MONDAY, 20 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Helicopter Shots (for Malene)" by Louise Vale. Reprinted with permission of author.
Helicopter Shots (for Malene)
Of course visuals are important. But remember,
you are writing for the British film industry,
and there will be no budget.
Keep crowd scenes to a minimum.
Avoid overseas locations, make it local, and
no explosions, crashing cars or other specials,
unless you're writing the next Bond—
and you won't be for a while!
Anyway, they've all been done.
But above all, and remember this, no helicopter shots.
I love helicopter shots.
Slooping over early-morning Washington
in a drink-tilt, the Potomac glinting,
then a swing-curve across Arlington,
focusing hard down on the spin-wheel
that is the Pentagon; slow-weaving
through the pin-lit towers of Manhattan
at night; running over the dusty rooftops
of Kabul or, best of all, skimming the sea
low enough to make your own waves,
and get the audience sighing.
Very good effects can be achieved
with a crane camera, rented for the day
from a pop video or advertising campaign.
Use your imagination. Set key scenes
on a cliff-top or, in London, tie a rope between
two lamp-posts and swing the camera over.
I don't want to be British.
I want to shoot the whole film from a helicopter,
with steamy-windowed, frankly dangerous
love scenes between the pilot and co-pilot,
on a food aid mission over Lake Tanganyika,
and flashbacks to their combat in the Falklands War.
It will be sponsored by Westland and Sikorsky,
and climax in the bombing of the Sir Galahad
with extra, particularly convincing explosions—
depth charges, live artillery and straker fire.
(Let's make it early evening, sunset backdrop.)
You will see the shooting-down of at least
ten attack helicopters; watch them fall
in exquisite, slow motion sycamore-spin
and sink into the heaving South Atlantic;
and it will all be filmed impeccably,
and at great expense, from above.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, (books by this author) born in Springs, South Africa (1923). She grew up in a gold mining town where her family was part of the white middle class. One mile from her neighborhood, there was a housing complex of windowless barracks, guarded by police, where the black miners lived. The adults in her town all referred to the miners as "mine boys." She never thought about who they were or what there life was like until she read Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, about a meat packing plant, and she began to see the similarities between the meat packers in the book and the miners in her town. She said, "Eventually, I realized that it was not a God-given decision that blacks did menial jobs or that white children had toys and shoes and black children didn't."
For a long time, Gordimer was the only white person she knew who didn't agree with the system of apartheid in South Africa. She moved to Johannesburg and began writing short stories, published in collections such as Face to Face (1949) and The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952). She also began associating with the radicals and bohemians in the black community. She said, "We thought that by ignoring the color barrier we were destroying it. But ... the moment the black friend or black lover walked into the street, he or she had to carry a pass — and abide by racist laws." Still, most of them were optimistic about the future. They believed that apartheid would soon come to an end.
But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gordimer watched as many of her friends were put under surveillance and arrested for treason. Then, there were massacres of unarmed protestors. She was one of the few white novelists of her generation who did not go into exile. Instead, she began to write about the South African political underground of resistance in a series of novels, including The Late Bourgeois World (1966), The Guest of Honor (1970), and The Conservationist (1974), which won the Booker Prize. She was attacked by South Africa's government, and her books were banned for years at time, but she was also attacked by her fellow political radicals, because she refused to use her books as political propaganda.
Then in 1991, a year after Nelson Mandela was released from his 28 years of imprisonment, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
It's the birthday of the novelist Don DeLillo, (books by this author) born in New York City (1936). He lived in Europe for a while in the early 1980s, and when he got back to the United States he was overwhelmed by how strange America suddenly seemed. He decided to write a novel to try to capture that strangeness and the result was White Noise (1984), which became his first big success. It's the story of Jack Gladney, a college professor who spends much of his free time thinking about TV commercials, tabloid magazines, and supermarkets.
DeLillo wrote, "This is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead."
Don DeLillo said, "I've never thought about myself in terms of a career. ... I don't have a career, I have a typewriter."
TUESDAY, 21 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Glitter and be Gay" by Richard Wilbur, from Collected Poems: 1943-2004. © Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Glitter and be Gay
A second lyric from Candide.
CUNEGONDE sings
Glitter and be gay,
That's the part I play.
Here am I in Paris, France,
Forced to bend my soul
To a sordid role,
Victimized by bitter, bitter circumstance.
Alas for me, had I remained
Beside my lady mother,
My virtue had remained unstained
Until my maiden hand was gained
By some Grand Duke or other.
Ah, 'twas not to be;
Harsh necessity
Brought me to this gilded cage.
Born to higher things,
Here I droop my wings,
Singing of a sorrow nothing can assuage.
(Suddenly brighter)
And yet, of course, I rather like to revel, ha, ha!
I have no strong objection to champagne, ha, ha!
My wardrobe is expensive as the devil, ha, ha!
Perhaps it is ignoble to complain...
Enough, enough
Of being basely tearful!
I'll show my noble stuff
By being bright and cheerful!
Ha, ha ha ha...(Sings "ha" at some length)
(Reciting to music)
Pearls and ruby rings...
Ah, how can worldly things
Take the place of honor lost?
Can they compensate
For my fallen state,
Purchased as they were at such an awful cost?
Bracelets...lavalieres...
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes to shame?
Can the brightest brooch
Shield me from reproach?
Can the purest diamond purify my name?
(Suddenly bright again; singing as she puts on enormous bracelets)
And yet, of course, these trinkets are endearing, ha ha!
I'm oh, so glad my sapphire is a star, ha ha!
I rather like a twenty-carat earring, ha ha!
If I'm not pure, at least my jewels are!
(Puts on three more bracelets)
Enough, enough!
I'll take their diamond necklace,
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!
Ha ha ha ha ha...
Observe how bravely I conceal
The dreadful, dreadful shame I feel.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha...
(Puts on a giant diamond necklace)
Ha!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who helped spark the Enlightenment in France, writing under the name Voltaire, (books by this author) born François-Marie Arouet in Paris (1694). He wrote so much in his lifetime that his collected works are still being assembled and edited by French scholars. He's known to us for a single short novel: Candide (1760), about a young man who follows the philosophy of Doctor Pangloss that no matter what misfortunes befall us, this is the best of all possible worlds. Candide eventually decides that this philosophy is nonsense, and he comes to the conclusion that the secret of happiness is to cultivate one's own garden.
Voltaire grew up at a time when Louis XIV had instituted the persecution of Protestants, turning France into a ferociously intolerant society, with little freedom of speech or religion. Voltaire began his writing career just a few years after Louis XIV had died, and Voltaire was one of the first writers to challenge the restrictions of society by writing satirical poems about the new king. He was sent into exile for the first series of these poems, and then, in May of 1717, he was thrown into prison in the Bastille for 11 months. At the time, he wasn't particularly well known, and his imprisonment only served to make him famous. It was when he got out of prison that he began using the pen name Voltaire. No one is sure how or why he picked the name.
He became a well-known playwright and poet, but in 1925 he got into an argument with a nobleman. A few days later, that nobleman hired a group of men to surround Voltaire in the street and beat him with cudgels. The nobleman stood by and watched.
Voltaire was outraged when none of his political friends came to his aid in trying to get retribution for the incident. He had thought that his stature as a poet made him the equal of the aristocrats he spent all his time with, but this incident made him realize that he was still a second-class citizen. He began publicizing the incident and calling for justice, and he was eventually exiled to England. He spent the rest of his life crusading for human rights.
It was on this day in 1877 that Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a new device for recording and playing back sound, which he called the phonograph. He had been working on a device to record telephone communication when he stumbled upon the right design, using a stylus and a tinfoil cylinder. The first thing he recorded was himself reciting the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
Most people who saw the early demonstrations of the phonograph found it spooky, as though it were playing back the voice of a ghost. Edison demonstrated it for the editors of Scientific American magazine, and the magazine later wrote, "No matter how familiar a person may be with the modern machinery, or how clear in his mind the principles underlying this strange device may be, it is impossible to listen to this mechanical speech without experiencing the idea that his senses are deceiving him."
For the first 10 years or so, most people remained uneasy with the phonograph. Bram Stoker included the invention as a plot device in his gothic novel Dracula (1897). In order to help American customers feel more comfortable with the idea of playing back sound, the Columbia Phonograph Company commissioned a recording of marching music by John Philip Sousa's U.S. Marine Band. The idea was that Americans couldn't be spooked out by patriotic music, and those recordings became some of the first successful musical recordings ever sold.
WEDNESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "A Monument on Okinawa" by Gary Snyder, from Left Out in the Rain: Poems. © Shoemaker Hoard. Reprinted with permission.
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A Monument on Okinawa
"One hundred twenty schoolgirls
Committed suicide together here."
Dead now thirteen years.
Those knot-hearted little adolescents
In their fool purity
Died with a perverse sort of grace;
Their sisters who lived
Can be seen in the bars—
The agreeable hustlers of peace.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was about 12:30 p.m. on this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It was the only successful assassination of an American president carried out in the last hundred years, and the only presidential assassination ever caught on film. Almost every American alive at the time remembers where they were when they heard the news. Walter Cronkite cried when he made the announcement that the president was dead.
The reason Kennedy was in Texas was that he was already gearing up for the election in 1964, and he wanted to meet the two Democrats who were planning to run for governor of Texas. The secret service wanted Kennedy and his wife to travel directly from the airport to the Dallas Trade Mart, where he was scheduled to make a speech. But Kennedy and Johnson had decided that it would be good publicity if he rode through Dallas so that reporters could cover the fact that a huge crowd had applauded the president.
Thousands of people turned out to watch the motorcade through Dealey Plaza. The president and his wife were in an open limousine, sitting behind the then governor of Texas, John Connolly, and his wife, Nellie. As they drove through the plaza, Nellie Connolly said, "Mr. President, you can't say that Dallas doesn't love you." He replied, "No, you certainly can't." Those were the last words he ever spoke. Seconds later, people in the crowd heard shots being fired, and two of the bullets hit Kennedy, first in the throat and then in the head.
The national TV networks interrupted all programming to bring several days of coverage of the events. A young man named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested 90 minutes after the murder took place. Two days after his arrest, Oswald was being transferred to jail, in front of TV cameras, when a local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby pulled out a gun and shot him. It was one of the only times in American history that a man was murdered on live television.
There was wild speculation about who might have been behind the assassination, especially after the assassin himself was assassinated. Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a presidential commission to investigate the event. The Warren Commission's report filled 27 volumes with about 10 million words. It included the transcripts of 25,000 FBI interviews, 1,500 Secret Service interviews, the testimony of 552 witnesses who appeared before the commission itself, as well as photos and related documents.
The writer Don DeLillo, who wrote the novel Libra (1988) about the Kennedy assassination, said of the Warren Report, "Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative X-rays, photos of knotted string, thousands of pages of testimony. ... It is all one thing, a ruined city of trivia ... the Joycean Book of America."
The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that Jack Ruby had also acted alone. But even before the commission's report was released, books were already being published suggesting various conspiracy theories. Today, there have been more books written by amateur historians about the Kennedy assassination than any other event in history.
The various conspiracy theories implicate a right-wing conspiracy within the U.S. government, a group of right-wing dissidents, anti-Castro Cubans and their supporters, left-wing pro-Castro Cubans, or the Mafia. Today, less than half of all Americans believe the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
It's the birthday of the woman who wrote under the name George Eliot, (books by this author) born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire, England (1819). Her first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1859), was about carpenter who is betrayed by his love, Hetty Sorrel. It was an immediate success. People across Europe, including Leo Tolstoy in Russia, called it a work of genius, and everyone wondered who this George Eliot was. Mary Evans decided to reveal her identity, and went on to become one of the most renowned writers of her lifetime.
Her masterpiece was Middlemarch (1871), the story of Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic, intelligent young woman who hopes to become a social reformer. She marries the scholar Edward Casaubon, hoping to share his intellectual life, only to realize that the marriage is a disaster and her husband is a stuffy, old-fashioned snob, and the man she really loves is her husband's younger cousin.
Middlemarch made Eliot rich and famous. In the last years of her life, thousands of women wrote letters to her saying that she had described their lives, and asking for her advice on their marriages and careers.
George Eliot wrote, "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
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Poem: "LOOK" by Patrick Phillips, from Chattahoochee. © The University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted with permission.
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LOOK
I'd like to ask my mother
why I'm here, straddling
one thigh of her bell-bottom jeans,
listening to her whisper look
look sweetie in my ear.
But I can't stop staring
at our fat cat Walina,
ancestor of every cat
that ever roamed that house,
as she blinks back at me,
licks between her claws,
then turns again to eating
the clear, vein laced skin
stretched over the faces
of her babies squirming
in a pulled-out dresser drawer.
I'd like to ask—but this is back
before anything means
anything, when it all just is,
and even the squinting kittens
are like a game my mother made up
to pass the drizzly afternoon.
Back in the cold, dark evening
of childhood, where I'm always
alone: watching Walina
close her mouth around the runt—
the sleepy one, the one too weak
to butt its head against her,
that meows and meows
though no sound comes out,
when she drops it outside the drawer.
This is in the oldest room
of the house behind my eyelids
where the world began:
where a light bulb pops and flickers
over everything, and no one
ever comes to stop the kitten
from dragging its sack of blood
all over the white linoleum.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Thanksgiving Day, the day Americans express gratitude for their good fortune by eating one of the biggest meals of the year. Americans as a whole will consume about 10 million tons of turkey this week, along with about 75 million pounds of cranberry sauce.
On October 3, 1789, President George Washington proclaimed the 26th of that November the first national Thanksgiving Day under the Constitution. On October 3, 1863, in the wake of victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln decided to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation declaring the fourth Thursday in November national Thanksgiving Day. In 1941 Congress made it official.
It was on this day in 1903 that the opera singer Enrico Caruso made his American debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, appearing in ''Rigoletto.'' At that time, the New York Met was the world's leading opera house, and Caruso made it there from a childhood in the slums of Naples. His auto-mechanic father had tried to get him to work in a factory, but he'd run away from home at 16 and supported himself singing at weddings and funerals.
He'd begun his career as an opera singer in 1894, at an amateur opera house. He was paid 16 dollars for two appearances. He slowly developed a reputation throughout Europe and around the world. But he was still only known to opera enthusiasts when the manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York signed him to a five-year contract for 50 performances a season.
There was a good deal of anticipation among opera aficionados for his American debut on this day in 1903, and most critics agreed that he did a good job, but it wasn't a standout performance. The critic for The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Caruso has a natural and free delivery and his voice carries well without forcing."
But over the course of that first opera season, Caruso began to relax and he sang better and better with each performance. By the end of the season, audiences were going into hysterics, women jumping onto stage.
Less than three months after his Metropolitan debut, Caruso made some recordings for the Victor Company, and these recordings of his voice helped transform the phonograph from a curiosity into a household item. Caruso could be said to be the first vocal recording star.
He went on to perform 17 consecutive seasons at the Met, giving a total of 626 performances in New York, in 37 different operas. He gave his final performance at the Met on December 11, 1920, but he had to leave the stage after the first act, because he was coughing up blood. It was the final performance of his life. It turned out he had pneumonia, which killed him a few months later.
It was on this day in 1889 that the jukebox made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It consisted of an Edison Class M Electric Phonograph inside a freestanding oak cabinet to which were attached four stethoscope-like tubes. Each tube could be activated by depositing a coin so that four people could listen to a single recording at one time.
Eventually jukeboxes changed the music business. Many early radio programs refused to play country, blues, or jazz, so it was jukeboxes that made all that music available in taverns, restaurants, diners, and army bases.
FRIDAY, 24 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "The Summer You Learned to Swim" by Michael Simms, from The Happiness of Animals. © Monkey Sea Editions. Reprinted with permission.
The Summer You Learned to Swim
for Lea
The summer you learned to swim
was the summer I learned to be at peace with myself.
In May you were afraid to put your face in the water
But by August, I was standing in the pool once more
when you dove in, then retreated to the wall saying
You forgot to say Sugar! So I said Come on Sugar, you can do it
and you pushed off and swam to me and held on
laughing, your hair stuck to your cheeks—
you hiccupped with joy and swam off again.
And I dove in too, trying new things.
I tried not giving advice. I tried waking early to pray. I tried
not rising in anger. Watching you I grew stronger—
your courage washed away my fear.
All day I worked hard thinking of you.
In the evening I walked the long hill home.
You were at the top, waving your small arms,
pittering down the slope to me and I lifted you high
so high to the moon. That summer all the world
was soul and water, light glancing off peaks.
You learned the turtle, the cannonball, the froggy, and the flutter
And I learned to stand and wait for you to swim to me.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the publisher and editor of The Little Review magazine, Margaret Anderson, born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1886). She grew up in the small town of Columbus, Indiana, but early on she decided that she didn't fit into small-town life at all. So she moved to Chicago, which was the artistic capital of the Midwest at the time. In order to create a circle of artistic friends, she decided to start a magazine devoted to the avant-garde. She said that her plan was to fill the magazine with "the best conversation the world has to offer."
She called her magazine The Little Review, and the first issue came out in March 1914. The magazine had a motto printed on the cover that said, "A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste." In 1918, the poet Ezra Pound showed Anderson the manuscript for a new novel called Ulysses by a man named James Joyce. When she read it, she wrote to Pound, "This is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have! We'll print it if it's the last effort of our lives." It took three years to serialize the whole novel, during which four complete issues of the magazine were confiscated and burned by the U.S. Post Office.
She was eventually convicted of obscenity charges for printing the novel. At the trial, the judge wouldn't let the offending material be read in her presence, because she was a woman, even though she had published it. But she said that the worst part of the experience was just the fact that all those issues of her magazine had been burned. She said, "The care we had taken to preserve Joyce's text intact. ... The addressing, wrapping, stamping, mailing; the excitement of anticipating the world's response to the literary masterpiece of our generation ... and then a notice from the Post Office: BURNED."
She kept publishing The Little Review after that, but the issues appeared less and less frequently. Her last issue came out in 1929.
Margaret Anderson said, "I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable—in other words, in an art of life."
It's the birthday of the novelist Laurence Sterne, (books by this author) born in Clonmel, Ireland (1713). He was a preacher before he became a writer. He supported himself and his wife by doing double duty in two different parishes, as well as substitute preaching at a third parish. He did all this preaching in spite of the fact that he was skeptical about the existence of God.
He knew he wanted to try writing fiction, but his friends kept telling him to put it off until he got promoted to higher office. He finally decided he couldn't wait any more, and began to write what became one of the most revolutionary novels in English literature: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760), a fictional autobiography in which the narrator is unable to tell his own story, constantly being side-tracked by various absurd digressions on all sorts of subjects, questioning perceived ideas in ethics, theology, philosophy, sex, and politics. The book is also filled with black pages, excerpts of obscure theological debates, and a graphic representation of its own plotline.
Sterne participated in all the details of Tristram Shandy's marketing campaign, even specifying the dimensions of the book to make sure it could fit into a gentleman's coat pocket. His efforts paid off and the book made him famous. His novel went on to influence many writers of the 20th century, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Italo Calvino said, "[Sterne] was the undoubted progenitor of all the avant-garde novels of our century."
SATURDAY, 25 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Famous Last Words" by Robert Phillips, from Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Famous Last Words
for Dana Gioia
"It has all been very interesting!"
declared Lady Mary Wortley Montague.
Examining his sickroom, Oscar Wilde railed,
"Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
Told the angels were waiting for him,
Ethan Allen quipped, "Let 'em wait."
"I am so very happy," Gerard Manley Hopkins cooed.
Goethe pleaded for "More light, more light."
Madame de Pompadour cried out to God,
"Wait a minute!" rouged her cheeks red.
"I suppose I am turning into a god?"
The dying Emperor Vespasian said.
Henry James, succumbing to a massive stroke,
"So it has come ... The Distinguished Thing."
Pancho Villa pleaded, "Don't let it end
like this. Tell 'em I said something."
Gertrude to Alice B.: "What is the answer?"
[Silence] "In that case, what is the question?"
"If this is dying, I don't think much of it,"
Muttered Lytton Strachey. When undone,
Julius Caesar managed, "Et tu, Brute?"
Edmund Kean: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
Chekhov: "It's been so long since I've had champagne."
Goethe: "More light, more light," then departed.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of American steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, born in Dunfermline, Scotland (1835). He grew up in Scotland, working as a milk hand for $1.20 per week. But when his family immigrated to America in 1848, Carnegie took a job in a factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He sensed instinctively that education would help him work his way up in the world, but at the time education was hard to come by. There were public libraries then, but they weren't free. People were asked to pay an annual fee to become a library member. Carnegie couldn't afford the annual fee at his local library, so he wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, arguing that poor young people should be given free access to libraries so that they could improve themselves. The director of Carnegie's local library read the letter, and it persuaded him to change the rule.
With the help of the library, Carnegie began teaching himself how to do all kinds of things, including how to use a telegraph. He got a job as a telegraph operator, and then attracted the notice of an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and became the executive's personal secretary and telegrapher. By 1859, just 11 years after he had arrived in America as a poor factory worker, he was named the Pennsylvania Railroad's vice president. He became an investor, and built a steel empire, and then at the height of his career, he sold his company. The sale made him one of the richest men in the world, but he spent the rest of his life giving his fortune away to charity.
Among his many charitable acts was the construction of almost 3,000 libraries across the country. For every library he funded, he required that the town set aside a certain amount of tax funds to keep it running in perpetuity. He also required that many libraries inscribe phrases like "Free Library" or "Free to the People" over the entrance, so that the libraries would always remain free.
It's the birthday of one of the latest of late bloomers in modern publishing, the novelist Helen Hooven Santmyer, (books by this author) born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1895). When she was five years old she moved with her family to the small town of Xenia, Ohio, where she grew up. She was inspired as a young girl by the Xenia Women's Club, an early feminist intellectual organization.
So she got a job as a secretary for Scribner's Magazine, where she met many writers, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But after a few years of living in New York City, and then studying at Oxford, she moved back to Xenia, Ohio. She taught English at a nearby college and then worked as a librarian. She was writing all the time, and even published a few novels, but they had little success.
It was only after her retirement that Santmyer began to delve into the history of her hometown, eventually writing a collection of essays called Ohio Town: A Portrait of Xenia (1862). Then she began an epic novel about the history of a small-town women's group based on her own Women's Club of Xenia called And Ladies of the Club (1982), which reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list in 1985, when Helen Hooven Santmyer was 88.
It's the birthday of physician and essayist Lewis Thomas, (books by this author) born in Flushing, New York (1913). In 1973, he became president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City, one of the world's largest facilities devoted to cancer research. It was only after he had established himself as one of the most renowned scientists of his field that he began writing literary essays, which he published in the back pages of The New England Journal of Medicine. In 1974, Viking Press collected 29 of the essays, exactly as they had appeared, in The Lives of a Cell, and it won the National Book Award in 1975.
It's the birthday of baseball player Joe DiMaggio (1914) born in Martinez, California. He is remembered as one of baseball's most graceful athletes. Many consider his 56-consecutive-game hitting streak in 1941 as the top baseball feat of all time.
DiMaggio said, "You start chasing a ball and your brain immediately commands your body to 'run forward, bend, scoop up the ball, peg it to the infield,' then your body says, 'Who me?'"
SUNDAY, 26 NOVEMBER, 2006
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Poem: "Where are Men When they're Not at Home?" by Reid Bush, from What You Know. © Larkspur Press. Reprinted with permission.. © George Braziller. Reprinted with permission.
Where are Men
When they're Not at Home?
Different places.
Some are out at the barn checking on the mare that's about to foal.
I know, not many now.
A few.
Some are running down to the corner store to pick up something they forgot.
Be right back.
Some are in offices practicing pitches. Spiels.
Some are phoning from offices—saying they'll be late.
Of course, many are dead.
You suddenly think about them because you're back where you haven't been
in 20 years
and go to look them up.
But they're not there.
Just some widows.
But most are way off somewhere searching for fathers who were never home
enough.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in 1942, the movie Casablanca had its premiere at the Hollywood Theater in New York City. Casablanca is the story of Rick Blaine, an American nightclub owner in North Africa during World War II. One night, he is approached by a French Resistance fighter named Victor and his wife, Ilsa, who are trying to get papers to escape to America. Ilsa happens to be Rick's true love, who deserted him when the Nazis invaded Paris. Meeting once more, they fall in love again, and they have to decide whether their love is more important than the fight against fascism.
The movie took 10 weeks to shoot. The script was constantly rewritten throughout the shooting, and not even the writers knew whether Ilsa would end up with Rick or Victor at the end. But it was a box office hit, and it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1943.
Casablanca is now one of the best-loved and most quoted movies of all time. It contains lines such as, "We'll always have Paris," "Here's looking at you, kid," "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," and "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine."
It's the birthday of the novelist Marilynne Robinson, born in Sandpoint, Idaho (1943). She read a lot as a child, went to Brown University, and went on to get a Ph.D. in English. While she was in graduate school, she began to write a series of fictional fragments about a girl growing up in Idaho, and eventually she realized she was writing a novel. That novel became Housekeeping (1980), which was nominated for the Pulitzer and won a PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel of the year.
But Marilynne Robinson didn't publish another book of fiction for more than 20 years. Instead, she began writing nonfiction. She published a book about nuclear waste in England, and another about philosophy and theology. She took a teaching job in Iowa and worked on the side as a deacon at her church.
After having lived in Iowa for a while, she began asking people about the history of the state, and most people had no idea what Iowa's history was. So Robinson began doing some research herself, and she was particularly fascinated by stories of settlers who had come from Eastern divinity schools to start abolitionist towns and colleges on the plains. Then, one day, she found herself writing a letter in the voice of an elderly preacher to his son, describing the history of his pioneer family and his own life as a clergyman. And that letter became her second novel, Gilead (2004), published almost 25 years after her first.
It's the birthday of cartoonist Charles Schulz, (books by this author) born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). He was the only son of a St. Paul barber, and the family was extremely poor. Schulz said, "We used to eat pancakes all the time because it's all we could afford."
He learned to love newspaper comics from his father, who'd only had a third-grade education but who bought six different newspapers every weekend and read all the comics with his son. Charles went on to create his own comic strip, Peanuts, which appeared for the first time on October 2, 1950, and went on to feature characters including Charlie Brown, his dog Snoopy, and his friends Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and Sally.
What made Peanuts revolutionary was that instead of making the children cutesy pranksters, like most children in cartoons at the time, Schulz drew upon on his own childhood difficulties for material. Charlie Brown became the chronically depressed and unlucky child who never gets to kick the football, who always gets his kite stuck in the tree, and who never wins the love of The Little Red Haired Girl. Charlie Brown was the first character in an American comic strip to suffer anxiety and insecurity.
