Monday, 27 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "IV," by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir (Counterpoint).
IV
The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth's green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of statesman and patriot Samuel Adams, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1722). As a young man, he tried to go into business for himself with some money his father had given him, but the business failed and he lost everything. He got a job as a tax collector, but he failed to collect any taxes and his accounting books were a mess. It wasn't until the British passed the Sugar Act of 1764 that he found his purpose in life. He was one of the first members of the colonies to speak out against taxation without representation and one of the first people to argue for the colonies' independence from Great Britain. He was the leader of the American radicals, and he was almost maniacal in his pursuit of American independence. He organized riots and wrote propaganda, describing the British as murderers and slave drivers. Adams said, "Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason," and he had a genius for stirring up feelings. In one speech he said, "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace ... Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." He was so influential in his opposition to the British that British soldiers tried to arrest him, but he and John Hancock hid in a farmhouse and weren't found. He went on to become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Continental Congress. He said, "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."
It's the birthday of hardboiled crime novelist Jim Thompson, born in Anadarko, Oklahoma (1906). He's best known for his novel The Killer Inside Me (1952) about a friendly, beloved sheriff who is also a serial killer. Thompson grew up in a town full of cattle thieves, gunfighters and bank robbers. He tried for seven years to get a high school diploma, working all night and going to school all day, but he finally dropped out and wandered around Texas, living as a hobo and working in the oil fields. One of his hobo friends encouraged him to write about his experiences, so he did. He spent the 1930s writing for true crime magazines. His mother, his wife and his sister would comb through the newspaper looking for crime stories, and he rewrote them as fiction. The newspaper stories often gave him nightmares, and he rewrote them with an emphasis on grisly violence, so that people would be as horrified as he was. When he began to publish crime novels like The Killer Inside Me (1952) and After Dark, My Sweet (1955), they were so dark and violent that they were only issued as pulp paperbacks and didn't get any critical attention. When he died in 1977, most of his books were out of print, but he told his wife to keep his manuscripts. He said, "Just you wait, I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years." About ten years later, in the mid-1980s, all of his crime novels were republished. They are now considered classics of the genre.
It's the birthday of lawyer and novelist Louis Auchincloss, born in Lawrence, New York (1917). He is known for writing about the New York City upper class in books like Portrait in Brownstone (1962), A World of Profit (1968), and Diary of a Yuppie (1987). He grew up in one of the most prestigious families in New York City, and spent his childhood in private schools and private clubs, surrounded by debutantes and servants. When his father took him to Wall Street to introduce him to the business world, he was horrified by what he called, "those dark narrow streets and those tall sooty towers." He wanted to be a writer, but when his first novel was rejected, he decided he wasn't cut out for the literary life and became a lawyer. He finally published his first book, The Indifferent Children, in 1947. It's an autobiographical novel about an upper-class young man and his experiences during World War II. He has published almost thirty books of fiction, most recently Her Infinite Variety (2000).
TUESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose (Knopf).
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Literary Notes:
It was on this day in 1066 that William the Conqueror of Normandy arrived on British soil. He defeated the British in the Battle of Hastings, and on Christmas day he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abby. One of the most important consequences of the Norman conquest of England was its effect on the English language. At the time, the British were speaking a combination of Saxon and Old Norse. The Normans spoke French. Over time, the languages blended, and the result was that English became a language incredibly rich in synonyms. Because the French speakers were aristocrats, the French words often became the fancy words for things. The Normans gave us "mansion"; the Saxons gave us "house." The Normans gave us "beef"; the Saxons gave us, "cow." The Normans gave us "excrement"; the Saxons gave lots of four letter words. The English language has gone on accepting additions to its vocabulary ever since the Norman invasion, and it now contains more than a million words, making it one of the most diverse languages on Earth. Writers have been arguing for hundreds of years about whether this is a good thing. Walt Whitman said, "The English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all." On the other hand, the critic Cyril Connelly wrote, "The English language is like a broad river ... being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck." And the poet Derek Walcott, who grew up in a British colony in the West Indies, said, "The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
It's the birthday of cartoonist Al Capp, born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Connecticut (1909). He's the creator of the cartoon strip L'il Abner, about a hillbilly named Abner Yokum who lived in the fictional town of Dogpatch, Kentucky. The strip ran from 1934 to 1977. It's been called the greatest cartoon strip of all time. John Steinbeck once said that Al Capp was one of the greatest living writers in the world and should receive the Nobel Prize. The strip was so popular that when Capp wrote about an imaginary tradition called Sadie Hawkins Day, on which an eligible male is forced to marry any woman who catches him, high schools across America started having Sadie Hawkins Dances.
It's the birthday of a man who shaped popular culture in America for almost twenty-five years, Ed Sullivan, born in Manhattan, New York City (1901). He wrote a gossip column called "Little Old New York" for the New York Daily News. He made extra money working as master of ceremonies for local variety shows, war benefits and dance contests. He was working at a giant dance competition called the Harvest Moon Ball when someone asked him if he'd like to try hosting a show on this new thing called television. He was forty-six years old. The Ed Sullivan Show, originally called Toast of the Town, premiered live on CBS in 1948, and within a few years about 50 million people watched it every Sunday night. Television was so new at the time that people didn't know what to do with it. Sullivan modeled it on vaudeville and did a little of everything. It had opera singers, rock stars, novelists, poets, ventriloquists, magicians, pandas on roller skates, and elephants on water skis. At a time when Hollywood saw television as a threat, Sullivan was the first person to persuade movie stars to come on his show and talk about their new movies. He brought celebrities into everyone's living room. His formula was "Open big, have a good comedy act, put in something for children, and keep the show clean." Women were not allowed to show cleavage. When Elvis Presley performed, the camera shot him from the waist up. When the Rolling Stones came on the show to play their song, "Let's Spend the Night Together," he made them change the words to "Let's Spend Some Time Together."
Sullivan was a shy, awkward man who couldn't tell jokes or sing or dance. He had been handsome when he started the show, but a car accident in 1956 severely damaged his face and his teeth. Comedians said he looked like he was in pain on stage, and he was. He suffered from terrible ulcers. But he loved performers, and he personally chose every guest for his show. He spent most of his free time searching for talent in nightclubs, often staying out until 4:00 in the morning. He discovered the violinist Itzhak Perlman on the streets of Tel Aviv. Even though his sponsors begged him not to, he invited African American performers and celebrities onto his show, including Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington, Richard Pryor, and James Brown. All he cared about was talent. At the end of his career in 1971, there were twenty different variety shows on television, all appealing to different demographics. When his show was canceled, he said, "Vaudeville has died a second death." He was the last television host who tried to appeal to everyone in America. He said, "If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers."
WEDNESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Broken Fishing Lines," by Robert Bly, used with permission of the poet.
Broken Fishing Lines
Sometimes I slip away on an October day,
Get in my car, and all that I haven't done—
Letters, poems, praises—fall away and I
Drive north, passing abandoned cabins,
And admiring the shadows thrown by bare trees
In small towns where cold waves lap the sand.
The renegade minister—the one they all gossip
About—would see those waves too, after throwing
His Sunday hat out the window. He'll be
All right. Death hugs the underside of oak leaves.
In each cove you pass you will see
What you had to say no to once.
Go ahead, pull off at some empty resort;
Walk among abandoned cabins on the shore.
You'll see the little holes that raindrops leave in fine sand,
And those old fishing lines driven up on the rocks.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of the Spanish author of Don Quixote (1605), Miguel Cervantes, born near Madrid (1547). He grew up in one of Spain's oldest families, and one of its poorest. When he was 24, he joined the Spanish Armada and fought at the Battle of Lepanto. He wounded his left hand in the battle, and he never regained its full use again. On the way back from the battle, he was captured and enslaved by pirates. Eventually he returned home, only to be put into jail there for fraud. While he was in prison he began his most famous work, Don Quixote. It's a story about a man who reads too many books about chivalry, goes mad, and tries to restore old-fashioned heroism to the world. In one episode, he mistakes a group of windmills for monsters and attacks them. Don Quixote is considered to be the first modern novel. It was written as a satire of the popular literature of its time. Don Quixote's foolishness mocks the chivalric romances that celebrated the values of the medieval world. Cervantes was successful in degrading this genre: very few medieval romances were ever published after Don Quixote.
It's the birthday of Gene Autry, one of the greatest country-western singers, born in Tioga, Texas (1907). He worked as a telegraph operator and played his guitar when the lines weren't busy. One day, a caller overheard him and said that he thought Autry could be a professional. The caller was Will Rogers, the famous "cowboy philosopher." Autry recorded 635 songs and acted in nearly 95 movies. He was the first person to sell out Madison Square Garden. In 1941, the town of Berwyn, Oklahoma, where Autry had a ranch, officially changed its name to "Gene Autry." When Autry retired, he was still very famous and very wealthy, and he purchased the California Angels baseball team.
It's the birthday of the author of the Inspector Morse mysteries, Colin Dexter, born in Lincolnshire, England (1930). He attended Cambridge University, where he earned his Master's Degree in Classical Studies. On a rainy vacation in 1972, Dexter read two mystery novels. He decided he could do better, and three years later he published Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), his first Inspector Morse novel. Inspector Morse is educated and charming, but he's often morose, and he has a weakness for beer and women. Morse is the main character in each of Dexter's fifteen novels, as well as his popular television series. Colin Dexter said, "Well I think that you've got to be prepared to write a load of nonsense to start with and then you can tart it up. The business of getting going, getting started, is enormously important, and this can be physical. Solvitur Ambulando as the Romans used to say, which means 'the solution comes through walking.'"
It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer William Beckford, born near Bath, England (1760). He's best known as the author of the story The History of the Caliph Vathek His father was the Lord Mayor of London and the descendant of royalty. William was orphaned at the age of eleven, but he was left an allowance of nearly 160,000 pounds a year. He became one of the wealthiest people in all England. After he had finished his education, Beckford traveled across Europe. When he returned, he decided to renovate the family mansion at Fonthill. But he wasn't happy with the work and ordered that the house be completely rebuilt, this time into a huge abbey. The project cost 273,000 pounds. Beckford built a tower 280 feet tall on the house. It collapsed and was rebuilt at least two times. William Hazlitt called Fonthill Abbey "a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness." When Beckford was 21 he wrote the story known as Vathek. He wrote it in French, and claimed to have finished it in three nights and two days. It's a tale about a young ruler corrupted by power and wealth who falls under the control of Elbis, the devil. Beckford eventually sold his Abbey for 330,000 pounds, having squandered most of his father's fortune. He retired into obscurity and died in 1844. He was buried, at his request, under the shadow of his great tower, next to his favorite dog.
THURSDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Berryman," by W.S. Merwin, from Flower & Hand (Copper Canyon Press).
Berryman
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of poet W.S. Merwin, born in New York City (1927). His father was a Presbyterian minister, and Merwin made up hymns before he could even write. Merwin is a pacifist, environmentalist, and Buddhist. When he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of the Ladder in 1971, he gave his $1,000 award to an anti-war demonstration. He currently lives in Hawaii, in a house built on an old pineapple farm where he preserves many native plants. Merwin's recent poetry reflects his passion for conservation, especially in the books The Vixen (1996), The River Sound (1999), and The Pupil (2001). W.S. Merwin said, "The world is still here, and there are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness."
It's the anniversary of the first edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in 1868. The success of the book made Alcott famous as a children's author. But her real passion was for dark and sensational stories with brilliant, diabolical woman protagonists. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a famous educator and friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He pressured his daughter to write a children's book. She responded by saying, "[I] never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." Little Women was so popular that she wrote two sequels, Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).
It's the birthday of mystery writer Michael Innes, born John Innes Mackintosh Stewart near Edinburgh (1906). He went to school at Oxford University, where he became close friends with the writers Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. In 1936 he sailed to Australia to start his first teaching job at Adelaide University. On the boat to Australia he began writing a mystery to pass the time. He published the book, Death at the President's Lodge (1936), later that year. Innes's mysteries are known for their complex plots and scholarly allusions, and for his entire life, he was able to excel both as a scholar and a mystery writer.
It's the birthday of American writer Truman Capote, born in New Orleans (1924). Even as a child, Capote wanted to become famous. He moved with his mother to New York City and applied to the prestigious Trinity School. He was given an IQ test as an entrance exam, and he scored 215, the highest in the school's history. Capote said, "I was having 50 perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing." One day he read a news release about the murder of a family in western Kansas, and he decided to write about it. He moved to Holcomb, Kansas with his friend Harper Lee, and became attached to the community as it recovered from the crime. Capote compiled over 6,000 pages of notes on the crime, 80% of which he threw away. Eventually, he wrote his most famous work, In Cold Blood (1966), about the murders. He got to know the two murderers well and worked for many years to have their death sentences reduced. When the two men were hanged, Capote became physically ill. In Cold Blood introduced a new genre, the "non-fiction novel." Capote received nearly two million dollars for text and movie rights.
Capote craved fame and spent much of his life socializing. He was an unassuming figure—small and with a high lisping voice. But he was a lively storyteller, and an expert charmer. George Plimpton said, "He knew he had to sing for his supper but, my God, what a song it was!"
FRIDAY, 1 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "Eating Together," by Li-Young Lee, from Rose (BOA Editions).
Eating Together
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of aviation pioneer William E. Boeing, born in Detroit, Michigan (1881). He went to Harvard, but left early to go into the timber industry. He became interested in flying, took lessons, and bought a small plane. On his first solo flight from Los Angeles to Seattle, he misjudged his landing and damaged his plane. When he learned that replacement parts would take weeks to ship, he decided to make his own, and that was the start of the company that became Boeing Aviation.
It's the birthday of historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin, born in Atlanta, Georgia (1914). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for Empire of Czar. His other books include The Discoverers (1983), a study of great explorers in history, and The Creators (1992), which chronicles the achievements of great artists.
It's the birthday of classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz, born in Ukraine (1904). When he was eight years old, he began studying music at the Kiev Conservatory. He got his big break in 1926 when he played Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with only a half-hour's notice. He got a standing ovation and became an overnight success. When he had already established a secure reputation, the only major conductor who had not opened up to him was Arturo Toscanini. After they met, Horowitz eventually won over Toscanini with his charm, and later married Toscanini's daughter. In 1986, he returned to his native Russia to give a series of concerts. It was his first return visit in sixty years.
It's the birthday of actor Walter Matthau, born in New York City (1920). He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Fortune Cookie (1966), and this was also the movie in which he starred with Jack Lemmon for the first time. When Matthau died several years ago, many newspapers reported in his obituary that his real surname was Matuschanskayasky. But this was just a false name that Matthau made up during an interview.
It's the birthday of the actress who played Maria in The Sound of Music (1965), Julie Andrews, born Julie Elizabeth Wells in Surrey, England (1935). She showed much talent even at a young age, and her father encouraged her. He taught her to read and write when she was three years old. When she was eight she began acting in theaters, and when she was thirteen she sang for the queen. Later, she became the youngest professional actress to play the lead role in My Fair Lady.
It's the birthday of author Tim O'Brien, born in Worthington, Minnesota. He graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, and went to Harvard for graduate school. He was drafted to go to the Vietnam War, and he went, even though he was opposed to it. Before he went off to Vietnam, he was spending the day in northern Minnesota and had the chance to cross the border into Canada, but he decided not to. He said later, "I did not want people to think badly of me. My conscience told me to run, but I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing." When he returned from Vietnam, he worked as an intern at The Washington Post. He left journalism after the publication of his book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). Almost all of his books deal with the Vietnam War. O'Brien also wrote The Things They Carried (1990), Going After Cacciato (1978), and July, July (2002). Tim O'Brien said, "Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember but the story."
SATURDAY, 2 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children," by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems (Knopf).
Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children
They will not be the same next time. The sayings
so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.
Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in
the more securely to the worldly buzz
of television, alphabet, and street talk,
culture polluting their gazes' dawn blue.
It makes you see at last the value of
those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells
of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces
like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)
who knew you from the start, when you were zero,
cooing their nothings before you could be bored
or knew a name, not even you own, or how
this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of comedian Groucho Marx, born in New York City (1890). In 1908 he began acting with his brothers Harpo and Chico, and they became famous as the Marx Brothers. He was known as the most talkative Marx brother, and he's famous for his snappy insults. He said, "Marriage is a wonderful institution. That is, if you like living in an institution." And, "I have nothing but confidence in you, and very little of that."
It's the birthday of poet Wallace Stevens, born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His father was a lawyer with a strong interest in literature. Wallace went to Harvard and then got a law degree from New York University. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Although he wrote highly imaginative poems, he led a simple, uneventful life as an executive at a Hartford, Connecticut insurance company. Stevens kept his life as a poet separate from his life as an executive. He would wake up at six o'clock to read for two hours before going to work, and he wrote many of his poems while walking home from the office in the evening. He wrote some of his best poetry after he reached the age of sixty, including the collections Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).
One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.
Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."
It's the birthday of writer Graham Greene, born in Hertfordshire, England (1904). He was the son a school headmaster, and was a very shy child who often tried to run away from home. After several suicide attempts in his teens, his therapist encouraged him to start writing and introduced him to several of his literary friends. Greene got a job as a journalist for the Times in London. He met his future wife when she wrote in to correct a mistake in one of his articles. He worked for the secret intelligence service in Sierra Leone during World War II, and drew on his experience to write his book The Heart of the Matter (1948). He traveled extensively all over the world and associated with people such as Fidel Castro, Manuel Noriega, and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos. His relationship with Torrijos led him to write Getting to Know the General (1948). Greene spent a good part of his life in Vietnam, and that experience gave him the material for one of his most well known books, The Quiet American (1955), which tells the story of an American, Fowler, who has an affair with a Vietnamese girl. When professor Norman Sherry started writing Greene's biography, Greene gave him a map of the world, and marked all of the places he had traveled. Sherry decided to go to all of the spots Greene had visited, and it took him twenty years to complete the book. Greene limited himself to writing just five hundred words per day, and would even stop writing in the middle of a sentence, but he ended up publishing over thirty books.
SUNDAY, 3 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "Only Years," by Kenneth Rexroth, from Sacramental Arts (Copper Canyon Press).
Only Years
I come back to the cottage in
Santa Monica Canyon where
Andrée and I were poor and
Happy together. Sometimes we
Were hungry and stole vegetables
From the neighbors' gardens.
Sometimes we went out and gathered
Cigarette butts by flashlight.
But we went swimming every day,
All year round. We had a dog
Called Proclus, a vast yellow
Mongrel, and a white cat named
Cyprian. We had our first
Joint art show, and they began
To publish my poems in Paris.
We worked under the low umbrella
Of the acacia in the dooryard.
Now I get out of the car
And stand before the house in the dusk.
The acacia blossoms powder the walk
With little pills of gold wool.
The odor is drowsy and thick
In the early evening.
The tree has grown twice as high
As the roof. Inside, an old man
And woman sit in the lamplight.
I go back and drive away
To Malibu Beach and sit
With a grey-haired childhood friend and
Watch the full moon rise over the
Long rollers wrinkling the dark bay.
Literary Notes:
Today is the anniversary of the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany. The two countries had been divided since the end of World War II. The most visible sign of this division was the Berlin Wall that divided the former capital for twenty-eight years.
It's the birthday of English veterinarian and author James Herriot, born James Alfred Wight in Sunderland, England (1916). Growing up, he never wanted to be anything other than a veterinarian. After going to school in Glasgow he dreamed of having a cutting-edge and flashy practice. He instead wound up, in his own words, "sitting on a high Yorkshire moor in shirt sleeves and Wellingtons, smelling vaguely of cows." But he fell in love with Yorkshire and the challenging life of a country veterinarian. After over twenty-five years as a veterinarian, Herriot started writing. He said he wanted to tell people what it was like to be an animal doctor before penicillin and modern medicine, and also about all of the people and funny events that he met on his daily rounds. It took him a long time to decide to finally write down his stories. In the end, his wife challenged him. He was telling her about his day, and said that he would put part of it in his book. She said to him, "Jim, you are never going to write a book." She reminded him that he had been talking about it for twenty-five years and had never written anything. He protested. She replied that old vets don't just suddenly write books. Herriot said, "That did it. I went straight out, bought a lot of paper and got down to the job." His first book was If Only They Could Talk (1970). It took him four years to get it published. The publishers only made 1200 copies, and it was not a success. He thought that this would be his only book. But he still had more stories to tell, and so he wrote another book, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet (1972). He suddenly became successful when these two works were published together in the United States as All Creatures Great and Small (1972). The book became a bestseller, and Herriot became a famous author.
It's the birthday of etiquette expert Emily Post, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1873). She started her writing career for financial reasons. Her husband had lost his fortune in a great stock panic. After this, he and Post divorced, and she had to raise her two daughters by herself. At first she was a novelist, but after fifteen years, her publisher convinced her to write an etiquette manual. She refused, because she thought that she knew nothing about etiquette and because she hated etiquette books. Then she read one of the books that had been published, and thought that it was completely wrong. So she wrote her own. Post's first etiquette manual was published in 1922. It was titled Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. She continued to write manuals for "high society" until 1960. In addition to her books, Post wrote a syndicated newspaper column that was carried by over two hundred newspapers. She said, "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."
It's the birthday of Thomas Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina (1900). He wrote autobiographical novels, including Look Homeward Angel (1929). In that book he fictionalized his hometown and the people he knew in it. He cast himself as Eugene Gant, a kid who grew up reading history and adventure books. Wolfe spent many years trying to become a playwright. But he was convinced to become a novelist by Aline Bernstein, a married woman twenty years older than Wolfe with whom he had a five-year love affair. He dedicated Look Homeward, Angel to her, and made her the model for several characters in his novels. Many of Wolfe's writings were published after his death at a young age from meningitis. Before leaving on his last trip, he left an eight-foot-tall crate of notebooks and writing with his editor. This included outlines for his next two novels. After his sudden death, the editor went through the writings and created two novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).
It's the birthday of American novelist Gore Vidal, born Eugene Luther Vidal, in West Point, New York (1925). He's the author of many novels, including Washington, D.C. (1967) and Duluth: A Novel (1983). His essays are collected as United States: Essays, 1952-1992 (1992). Vidal said, "Style is knowing who you are, what to say, and not giving a damn."
