I'm making my Kindle book on Henry Livingston free tomorrow

The Kindle book I wrote last year about the life of Henry Livingston, Jr., identified by multiple scholars as the actual author of "Night Before Christmas", is available for free on Amazon for 24 hours starting 26 Sep 2017.

I should have included Mac’s comments on my book. Mac is really such a sweetheart.

***

This book celebrates the life and times of Poughkeepsie army major and land-holder Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748–1828), the true author of that classic of popular culture, “The Night Before Christmas.” Mary Van Deusen’s lively writing is enhanced by a wealth of evocative illustrations. Her research has been exceptionally thorough, and many primary documents are reproduced. Livingston’s ancestors, relatives, and descendants belong in the story, so that biography is extended into fascinating family and social history. Included are many examples of Livingston’s verse and prose. The quest to prove that he composed “The Night Before Christmas” is related in detail, and there is a clear description of the research that established the truth.

Livingston’s engaging personality shines through this account, which vividly conjures up a bygone age.

I can actually imagine that. I’m overly excited about a book I’m writing. I don’t want to go into specifics, but some of my ancestors were in the middle of a huge national story in the early 20th century. I came along decades later in the 60’s, but grew up hearing about it from the older generation as if the memories were fresh. It is a fascinating story that few today know anything about. I don’t know how many will care about it, but I’m writing it as a tribute to my great-grandfather as much as anything. I want to have it finished while my dad is still alive and of sound mind because it’s about events in his family, so I’m writing it for him, too. And one day, my children and grandchildren will read it and understand people and events that helped shaped their lives a full century before they were born.

Hopefully, it will turn the price off and just be free without the Kindle unlimited. Feeling very naive about the process, but hopeful.

If you're doing it by Kindle unlimited, I recommend you take the other two books while you're at it. I was an art history/physics major and art wipes my soul out. Both of the other two are basically art books. The Night Before Christmas book has 89 illustrations from my own collection of antique editions of the poem. It's just staggeringly beautiful, and uses the original 1823 form of the poem.

The other book, Thrice Happy Poetry, is mindboggling. I still go through the printed copy with awe. The Kindle edition suffers with the Kindle problem of not wanting to lock text to illustrations on a single page. But it works well enough and art showing on a computer screen is amazing. I collect antique, turn of the century postcards, and I illustrated usually every other line of the poems - which are mostly about beautiful women, one of Henry's loves. 174 art postcards!

He has that light and happy touch in much of his work, and I always come away from reading him feeling good. Whether it's one of his serious pieces (not in either book)

Without distinction, fame, or note
Upon the tide of life I float,
A bubble almost lost to sight
As cobweb frail, as vapor light;
And yet within that bubble lies
A spark of life which never dies.

Or one of his poems about women, the one below is in Thrice Happy. If it's not obvious, I adore Henry.

The Acknowledgment

With the ladies' permission, most humbly I'd mention
How much we're oblidged by all their attention;
We sink with the weight of the huge obligation
Too long & too broad to admit compensation.

For us (and I blush while I speak I declare)
The charming Enchanters be-torture their hair,
Till gently it rises and swells like a knoll
Thirty inches at least from the dear little poll;
From the tip-top of which all peer out together
The ribband, the gause, & the ostrich's feather;
Composing a sight for an Arab to swear at
Or huge Patagonian a fortnight to stare at.

Then hoops at right angles that hang from ye knees
And hoops at the hips in connection with these
Set the Fellows presumptuous who court an alliance
And ev'ry pretender, at awful defiance.

And I have been told (though I must disbelieve
For the tidings as fact, I would never receive)
That billets of cork have supplied the place
Of something the Fair-ones imagine a grace;
But whether 'tis placed behind or before;
The shoulders to swell, or the bosom to shoar
To raise a false wen or expand a false bump
Project a false hip or protrude a false rump,
Was never ascertain'd; and fegs I declare
To make more enquiry I never will dare.

You are doing EXACTLY the right thing for exactly the right reasons. Good people die and I rail to the skies over that. And it seems that the only way to bring them back into some virtual life is to write about them and have them be remembered. And there are so MANY good people out there who need to be remembered. I am thrilled to hear you’re writing. It’s the most exciting feeling to create word pictures. Oh, please, too, record the stories that your family has told you. I can’t describe how it feels to believe you’ll remember and then to realize you’ve forgotten and no one is left to retell them to you. So many good wishes to you.

My favorite recorded version of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is by Waring's Pennsylvanians, from 1942.

In the last week of July of that year, Fred Waring and his crew were frantically working to finish the recording before the instrumentalists in the musicians' union went out on strike against the record companies on August 1. They barely managed to get it "in the can" before the walkout, which would last more than a year. The tune would go on to become a seasonal bestseller for decades afterwards.

Look at pictures and read the poetry. Those are my favorite parts.

We’ve been doing a new type of research on the poetry this past year. I’ve been frustrated since 1999 about identifying which poems that I find in newspapers belong to Henry or not. I started out thinking Don, like magic, would know. He couldn’t, of course. And Mac had a good instinct on Henry’s work, but mine turned out to be better. But it still wasn’t good enough.

So I started trying to convince Mac to find some analytical way that we could take a single poem and know for probability, since you can’t get certainty, if it was Henry’s or not. He came up with replacing the body of Moore poetry with a random assortment of newspaper poems to use as the comparison. So I searched through the appropriate papers and developed a body of “other poetry” that we’ve been running the same tests over. Started with the phoneme tests because they’re the real fundamental, unconscious tests. Mac got a paper out of it, but what I’m looking for is a way to run the whole battery of tests automatically on a single poem and get a single probability factor to attach to it, and that we haven’t finished.

We’ve run the battery automatically, we just haven’t figured out how to crunch it into a single number. So we’ve divided the poems into those that are Henry’s with certainty, high probability and possibility. And I’ve collected another test set to run against the tests that contain ones that are similiar to Henry’s, but which we can guarantee are not his and not those of famous people. And we run those as a counterweight to make sure we’re not getting false positives. It’s rather nifty because I don’t think this has ever been done before.

And, best of all, with the new newspaper subscriptions I’ve obtained, I’m finding more poems of Henry’s than I had before, so we’re adding to the canon. I even found two different Carrier Addresses that used a character that approaches a sleeping man, but these variants of the same poem are nightmares instead of a pleasant dream and turn out to be a Revolutionary version of France arguing about government.

This is all an ongoing story that really won’t fit in any book, I fear, but I so love watching the story unfold.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.