Friday February 2

Welcome to Friday's Almanac.

Today is the birthday 1650 of Nell Gwyn, actress and long-term mistress of King Charles II of England. Her father left the family when Nell was a child. He may or may not have died in prison. Her mother may or may not have run a brothel where Nell may or may not have been a child prostitute. It is known for a fact that Nell's mother drowned, while drunk, in a ditch near Westminster.
     Charles' father King Charles I, had been beheaded by Parliament in 1648. England became a Commonwealth until 1660 when the son was recalled from exile and crowned Charles II. The Commonwealth had been ruled by Puritans who had closed the theatres as ungodly. One of the first things Charles did was to reopen the theatres. Young Nell got a job at age 13 as a scantily clad "orange girl" selling fruit to the audience. Thanks to her wit and her strong voice, she was soon acting herself. This was the first time women were allowed to act on the stage. Boys had taken women's parts previously. Charles was notorious for keeping mistresses and Nell had the longest run of any of them, beginning at the age of 18 until Charles' death when she was 35.
    Nell died of a stoke probably related to syphilis at age 37. She left a bequest for the inmates at Newgate Prison. Some of her witticisms have been recorded. Once, when her coachman was fighting with a man who had called her a whore, she stuck her head out the window and said, "I am a whore. Find something else to fight about."

It's also the birthday, in 1882 of James Joyce. Joyce was born in Dublin to a middle class family, but his father's alcoholism and financial mismanagement led the family into poverty. Joyce obtained a good education and wished to become a writer, but could not get anything published in Ireland. He and his wife moved to Trieste, then part of Austria, where he taught English in a Berlitz school. He was good at borrowing money which also helped keep the family out of poverty. Without wealthy patrons, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake would never have appeared.
     Most of  Ulysses takes place in the characters' heads. Joyce more or less invented the technique known as stream of consciousness. The book follows the main characters around Dublin on a single day. Finnegan's Wake tries to replicate a single night of dreams of one Dubliner. Ulysses is a difficult book, but  perseverance will reward the reader with much pleasure. Finnegan's Wake however is an impossible book. One critic said that we should thank Joyce for spending almost twenty years proving that it is impossible to recreate in prose a night of dreams.

Today in 1893, the U.S. Post Office issued its first stamp depicting a woman. A four dollar stamp couldn't been very handy, but the stamp was commemorating  400 years of awkward history.
And what a pair for our day: he the genocider, she the scourge of Islam.

Today in 1839,  Louis Daguerre  took the first photograph of the moon. I am not including it here for three reasons: a. It was just a crescent moon. b. It was not focused. c. In March, 1839  Daguerre's laboratory burned down and his photograph of the moon went with it.


Today's poem is by James Joyce:

All day I hear the noise of waters

Making moan,

Sad as the sea-bird is when, going

Forth alone,

He hears the winds cry to the water's

Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing

Where I go.

I hear the noise of many waters

Far below.

All day, all night, I hear them flowing

To and fro.      

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