Monday, 10 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "High Water Mark" by David Shumate, from High Water Mark © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
High Water Mark
It's hard to believe, but at one point the water rose to this
level. No one had seen anything like it. People on rooftops.
Cows and coffins floating through the streets. Prisoners
carrying invalids from their rooms. The barkeeper consoling
the preacher. A coon hound who showed up a month later
forty miles downstream. And all that mud it left behind. You
never forget times like those. They become part of who you
are. You describe them to your grandchildren. But they think
it's just another tale in which animals talk and people live
forever. I know it's not the kind of thing you ought to say...
But I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die.
It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and
drift downstream and see where I end up.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet Philip Levine, born in Detroit (1928). He's the author of many collections of poetry, including What Work Is (1991), The Simple Truth (1994), and The Mercy (1999). He discovered writing before he really knew what it was. He said, "As a boy of fourteen, I took long walks and talked to the moon and stars, and night after night I would reshape and polish these talks, but the moon and stars never answered."
After college, he tried getting a job in advertising, but he couldn't stand it, so he supported himself working in various auto factories around Detroit. Looking around at the other men in the factories, he realized none of them had a voice. Nobody was speaking for them or writing for them. He said, "As young people will... I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them, and that's what my life would be. And sure enough I've gone and done it. Or I've tried anyway."
Philip Levine said, "In a curious way, I'm not much interested in language. In my ideal poem, no words are noticed. You look through them into a vision of... just see the people, the place."
It was on this day in 1776 that Thomas Paine published his political pamphlet Common Sense arguing for American independence from Great Britain. At the time of the publication, Paine had been living in America only two years. He'd grown up in England, where he'd struggled to earn a living as a tax collector. He saw first-hand the corruption of the British government, and had recently been fired from his job when he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who encouraged him to move to America.
He arrived just in time to see the colonies rebelling against problems in the British tax system similar to what he had experienced back in England. He got a job as a journalist, and he immediately began to write about the political situation. After the battle of Lexington and Concord in April of 1775, he decided that the only solution to the conflict would be total independence for the American colonies. But when he expressed those ideas in his newspaper, he lost his job.
He spent the next several months traveling around Pennsylvania, going to various bars and taverns and talking to ordinary people about their opinions on American independence. He used these conversations to develop a writing style that an ordinary person could easily understand, and he used that style to write his pamphlet "Common Sense."
The pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies, more copies than any other publication had ever sold at that time in America. It helped persuade many Americans to support revolution, and six months later, the colonies officially declared independence.
It's the birthday of the poet Robinson Jeffers, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1887). His father was an Old Testament scholar who taught him Greek and Latin, but from an early age he was also interested in science. He spent his free time either writing poetry or constructing homemade wings with which he attempted to fly. In college, he studied medicine, anatomy, astronomy, and forestry. He was still trying to figure out what to do for a living when he inherited enough money to support himself writing poetry, so he moved to the coast of California and built himself an observation tower so that he could observe the natural world and write about it.
His scientific studies had persuaded him that human beings were just one animal species whose time on earth would be brief, and he explored this idea in his poetry. He wrote,
"[Nature] knows the people are a tideHe was living in his tower, without electricity or plumbing, publishing his books of poetry at his own expense, when an editor chose one of his poems for an anthology of California verse. Jeffers sent the editor his new collection, Tamar and Other Poems (1924) as a thank you gift, and the editor liked it so much that he sent it around to various magazines, where it got great reviews. Jeffers sent all the copies of the book he had to New York, and they immediately sold out.
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve... As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from."
Within a year, Jeffers was hailed as a genius, compared to Sophocles and Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Real estate agents started using his name to sell land in Carmel, California, where he lived.
But after his initial success, he began to write long narrative poems that no one could categorize. They told stories of sex and violence, more like the novels of Faulkner than any poetry being written at the time. Critics didn't know what to make of these poems, and so by the 1940's, Jeffers had sunk back into obscurity. He's been reassessed in the last two decades as possibly one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. A new collection of his work, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers came out in 2001.
Robinson Jeffers wrote,
"Man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems."
It's the birthday of historian Stephen E. Ambrose, born in Decatur, Illinois (1936). He was the son of a small town doctor, and he became a football star at the University of Wisconsin, where he played both offense and defense and often spent the entire sixty-minute game on the field. If he had been a little bigger, he would have considered turning pro. But after taking a class with a popular history professor on campus, he decided to devote his life to history.
He was twenty-eight years old when a small university press published his first book, Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (1962), a biography of General Henry Halleck. Only a few thousand copies of the biography were printed, and Ambrose assumed that it had only been read by the academic community. But one day he got a phone call from the former President Dwight Eisenhower, who had read his book on Halleck and liked it so much that he wanted Ambrose to be his own biographer. Ambrose wrote several about Eisenhower, including The Supreme Commander (1970) and Eisenhower: The President (1984), and those books helped him make the leap from academic to popular historian.
He went on to write many best-selling books about American history, including Band of Brothers (1992) and Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996). He participated in the more than 1,400 interviews of World War II veterans, collecting oral histories of the war, and he drew upon those interviews to write one of his most popular books, D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994). Ambrose was the founder and director of the National D-Day Museum which opened in New Orleans in 2000. He died in 2002.
Stephen Ambrose believed that he became a successful historian because he got so much practice telling stories to his students. He said, "There is nothing like standing before 50 students at 8 A.M. to start talking about an event that occurred 100 years ago, because the look on their faces is a challenge—'Let's see you keep me awake.' You learn what works and what doesn't in a hurry."
He also said, "As I sit at my computer... I think of myself as sitting around the campfire after a day on the trail, telling stories that I hope will have the members of the audience, or the readers, leaning forward just a bit, wanting to know what happens next."
TUESDAY, 11 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "The Change" by Tony Hoagland, from What Narcissism Means to Me © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Change
The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.
Sometimes I think that nothing really changes -
The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he's a dummy.
but remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes
some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite -
We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,
putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,
and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips
and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated,
hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln's throat,
like she wasn't asking anyone's permission.
There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,
and I don't watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there
in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes
as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure
and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.
And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing
and in fact, everything had already changed -
Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,
and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the founding fathers of our country, Alexander Hamilton, born in the British West Indies (1755, some sources say 1757). He's the man on the $10 bill.
He grew up on the tiny island of Nevis, where his father abandoned the family and his mother died when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a local merchant who gave him a job at a general store. He turned out to be quite good at accounting, so when he was thirteen, his boss took a trip to Europe and left young Alexander in charge of the store. He started writing on the side, and an article about a recent hurricane so impressed the adults around him that they all pitched in to pay for his passage to New York, where he could attend school.
He arrived in America just as rebellion against Great Britain was brewing, and he immediately began to write for New York newspapers in support of the colonies' rights. He impressed George Washington so much that he became Washington's right hand man when he was barely twenty-years old. After the revolution, when many American politicians believed that the colonies should remain mostly independent of each other, Hamilton was one of the earliest supporters of a strong central government.
In just three years, between 1787 and 1790, he served on the constitutional convention, wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, (which helped garner support for the new constitution) became the first secretary of the treasury, and set up the U.S. National Bank.
While serving on Washington's cabinet, Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson became bitter enemies, and set out to undermine each other with gossip about each other's scandalous private lives. Hamilton was having an affair at the time, and there were rumors that Jefferson had had children with one of his slaves. But despite their bitter rivalry, Hamilton later spoke in favor of Jefferson as president over Aaron Burr, whom he considered a scoundrel.
Four years later, Burr challenged him to a duel. They met at sunrise in a wooded area of Weehawken, New Jersey, above the Hudson River. Hamilton showed up for the duel to prove his courage, but he purposely fired his gun straight up into the air. Burr aimed at him anyway, and Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day.
He hasn't been as well remembered as Washington or Jefferson, but by setting up the national treasury, the national bank, the first budgetary and tax systems, and most of all by helping gather support for the U.S. constitution, he did more to design the system of government we now live under than almost any other man.
The columnist George F. Will said, "We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country."
Alexander Hamilton wrote, "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
It's the birthday of the psychologist and philosopher William James, born in New York City (1842). He was the older brother of the novelist Henry James, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his era. He was a man who started out studying medicine and went on to become one of the founders of modern psychology, and finished his life as a prominent philosopher.
He was a professor of physiology at Harvard when he was hired to write a textbook about the new field of psychology, which was challenging the idea that the body and the mind were separate. He could have just written a summary of all the current ideas in the field but instead decided to explore the issues of psychology he found most interesting and perplexing. He took twelve years to finish the book called, The Principles of Psychology (1890). It was used as a textbook in college classrooms, but was also translated into a dozen different languages, and people read it all over the world.
One of the ideas he developed in the book was a theory of the human mind which he called "a stream of consciousness." Before him the common view was that a person's thoughts have a clear beginning and end, and that the thinker is in control of his or her thoughts. But William James wrote, "Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows."
James's ideas about consciousness were especially influential on writers, and novelists from James Joyce to William Faulkner began to portray streams of consciousness through language, letting characters think at length and at random on the page. Consciousness itself became one of the most important subjects of modern literature.
He also helped invent the technique of automatic writing, in which a person writes as quickly as possible whatever comes into one's head. He encouraged audiences to take up the practice as a form of self-analysis, and one person who took his advice was a student named Gertrude Stein, who went on to use it as the basis for her writing style.
William James wrote, "The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures."
He also wrote, "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
It's the birthday of novelist Alan Paton, born in the province of Natal, South Africa (1903). He's best known for his novel, Cry, Beloved Country (1948), which he wrote after working for twenty-five years as a public servant and educator.
He was the son of English settlers in South Africa. After graduating from college, he took a job as a teacher in a Zulu school. He had long wanted to be a writer, and wrote two failed novels about his experiences in the Zulu community before deciding he needed to put writing on hold and get involved in the fight against apartheid.
He went to Johannesburg and got a job transforming a reformatory from a prison into an educational institution. He became known among the residents of the reformatory as the man who pulled out the barbed wire and planted geraniums. He became one of the foremost authorities on penal systems in South Africa, and he began giving talks on the subject. After World War II, he decided to go on a world tour of penal institutions, to learn as much as he could about improving those in his own country.
It was only after he'd left South Africa that he realized he could no longer put off writing fiction. One evening in Norway, sitting in front of a cathedral at twilight, he found himself longing for home, and when he got back to his hotel room he started writing his novel Cry, the Beloved Country, about a Zulu pastor in search of his son who has murdered a white man. He finished the novel in three months, writing in a series of hotel rooms. When it was published in 1948, it became an international best-seller. It's the best-selling novel in South African history. It still sells about 100,000 copies a year.
WEDNESDAY, 12 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Which One" by Maxine Kumin, from Jack and Other New Poems © W.W. Norton. Reprinted with permission.
Which One
I eye the driver of the Chevrolet
pulsing beside me at a traffic light
the chrome-haired woman in the checkout line
chatting up the acned clerk
the clot of kids smoking on the sly
in the Mile-Hi Pizza parking lot
the meter reader, the roofer at work
next door, a senior citizen
stabbing the sidewalk with his three-pronged cane.
Which one of you discarded in a bag
-- sealed with duct tape - in the middle of the road
three puppies four or five weeks old
who flung two kittens from a moving car
at midnight into a snowbank where
the person trailing you observed the leg
and tail of the calico one that lived,
and if not you, someone flossing her teeth
or watering his lawn across the street.
I look for you wherever I go.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Jack London, born in San Francisco (1876). He is best known as the author of over fifty books, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). His best known short story is "To Build a Fire."
London was mostly self-educated. He read Ouida's Signa in 1883, a book about a poor Italian child who eventually earns fame as an opera composer. London credited reading this book as the beginning of his literary aspirations.
After graduating from grammar school in 1889, London began working long hours at a cannery, sometimes up to eighteen hours a day. Desperate for a different life, he borrowed money from his foster mother and bought a sloop named Razzle-Dazzle from French Frank, an oyster pirate, and then Jack London became an oyster pirate himself. When his sloop became too damaged to sail, London became a member of the California Fish Patrol.
London worked on a sealing schooner off the coast of Japan in 1893, and when he returned to America there were no jobs and he became a vagrant. In his memoir The Road (1907), London wrote about those days, including the tricks he used to evade train crews when he stowed away, and how he convinced strangers to buy meals for him. He even spent thirty days in jail in Buffalo, New York, before returning to California. Then he met a librarian named Ina Coolbrith at the Oakland Public Library. London called her his "literary mother."
London graduated from high school in Oakland and then spent a year at the University of California before poverty forced him again to seek his living through adventure. He sailed to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, and when this did not make him rich, London turned to writing and began seriously to seek publication for his stories.
He came close to abandoning a career in writing when The Overland Monthly was slow to pay for a story they had accepted. But he was saved, both "literally and literarily," when The Black Cat accepted his story "A Thousand Deaths" and paid him forty dollars to publish it. London's short story "An Odyssey of the North" appeared in the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Around this time, London also became vocal as a socialist. In 1896, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a story about London, giving speeches on socialism in Oakland's City Hall Park. He was arrested for this practice in 1897. He ran for mayor of Oakland as a socialist in 1901 and 1905, and published several essays on socialism, including Revolution, and Other Essays (1910).
Jack London said, "The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
It's the birthday of the novelist Haruki Murakami, born in Kyoto, Japan (1949). He is best known in America as the author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995).
Murakami is the child of Japanese literature teachers, but he was more interested in American literature as a boy. He studied literature and drama at Waseda University and Tokyo, and after graduation, Murakami operated a jazz bar called "Peter Cat" in Tokyo for eight years. During this time Murakami became familiar with Western music, and that is why so many of his novels have musical themes.
Murakami did not write at all until after age thirty. He claims that he was inspired to write his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979) while watching a baseball game. He worked on the novel for many months, usually after finishing his workdays at the jazz club, and the finished book had short chapters and a fragmented style. Murakami sent the novel to a writing contest and won first prize.
In 1987, Murakami published Norwegian Wood and became popular in his home country, so he left Japan and traveled through Europe before coming to America. He taught at Princeton University and Tufts University and published two more novels. After a gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995, Murakami returned to Japan and his writing became less comedic and more serious.
Haruki Murakami said, "I have drawers in my mind, so many drawers. I have hundreds of materials in these drawers. I take out the images and memories that I need."
It's the birthday of the man who has given us the novels of Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones, Walter Mosley, born in Los Angeles (1952). He is the author of Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first mystery novel featuring Easy Rawlins. Devil in a Blue Dress was made into a movie in 1995, with Denzel Washington playing the role of Easy Rawlings. Mosley worked for several years as a computer programmer before becoming a writer. He said, "I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war."
Mosley became well-known when Bill Clinton said in 1992 that Mosley was one of his favorite writers. Since that time, Mosley has earned national acclaim, and his work has been translated into 21 languages.
Walter Mosley said, "I don't see writers as teachers because books are kind of shared items... when writers write them, they are hardly anything and when people start to read them, they begin to change and to grow."
It's the birthday of John Winthrop, born in Suffolk, England (1588). He is best known as the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the leader of The Winthrop Fleet of 1630, the largest fleet of Englishmen ever to depart for the New World.
Winthrop was a deeply religious man, and he believed that the Anglican Church needed to rid itself of Catholic ceremonies. He and his followers decided to leave England because they thought that God would punish their country for this heresy, and they thought they would be safe in the New World.
He was elected governor of the colony before their departure in 1630, and he was re-elected several times after they had arrived in the New World. As governor, he tried to keep the number of executions for heresy to a minimum and he opposed the veiling of women, which many colonists supported.
He is famous for his "City on the Hill" sermon. He claimed in this sermon that Puritans who had come to the New World had a special pact with God to create a new, holy community. He also claimed that the rich had a holy duty to look after the poor. The sermon was not given much attention when Winthrop first delivered it.
THURSDAY, 13 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Too Much Snow" by Louis Jenkins, from Just Above Water © Holy Cow Press! Reprinted with permission.
Too Much Snow
Unlike the Eskimos we only have one word for snow but we have a lot of modifiers for that word. There is too much snow, which, unlike rain, does not immediately run off. It falls and stays for months. Someone wished for this snow. Someone got a deal, five cents on the dollar, and spent the entire family fortune. It's the simple solution, it covers everything. We are never satisfied with the arrangement of the snow so we spend hours moving the snow from one place to another. Too much snow. I box it up and send it to family and friends. I send a big box to my cousin in California. I send a small box to my mother. She writes "Don't send so much. I'm all alone now. I'll never be able to use so much." To you I send a single snowflake, beautiful, complex and delicate; different from all the others.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of short story writer Lorrie Moore, born in Glens Falls, New York (1957). She's the author of the short story collections Like Life (1990) and Birds of America (1998). She skipped a grade in school when she was growing up, and the difference in age between her and her classmates made her feel especially small and shy. She said, "I felt so completely thin that I was afraid to walk over grates. I thought I would fall down the slightest crevice and disappear."
She started writing in college, and published her first story in Seventeen magazine. She was so happy she proceeded to send them everything she'd ever written. She said, "They couldn't get rid of me. I was like a stalker. I sent them everything, and of course they didn't want anything more from me."
It was only after she told her parents about her publication that she found out they had both wanted to be writers themselves. Her father went up into the attic and brought down stories that he'd once submitted to the New Yorker, and her mother admitted that she'd given up journalism for nursing.
In grad school, Moore realized she had to decide whether she wanted to devote her life to writing or to the piano, which had been her first love. She said, "The typewriter and the piano were actually similar ideas, for my mind and for my hands. I was completely unaccomplished musically [but] I was having ecstatic experiences in the practice room and wasn't getting any writing done. So I had to choose." She chose writing, and published her first book of short stories by the time she was twenty-six years old.
Lorrie Moore's first book was Self Help (1985), in which the stories were written in the style of how-to manuals, including "How to Be an Other Woman," "How to Talk to Your Mother," and "How to Be a Writer."
"How to Be a Writer" begins, "First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age—say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."
When she was asked in an interview why she writes so often about characters who make lots of jokes, she said, "I feel that when you look out into the world, the world is funny. And people are funny. And that people always try to make each other laugh. I've never been to a dinner party where nobody said anything funny. If you're going to ignore that [as a fiction writer], what are you doing?"
It's the birthday of the novelist Edmund White, born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1940). He realized he was gay when he was twelve years old, but he kept trying to blame it on things like his shyness or the fact that his mother was over-protective. He came out of the closet to his father, and his father didn't believe him until he hired a private investigator to follow him around. White spent years going to psychoanalysts, trying to cure himself. He said. "I wanted to be normal, to have a wife and kids, not have a lonely old age." He finally came to terms with his sexuality when a new psychotherapist turned out to be gay as well.
He got a job working for Time Life Books, and he wrote fiction on the side. He wrote five novels about contemporary homosexual life, but he couldn't get any of them published. So finally he wrote Forgetting Elena (1973), about a man who wakes up after a party and can't remember who he is. It was the first novel White had written that didn't mention homosexuality, and it got great reviews. The writer Vladimir Nabokov called it the best new novel he'd read in years.
But even though White had had his first success with a novel that didn't address his own sexuality, he decided that if he was going to be a writer, he wanted to write about his own experiences, and so he set out to become the foremost gay novelist in America. His third novel, A Boy's Own Story (1982) was the first gay coming of age novel in America, and it became a best-seller in the United States and England. He has gone on to write a series of novels, chronicling the history of gay society in his lifetime, including The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), The Farewell Symphony (1997), and The Married Man (2000.)
FRIDAY, 14 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "The Very Rich Hours of the Houses of France" by David Kirby, from I Think I Am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay © Orchisis, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
The Very Rich Hours of the Houses of France
Our plane falls from the sky
into France, where everyone seems
so much happier than we are,
but no, it's not the people
who are happy, it's the buildings,
the high-beamed Norman farmhouses,
the cottages with roofs of trim thatch,
the chateaux set in verdant vineyards.
The people are like you and me:
their clothes don't fit very well,
their children are ungrateful,
and they're always blowing their noses.
But the buildings are warm and well-lit,
and even the ones that aren't,
the ones that have bad lighting
and poor insulation and green things
growing on the tile, even these
seem to be trying like crazy to comfort us,
to say something to us in French,
in House, in words we can understand.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Mary Robison, born in Washington, D.C. (1949). Her most recent book is called Why Did I Ever (2001), which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction.
She grew up in Ohio with five brothers and two sisters. She ran away from home twice when she was young, one of those times going to Florida to look for Jack Kerouac. She always wanted to be a writer, and she kept journals and diaries and wrote poetry as a teenager. She started writing seriously when she enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked with John Barth. In addition to novels and short stories, she has also written screenplays. She says, "I'm afraid of autobiography and fond of my family. I'm not ready to write them really."
It's the birthday of writer Anchee Min, born in Shanghai, China (1957). She is the author of a memoir about growing up in communist China called Red Azalea (1994). The book was banned in China, but after its success here, she was invited back to her homeland to make some public appearances. Min writes in English even though she didn't speak it until she was twenty-seven years old. She learned English when she came to the United States by watching Sesame Street and Oprah on television. She says, "Her show played a big role in convincing me to get my story out, the way she encourages guests to reveal their past by telling them it's all right to speak out about what they consider shameful."
Min is the eldest of four children. Her father taught astronomy, but lost his job when he taught his students about sunspots. The sun was thought to represent Chairman Mao, and so talking about sunspots was considered a criticism of the communist system.
In 1974, Min was separated from her family and sent to a labor camp near the East China Sea. It was there that a group of talent scouts saw her working in the fields and picked her to star in a film, but changing political climates prevented the film from being made. Her association with the movie made her a political outcast, and so she began the process of getting permission to leave China for the United States.
Min worked as a plumber's assistant, a waitress, and a baby-sitter when she first moved to the U.S. She even held a job painting flowers on women's underwear. She took English classes at Chicago's University of Illinois and learned English well enough to eventually earn a B.F.A. and an M.F.A from the Art Institute of Chicago. Min once said her writing process was "like a long line of ants walking for blocks carrying one crooked cricket leg."
It's the birthday of columnist Maureen Dowd, born in Washington D.C. (1952). She was one of five children, and her father was a native of Ireland who worked as a police detective for the city. She said, "For me, the Capitol is not just a famous building; it's where my mother and I picked up my father from work. The Lincoln Memorial is where we went on cheap dates."
Dowd was well known for what she called "warts-and-all journalism," especially her articles on former president George H.W. Bush, who was not always happy with how she portrayed him.
Her first job out of college was at the pool and tennis club at the Washington Hilton, but she quit because her family didn't like that she wore a tennis dress to work. She tried substitute teaching after that, but finally ended up as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star. She said, "I was almost fired every day because I couldn't take a decent phone message."
She was hired by the New York Times in 1983 when the editor found Dowd's two-year old résumé in a pile of old job applications. In 1995, she became the fourth woman in the history of the Times to have her own op-ed column. She said, "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."
She's described as habitually late, and her favorite meal is said to be potato chips and champagne. She said, "Attacking the press is a cheap way to throw the spotlight off a politician who is stumbling."
It's the birthday of novelist John Dos Passos, born in Chicago (1896). His grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant and had worked as a shoemaker in Philadelphia.
His father served in the American Civil War as a drummer boy, and he was a successful lawyer by the time Dos Passos was born.
Dos Passos was born out of wedlock, and so he lived with his mother. He moved around so much that he called himself a "hotel child," living in Mexico, Belgium, England, Washington D.C. and on a farm in Virginia. He attended the Choate School, a private American prep school, where his friends called him by the nickname "Dos."
Dos Passos later attended Harvard, where he was a classmate of e. e. cummings. He went to Spain to study architecture after he graduated, but with the outbreak of World War I, he worked as a volunteer ambulance driver instead. He later enlisted in the United States Medical Corps as a private. He served in France and Italy, and those experiences inspired his anti-war novels, One Man's Initiation (1920), and Three Soldiers (1921). When the war was over, he worked as a newspaper correspondent in Spain, Mexico, and New York. He said, "People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them."
Dos Passos was a sympathizer of the radical left when he was young. He wrote, "My sympathies lie with the private in the front line against the brass hat; with the hodcarrier against the strawboss, or the walking delegate for that matter; with the laboratory worker against the stuffed shirt in a mortarboard; with the criminal against the cop."
As Dos Passos got older, his views became more conservative. One of the reasons for this shift was the execution of his friend, Jose Robles, by Communists during the Spanish Civil War.
His other books include Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the famous U.S.A. trilogy, comprised of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
The nearsighted Dos Passos was shy and didn't like to speak in public or over the radio. Later on in his life, he lived on Cape Cod, where he wrote in the mornings and sailed and swam in the afternoons. He also sketched and painted. In 1937, a New York gallery held an exhibit of 30 of his sketches. He hated talking about the literary world and avoided what he called "talking shop." He said, "If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."
SATURDAY, 15 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Nothing is Lost" by Noel Coward, from Collected Verse, edited by Graham Payn & Martin Tickner © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
Nothing is Lost
Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1831 that Victor Hugo finished his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known to us as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. In this epic Gothic novel, Quasimodo, a grotesque, hunch-backed bell ringer, falls in love with a gypsy street dancer named Esmeralda. While the novel was being written, Hugo was asked to compose a poem in honor of Louis-Philippe, France's first constitutional king, who had been brought to power by the July Revolution. Because of the distraction, Victor Hugo had to keep asking his publishers for deadline extensions for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Once he finally sat down to write it, he finished it in only four months.
Victor Hugo, who said, "If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away."
It's the birthday of another French writer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, born in Besançon in the east of France (1809), seven years after Victor Hugo was born in the same town. Proudhon was a socialist journalist, and in 1840 he wrote the pamphlet What Is Property? In it, Proudhon said, "I am an anarchist" and "Property is theft." During the July monarchy, he narrowly missed being arrested for What Is Property? But he was brought to court when, two years later, he wrote the sequel, Warning to Proprietors (1842). He was not convicted, because his jury decided they couldn't condemn a man for making arguments they didn't understand.
In the late 1840s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon edited four newspapers, all of which were destroyed by government censorship. He said, "The newspapers are the cemeteries of ideas."
It's the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta (1929). The leader of the Civil Rights Movement, King was a powerful speaker and strong leader—even during his younger years. After graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta, King was urged by his father, who was a Baptist preacher, to enter the ministry. He enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he worked toward a Bachelor of Divinity degree.
While at the seminary, King was elected president of the student body, which was almost exclusively white. A Crozer professor wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, "The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation."
It was 1955, early in King's new tenure as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on one of that city's busses. King was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was formed with the intention of boycotting the transit system. He was young—only 26—and he knew his family connections and professional standing would help him find another pastorate should the boycott fail. So he accepted.
In his first speech to the group as its president of that organization, King said: "We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice."
The boycott worked, and King saw the opportunity for more change. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which provided him a national platform. For the next 13 years, King worked to peacefully end segregation. In 1963 he joined other civil rights leaders in the March on Washington—that's where he gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
The following year, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and King earned the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech for that prize he said: "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, was assassinated almost four years later, in Memphis. He was there to support a strike by the city's sanitation workers, and had told them the night before a sniper shot him on his hotel-room balcony: "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
It was on this day in 1622 that a third French writer, the playwright Molière, was baptized in Paris. He is known to be the father of French comedic theater, and wrote Tartuffe (1664), Le Misanthrope (1666), and Le Malade Imaginaire (1673). Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin to wealthy parents—his father was the royal upholsterer—Molière attended school at the well-respected College de Clermont and studied law at Orleans.
He was expected to follow in his father's footsteps, but when he was 21, he became involved with a theatrical family, the Béjarts. He joined them and others to produce and play comedy as a company under the name of the Illustre-Théâtre. The company didn't last long—it was a financial mess, and Poquelin spent time in debtor's prison. But it was during these first years with Illustre that two things happened: Poquelin developed a relationship with Madeleine Béjarts, who was with him until her death and widely thought to have been his mistress. And, as a performer, he started using the stage name Molière.
Since there was clearly no room for another theater troupe in Paris, Molière, Madeleine, and their company ran off to tour the provinces. They did this for 13 years, giving Molière plenty of practice with all aspects of the theater: He was an actor, director, stage manager, and writer. In 1658, Molière and his company performed before Louis XIV on a makeshift stage in a guardroom of the Louvre. They chose a play that had been popular with provincial audiences, Le Docteur Amoureux (The Amorous Doctor). The King's brother Philippe loved it, and the troupe was invited to stay in Paris. Molière spent the rest of his life there, and died in 1673 not far from where he was born.
Molière was a womanizer, and had affairs with several actresses in addition to Madeleine. When he finally married, at age 40, he scandalously chose 19-year-old Armande Béjarts, who was either Madeleine's daughter or her sister. She was a flirt, and Molière was not only a womanizer but a jealous husband, so they were unhappy. They separated after only two years, after she bore him a son, but she continued to work with him. One of her most important roles was Celimene in Le Misanthrope, a coquettish character which was modeled after her. Molière played the role of Alceste, who is in love with Celimene.
Le Misanthrope is widely considered to be Molière's greatest achievement. In it, the character Alceste says "I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper."
SUNDAY, 16 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland, from What Narcissism Means to Me © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
A Color of the Sky
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.
I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.
Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.
Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,
which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Anthony Hecht, born in New York City (1923). Hecht won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, and served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, but his interest in writing did not come early. He said that in school he was so "conspicuous" in his "mediocrity" that his mother had him tested to see if anything was wrong. The tests found him to be without any "aptitudes whatsoever."
Hecht fell in love with poetry during his freshman year at Bard College. When he told his parents that he intended to become a poet, they asked their only literary friend for advice: Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Geisel's advice was that Hecht should read the Life of Joseph Pulitzer, which he never did, because he suspected it would be discouraging. Until his death on October 20, 2004, Hecht discouraged new poets from reading that book, since not reading it had served him so well.
It's the birthday of the Canadian poet Robert W. Service, born in Preston, England in 1874. He moved to Canada in 1897 and for eight years worked in the Yukon for the Canadian Bank of Commerce. It was there that he began to write. He said, "I was greatly surprised to find my work acceptable."
Influenced by Kipling, Robert W. Service wrote ballads about Yukon life. Two of these poems, his most famous, are "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee." They appeared in Songs of a Sourdough (1907, reprinted in 1915 as The Spell of the Yukon). He left the Yukon to report about the Balkan War for the Toronto Star. During World War I he drove an ambulance, which gave him material for Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916). After the war he moved to France and wrote more in his later years, but he never met the same fame as he had with his poems about the Yukon.
It's the birthday of the novelist William Kennedy, born in Albany, New York (1928). Kennedy's novel Ironweed was the third in his "Albany trilogy," but it was the first success. When it was published in 1983, there was an immediate demand for the first two: Legs (1975) and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978). The trilogy, which was set in the "sin city" days of Albany's Prohibition and Depression eras, made Kennedy famous and put his hometown on the map. Ironweed won him a National Book Award and a Pulitzer; in 1987 it was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
William Kennedy, who said about the life of a writer, "There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot."
It's the birthday of essayist and cultural critic Susan Sontag, also born in New York City (1933). Her father died when she was five, and her mother moved her and her sister first to Tucson, Arizona, and then to the suburbs of LA. She was an intellectual even as a child, buying the Partisan Review and reading Trilling, Rosenberg, and Arendt. She graduated from high school at age 15 and became a serial academic. She took classes at Berkeley, then earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago after only two years of classes. She earned two master's degrees from Harvard, studied at Oxford and the University of Paris, and then, in 1959, moved with her son to New York City. During the course of her studies she had married, had a child with, and divorced Philip Rieff, who had been one of her professors at the University of Chicago.
Susan Sontag said that she prefers to think of herself as a novelist. Her first novel, The Benefactor, was published in 1963. Her most popular, The Volcano Lover, came out in 2002. But it is her essays that made her famous.
In her early essays, Sontag wrote criticism of art and culture. Other critical essays of the early 60s were dry and academic—hers were not. Her essay "Notes on Camp" was first published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Sontag suggested that even bad art can be appreciated, that there can be "a good taste of bad taste." The essay had a huge impact on the New York intellectual world, and Susan Sontag became a sort of spokesperson for American avant garde.
In 1969 Sontag decided to try filmmaking, which fascinated her. She said it gave her the chance to exercise a part of her imagination and her powers in a way that she couldn't as a writer. But she missed writing. She says: "I thought: where I am? what am I doing? what have I done? I seem to be an expatriate, but I didn't mean to become an expatriate. I don't seem to be a writer anymore, but I wanted most of all to be a writer."
In 1976 she returned to the literary world, this time focusing on short stories. That same year she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctors told her she had two years to live. She searched for treatment options and found alternatives with a doctor in France. She not only survived, but also wrote Illness as Metaphor (1978), which looked at the way language is used to describe disease. It was one of her most significant books. Other critical works include AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988) and On Photography (1977).
Susan Sontag's son, David Rieff, said his mother had "an unslakable kind of curiosity, of interest in the world. She is someone who can go to an opera, meet someone at two in the morning to go to the Ritz and listen to some neo-Nazi punk synthesizer band and then get up the next morning to see two Crimean dissidents."
Sontag succumbed to complications of leukemia in Manhattan on December 28, 2004, among her a personal library of 15,000 books, neatly arranged by historical period: Egyptians, Greeks, Fascism, Communism. She said, "What I do sometimes is just walk up and down and think about what's in the books, because they remind me of all there is. And the world is so much bigger than what people remember."
