Scientists used carbon dating to estimate the age of some charcoal found in the caves, and according to that method, the drawings are about 17,000 years old. Assigning a precise date to the art has been difficult. In addition to the figures, there also appears to be an Ice Age star chart: clusters of stars that resemble known constellations like Taurus the Bull, the Summer Triangle, and the Pleiades. ![]() The chambers have been given evocative names: the Great Hall of the Bulls the Chamber of Felines and the Shaft of the Dead Man. Horses and stags are the most common subjects there are also human figures, various geometric shapes, and the outlines of human hands - possibly the signatures of the artists. There are about 2,000 drawings and engravings, mostly of animals: horses, bison, red deer, stags, cats, and aurochs - large, black cattle-like animals that are now extinct. The main cave is approximately 66 feet wide and 16 feet high, and is connected to a number of smaller chambers. ![]() On this date in 1940, four teenage boys and a dog named Robot stumbled upon Paleolithic drawings in a cave in Lascaux, France. He wrote, in the introduction to his collection Autumn Journal (1939): “Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” He began writing for the BBC in 1941, at first just programs to build support for the United States, but later he wrote some radio plays, like The Dark Tower (1946, with music by Benjamin Britten), and a six-part adaptation of Goethe’s Faust (1949). It was Auden who convinced him to take poetry seriously as an occupation, and encouraged him to stick with it, and the two remained friends for the rest of their lives. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis they met at Oxford and together they were known as “the Auden group” or sometimes just “the Thirties poets.” Poet Roy Campbell gave them the composite name “MacSpaunday.” MacNeice published his first collection of poetry, Blind Fireworks, in 1929. Today is the birthday of poet and playwright Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907), born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Lawrence, James Baldwin, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes his favorite of all his authors was Willa Cather. He also published the work of several notable authors of the 20th century, including Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, D.H. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in 1924, and remained its publisher for 10 years. He co-founded the literary magazine The American Mercury with H.L. In 1923, he published Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet and was nonplussed when it became a huge best-seller. He wanted to publish quality books and didn’t really care how well they sold. ![]() He was a hands-on boss, overseeing every aspect of production, down to the typeface. He started his own publishing house when he was 23, and it soon gained a reputation for publishing works of literary merit. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.” And, “To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies - the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.” It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. He wrote, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” And, “The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. ![]() He continued to update and expand it throughout his life. In 1919, he published the first edition of The American Language, an attempt to catalog uniquely American phrases and idioms. America outgrew him, though there wasn’t much to laugh about during the Great Depression, and during World War II, patriotism, not cynicism, was the mode of the day. He was not a friend of organized religion, and he referred to the American middle class as the “booboisie.” He was at his peak in the 1920s, editing the magazines The Smart Set and The American Mercury. He was a literary critic who used his platform to criticize society as well: in particular, pretension, provincialism, and prudery. Mencken, born Henry Louis Mencken in Baltimore in 1880. ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO – 2011 Today is the birthday of H.L. “ I Ran Out Naked In The Sun ” by Jane Hirshfield, from Come, Thief.
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