Born in 1949: Tom Waits, American musician, actor.

Born in 1940 – Richard Pryor, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter.

Born in 1942 – Sharon Olds, American poet.

Born in 1930 – Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author and poet.

“Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord’s holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life – to drive the crowd away from His church.” 

― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Born in 1922 – Kurt Vonnegut, American soldier and author.

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”

                                                       –from Breakfast of Champions

Born in 1939 – Ali Farka Touré, Malian singer-songwriter and guitarist.

Listen to Ali’s Here.

Born in 1932 – Louis Malle, French-American director, producer, and screenwriter.

Above: Malle and actor Benoît Ferreux  go over a scene in Le souffle au coeur.

Born in 1861 – Andrei Ryabushkin, Russian painter.

Above: His 1895 painting, Seventeenth-Century Moscow Street on a Public Holiday.

In 1628,  Protestant French Huguenots surrendered to King Louis XIII and the Catholics at The Siege of La Rochelle, which had lasted for 14 months.

Pictured: Cardinal Richelieu at the Siege of La Rochelle, by Henri Motte, 1881.

Lou Reed died a year ago today.

“There’s a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out.”