. First published in 1910, the series total more than 100 volumes. Wikipedia

Bomba, the Jungle Boy

Book series

Bomba the Jungle Boy is a series of American boy's adventure books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the pseudonym Roy Rockwood and published by Cupples & Leon in the first half of the 20th ... Wikipedia

Author: Roy Rockwood

Rudyard Kipling: the misfit poet

John Collier's 1891 portrait of Kipling — JOHN COLLIER'S 1891 PORTRAIT OF KIPLING, WHO WAS BORN IN INDIA ON DECEMBER 30 1865 CREDIT: ALAMY

Sponsored by Ticketbis

Hanging out with Harry Styles

YouTube prankster Ben Phillips found himself watching the Rugby World Cup with Dan Stevens and Harry Styles

Kipling is not at all like his image, which is a good thing, since he is widely regarded as jingoistic, narrow and racist. It is a pity if, for this reason, some never read him.

Kipling was always an outsider, and never a member of the Establishment. He received the Nobel Prize, but refused any honour, including the Order of Merit, that would identify him with a single country.

Read: Best 100 books for Christmas

He wasn’t English, being born in Bombay, 150 years ago, on December 30 1865. A repeated pattern in his life was to turn his back and begin again. He never returned to India after the age of 25. He made a home in Vermont, but, after an almost fatal illness and the death of his daughter Josephine, left America forever in 1899. He pinned his hopes on English rule in South Africa, but, disgusted with the ascendancy of the Boers, left in 1908 and never went back.

In his writings, as if in a recurrent dream, small male groups offer shelter from a hostile world: the schoolfriends of Stalky & Co; Mowgli’s wolf-pack in The Jungle Book; or the Janeites in a short story from the First World War.

As Andrew Lycett points out in a new collection, Kipling and War, the term Janeites, meaning “admirers of Jane Austen”, was invented by Kipling’s friend George Saintsbury.

'To me England is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries’

Who would expect to find them behind the sandbags of the Western Front? But the narrator of the story tells how Macklin, a drunken mess-servant, joins in the officers’ discussion of their heroine.

“Pa-hardon me, gents,” Macklin says, “but this is a matter on which I do ’appen to be moderately well informed. She did leave lawful issue in the shape o’ one son; an’ ’is name was ’Enery James.”

It wasn’t from the First World War that Kipling learnt of life’s brutal horrors, but from a boarding house in Southsea, Hampshire, where he went to live in 1871, aged five, separated from his parents in India and cruelly treated, physically and mentally, by the landlady.

This went on for more than five years, no unusual ordeal for the children of Empire, but for this boy “an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar”.

To these years in the House of Desolation (as he calls it in his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”) Kipling attributed his “habit of observation and attendance on moods and tempers”, as he noted in his fragmentary autobiography, Something of Myself.

The Poems of TS Eliot, vols 1 & 2, review: 'teases out every allusion'

No doubt also in Southsea was ground into his psyche the sadism that regularly emerges in his work. One story in Stalky & Co, on the torture of two bullies, is too terrible to reread.(Stalky & Co is sometimes mistaken for children’s literature, since its subject is school, but it isn’t, any more than is Kim, the dreamlike tale of a boy in India.)

How Kipling seemed to a brilliant contemporary is shown by the parody “PC X36” in Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912). The narrator’s policeman friend Judlip spotted an old man with “a hoary white beard, a red ulster with the hood up, and what looked like a sack over his shoulder” standing on a rooftop.

Ordering him down to the street, the constable grabbed his collar. “The captive snivelled something about peace on earth, good will toward men. 'Yuss,’ said Judlip.

Kipling did often refer to the Law, but his version is the Law of the Jungle, or of schoolboys, or soldiers, or hunters

'That’s in the Noo Testament, ain’t it? The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin’ for old gents an’ young ladies. But it ain’t included in the librery o’ the Force. We confine ourselves to the Old Testament – O T, ’ot. An’ ’ot you’ll get it. Hup with that sack, an’ quick march!’ ”

Beerbohm is right about the often annoying rendering of dialect and the petty violence, but he puts his finger on a more important feature of Kipling’s world: its rejection of Christianity. Kipling lost all that in the Southsea boarding house.

It didn’t seem to trouble late Victorian readers who had seen their tide of faith ebb on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867). Kipling did often refer to the Law, almost as if it were the Law of Moses, but his version is the Law of the Jungle, or of schoolboys, or soldiers, or hunters.

The Law may be unjust to an individual caught up in its workings, but it is ineluctable. In his poem Recessional (marking the diamond jubilee of the Queen and Empress Victoria in 1897), the “lesser breeds without the Law” are not the natives on whose behalf the White Man takes up his burden; they are rival empire-builders such as Russia and Germany.

Kipling won the Nobel Prize but refused any honour that would identify him with a particular country CREDIT: ULLSTEIN BILD

Recessional was included, surely mistakenly, in The English Hymnal, compiled in 1906. Perhaps the editors judged it by its form, that of a prayer, and overlooked its content: a caution against national hubris.

It is not for political theory that Kipling is read, but for his astonishing prose (notably in short stories) and his poetry.

He had burst on London in 1889 after six long years as a journalist in India, but still only 23 (if already acquiring the balding Alf Garnett look). Success was immediate, and new bestsellers joined reprints of stories published in India.

“Readers who had not heard of Kipling at the beginning of 1890,” notes the Kipling scholar Thomas Pinney, “could have a whole shelf of Kipling by the end of 1892.”

“His touch is uncanny,” says Daniel Karlin, whose edition of Kipling’s stories and poems has just been reissued. “He can evoke a taste, a smell, a look, a human expression with immediate and infallible conviction, so that reading him is often a series of delighted assentings.”

Yes, the female labourers walking north along Grand Trunk Road in Kim, for example, are overpoweringly real. “A solid line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in haste, would swing up through the quivering dust,” overtaking the boy and his companion.

Kipling at work CREDIT: ROGER-VIOLLET/ REX SHUTTERSTOCK

But I find that a response as frequent as delight to Kipling’s convincing reality is tears. Indeed he himself sees tears, not rationality, as the distinguishing mark of humanity.

In The Jungle Book, when Mowgli has grown up and proved himself master by the use of fire, he feels something he has not experienced in his lupine upbringing: “What is it? What is it?” he said. “I do not wish to leave the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?”

“No, Little Brother. That is only tears such as men use,” said Bagheera. “Now I know thou art a man, and a man’s cub no longer.”

Kipling’s style, like Stevenson’s, interrupts a Victorian post-prandial slumber with a briny bucketful of North Sea water.

Like Hardy, he pulled off the rare double of matching virtuosity as a storyteller with inventiveness as a poet. The mistake now is to discount his poetry because familiarity with so many quotations breeds contempt.

Sadism was ground into his psyche in the boarding house where he grew up

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations included 331 of his: “If you can keep your head…”; “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that…”; “Brandy for the Parson, / Baccy for the Clerk…”;“Ship me somewheres East of Suez…”; “What should they know of England who only England know?”

Yet, as Juliet Townsend pointed out when the new edition of his poems (in three volumes) came out in 2013, Kipling always stretched the boundaries of rhythm and rhyme, as in “Song of the Galley-Slaves”:

The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt-cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to the gums, and you whipped us because we could not row. Will you never let us go?

That came in Many Inventions (1893), in the first flush of London fame. But he did not fall like the skyrocket’s stick. After turning his back on America, and soon before doing the same to South Africa, he found a bivouac in an old house in Sussex – and in 1904 bought a car.

“The chief end of my car is the discovery of England,” he wrote. “To me it is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries.” The upshot was Puck of Pook’s Hill, an uncategorisable work, in prose and poetry, weaving a sort of mythical history for England.

Its air is halfway between Tolkien’s Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Masefield’s The Midnight Folk. Perhaps both authors had fed their imaginations with it. Kipling did not succumb in America to the pneumonia that killed his daughter and nearly killed him.

Kipling's writing had 'an uncanny touch'

But the First World War brought sorrows that never abated. In 1915, his son was reported missing in action (a cruel way of losing him, since his mother long hoped he might be wounded or a prisoner).

Even then, Kipling wrote superb war journalism, much of it for The Daily Telegraph, from unfamiliar fronts, in Alsace, the Dolomites or at sea. For his last 25 years he suffered stomach pains.

His teeth were pulled out (in line with the latest scientific theory of “septic foci”). He was operated on for a twisted bowel he did not have. He died quite suddenly in 1936, from a haemorrhage of the stomach ulcer that had been there all along. Now that his world seems so utterly changed and distant, perhaps readers will discover it with more wonder.

Order Kipling and War ed by Andrew Lycett and Rudyard Kipling: Stories and Poems ed by Daniel Karlin from the Telegraph bookshop for £16.95 and £10.99 plus £1.99 p&p

Rudyard Kipling

(1865 - 1936)

'The most complete man of genius…
that I have ever known'

Henry James

AN ANGLO-INDIAN CHILDHOOD

Rudyard Kipling was born in the grounds of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay on 30 December 1865. His father, Lockwood Kipling, was Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the school and had met his wife Alice Macdonald two years before whilst staying near Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, hence Kipling’s unusual first name.

His parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians, a term used in 19th-century India to describe British people who were born and spent their lives on the sub-continent. As a result, Kipling’s first language was not English but Hindi – the language of the servants who took care of his initial education.

At the age of five, as was common with many Anglo-Indian children, he was sent to live at Lorne Lodge near Portsmouth in a boarding house for children whose parents lived in India. There he was cared for by a retired Merchant seaman and his wife who subjected the young boy to ‘calculated torture’. He was severely bullied by the couple who were fervently religious; however Kipling claims that it was this torture which fostered his literary beginnings – creating in him an aptitude for lying. After six years at the boarding house his mother Alice returned from India and immediately took him out of Lorne Lodge. He was then enrolled in the United Services College in Devon, a school designed to prepare children for service in the British Army. With his bad eyesight and lack of sporting prowess he did not enjoy the experience and in 1882 he returned to India. Immediately upon disembarking Kipling said his 'English years fell away'.

JOURNALIST AND TRAVELLER

Kipling’s father found him a job as a journalist on the Lahore-based Civil and Military Gazette. Since his days at Lorne Lodge he had written poetry and thought up stories, and his new job gave him the opportunity to focus on his writing. A fiercely enthusiastic writer (his study in Lahore was always covered in ink from his frantic writing), he produced verse and stories for the newspaper as well as writing features on Anglo-Indian life. As Kipling travelled India for the newspaper he became absorbed in the local stories – for example, the great gun 'Zam-Zammeh' and its history would be later be immortalised in the opening chapter of his novelKim (1901). Early Rudyard Kipling books were published throughout the 1880's with his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties, in 1886, and eight collections of short stories in 1888 including Plain Tales from the Hills and The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Stories (which contained his classic story ‘The Man who would be King’). Whether it was the hill stations of the Raj or the markets of Allahabad, India would provide an extraordinary inspiration to his work for the rest of his life.

In 1889 Kipling quarrelled with his newspaper's editor and was given notice. Deciding to return to England, he moved into cheap rooms just off the Strand in London. His literary reputation grew as he wrote stories for numerous magazines and periodicals. In 1891 he completed his first novel The Light that Failed, the story of an artist completing his masterpiece as he goes blind. Whilst in London he befriended American literary agent Wolcott Balestier, collaborating with him on a novel, The Naulahka, published in the same year. In 1892, while staying with his family in Simla, he telegrammed Balestier’s sister Caroline ‘Carrie’ Balestier and asked her to marry him. It turned out they had been conducting a secret romance whilst he was in London. She accepted, and they were married in London in January 1892, with novelist Henry James giving the bride away.

Following their marriage Kipling and Carrie went to live in the United States near her family’s home in Vermont, in a house named ‘Bliss Cottage’. It was there in December 1892 that Kipling’s daughter Josephine was born. That year, the most famous Rudyard Kipling book was written, The Jungle Book. Published in 1894, it was greeted with widespread acclaim, not only as brilliant adventure stories but moral touchstones for the Victorian era. A further volume of Jungle Books were published in 1895. Whilst in Vermont Kipling also completed a collection of verseBarrack-room Ballads (1892) which included his poems ‘Mandalay’ and ‘Gunga-Din’.

POET OF THE EMPIRE

Kipling enjoyed the rural splendour of New England immensely; however, diplomatic and trade hostilities between the USA and the British had reached boiling point by the 1890s and it seemed likely there would be war. As a result Kipling took his family back to England in 1896.

During a brief spell in Devon, where Kipling’s son John was born in 1897, Kipling wrote his most controversial works, the poems ‘Recessional’ (1897) and ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899). These poems, though hugely influential and popular, mark a shift in his writing into the political realm. A staunch supporter of the British Empire and the high ideals of colonialism, Kipling's fame increased, and he would become known as ‘the Poet of the Empire’.

In 1897 he moved his family to Batemans, a huge 17th-century manor in East Sussex. Though it was considered by many (including Kinglsey Amis) as terribly gloomy, Kipling loved the house dearly and it would remain his home for the rest of his life. During this period he also travelled regularly, making an annual trip to South Africa, where he became friends with Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement. Scout leaders to this day name themselves after characters inThe Jungle Books. On a trip to America in 1899, Kipling's eldest daughter Josephine contracted pneumonia and died, aged just seven. His surviving daughter Elsie later wrote, 'His life was never the same after her death; a light had gone out that could never be rekindled.'

By the turn of the century Kipling's literary career was at its peak. His largely autobiographical novel Kim was published in 1901 and his Just So Stories were published in 1902. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the youngest ever recipient and the first to speak the English language. With his reputation now secured his writing became even more political as he used his fame to promote causes from Freemasonry and Ulster Unionism to the arms race with Germany. In 1910 he published his most celebrated poem, ‘If…’ cataloguing the qualities necessary to become a decent man, it remains Britain’s most popular poem.

LATER LIFE AND LEGACY

Kipling's love for the Empire led to his enthusiastic support for the First World War in 1914. He encouraged his son John to join the armed forces; however he was turned down on numerous occasions (like Kipling, John with his extremely poor eyesight was unsuited for military service). With his political and military connections, Kipling was able to persuade the commander of the Irish Guards to recruit his son. John was sent to France, only to be killed almost immediately in the second day of the Battle of Loos (1915). His body was never identified. In Epitaphs of the War Kipling's post-war collection of short poems he wrote “If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied”.

Kipling continued to write after the loss of his son, though less frantically. Though he still extolled in print the virtues of the Empire, after the slaughter of the War, the mood of the nation was irrevocably altered. Kipling became involved in the War Graves Commission, who were to care for the seemingly endless graves in northern France. He chose the words that would be carved on each gravestone: 'Their Name Liveth For Evermore' if the dead soldier was identified, 'Known unto God' if he was not. He also chose the phrase 'The Glorious Dead' to be carved on London’s cenotaph.

Kipling died on 18 January 1936 and his ashes were interred in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, alongside numerous British literary figures from Tennyson to Dickens.

Since his death, there has been much debate over Kipling's militant enthusiasm for the British Empire. However, few critics fail to praise the quality of his stories and poems, with many great authors, from George Orwell to Jorge Luis Borges, citing Kipling as a key inspiration. Though he remains controversial in his beloved India, the post-Independence Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru always claimed Kim was his favourite book.

If—

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Share this text ...?

Source: A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)

viceorverse

Thursday, December 31, 2015

The World's on New Year's Eve Alert

Cities around the world on New Year's Eve alert

Wednesday, December 30, 2015