MONDAY, 31 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "A Poison Tree" by William Blake.
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, —
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of John O'Hara, author of many novels and short stories, born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania 100 years ago today (1905). He is well-known for the "Pal Joey" stories. Of them, O'Hara said, "They're about a guy who is master of ceremonies in cheap night clubs, and the pieces are in the form of letters from him to a successful band leader."
O'Hara was deeply influenced by his upbringing in Pottsville, especially by the fact that those of Irish descent, like the O'Haras, were not welcome in parts of town dominated by Protestants. O'Hara desperately wanted to attend Yale and receive an Ivy League education like those Protestants he despised, but the sudden death of his father made that impossible. Instead, O'Hara became a reporter for the Pottsville Journal before leaving town. He first moved to Chicago and worked as a boat steward, a soda jerk, an amusement park guard and a freight clerk for the railroad. It was during this difficult time that O'Hara began to drink heavily, a problem he would have throughout much of his life.
When O'Hara moved to New York City, he began to have some success as a writer. He began writing for the Daily Mirror, and even became a radio columnist under the pseudonym "Franey Delaney." O'Hara then had a story accepted for publication in the New Yorker and that encouraged him to write more stories and begin a novel. O'Hara eventually published dozens of stories in the New Yorker.
O'Hara's first novel was Appointment in Samarra (1934), and it was met with critical praise and strong sales. The novel is set in the fictional city of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania—inspired by O'Hara's own home town—and the story is set against the tensions between Irish Catholics and Protestants. This theme reflected O'Hara's own youth, and it dominated many of his short stories and novels.
O'Hara was hired as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., mainly because of his gift for writing smooth dialogue, and he lived in Los Angeles on several different occasions. He also wrote several more novels, including Ten North Frederick (1955), which won a National Book Award but was banned for obscenity in Detroit and Albany.
O'Hara did not win many awards for his work, a fact which bothered him, but he took great pride that his books were regulars on best-seller lists. And so he said, "You must not expect modesty from me. I am just as aware as anyone else that my books have sold something like 15 million copies, and I could not have attained that circulation if I had not been readable."
John O'Hara said, "They say great themes make great novels... but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women."
It's the birthday of Norman Mailer, born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1923). Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), considered one of the best novels about World War II, and helped found The Village Voice, an independent weekly newspaper in New York City. He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.
Mailer was considered very bright as a young boy, and he had so much energy that it was necessary to keep him occupied at all times. According to a story, one summer Mailer's mother handed her son a pad and paper and said, "Here, write something." He wrote his first story at 10 years old. It was called "The Martian Invasion" and reached 35,000 words in length.
Mailer entered Harvard University when he was just sixteen, where he studied aeronautical engineering. He also wrote a short story called "The Greatest Thing in the World," which won Story magazine's undergraduate prize, and he also wrote a lot of fiction in the style of Ernest Hemingway.
Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943 and found himself in the Army, fighting in World War II, less than a year later. He served as a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains and, while there, got the idea for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. He wrote that novel after he was discharged, and it made him famous.
Norman Mailer said, "The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people."
Mailer was also interested in journalism, and in 1954 he helped found The Village Voice, and wrote a weekly column for a short time. Mailer was also one of the first to write in the style of "new journalism," which mixes autobiography with journalism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his "new journalism" book The Armies of the Night (1968), a personalized account of the 1967 march on Washington, D.C., which Mailer participated in and was arrested for. Mailer has also written "interpretive biographies" of such people as Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Pablo Picasso.
And he said, "Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
It's the birthday of Thomas Merton, born in Prades, France (1915). Merton was a Trappist monk, but he was also the author of more than 50 books, 2,000 poems and a personal diary that spanned much of his lifetime.
Merton was educated in France and the United States before beginning his university career at Cambridge University. But he left after only one year and returned to America to attend Columbia University and live with his grandparents. Merton decided to write his master's thesis on William Blake, and he found himself deeply influenced by Blake. He converted to Christianity, and in 1941 he entered a Trappist abbey in Kentucky, where he remained for most of his life. In his diary from this time, Merton wrote, "Going to the Trappists is exciting. I return to the idea again and again: 'Give up everything, give up everything!'" Merton had become well-known throughout the world, in part because of his writing, in particular his autobiography The Seven Story Mountain (1948).
He said, "An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck."
Merton was also known for his dialogue with other faiths, and for advocating non-violence during race riots and the Vietnam War. Merton was encouraged to write at the abbey, but he was not allowed to leave. And so a new abbot allowed Merton to leave the abbey in 1968 for a tour of Asia, where he met the Dalai Lama, and where he died accidentally, touching an electric fan as he stepped from his bath.
TUESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY, 2005
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Poem: "The Sow Piglet's Escapes" by Galway Kinnell, from Three Books. © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.
The Sow Piglet's Escapes
When the little sow piglet squirmed free,
Gus and I ran her all the way down to the swamp
and lunged and floundered and fell full-length
on our bellies stretching for her, and got her,
and lay there, all three shining with swamp slime,
she yelping, I laughing, Gus gasping and gasping.
It was then I knew he would die soon.
She made her second escape on the one day
when she was big enough to dig an escape hole
and still small enough to squeeze through it.
Every day I took a bucket of meal up to her plot
of rooted-up ground in the woods, until
one day there she stood, waiting for me,
the wild beast evidently all mealed out of her.
She trotted over and let me stroke her back
and, dribbling corn down her chin, put up her little worried face
as if to remind me not to forget to recapture her,
though, really, a pig's special alertness to death
ought to have told her: in Sheffield the dolce vita
leads to the Lyndonville butcher. When I seized her
she wriggled hard and cried oui oui oui all the way home.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1927). He says he realized the music in language early on through listening to the rhythm of his mother's Irish accent. His Selected Poems (1980) won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He received letters, phone calls, and telegrams from people all over the world congratulating him, most of them from people he had never met. He was so moved by a letter from the widow of his best friend from childhood that he carried the letter around with him in his wallet.
He said, "What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come." He also said, "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."
It is the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). He was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance and he wrote over 50 books in his lifetime. He was also a journalist. His first assignment came in 1937, when he worked as the Madrid correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American during the Spanish Civil War.
Hughes went on to write a witty column for the black weekly Chicago Defender from 1942 until 1965, which took what he called a "laugh to keep from crying" approach to looking at racial intolerance. Hughes said, "Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."
It's the birthday of novelist, critic and BBC Radio personality Stephen Potter, born in London, England (1900). He wrote several humorous books about how to outwit other people, including the book The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating (1947).
He said, "My first novel, The Young Man, had no plot, no characters, and no action (all this seemed O.K. in 1928)." He wrote while pacing up and down, and he claimed to have invented the word "gamesmanship" and the term "Eng Lit," defining it as "the racket, the flummery, the techniques and the gambits of English Literature teaching." He said, "If you have nothing to say, or, rather, something extremely stupid and obvious, say it, but in a 'plonking' tone of voice—roundly, but hollowly and dogmatically."
It's the birthday of novelist Muriel Spark, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1918). She's best known for her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which was later turned into a play. She began writing stories as a child, and she wrote love letters to herself, signing them with fake men's names and hiding them in the family couch for her mother to find. When she was a teenager, if she came home after 10 o'clock, her dad would wait for her at the front door dressed as a ghost and making spooky noises to scare her.
She said, "I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work." She also said, "When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality."
It's the birthday of aviator and novelist Charles Nordhoff, born in London, England (1887) to American parents. He served as an ambulance driver in France during World War I, and later as a pilot in the French Air Service. He wrote about his experience in France during the war in articles for the Atlantic.
Nordhoff wrote only three novels on his own during the mid-1920s. Most of his writing was done in collaboration with his friend and fellow pilot James Norman Hall. The two men co-authored a book about their flying unit right after the war, and then they both moved to Tahiti with an advance from Harper's to write travel articles about the South Pacific. Together they wrote their most successful work, a three-volume piece about the late 18th century mutiny aboard the H.M.S. Bounty. The trilogy sold millions of copies, and the books were made into films in 1935, 1962, and 1984. The best-known book from the trilogy is Mutiny on the Bounty (1932).
Nordhoff and Hall worked very closely when they wrote. They usually tackled separate chapters, but would often write single paragraphs together. They wrote three more historical and adventure novels after the success of the Bounty trilogy before Nordhoff left Tahiti in 1941.
He said, "Anthropology interests me more than anything else; if I had my life to live over, I should do the necessary groundwork and become a professional anthropologist." Nordhoff committed suicide in 1947. At the time of his death he was working on another collaborative novel with Tod Ford.
It's the birthday of humorist S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman, born in Brooklyn, New York (1904). He's best known for his collaboration with the Marx Brothers on the film comedies Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), and for his Academy Award™-winning screenplay, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). He also wrote for the New Yorker.
Perelman was raised in Rhode Island and attended Brown University in 1921. He had a hard time fitting in with the school's fraternity scene because he was disliked for being Jewish and from a lower-middle-class background. He ended up becoming close friends with another literary-minded student who would later come to be known as the novelist Nathanael West. West became Perelman's brother-in-law when he married West's sister, Laura, in 1929.
Perelman loved playing with words. He was greatly influenced by James Joyce. Perelman often parodied Joyce's steam of consciousness style, and he had a habit of mixing in obscure words and references. Perelman's last piece for the New Yorker was even titled "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat's Paw" (1979). He wrote his own introduction for his book The Best of S. J. Perelman (1947) under the pseudonym Sidney Namlerep (Perelman backwards).
The names of Perelman's characters and titles of his pieces came from what he called his "lifetime devotion to puns." He carried clippings that he tore out from newspapers in his pockets, his favorite being articles with people that had funny or complicated names. He had an airmail subscription to the London Times and read it every day, because he thought the names in that paper were more unusual than those in American papers.
Perelman wrote in Hollywood for 11 years, but he was happier with his career writing for the New Yorker, and his pieces were collected in books like Strictly from Hunger (1937).
After his wife died in 1970, he traveled and wrote, lived for a time in London, and finally came back to Manhattan, living at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He always wore a pair of oval, steel-rimmed glasses that he found in Paris in 1927. He said, "I'm highly irritable and my senses bruise easily, and when they are bruised I write."
WEDNESDAY, 2 FEBRUARY, 2005
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Poem: From "To Ireland in the Coming Times" by William Butler Yeats.
from To Ireland in the Coming Times
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth's consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist James Joyce, born in Dublin, Ireland (1882). He was a writer who claimed at an early age to hate his home, who chose to live as an exile for most of his adult life, and then went on to write all of his books about that very home he claimed to hate. He made up his mind to leave Ireland in the summer of 1904, after he fell in love with a beautiful redheaded chambermaid named Nora Barnacle. He'd only known her for a few months when he asked her to leave the country with him, and she agreed. In a letter to her the next day he wrote, "Last night... it seemed to me that I was fighting a battle with every religious and social force in Ireland for you and that I had nothing to rely on but myself... The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy."
He wrote to an English school in Zurich, secured a job, and they set off. Joyce expected that his job teaching English would be boring but easy, and that it would leave him a lot of time for writing, but when he showed up at the school to announce his arrival, they'd never heard of him. The job he thought he had secured by mail did not exist.
They'd used up all their money traveling, so Joyce had to scramble to find some work. He had a genius for talking people into giving him money, and he got a few students to hire him as a private language tutor, but he could still barely pay the rent. He was constantly writing home to family to ask for financial help, and even entered a puzzle contest in a London magazine with hopes of winning the cash prize. He sent in the correct answers to the puzzle, but his letter arrived too late to be a winner.
Within Joyce's first year abroad, Nora was visibly pregnant, and they got kicked out of one of their apartments because no children were allowed. That summer was stiflingly hot, and Nora was miserable with her pregnancy, and spent most of her time crying. Joyce's English students made fun of his shabby clothes and his old-fashioned Italian, which he had learned by reading Dante. He eventually grew so desperate that he considered giving up on the whole idea of being an exile.
But his son was born healthy, and Joyce got a series of slightly better paying jobs, including one job at a bank where he had to write 250 letters a day. He had very little time to write fiction, but he'd always found that time constraints made him a better writer. The first book he finished was his collection of short stories, Dubliners, about a series of Irish characters in various states of frustration and despair.
When he sent the manuscript to a publisher in London, he wrote, "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis... I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness."
The publisher accepted the manuscript for Dubliners, but asked Joyce to clean up the language in a few places. Joyce tried to be accommodating, but each time he sent the edited manuscript back to the publisher, the publisher had new objections. Finally, Joyce wrote, "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization [sic] in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass." The publisher wasn't convinced.
His money situation grew worse. One night he got mugged, and the robbers stole most of his monthly pay. He wrote to his brother, "My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions." He found himself thinking about his homeland more and more every day, and he began to ask his Aunt Josephine to send him copies of anything to do with Ireland: newspapers, magazines, history books, guidebooks, maps, and photographs. He decided to write a story that captured some of the things he loved about his country, and so he wrote "The Dead," about a Christmas party, which many critics consider his first masterpiece.
Around the same time he also began a short story about a man who takes a walk around Dublin on the day he believes his wife is going to have an affair. Joyce decided that the story wanted to be longer, so he didn't include it in Dubliners, but over the next decade it began to grow larger and larger in his mind, until he got the idea to use it at the center of an epic novel about a single day in the city of Dublin. He chose for that day the date of June 16, 1904, the date on which he had fallen in love with Nora. He called that date "Bloomsday" after the main character of the book: Leopold Bloom.
Joyce started writing Ulysses in 1914, the same year that he finally published Dubliners. Two years later, he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which got him his first real attention from the literary world. But even with the support of writers like Ezra Pound, he still struggled to find money, and it took him more than seven years to finish Ulysses.
The book had almost no plot. Joyce's goal was not to tell a story so much as to recreate a single day in the city of Dublin, with all its sights, sounds, smells, as well as the many different kinds of people, the way they talked, and what private thoughts floated through their heads as they went about their daily lives. Joyce said, "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."
While writing the book, he often made up his own words for things by combining other words. He was asked if there weren't enough words for him in English, and he replied, "Yes, there are enough, but they aren't the right ones." He ultimately used a vocabulary of about thirty-three thousand words to write the book, and of those thirty-three thousand words, only about half of the words appear in the book more than once.
One of his patrons was an English woman named Harriet Weaver, who planned to publish Ulysses in England. But she grew less and less enthusiastic as he sent her new chapters, each one more experimental than the last. In reply to one of her letters of disapproval, he wrote, "I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present."
Eventually Harriet Weaver decided she didn't want to publish Ulysses. At the same time, the Little Review, a New York avant-garde magazine, was prevented from serializing the novel by charges of obscenity. An American publisher then quickly dropped the book.
Joyce began to despair that he would ever publish it. He told his story to Sylvia Beach, a friend of his who owned the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, and he was shocked when she offered to publish it for him. The first printing, of 1,000 copies, came out on this day, Joyce's birthday, in 1922. It was hailed as a masterpiece by writers in Europe and America, and Joyce was finally able to support his family comfortably for the rest of his life.
On June 16, 1924, the 20th anniversary of Bloomsday, Joyce wrote in his notebook, "Twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date?" Today, June 16th is a holiday in Ireland that rivals St. Patrick's Day. It's one of the only national holidays in the world that's based not on anyone's birthday or on a religious or a historical event, but merely upon a date in a work of fiction.
James Joyce wrote, "Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."
THURSDAY, 3 FEBRUARY, 2005
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Poem: from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.
from Tender Buttons
A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The
sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even
notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating
hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia
and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even
withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and
with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even
with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be
pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is
wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which
there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a
fountain.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Richard Yates, born in Yonkers, New York (1926). He was a writer whose work influenced many other writers, including Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, and Robert Stone, but he never sold many copies of his own books. He spent his life struggling to pay the bills with teaching jobs, trying to find time to write. When he died in 1992, few of his books were still in print. But a group of writers, including Richard Ford, Michael Chabon and Kurt Vonnegut, began to champion his work, and they brought many of his novels back into print, including Revolutionary Road (1961) and The Easter Parade (1976). They also published The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001), which became a minor bestseller.
It's the birthday of the novelist Paul Auster, born in Newark, New Jersey (1947). Growing up, he didn't get along with his father, who was an extremely distant, solitary man. Auster wrote, "Devoid of passion, either for a thing, a person, or an idea, incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances, [my father] had managed to keep himself at a distance from life... In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man."
Auster's parents divorced when he was 15, and around the same time he decided to become a writer. He went to Columbia University in 1965, where he spent almost all of his time reading.
He dropped out of graduate school to take a job mopping floors on an oil tanker, and then spent several years living in poverty in Paris. When he returned to the United States, he tried to make a living as a poet and translator, but he could barely pay the bills.
Auster was struggling with writer's block and depression, his marriage was breaking up, and then one morning he learned that his father, the man he'd never gotten along with, had died and left him enough money to support him as a writer. The first book he wrote with that support was a memoir about his father called The Invention of Solitude (1982).
Paul Auster has gone on to write many more novels, including Book of Illusions (2002) and Oracle Night (2003).
He said, "It still seems like a strange way to make a living, sitting alone in a room for long periods of every day... I never go out looking for stories to tell; they grow inside me and become a weird compulsion. So, even though the story might change day to day, I know the characters really well, because I've carried them inside my head for years."
It's the birthday of the novelist James A. Michener, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1907). His parents abandoned him when he as a very young boy, and he was adopted by a poor young widow named Mabel Michener. Because he lacked roots, he became obsessed with travel. He worked in traveling carnivals and theater companies; he rode boxcars and hitchhiked across the country. By the time he was twenty years old he had already seen 45 of the lower 48 United States.
Michener's plan was to get a PhD in history and become a professor. But before he could finish that PhD, World War II broke out and he joined the Navy. It was in a Quonset hut that he began writing fiction for the first time, about his experiences as a military man. His first book Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. It wouldn't have made him much money, but it was turned into the Broadway musical South Pacific, and the proceeds from the musical let him devote his life to writing.
He went on to write a series of big historical novels, most of them about places, including Hawaii (1959), Chesapeake (1978), Alaska, and Texas (1985). He filled his books with historical and geographical details. When asked how he did his research he said, "What I need is very simple. A good library and access to an airport." He believed he couldn't write about a place unless he had gone there and listened to the weather reports and learned about the local sporting events. He also read a lot. For his book about Texas alone, he read more than 400 books.
Most of Michener's novels were bestsellers. They sold more than 75 million copies, but even though he made a great deal of money, he lived an extremely frugal life. He never bought shaving cream, for instance, because he'd once learned to shave with leftover slivers of soap. By living a simple life, he was able to give most of his money away. Over his lifetime, he donated $117 million to various institutions, including the University of Texas.
It's the birthday of the avant-garde novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1874). She was one of the early students at Radcliffe College, the sister school to Harvard University, and her favorite professor was the psychologist William James. She was especially inspired by his ideas about language. He taught her that language often tricks us into thinking in particular ways and along particular lines. As a way of breaking free of language, he suggested she try something called automatic writing: a method of writing down as quickly as she could whatever came into her head. She loved it, and used it as one of her writing methods for the rest of her life.
Stein went to graduate school to study medicine, but she grew bored with science and dropped out. Her brothers had recently moved to Paris, so she decided to join them. Except for one six-month trip back to the United States, she lived in Paris for the rest of her life. She said, "Paris was the place that suited us who were to create the twentieth century art and literature."
Stein's brother Leo had begun collecting art, and he introduced Stein to a promising new artist named Pablo Picasso. At the time, Picasso was in the process of inventing a style of art called cubism in which he depicted an object from multiple angles at the same time. Stein decided she wanted to do the same thing with fiction. In one of her first novels, The Making of Americans, she started out writing about an American family, but because she wanted to incorporate everything that had led up to the life of this family, her novel grew into a 900-page history of the human race. She finished it in 1908, but it took her 17 more years to get it published.
Stein's first book to attract attention was Tender Buttons (1914), a book-length prose poem based on her automatic writing. In that book, she developed a style of repeating words and phrases to highlight the sounds of words instead of their meaning.
Stein wrote most of her work in exercise books, and she often wrote while she was entertaining guests. She once let Picasso paint a portrait of her, and the experience inspired her to start writing "word-portraits" of her many artist and writer friends. Her most popular book was the book she wrote about herself from the point of view of her lover Alice B. Toklas, called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
An interviewer once asked her what she meant by a famous passage in her work that begins, "Pigeons on the grass alas. Pigeons on the grass alas." Stein said, "I was walking in the gardens of the Luxembourg in Paris it was the end of summer the grass was yellow I was sorry that it was the end of summer and I saw the big fat pigeons in the yellow grass and I said to myself, pigeons on the yellow grass, alas, and... I kept on writing until I had emptied myself of the emotion."
Gertrude Stein argued that she was not an experimental writer. She said, "Artists do not experiment. Experiment is what scientists do... an artist puts down what he knows and at every moment it is what he knows at that moment."
FRIDAY, 4 FEBRUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Poem for the Family" by Susan Cataldo, from drenched: selected poems of Susan Cataldo 1979-1999. Reprinted with permission.
Poem for the Family
Before I went to sleep, the soft lamplights
from the tenements across the street,
still, in the night, resembled peace.
There is something I forgot to be grateful
for. But I'm not uneasy. This poem
is enough gratitude for the day. That leaf
tapping against the window, enough
music for the night. My love's even
breathing, a lullaby for me.
Gentle is the sun's touch
as it brushes the earth's revolutions.
Fragrant is the moon in February's
sky. Stars look down & witness,
never judge. The City moves
beneath me, out of sight.
O let this poem be a planet
or a haven. Heaven for a poet
homeward bound. Rest my son's head
upon sweet dreams & contentment.
Let me turn out the light to rest.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Stewart O'Nan, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1961). He's the author of many novels, including Snow Angels (1994), A Prayer for the Dying (1999) and The Night Country (2003).
He's known for writing about unsympathetic characters, criminals and delinquents, but he said, "I want [readers] to live and die for my characters even though they have massive faults. Popular culture has brainwashed us into believing that our heroes need to be blameless, and that just drives me nuts."
He got in trouble when he tried to publish his novel The Speed Queen (1997), about a woman on death row who sells her story to a famous American writer. In the original draft of the book, that famous American writer was Stephen King, and O'Nan wanted to call the novel "Dear Stephen King." Stephen King's lawyers threatened to sue if he didn't change the name of the character and the name of the novel, and eventually he did.
Later, he and Stephen King got to know each other and became friends, and last year they wrote a book together about the Boston Red Sox called Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season.
It's the birthday of the poet Gavin Ewart, born in London, England (1916). He's the author of many books of poetry, including Pleasures of the Flesh (1966) and The Learned Hippopotamus (1987).
He started his poetic career early, when he was just 17 years old, by publishing a poem in the prestigious British literary journal New Verse. He published his first book of poems when he was 23, and his work was compared to T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. But then, when World War II broke out, he stopped writing poetry for 25 years.
He didn't publish another book until 1964, when his collection Londoners came out. After that, he became one of the most popular writers of light verse in England, and he specialized in poems about love and sex. He wrote, "The path of true love isn't smooth, / the ruffled feathers sex can soothe, / soon ruffle again—for couples never / spend all their lives in bed together."
He died in 1992, just a few months short of his 80th birthday. His work is available in this country in The Selected Poems of Gavin Ewart (1988).
It's the birthday of the experimental novelist and short story writer Robert Coover, born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). As a boy, he moved with his family to a mining town in rural Illinois, where his father ran the local newspaper. In 1951, he had just come home from college for the holidays, when a mining accident killed a number of miners. His father asked him to help cover the story for the newspaper, and he witnessed the family members of dead miners grieving over the unidentifiable bodies.
He later said, "I began to wonder what might happen if some guy did get rescued, and came up thinking he'd been saved for some divine mission. What might that lead to?" That idea led to his first short story and his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), about the lone survivor of a mining accident who goes on to start a religious cult.
He has gone on to write many experimental novels, including The Universal Baseball Association (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and Spanking the Maid (1981). His first several books were so wildly different from one another in style and content that he had to constantly jump from one publisher to the next. His 13th book, Gerald's Party (1986) was the first novel he published without it having been rejected by a publisher at least once.
He has occasionally been attacked for some of his more controversial satirical novels. He once said, "A recent review of one of my books... described my work as some sort of terrorist mission—and yet I like...to be controversial in that way. It's proof I'm alive."
His most recent book is Stepmother, which came out last year.
Robert Coover said, "The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it."
It's the birthday of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in Breslau, Prussia (1906). He came from a family of Lutheran theologians and pastors and decided when he was 16 that he wanted to study for the ministry. He finished his first doctoral dissertation in theology by the time he was only 21 years old. He was a perfectionist in everything, from academics to sports. One of his friends said that he always gave the impression that he was savoring good food. His teachers thought he was a genius, and they expected him to become one of the foremost Christian theologians of his generation.
He thought the Lutheran religious community in Germany was too narrow in its focus, not engaged enough with the world at large, and so in 1930, he hopped a ship for New York City to study at the Union Theological Seminary. He had a maverick professor there who taught theology by way of the Harlem Renaissance, assigning books by Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson. Bonhoeffer was inspired to start attending a black church in Harlem, where he began to teach Sunday school, and he also witnessed his church's struggle against racism.
In 1931, when Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin, he suddenly saw the anti-Semitism that had been brewing in his county with a new clarity. When Hitler took power in 1933, other pastors and theologians in Germany chose to ignore it, but Bonhoeffer made a speech on the radio denouncing fascism that was cut off by the authorities before he'd finished speaking. He became the head of an underground seminary, and published his book The Cost of Discipleship (1937), which became one of the most influential works on the theology of social justice.
Though he'd previously been a pacifist, Bonhoeffer decided to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. He said, "Will the church merely gather up those whom the wheel has crushed or will it prevent the wheel from crushing them?" The assassination plot was a failure, and Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.
Just before he was arrested, he got engaged to a young woman named Maria von Wedemeyer. They'd met through each other's families. Bonhoeffer had proposed to her through her grandmother. According to the social custom of the era, they had never been alone together. Maria later said she's fallen in love with him because of the way his hand looked on the couch next to her. They began a correspondence while he was in prison, and it was to her that he wrote many of his final thoughts about theology and life.
Bonhoeffer and Maria also discussed ordinary things in their letters. She asked him if he liked dogs. He asked her if she liked skiing. They made plans for their wedding, and picked which flowers they might use at the ceremony. She told him that she had drawn a chalk line on the floor around her bed the size of his prison cell, so she could imagine she was with him.
In his final letter to her, Bonhoeffer wrote, "I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you..." He was executed a few months later. The correspondence between him and Maria were collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Love is not something in its own right, it is what people are and have become."
SATURDAY, 5 FEBRUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Messy Room" by Shel Silverstein, from A Light in the Attic. © Harper Collins. Reprinted with permission.
Messy Room
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or—
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of mystery writer and novelist Margaret Millar, born in Kitchener, Ontario (1915). She wrote 21 murder mysteries, including The Invisible Worm (1941) and Beast in View (1955), which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel. She's known for writing mystery novels that are also artistic, and she wrote several non-mystery books, too. She began playing the piano when she was four, and her performances had been broadcasted over local radio stations by the time she started high school, so her writing came second to her piano playing when she was young. She was married to Kenneth Millar, who also published mystery novels under the name Ross Macdonald.
She said, "I've been an avid reader of mysteries since the age of eight... I began writing when put to bed in September, 1941, for an imaginary heart ailment. After two weeks of reading three or four mysteries a day, I decided to write one and I spent the next two weeks doing just that. I rewrote it twice and it sold to Doubleday. Whereupon I rose from bed. My heart was fine; my doctor's was considerably weakened."
It's the birthday of English novelist and short-story writer Susan Hill, born in Scarborough, Yorkshire (1942). She began writing her first novel, The Enclosure (1961), when she was only 15, working on it in the evenings after school after doing her homework. She finished it when she was 17, and it was published by the time she was 19. She's also well known for her radio plays, some of which have been collected in The Cold Country (1975). She says, "Writing a novel is nice, but it's a lonely business; when it's finished, that's it. Writing a radio play is lovely because when it's finished, it's only half there. It's a collaborative thing."
Hill always knew she wanted to be a writer. She went to a convent school as a girl, but it wasn't very strict. She says, "I didn't understand math so I went and asked the Reverend Mother if I could stop. She asked me what I wanted to do instead and when I said read in the library, she said fine." Hill wrote to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson asking for advice about writing, and Johnson wrote to Hutchinson Publishers on Hill's behalf to help her get her first novel published. Johnson invited Hill to literary parties, and she had met W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot by the time she was 19.
Hill usually writes in pencil on lined A4 pads. She only uses a computer for office work, book reviews, or articles. She says, "I could never do real writing, novel-writing, onto any machine. I need silence, and to think, as it were, through my pen."
It's the birthday of writer, director, and comedian Christopher Guest, born in New York City (1948). He's best known for his mock documentaries, such as This is Spinal Tap (1984), which follows the tour of a fake heavy metal band, and Best In Show (2000), in which he makes fun of the world of competitive dogs shows.
Guest's films have no scripts, but he gives the actors information about their characters and a very detailed plot outline. Almost all of the specific scenes are improvised right in front of the camera. He says, "I really like to use the analogy of jazz players who basically stand up on stage and play, yet people don't question that there is no music they are reading from. This is really the same thing, but we're actors and we're really jamming-with people occasionally."
Guest would watch people out of his window when he was a little kid, and he would make up voices for the people passing by. He married actress Jamie Lee Curtis in 1984 at director Rob Reiner's house. She first saw him on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and told her mother that she wanted to marry him. In 1996, Guest inherited the title of the fifth Lord Haden-Guest. The English title was given to Guest's grandfather in 1950 for his work as a physician in children's health care and as a Parliament member representing working-class districts.
Guest once said, "I found a journal from my family that went back 200 years, and one of my great, great, great, great ancestors was a ventriloquist, in London in 1802. It was eerie because I did ventriloquism when I was a kid. I never had any training. The voices just came to me." Guest also says, "Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops."
It's the birthday of novelist William S. Burroughs, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1914). He's known as one of the founding fathers of the Beat Movement, and for his novels about drug addiction and drug culture, including Junky (1951) and Naked Lunch (1959).
Burroughs studied English literature at Harvard and did graduate work in ethnology and archaeology. He worked all sorts of odd jobs during World War II, including private detective, exterminator, advertising copywriter, factory worker, and bar attendant. It was around that time that he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He said, "There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks."
He became addicted to heroin in 1944 and eventually moved to Mexico with his wife, Jean Vollmer. He left Mexico after he accidentally shot her in the head and killed her. He traveled around South America, but finally settled in Tangier, Morocco for several years. He went to London in 1957 to try apomorphine treatment for drug addiction because it was banned in the U.S. He said, "England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs."
Burroughs wrote several other novels, including Queer, which he wrote in 1951, but it wasn't published until 1985. The book has the same protagonist, Lee, as Junky, but the homosexual subject matter kept it from being published at that time. He said, "So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."
Burroughs kept a daily journal with three separate columns in it. In one, he would write what he was doing, in the second he wrote what he was thinking, and in the third he wrote about what he was reading. He used to carry around big files with notes, pictures, and news clippings wherever he went. He thought of scrapbooks as his writing tools, and also usually had with him scissors, paste, and a tape recorder.
William S. Burroughs said, "In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed."
It's the birthday of French noblewoman, Marie de Sévigné, born in Paris (1626). She's famous for her letters to her daughter and other friends, where she vividly describes life at that time. They include everything from descriptions of the red buds of spring to the execution of a nun. She wrote some fifteen hundred letters over twenty-five years, and copies of her letters circulated, though most of the original, signed letters no longer exist. Her letters were greatly admired by Marcel Proust. She was orphaned by age seven, and her husband died in a duel after a short marriage. She didn't keep a journal and never made any notes for a novel. Her letters were her only writing.
On Sunday, June 21, 1671 de Sévigné wrote to a friend,
"At last, my dear, I breathe again. I heave a sigh... a weight is lifted from my heart. You tell me how well you are looking. How happy this makes me... enjoy yourself, look after yourself... I am glad you can turn your mind to dress. Do you recollect how tired we grew of that old black mantle you wore? No doubt it was meritorious but scarcely attractive to the onlooker."
SUNDAY, 6 FEBRUARY, 2005
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Poem: "My Son" by Susan Cataldo, from drenched: selected poems of Susan Cataldo 1979-1999. © Telephone Books. Reprinted with permission.
My Son
I love this messy room you live in
The plants you care for
The nickels & dimes & pennies you pile
Up on your desk like no-good money
The Amazing Spiderman poster on the wall
Tapes paint comic books biographies
Of all you favorite presidents
A picture of the Lincoln Memorial
On the wall facing your bed
An eleven year old dusty red TV
Daphne turning into a tree
Two autographed photographs of
Leonard Nimoy. Dracula.
A cross made of branches
Held together by a rubber band
You love daisies
& keep them alive until
Every bud has blossomed
You are interested in
What everyone is doing
You think of new things for them
To do you make them heroes
In your fantastic head
You look strong & handsome
But you don't see that
You want to defend helpless people
You want to know why there aren't
Really super heroes
You ask the same questions
I ask myself & can't answer
You don't understand jokes
You think they hurt
You are constantly dodging
Bullets & dreaming up new
Ways to defend yourself
You are stubborn to a fault
A fortress of mind & chest
Eyes never more mirrored
The soul than your
You deny love
You want to be "different"
You don't want to feel
How much you love this life
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the lexicographer Eric Partridge, born near Gisborne, New Zealand (1894). He is best known as the author of several dictionaries on slang.
Partridge grew up on a farm in New Zealand, and at age eleven his family moved to Australia. He earned a scholarship to attend the University of Queensland, where he studied classics, and then French and English. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, when he served in the Australian infantry, but he returned to university when the war ended, and Partridge graduated in 1921.
Then, Partridge moved to England, where he studied at Oxford and taught at universities in Manchester and London. In 1927, Partridge gave up his academic life and started Scholartis Press. Partridge said, "I did absolutely all the work myself, even to delivering parcels." Despite his efforts, the economic depression in 1931 forced him to close his press.
It was at this time that Partridge began occupying his customary seat at the British Museum, seat K-1 in the Reading Room, which he would occupy nearly every day for the rest of his life. He spent all those hours at the British Museum studying slang, and became an expert on slang in the English language. He published several dictionaries on slang, beginning with Slang Today and Yesterday (1933). He wrote and revised dictionaries on slang well into his eighties, and published his final book A Dictionary of Catch Phrases in 1977.
Of his addiction to the English language, Eric Partridge said he was "cheerfully and incorrigibly serving a life sentence."
Eric Partridge said, "Language cannot be thrust into a vacuum and examined as though it were something existing apart from the people who devised it and the people who use it. To ignore the human origin, the human dependence, the human nexus, is fatal."
It's the birthday of the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, born in Tampico, Illinois (1911).
Reagan became a radio announcer for the Chicago Cubs after graduating from college. He was given only the bare bones of the game from a ticker, and relied on his natural gifts of storytelling and imagination to make the games lively and interesting. His abilities were put to the test when, in 1934, the ticker went dead in the ninth inning of a game between Chicago and St. Louis. Reagan improvised with a fictional broadcast until the ticker came back on line.
Reagan joined the Army as a reserve cavalry officer in 1935, and was activated after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Due to his poor eyesight, Reagan was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit in the Army Air Force, which made training and education films. Reagan stayed in Hollywood throughout the war, becoming a captain, although he tried many times to go overseas for combat duty.
Also during this time, Reagan became a successful screen actor. The agent who signed Reagan to his first contract said, "I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office." In 1940, Reagan gave the performance for which he would be best remembered as an actor, when he played George "The Gipper" Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American. The movie confirmed Reagan's status as an American icon, and earned him the nickname "Gipper."
Ronald Reagan actually began his political career as a Democrat, and he voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the first time he voted for president. He gradually became more conservative, and he supported the campaigns of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon while he was still a registered Democrat. Reagan believed that Republicans were better suited to fight Communism, and this is a major reason why he left the Democrats. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Communist influence in Hollywood. He also reported any actors he considered suspicious to the FBI, and was given the code name "Agent T-10." He delivered a passionate speech in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign that is now called simply "The Speech" by some people. Because of this speech, Reagan was asked to run for governor of California, and after considering it for several sleepless nights, Reagan decided to run, and he won two terms as California governor.
Reagan tried twice for the Republican presidential nomination before winning it, and then the presidency in 1980. He ran on a platform of low taxes and strong national defense, which he called "Peace Through Strength." Also, Reagan openly supported anti-communist rebels in other countries, and so he funded and armed the "freedom fighters" of Afghanistan, calling them "an inspiration to those who love freedom," as well as the Contras in Nicaragua, who he called "the moral equivalent to our founding fathers." Reagan also intervened in the long war between Iraq and Iran, throwing support to now-deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein because he feared an Iranian victory would embolden extremist groups in that region. Reagan cut off Iran's access to weapons, and supplied intelligence and weapons to the Iraqi military.
Ronald Reagan said, "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." And he said, "I happen to believe government is not the solution to our problems—government is the problem."
It's the birthday of our third vice-president, Aaron Burr, born in Newark, New Jersey (1756). He is best known as the man who challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel, and then mortally wounded him.
Burr was a law student when the American Revolution began, and he suspended his education to take up arms with the colonists. One time, Burr disguised himself as a Roman Catholic priest and traveled across British lines into Montreal, to carry news to a general. As a result, Burr became very well known throughout the military, and though he never entirely earned the trust of George Washington, Israel Putnam made Burr his charge. Putnam's trust was rewarded when Burr saved an entire brigade from capture at Long Island.
Burr left the military when he became ill, and in 1782 Burr was admitted to the bar, and became a passionate lawyer and politician. He became vice president when he and Thomas Jefferson tied in the electoral college and the election went to the House of Representatives, where he was nearly elected America's third president. After three days and thirty-six ballots, Jefferson was narrowly elected president, and Burr became vice president, partly because his political rival Alexander Hamilton opposed him so strongly.
In 1804, Burr ran for governor of New York, but was defeated, due in part to the influence of Alexander Hamilton. Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, and in that duel he shot Hamilton just below the chest. Hamilton died of the injury the next day.
