MONDAY, 16 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog," by Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words (Perennial).
The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog
I never intended to have this life, believe me—
It just happened. You know how dogs turn up
At a farm, and they wag but can't explain.
It's good if you can accept your life—you'll notice
Your face has become deranged trying to adjust
To it. Your face thought your life would look
Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.
That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.
Even your parents can't believe how much you've changed.
Sparrows in winter, if you've ever held one, all feathers,
Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.
You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,
But you can't quite get back to the winter sparrow.
Your life is a dog. He's been hungry for miles,
Doesn't particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is President's Day. George Washington was born on February 11 according to the old-style calendar and February 22 according to the calendar we use today. In 1968, an act of legislation was passed that made the third Monday of February the official day to celebrate Washington's birthday. Since Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, President's Day has become a day on which we honor his birthday as well as George Washington's.
It's the birthday of novelist Richard Ford, born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). He's best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.
After his father had a heart attack, Ford went to live with his grandparents, who managed a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. He went to college to study hotel management, but when he got there he realized what he really wanted to do was read literature, and he switched his major to English. After college, he taught for a year, tried to join the Arkansas State Police, and spent a semester at law school. In 1968, he moved to New York City, got married, and decided on a whim to try to become a writer. He said he wanted to do something different, and "being a writer just seemed like a good idea. It was just casting off into the dark."
Ford's first novel, A Piece of My Heart, came out in 1976. He followed that up with The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). The two books together sold fewer than 12,000 copies, and Ford started thinking that maybe he wasn't cut out for writing novels. He quit writing fiction and got a job as a sportswriter for Inside Sports magazine, covering baseball and college football. He liked his new job and would have kept at it if the magazine hadn't have folded the following year. He didn't have anything else to do, so he started writing a novel about a fiction writer who becomes a sportswriter after the death of his son. The Sportswriter was published as in 1986, and it was huge critical and popular success. He wrote in The Sportswriter, "I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people—men and women alike—could go on to happier, more productive lives."
Ford's 1995 novel Independence Day picks up where The Sportswriter left off, with the sportswriter now a realtor trying to connect with his wife and his teenage son. After Ford finished writing it, he read aloud the whole 700-page manuscript, twice. Just before it was going to be published, his editor mentioned offhand that there were quite a few verbs that ended in "-ly". Ford agreed, and spent two weeks going back through the novel to change all the "-ly" verbs he could. All of his work paid off: Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.
Ford said, "If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure."
It's the birthday of critic and biographer Van Wyck Brooks, born in Plainfield, New Jersey (1886). His early twentieth century biographies of American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman helped to create a sense of history in American literature.
Brooks said, "The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but by newspapers and the Bible."
It's the birthday of historian and philosopher Henry Adams, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1838). He was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams, and wrote several books on American history, including the nine-volume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-91). He's best known for his dark and pessimistic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1918). He said he felt more at home in seventeenth and eighteenth century America than he did in twentieth century America. He wrote that most Americans he had encountered "had no time for thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond their day's work; their attitude to the universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish."
TUESDAY, 17 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Waving Good-Bye," by Gerald Stern, from This Time: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton).
Waving Good-Bye
I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the father of modern Persian fiction, Sadeq Hidayat, born in what is now Tehran, Iran (1903). Before he came along, poetry in Persia was given a much higher status than prose, but he helped to change that with his first two short story collections, Three Drops of Blood (1932) and Buried Alive (1930). His masterpiece was the novel The Blind Owl (1936), about a depressed Persian man who turns to opium and alcohol to escape from his misery.
It's the birthday of spy novelist Elleston Trevor, born Trevor Dudley-Smith in Bromley, Kent, England (1920). He's the author of a popular series of novels starring the secret agent Quiller, who works for a branch of the British government so secret that it is not officially acknowledged to exist. He started writing while he was in the British Air Force during World War II. He wrote a novel every two weeks, using different pseudonyms. He once said that the only reason that he was able to publish so many novels was that there was a paper shortage during World War II, and his publisher was one of the in England that had a lot of paper in its warehouse.
It's the birthday of novelist Chaim Potok, born in the Bronx, New York (1929). He's the author of several novels about Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx, including The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969) and The Book of Lights (1981).
He decided to become a writer after reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945). He was fourteen years old, and all he had read were magazines and pulp fiction. He wanted to read a serious adult book, and he chose Brideshead Revisited at random from the public library. He later said about reading it, "I found myself inside a world the merest existence of which I had known nothing about. I lived more deeply inside the world in that book than I lived inside my own world."
He worked for two years as a chaplain for the United States Army in Korea, and it was there that he wrote his first novel. It wasn't published, but it was the basis for his first major success, The Chosen (1967), about two Jewish friends growing up in Brooklyn in the late 1940s. He went on to write many more novels, as well as a book of history called Chaim Potok's History of the Jews (1978).
It's the birthday of economist Thomas Robert Malthus, born in Surrey, England (1766). In 1798 he published a pamphlet called An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that the human population of the earth was growing at a faster rate than the food supply, and that war, disease and famine were necessary in order to prevent overpopulation.
People are still debating whether Malthus was right about overpopulation. The world's growth rate has been declining for the past 40 years. Technological advances in agriculture have made it possible to get more food out of the same amount of land; and birth control has reduced the birth rates in many countries. On the other hand, many developing countries are growing by more than 80 million people a year, and are full of disease and starvation.
It's the birthday of folk poet Andrew "Banjo" Paterson, born in Narrambla, New South Wales, Australia (1864). He's credited with writing the lyrics to the ballad "Waltzing Matilda," sometimes called Australia's unofficial national anthem. He was raised on a sheep farm in the bush country of New South Wales, and he came to love the rugged land and people. He wrote his first poems for a Sydney magazine under the name "Banjo", which he took from a racing horse. He wrote about cowboys, drovers and other outdoorsmen, and he soon developed a huge following. His first collection, The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895), sold out a week after it was published. It went through four editions in six months, and it's still one of the best-selling books of Australian poetry ever published.
It's the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell, born in London (1930). She's best known for her mystery novels featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. In her first few novels, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford was fat, ugly and crude; but over the years he's become thinner, smarter and nicer. Rendell said, "At first I never saw him as a serious character, but if I was going to have to live with him, I had to make him tolerable." Instead of being solitary and depressed like most detectives in mystery novels, Reginald Wexford is happily married with two children.
It's the birthday of writer Margaret Truman, born in Independence, Missouri (1924). She's the daughter of President Harry S Truman, born while he was a county judge. She was twenty-one years old when her father became president. Her first books were biographies of each of her parents, as well as an autobiography called Souvenir (1956). She didn't start writing novels until she was in her fifties. She was working on a history of U.S. presidents' children when she had an idea for a mystery novel set in the White House. Murder in the White House was published in 1980, and she's gone on to write many more mystery novels set in Washington D.C., including Murder in the Supreme Court (1982) and Murder in the Smithsonian (1983).
WEDNESDAY, 18 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Walking to Work," by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press).
Walking to Work
Today, it's the obsidian
ice on the sidewalk
with its milk white bubbles
popping under my shoes
that pleases me, and upon it
a lump of old snow
with a trail like a comet,
that somebody,
probably falling in love,
has kicked
all the way to the corner.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). She's the author of Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987) and other novels. She grew up during the Depression in a steel town just west of Cleveland. She graduated from college with a degree in literature and got a job teaching English at Howard University.
She didn't start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She wasn't happy with her marriage, and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She later said, "It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly." She joined a small writing group, and one day she didn't have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969). She wrote most of it in the mornings and on weekends while she was working as an editor for Random House and raising her children on her own.
She continued to edit books for Random House after the publication of The Bluest Eye, but she was transferred from the textbook department to the trade department. She helped to get books by black authors published, including an autobiography by Muhammed Ali, and she wrote social commentary for mass-market publications.
Morrison's first big success was the 1977 novel Song of Solomon, about a rich black businessman who tries to hide his working class background. It was the first novel by a black author to be chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
Morrison said, "[Writing] stretches you . . . [and] makes you stay in touch with yourself. . . . It's like going under water for me, the danger. Yet I'm certain I'm going to come up."
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, born in Heraklion on the island of Crete, Greece (1886). He's best known for his novels Zorba the Greek (1946) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1955). He got a degree in law in 1906, but instead of becoming a lawyer he went to Paris to study philosophy with the philosopher Henri Bergson. In 1919 he began his long career in public service, working in the Greek Ministry of Public Welfare. He was responsible for the rescue of about 150,000 Greeks from a war in the western Soviet Union. He also spent years traveling through Europe and Asia and working on his epic 33,333-line sequel to Homer's Odyssey.
He didn't make it big as a writer until he was sixty years old, with the publication of Zorba the Greek (1946). It's about an intellectual who travels to Crete with his uneducated friend Zorba to manage a group of mine workers. Kazantzakis wrote in Zorba the Greek: "How simple . . . a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple . . . heart."
It's the birthday of novelist Wallace Stegner, born in Lake Mills, Iowa (1909). He wrote dozens of novels about the American West, including The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) and Angle of Repose (1973). As a child, his father was constantly moving the family from town to town. They went from North Dakota to Washington to Saskatchewan to Montana—where he and his friends used to ride boxcars up into the mountains to go hunting and fishing. After college, he ended up in California, where he founded the creative writing program at Stanford University.
He thought that most writing about the West relied too much on legend and myth. He was one of the first writers to write about people in the West without stereotyping them as tough cowboys and helpless women. His best known novel is Angle of Repose (1973), about an old, sick man who finally accepts his hardships after he learns about the hard lives of his grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.
Wallace Stegner said, "It is something—it can be everything—to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below."
THURSDAY, 19 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Waking," by Stephen Dobyns, from Velocities: New and Selected Poems (Penguin).
Waking
Waking, I look at you sleeping beside me.
It is early and the baby in her crib
has begun her conversation with the gods
that direct her, cooing and making small hoots.
Watching you, I see how your face bears the signs
of our time together—for each objective
description, there is the romantic; for each
scientific fact, there's the subjective truth—
this line was caused by days at a microscope,
this from when you thought I no longer loved you.
Last night a friend called to say that he intends
to move out; so simple, he and his wife splitting
like a cell into two separate creatures.
What would happen if we divided ourselves?
As two colors blend on a white pad, so we
have become a third color; or better,
as a wire bites into the tree it surrounds,
so we have grown together. Can you believe
how frightening I find this, to know I have
no life except with you? It's almost enough
to make me destroy it just to protest it.
Always we seemed perched on the brink of chaos.
But today there's just sunlight and the baby's
chatter, her wonder at the way light dances
on the wall. How lucky to be ignorant,
to greet joy without a trace of suspicion,
to take that first step without worrying what
comes trailing after, as night trails after day,
or winter summer, or confusion where all
seemed clear and each moment was its own reward.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Stephen Dobyns, born in Orange, New Jersey (1941). He's the author of many collections, including Black Dog, Red Dog (1984) and Body Traffic (1990).
It's the birthday of novelist Jonathan Lethem, born in Brooklyn, New York (1964). He's known for his humorous science fiction novels such as Girl in Landscape (1998) and As She Climbed Across the Table (1994). He lived for ten years in California, but he returned to Brooklyn six years ago to write his most recent novel, The Fortress of Solitude (2003), which was published last year. It's about two kids named Dylan and Mingus, one white and one black, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s.
It's the birthday of novelist Amy Tan, born to Chinese parents in Oakland, California (1952). She once said she writes using the four different languages she grew up with: the straightforward English she spoke to her mother, the broken English her mother spoke to her, her simplified translation of her mother's Chinese, and what she imagined to be her mother's translation if her mother could speak in perfect English.
She worked for many years as a freelance business writer. She drafted speeches with names like "Telecommunications and You" for salesmen and executives. She became so successful that she was working ninety-hour weeks to keep up with all her clients. She eventually entered therapy for workaholics, and around the same time she wrote her first short story. She started writing The Joy Luck Club in her mid-thirties, after visiting her half-sisters in China. It consists of sixteen interrelated stories about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their Chinese-American daughters. It was a huge bestseller and was made into a popular movie.
Tan has gone on to write the novels The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001). Her latest book, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, came out last October.
It's the birthday of novelist Carson McCullers, born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia (1917). She's known for writing about bizarre, twisted characters in novels such as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which was published when she was twenty-three years old. It's about four people in a small town in Georgia—an adolescent girl, a socialist agitator, a black physician, a widower who owns a café, and a deaf and mute man who tries unsuccessfully to communicate with the people around him.
McCullers said, "The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without love and the struggle that goes with love?"
FRIDAY, 20 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Beer Bottle," by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press).
Beer Bottle
In the burned-
out highway
ditch the throw-
away beer
bottle lands
standing up
unbroken,
like a cat
thrown off
of a roof
to kill it,
landing hard
and dazzled
in the sun
right side up;
sort of a
miracle.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain, born in Hoquiam, Washington (1967). His parents got divorced when he was eight years old, and he spent the next several years shuttling back and forth between the homes of his parents, his grandparents, and three sets of aunts and uncles. He started playing guitar and writing songs in high school, but when he was seventeen, his father forced him to sell the guitar and sign up for the Navy. He only decided not to enlist at the last minute. He got a job as a school janitor and started playing in local rock bands, living at various friends' houses and on the street, occasionally sleeping under a bridge. He and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach (1989), under the name Nirvana. The album was received well enough that they began to play live venues in nearby cities like Olympia and Seattle. They signed to a major label for their next album, Nevermind (1991), and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.
He became internationally famous almost overnight. The way he dressed—in torn jeans, flannel shirts, and striped sweaters—began to influence clothing designers. His abrasive music was played at high school dances and sporting events, and it changed the kind of music that got played on the radio. But Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994, he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.
It's the birthday of filmmaker Robert Altman, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1925). His father was a successful insurance salesman, and a compulsive gambler. Altman said, "I learned a lot about losing from [my father]. That losing is an identity; that you can be a good loser and a bad winner; that none of it—gambling, money, winning or losing—has any real value."
Altman served during World War II as a bomber pilot, and then got a job making industrial films for various corporations. He started working on television shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Bonanza, but the television executives didn't like him. He always wanted important characters on his TV shows to die unexpectedly, because he thought that was more realistic. He didn't think there was enough realism in television.
His first success as a Hollywood filmmaker came when he chose to direct a movie that had been passed over by fourteen other directors. The movie was M*A*S*H (1970), about a group of military surgeons who joke around to keep themselves sane during the Korean War. It was the first major studio film to use extreme profanity and to mock the belief in God. The studio almost didn't release it because they thought the surgical scenes were too bloody and morbid. It came out at the height of the Vietnam War, and became the highest grossing movie of the year.
Altman has since become known for movies using large casts of characters and overlapping, improvised dialogue, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), about a whore house in the old west; Nashville (1975), about the country music industry; The Player (1992), about Hollywood; and Short Cuts (1993), loosely based on a series of short stories by Raymond Carver. His most recent film is The Company (2003) about a group of ballet dancers in New York City.
Altman said, "To play it safe is not to play."
It's the birthday of short story writer and novelist Ellen Gilchrist, born in Vicksburg, Mississippi (1935). After her marriage broke up, she tried to write poetry in her free time, but she didn't think of it as anything serious. Then, in her late thirties, she read a book of poetry by Anne Sexton, and she suddenly felt that she was wasting her life. She said, "I began to have this recurrent dream of being in my house in New Orleans and opening a door to find all these rooms that I didn't know were there, full of chests with the drawers full of treasures. Nothing had been touched in a long, long time, and I had this feeling that I wanted to get other people in the house and show them these rooms. So I began to write." She published her first book of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, in 1981, and she has gone on to publish many more books of short stories and novels, including Drunk with Love (1986), I Cannot Get You Close Enough (1990), and Rhoda: A Life in Stories (1995).
It's the birthday of spy novelist Alan Furst, born in New York City (1941). In 1983, he got an assignment to write about the Soviet Union. He happened to arrive on the day the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean Airlines plane, and the country was in a state of panic. People in the streets were terrified that the United States might use the incident as an excuse to attack. He was shocked by the number of policemen on the streets, and the sense that the people were as afraid of their own government as they were of the United States. He realized that he wanted to write a novel that captured the experience of Soviet totalitarianism. He moved to Paris and sold all his nonessential possessions, and started researching and writing the novel that would become Night Soldiers (1988), about an ordinary man who is forced to become a spy for the Soviets. The book was a big success, in part because it was such a realistic spy novel, with close attention paid to precise historical details. Furst has gone on to write many novels about World War II era Europe, including The World at Night (1996), Red Gold (1999), and Kingdom of Shadows (2001).
It's the birthday of poet Hugo Williams, born in Windsor, England (1942). One of the most popular living poets in England, he's the author of many collections, including Symptoms of Loss (1965), Sugar Daddy (1970), and Some Sweet Day (1975).
It's the birthday of photographer and conservationist Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco, California (1902). When he was thirteen, his father took him to Yosemite National Park, and it was there that he took his first photographs with a Kodak Box Brownie camera. He couldn't wait to get the pictures back from the developer, but when he did, he was horrified at how they turned out. He thought they hadn't captured the beauty he'd seen at all. He persuaded the owner of a San Francisco photo-finishing plant to take him on as an apprentice in the darkroom, and he began traveling to Yosemite every summer, working on improving his photographic technique.
He started out taking pictures in soft focus, imitating impressionist paintings, but he slowly became obsessed with clarity. After one of his first trips to the Sierra Nevada, he wrote, "The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor." He wanted to capture that quality in his photographs, and he dedicated himself to rendering every blade of grass and particle of sand in perfect focus. He spent so much time trying to perfect his photographs in the darkroom that he only produced about twelve new images every year that he felt satisfied with.
Adams also used his own photographs to campaign for environmental protection. He joined the Sierra Club in 1919 and served on the board of directors for more than forty years. He allowed his photographs to be reprinted in numerous calendars and books, in the hopes that they would persuade people to feel about nature the way that he did, and in the process he became the most famous landscape photographer of the twentieth century. In 1984, shortly after his death, Congress approved the Ansel Adams Wilderness, which added several thousand acres of land to Yosemite National Park. A year later, a peak in the High Sierra was named Mount Ansel Adams.
SATURDAY, 21 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Funeral Blues," by W.H. Auden, from As I Walked Out One Evening (Vintage).
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden, born in York, England (1907). He grew up in an industrial area of northern England. He loved the huge mining machines designed for breaking up rocks, and he originally wanted to become a mining engineer, but then one afternoon when he was fifteen, a friend asked him if he ever wrote poetry. He never had, but being asked the question made him want to start. He studied poetry in college and began to write his own, supporting himself as a schoolmaster at a series of prep schools. He became known as an incredibly versatile poet, experimenting with all kinds of verse forms. When other poets were writing personal lyrics, his poems addressed philosophy, psychology, art history and mythology.
As he witnessed the rise of fascism throughout Europe in the 1930s, he began to write political poems attacking nationalism. When Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War II, he wrote the poem "September 1, 1939" in disgust. The poem began:
"I sit in one of the divesAuden argued that Nazism was just a symptom of the madness of Europe in general, and he used the poem as a kind of goodbye letter to the whole continent. It was one of the last political poems he ever wrote. He moved to the United States, even though many critics in England called him a deserter and a coward. He taught at various American universities and encouraged many younger poets, including Adrienne Rich. He died in 1973, and is now considered one of the greatest poets of the English language.
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night."
It's the birthday of columnist and humorist Erma Bombeck, born in Dayton, Ohio (1927). She became famous for her humor column called "At Wits End", about the daily madness of being a housewife. She knew she wanted to be a journalist from the eighth grade, and she had a humor column in her high school newspaper. She got a job at the Dayton Journal-Herald writing obituaries and features for the women's page, but when she married a sportswriter there, she chose to quit her job and stay home with the kids. She spent a decade as a fulltime mother, and then in 1964 she decided she had to start writing again or she would go crazy. She said, "I was thirty-seven, too old for a paper route, too young for social security, and too tired for an affair."
She got a column at a small Ohio paper and wrote about the daily trials and tribulations of the average housewife. Within a few years, she was one of the most popular humor columnists in America. She went on to publish many books, including Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983) and Family: The Ties That Bind . . . and Gag! (1987).
Bombeck wrote, "All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them."
It's the birthday of novelist and diarist Anaïs Nin, born in Paris, France (1903). Her father was a Spanish composer and her mother was a Cuban singer, and she spent the first ten years of her life traveling with them around the world. Her father abandoned the family when she was eleven, and she started writing a letter to him that became her diary. She kept the diary for the rest of her life, and it eventually totaled more than 35,000 pages.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer David Foster Wallace, born in Ithaca, New York (1962). Growing up, he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player, but when he got to college, his teachers singled him out as someone who might become an important philosopher. One of his teachers actually told him that he was a genius. Wallace said, "It was the happiest moment in my life. I felt like I would never have to go to the bathroom again—that I'd transcended it." But he took a year off to drive a school bus in his parents' town of Urbana, Illinois, and when he got back to school he decided to write a work of fiction for his senior philosophy thesis. It became his first published novel, The Broom of the System (1987).
He spent the next several years trying to live the life of a hip, successful writer, but instead he grew increasingly miserable. He said, "I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift." He started sitting in on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Boston, and found them to be incredibly powerful and uplifting. They gave him an idea for a novel about a future America where everyone is addicted to something—sports, drugs, sex, or entertainment.
That novel was Infinite Jest (1996), which became a bestseller even though it was more than 1000 pages long and included 100 pages of footnotes. It's about many things, including Alcoholics Anonymous, tennis, environmental catastrophe, Canadian terrorists, and a movie that's so entertaining it kills people.
It's the birthday of novelist Ha Jin, born in Liaoning Province, China (1956). He studied American literature in college, and in the mid-1980s, he traveled to the United States to get his PhD. He planned to return to China as soon as he finished his degree, but in June of 1989 he watched on TV as the Chinese Army attacked students demonstrating for democratic reform in Tiananmen Square. He decided at that moment that he would never return to China. He had never intended to become a writer, but his dissertation didn't make him a very good candidate for teaching positions in the United States, and he couldn't thing of anything else to do. He said, "Writing in English became my means of survival, of spending or wasting my life, of retrieving losses, mine and those of others." He published his first book of poetry, Between Silences (1990), and got a job teaching creative writing at Emory University. He began to write fiction as well, and he chose to write in English, rather than having someone translate his work from the Chinese. He said, "I slowly began to squeeze the Chinese literary mentality out of my mind. . . . For the initial years, it was like having a blood transfusion."
His first book of fiction was Ocean of Words (1996), and he has also written several novels, including Waiting (1999), about a doctor in the Chinese Army who has been trying to end his arranged marriage for eighteen years but can't seem to tell his wife. His most recent book is The Crazed (2002).
SUNDAY, 22 FEBRUARY, 2004
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Poem: [What lips my lips have kissed] by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Modern Library).
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings so more.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in Rockland, Maine (1892). Her parents divorced when she was a little girl, so she was raised by her mother, who supported the family by making wigs and working as a nurse. Millay helped take care of her younger sisters, but when she wasn't cooking or cleaning, she wrote poetry. By the time she was fourteen, she was publishing poems in the children's magazine St. Nicholas. Her mother couldn't afford to send her to college, but when she was nineteen, she entered a poem called "Renascence" in a poetry contest hoping to win the large cash prize. One of the judges was so impressed that he started a correspondence with her, fell in love, and nearly divorced his wife. Her poem didn't win first prize, but when she recited it at a public reading in Camden, Maine, a woman in the audience offered to pay for her to go to Vassar College, and Millay accepted.
At Vassar, she was the most notorious girl on campus, famous for both her poetry and her habit of breaking rules. Vassar's president, Henry Noble McCracken, once wrote to her, "You couldn't break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don't want a banished Shelley on my doorstep." She wrote back, "Well, on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole." She started sending her poems off to magazine editors in New York City, and she always included a picture of herself with her submissions. She had red hair and green eyes and when she'd lived in Camden, Maine, people had often stopped and stared at her on the street, she was so beautiful. When she moved to Greenwich Village after college, most of the men in the literary scene fell in love with her, including the critic Edmund Wilson, who proposed to her and never got over her rejection. He wrote about her in his novel I Thought of Daisy (1929).
Millay wrote poems about bohemian parties and free love in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and she became one of the icons of the Jazz Age. When she gave readings of her poetry, she drew huge crowds of adoring fans. She recited her poetry from memory, delivering the poems with her whole body. Many critics considered her the greatest poet of her generation. The poet Thomas Hardy famously said that America had produced only two great things: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She became the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
But after her marriage, she began to suffer from debilitating stomach pains, and she became addicted to morphine. By the end of her life, her poetry had fallen out of fashion. She died in 1950, at the age of fifty-eight, after falling down the steps in the middle of the night.
Millay wrote, "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely light!"
It's the birthday of poet Gerald Stern, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1925). He was the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. His younger sister died of spinal meningitis when he was just eight years old, and his parents never recovered from the loss. He grew up the only Jewish kid in his school, and he often got into brutal street fights with boys in the neighborhood.
He began to write poetry in college but he didn't know any other poets, so he didn't try very hard to get anything published. He once wrote an epic poem called "Ishmael's Dream" and sent it to the poet W.H. Auden. Auden was so impressed he invited Stern to tea, but Stern never even sent the poem out for publication. He later said, "I was too harsh a critic of my own work, and I couldn't focus my thoughts and feelings in a way that would satisfy me."
He worked a series of teaching jobs but began to suffer from depression. Then, one day, in his late thirties, after a doctor's appointment, he suddenly realized that his life was almost half over, and he began to write poems furiously. He said, "I discovered . . . everything at once—voice, style, approach, and have been practically besieged by poems from that time on." He published his first poetry collection, The Pineys, in 1971, and has gone on to write many more collections, including Leaving Another Kingdom (1990), Bread Without Sugar (1992), and Odd Mercy (1995).
It's the birthday of Edward Gorey, born in Chicago, Illinois (1925). He's known for writing and illustrating many morbidly funny books, including The Beastly Baby (1962), The Wuggly Ump (1963), and The Epiplectic Bicycle (1969). After college, he got a job drawing book covers for Doubleday, and started to produce a series of very strange, uncategorizable books of his own. These books looked like children's storybooks, but they were much too dark and violent to be read by children. The Hapless Child (1961) is about a little girl named Sophia who is picked on and abused, sold into slavery, forced to make artificial flowers, and finally run over by a car. His alphabet book The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963) teaches the ABCs by using the names of children who have been violently injured or killed. It begins, "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears."
Because his books were printed in such small quantities, they became collector's items, and began to sell for up to a thousand dollars each. Eventually, his early books were collected into an anthology called Amphigorey (1972), which became a bestseller. By the time of his death in 2000 he had written and illustrated more than a hundred books, and his work had been made into a Broadway musical.
