Happy Halloween:

Theodore Roosevelt, on books:

There are rainy days in autumn and stormy days in winter

when the rocking chair in front of the fire

simply demands an accompanying book.

- Theodore Roosevelt.

Recommended reading - I Wake Up Screaming

I Wake Up Screaming

I Wake Up Screaming
by Steve Fisher.
 
Paperback.
Published by Vintage.
First published 1941.
ISBN 13: 9780679736776
ISBN 10: 0679736778
ASIN: 0679736778
 
Description:

The classic novel of sexual obsession and murder amid the star-making machinery of Hollywood in the 1950s.
 

"She was as white as marble, but she looked lovely.  Her hair was splayed out in fine strands of gold, and her lips were bright, rich red, and there was a green eyeshadow on her eyelids.  You could see that because her eyes were closed and she was lying very still.  She was lying still and she wasn't breathing."

 

With its portraits of washed-up directors, jaded leading men, and a ruthless cop whose one-track mind leads straight to a cyanide pellet, I Wake Up Screaming is a magnificent thriller by a Hollywood insider whose screenplays included Lady in the Lake and I, Mobster.

Born on this day – John Keats:

John Keats

Writer

October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821

Credits:

Poems:

A Galloway Song; A Song About Myself; A Song of Opposites; A Party Of Lovers; Acrostic: Georgiana Augusta Keats; Addressed to Haydon; Addressed to the Same; After dark vapours have oppressed our plains; Apollo to the Graces; An Extempore; As from the darkening gloom a silver dove; As Hermes once took to his feathers light; Before he went to live with owls and bats; Ben Nevis: A Dialogue; Blue!—’Tis the life of heaven—the domain; Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art; Calidore: A Fragment; Character of C. B.; Epistle To John Hamilton Reynolds; Endymion; Extracts from an Opera; Faery Songs; Fancy; Fill for me a brimming bowl; For there’s Bishop’s Teign; Fragment Of “The Castle Builder”; Fragment of an Ode to Maia; God of the meridian; Happy is England! I could be content; Hence burgundy, claret, and port; Hither, hither, love; How many bards gild the lapses of time; Hush, hush, tread softly, hush, hush, my dear; Hymn To Apollo; Hyperion; I am as brisk; I cry your mercy—pity—love!—aye, love; I had a dove, and the sweet dove died; I stoof tip-toe upon a little hill; Imitation of Spenser; In after time a sage of mickle lore; In drear nighted December; Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil; Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there; King Stephen: A Fragment of a Tragedy; La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad; Lamia; Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair; Lines on the Mermaid Tavern; Lines (Unfelt, unheard, unseen…); Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles’s Restoration, on Hearing the Bells Ringing; Meg Merrilies; Modern Love; Not Aladdin magian; O grant that like to Peter I; O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell; O thou whose face hath felt the winter’s wind; Ode (Bards of Passion and of Mirth); Ode on a Grecian Urn; Ode on a Melancholy; Ode on Indolence; Ode to a Nightingale; Ode to Apollo; Ode to Psyche; Of late two dainties were before me plac’d; Oh! how I love, on a fair summer’s eve; On a Leander Which Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend, Gave Me; On Fame (“Fame, like a wayward girl”); On Fame (“How fever’d is the man”); On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer; On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour; On Peace; On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses, from the Same Ladies; On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt; On Seeing the Elgin Marbles; On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again; On Some Skills in Beauley Abbey, near Inverness; On the Grasshopper and Cricket; On the Sea; On the Sonnet; On Visiting the Tomb of Burns; On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, the ‘Story of Rimini’; Otho the Great: A Tragedy in Five Acts; Over the hill and over the dale; Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud; Robin Hood; Sharing Eve’s Apple; Sleep and Poetry; Song of Four Fairies: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water; Sonnet to Byron; Sonnet to Chatterton; Sonnet to Sleep; Sonnet to Spenser; Specimen of an Induction to a Poem; Spirit here that reignest; Stay, ruby breated warbler, stay; Sweet, sweet is the greeting of eyes; The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone; The Eve of St. Agnes; The Eve of St. Mark; The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream; The Human Seasons; The Gadfly; The Gothic looks solemn; The Cap And Bells; Or, The Jealousies: A Faery Tale (Unfinished); There is a joy in footing slow across a silent plain; Think not of it, sweet one, so; This living hand, now warm and capable; This mortal body of a thousand days; Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb; Tis the “witching time of night”; To.- (Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs); To.- (Hadst tho liv’d in days of old); To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses; To a Young Lady Who Sent Me a Laurel Crown; To Ailsa Rock; To Autumn; To Charles Cowden Clarke; To Emma; To G. A. W.; To George Felton Mathew; To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on seeing the Elgin Marbles; To Homer; To Hope; To J. H. Reynolds; To Kosciusko; To Leigh Hunt, Esq.; To Mrs. Reynold’s Cat; To My Brother George (epistle); To My Brother George (sonnet); To My Brothers; To one who has been long in city pent; To Some Ladies; To the Ladies Who Saw Me Crown’d; To the Nile; Translated From A Sonnet Of Ronsard; Two or three posies; What can I do to drive away; When I have fears that I may cease to be; Where by ye going, you Devon maid; Where’s the Poet? (Fragment); Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell; Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain; Women, wine, and snuff; Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition; Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison; Written On The Blank Space Of A Leaf At The End Of Chaucer’s Tale Of The Flowre And The Lefe; You say you love, but with a voice.

Movies and television:

Bright Star (2009); Camera Three (1958); Cariño, sabes que soy de otro planeta (2022); Count the Ways (1975); Isabella and the Pot of Basil (2004); La belle dame sans merci (2005); La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats (1997); New in November 2011 (2012); The Eve of St. Agnes (1950); The Merciless Beauty (2016); The Sunday Programme (2003); Venus Blue (1998).

Born on this day – Ethel Waters:

Ethel Waters

Singer

Actress

October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977

Born on this day – Margery Wilson:

Margery Wilson

Actress

Director

Producer

Writer

October 31, 1896 – January 21, 1986

Credits:

A Corner in Colleens (1916); A Dark Horse (1915); A Woman of Nerve (1915); Bred in the Bone (1915); Crooked Straight (1919); Desert Gold (1919); Double Trouble (1915); Eye of the Night (1916); Flooey and Axel (1915); For the Honor of Bettina (1915); Insinuation (1922); Intolerance (1916); Jane Eyre (1914); Marked Cards (1918); Mountain Dew (1917); Old Love for New (1918); That Something (1920); The Bankhurst Mystery (1915); The Blooming Angel (1920); The Bride of Hate (1917); The Charcoal-Burner's Son (1939); The Clodhopper (1917); The Deadly Focus (1915); The Desert Man (1917); The Fatal Hour (1915); The Flames of Chance (1918); The Gunfighter (1917); The Hand at the Window (1918); The Hard Rock Breed (1918); The Honorable Algy (1916); The House of Whispers (1920); The Last of the Ingrams (1917); The Law of the Great Northwest (1918); The Lucky Transfer (1915); The Man of It (1915); The Mother Instinct (1917); The Offenders (1924); The Opal Pin (1915); The Primal Lure (1916); The Return of Draw Egan (1916); The Showdown (1915); The Silent Feminists: America's First Women Directors (1993); The Sin Ye Do (1916); The Stab (1915); The Ten O'Clock Boat (1915); The Way of a Mother (1915); Two of a Kind (1920); Unwinding It (1915); Venus in the East (1919); Why Not Marry? (1922); Wild Sumac (1917); Without Honor (1918); Wolf Lowry (1917).

Born on this day – Sheila Bromley:

Sheila Bromley

Actress

October 31, 1907 – July 23, 2003