MONDAY, 8 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: excerpts from "O, Florida" by Daniel Anderson, from Drunk in Sunlight. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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O, Florida
This is the old country,
A land of statuary herons,
Where chevron squads of pelicans patrol
The glittering green shallows of the gulf.
Where color schemes are chiefly melon,
Flamingo pinks, and tropical pastels.
Where all day single-engine planes buzz by.
Their block red-letter advertisements scroll
Across those beefy, milk-white cumuli:
EAT SHRIMP AT RUBY'S-BY-THE-BAY.
RAW BAR AT JACK'S. ALASKA KING CRAB CLAWS.
ENJOY WORLD FAMOUS KEY LIME PIE.
Ponce de León, is this that paradise
You sought, whose tonics might restore
The potency and thrust of youth? The truth
Is that the old grow older here.
Their bones go frail as balsawood.
Strokes slur their speech. Their eyes become
Diminished lakes. We watch them dodder
Down grocery aisles. We see them heft
Their chronic coughs and aches along the beach.
Their sorrows all metastasize — they must —
And yet we seldom say a word
Or spend much time imagining ourselves
In thirty years. Shivering and sweating.
A lukewarm spittle on the chin.
Wide-open hours of waiting and regretting.
The air-conditioned room of our hotel
Looks out on swimming pool and sea.
We've paid good money for the view.
We seek the boredom that they know so well.
Back home, it's thirty-three degrees,
The March rain changing steadily to sleet.
We're only here another day. And if tonight
We eat at Ruby's-by-the-Bay
Or Jack's what difference will it make?
The beach boy, having closed up shop,
Has faced his bath chairs to the west
In regimented rows. Beside
The ponderous and receding tide
Three toasted, golden teenage girls relax.
They're sitting cross-legged in the sand
And posing for a picture that a fourth
Intends to take. Each tosses back her hair
Then feigns a fashion model's runway stare.
Cotton blouses. An almost chilly breeze.
That blush reflection of the sinking sun.
Just listen to them shriek and laugh.
Let memory and love arrest them there.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1935). He learned to play the guitar when he was 12, and his friends said that he could reproduce perfectly almost anything he heard on the radio. After high school, he got a job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company, and he began studying to become an electrician. His career as a recording artist only came about because of his love for his mother.
At the time, the Sun Record Company had a special recording studio where anyone could come in and pay a small fee to record personal records for themselves. In the summer of 1953, Elvis scraped together four dollars to record two songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin," as a present for his mother.
The recording engineer that day liked Elvis's voice, and somehow those recordings made their way into the hands of producer Sam Phillips, and that was the beginning of Presley's career.
It's the birthday of physicist Stephen Hawking, (books by this author) born in Oxford, England (1942). He went to Oxford University, but never attended lectures. He was bored with most of his classes, because they seemed too easy, and it was only after an oral exam that his professors realized how smart he was. He had gone on to get a Ph.D., and he was just starting to find his courses interesting when he was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that slowly destroys a person's ability to move any part of his or her body, while leaving the brain itself unharmed. His doctors said he probably had two to three years to live.
At first Hawking was utterly depressed, and he considered giving up on everything. But he decided to focus his studies on the mysterious astronomical objects known as black holes, and he developed new theories about how they function and what role they may have played in the origin of the universe.
In 1988, Hawking decided to sum up all the research on physics and astronomy in a book for nonscientists called A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. It went on to sell almost 10 million copies.
Today is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on this day in 1815. It was the last major battle of the War of 1812, won with the help of a pirate named Jean Laffite.
The war of 1812 had started for a variety of complicated reasons, but mainly because the United States refused to put up with British control of the Atlantic Ocean while the British were fighting a war with France. When the war started, the United States had only existed for a few decades. By 1814, after just two years of fighting with the British, almost all the buildings in Washington, D.C., had been destroyed, the U.S. treasury was virtually empty, and the British Navy had blockaded every major seaport on the East Coast.
At the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson managed to fend off the British attempt to take over the mouth of the Mississippi with a ragtag band of volunteers, Indians, and pirates. It was America's greatest triumph in the War of 1812, but it turned out that it took place after the war was over. The United States and Great Britain had signed a treaty, ending the war, on Christmas Eve, a few weeks before the battle. The news of the treaty just hadn't reached New Orleans in time.
TUESDAY, 9 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "After Dinner" by Philip Levine, from A Walk With Thomas Jefferson. © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
After Dinner
She's eaten dinner talking
back to the television, she's
had coffee and brandy, done
the dishes and drifted into
and out of sleep over a book
she found beside the couch. It's
time for bed, but she goes
instead to the front door, unlocks
it, and steps onto the porch.
Behind her she can hear only
the silence of the house. The lights
throw her shadow down the stairs
and onto the lawn, and she walks
carefully to meet it. Now she's
standing in the huge, whispering
arena of night, hearing her
own breath tearing out of her
like the cries of an animal.
She could keep going into
whatever the darkness brings,
she could find a presence there
her shaking hands could hold
instead of each other.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the 37th president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, (books by this author) born in Yorba Linda, California (1913). He had a childhood full of tragedy and disappointment. When Nixon was 12, his older brother got a headache that turned out to be meningitis. He died a month later. Nixon said that he cried for weeks afterwards. A few years later, Nixon's other brother caught tuberculosis and spent five years in a sanitarium before he died. The cost of his treatment drained the family's resources, and Nixon had to turn down a partial scholarship to Harvard. He did get a full scholarship to Duke Law School, but he had to live in a one-room house with no plumbing or electricity. He was forced to shave in the men's room of the Duke University library.
Nixon's luck only began to change when he decided to join the military during World War II. He'd been raised a Quaker, but he was interested in politics, and he knew that military service would look good on his résumé. One of the things he learned in the military was that he was a fantastic poker player. By the end of the war, he had earned almost $10,000. When he got back to civilian life, he used that money to fund his first political campaign.
He managed to win his first election for Congress, and he served as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, but he was defeated for the presidency by John F. Kennedy in 1960. Then, in 1962, he lost a campaign for governor of California, and suddenly it seemed like his career was over. But just six years later, he was elected president of the United States.
His policies as president were surprisingly liberal by today's standards. He began arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and eased relations with China. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, expanded Social Security and state welfare programs, and he tried to create a national health insurance system.
The Watergate investigations eventually forced Nixon to resign in 1974. At his last meeting with his Cabinet in 1974, Nixon burst into tears. He told them, "Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."
It's the birthday of the novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, (books by this author) born in Paris, France (1908). She entered the Sorbonne, and it was there that she met another philosophy student named Jean-Paul Sartre. He was five feet tall, had lost his sight in one eye, wore baggy clothes and seemed to have no interest in hygiene. But he loved to talk, and he was both funny and brilliant. Beauvoir later said, "It was the first time in my life that I felt intellectually inferior to anyone else."
Sartre was equally impressed by Beauvoir's intellect, especially when she finished her philosophy degree in one year, after it had taken Sartre three years to finish his own. She was the youngest person to receive the degree in French history. They fell in love, but instead of getting married, they decided to form a pact. They would both have affairs with other people, but they would tell each other everything. That basic arrangement of their relationship would last for the rest of their lives.
One of her most famous books was inspired by an offhand comment Sartre made one day. They were talking about the differences in the ways men and women were treated, and Beauvoir claimed that she'd never been adversely affected by this treatment. Sartre said, "All the same, you weren't brought up the same way a boy would have been; you should look into it further."
So Beauvoir did look into it. She spent weeks at the National Library in Paris researching the way women had been treated throughout history. The result was her book The Second Sex (1949), in which she wrote, "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." It was one of the first comprehensive arguments that the difference between the sexes was the result of culture, not nature, and it helped found the modern feminist movement.
It's the birthday of the Irish playwright Bernard Patrick Friel (Brian Friel) (books by this author) born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland (1929). In 1959, his short stories began to appear in The New Yorker, which gave him the courage to give up his teaching and start writing full time. He also wrote popular plays, including Philadelphia, Here I Come!, produced on Broadway in 1966, and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), about the five unmarried Mundy sisters who live together on a rugged farm outside Ballybeg, a small town in Donegal.
WEDNESDAY, 10 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "The Phone Call" by Philip Levine, from A Walk With Thomas Jefferson. © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
The Phone Call
She calls Chicago, but no one
is home. The operator asks
for another number but still
no one answers. Together
they try twenty-one numbers,
and at each no one is ever home.
"Can I call Baltimore?" she asks.
She can, but she knows no one
in Baltimore, no one in
St Louis, Boston, Washington.
She imagines herself standing
before the glass wall high
over Lake Shore Drive, the cars
below fanning into the city.
East she can see all the way
to Gary and the great gray clouds
of exhaustion rolling over
the lake where her vision ends.
This is where her brother lives.
At such height there's nothing,
no birds, no growing, no noise.
She leans her sweating forehead
against the cold glass, shudders,
and puts down the receiver.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet Philip Levine, (books by this author) born in Detroit (1928). After college, he tried getting a job in advertising, but he couldn't stand it, so he supported himself working in various auto factories around Detroit. Looking around at the other men in the factories, he realized that none of them had a voice. Nobody was speaking for them or writing for them. He said, "As young people will ... I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them, and that's what my life would be. And sure enough, I've gone and done it. Or I've tried anyway."
It's the birthday of the poet Robinson Jeffers, (books by this author) born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1887). He was still trying to figure out what to do for a living when he inherited enough money to support himself writing poetry, so he moved to the coast of California and built himself an observation tower so that he could observe the natural world and write about it.
He was living in his tower, without electricity or plumbing, publishing his books of poetry at his own expense, when an editor chose one of his poems for an anthology of California verse. Jeffers sent the editor his new collection Tamar and Other Poems (1924) as a thank-you gift, and the editor liked it so much that he sent it around to various magazines, where it got great reviews. Jeffers sent all the copies of the book he had to New York, and they immediately sold out.
Within a year, Jeffers was hailed as a genius, compared to Sophocles and Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Real estate agents started using his name to sell land in Carmel, California, where he lived.
But after his initial success, he began to write long narrative poems that no one could categorize. By the 1940s, Jeffers had sunk back into obscurity. He's been reassessed in the last two decades as possibly one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. A new collection of his work, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, came out in 2001.
It's the birthday of historian Stephen E. Ambrose, (books by this author) born in Decatur, Illinois (1936). He was 28 years old when a small university press published his first book, Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (1962), a biography of General Henry Halleck. Only a few thousand copies of the biography were printed, and Ambrose assumed that it had only been read by the academic community. But one day, he got a phone call from the former president, Dwight Eisenhower, who had read his book on Halleck and liked it so much that he wanted Ambrose to be his own biographer.
Ambrose wrote several books about Eisenhower, including The Supreme Commander (1970) and Eisenhower: The President (1984), and those books helped him make the leap from academic to popular historian. He went on to write many best-selling books about American history, including Band of Brothers (1992) and D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994).
Stephen Ambrose believed that he became a successful historian because he got so much practice telling stories to his students. He said, "There is nothing like standing before 50 students at 8 a.m. to start talking about an event that occurred 100 years ago, because the look on their faces is a challenge — 'Let's see you keep me awake.' You learn what works and what doesn't in a hurry."
It was on this day in 1776 that a 77-page pamphlet called "Common Sense" was published anonymously, making the case that the American colonies should declare independence from Great Britain. It had been written by a man named Thomas Paine. The pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies, more copies than any other publication had ever sold at that time in America.
Adams would always be somewhat jealous of the attention "Common Sense" received, but even he had to admit that it was "Common Sense," more than anything else, that had persuaded most ordinary Americans to support independence. Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of 'Common Sense,' the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain."
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Poem: "I Married You" by Linda Pastan, from Queen of a Rainy Country. © W. W. Norton & Company. Reprinted with permission.
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I Married You
I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.
I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity —
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the founding fathers of our country, Alexander Hamilton, (books by this author) born in the British West Indies (1755 or some sources say 1757). He had an extraordinary childhood. He grew up on the tiny island of Nevis, where his father abandoned the family and his mother died when he was just a boy. But he was taken in by a local merchant, who gave him a job at a general store. He turned out to be quite good at accounting, so when he was 13, his boss took a trip to Europe and left young Alexander in charge of the store. He started writing on the side, and an article about a recent hurricane so impressed the adults around him that they all pitched in to pay for his passage to New York, where he could attend school.
He arrived in America just as rebellion against Great Britain was brewing, and he immediately began to write for New York newspapers in support of the colonies' rights. He impressed George Washington so much that he became Washington's right-hand man when he was barely 20 years old. After the revolution, when many American politicians believed that the colonies should remain mostly independent of each other, Hamilton was one of the earliest supporters of a strong central government.
In just three years, between 1787 and 1790, he served on the Constitutional Convention, wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, which helped garner support for the new constitution, became the first secretary of the Treasury, and set up the U.S. National Bank. He was challenged to a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. They met at sunrise in a wooded area of Weehawken, New Jersey, above the Hudson River. Hamilton showed up for the duel to prove his courage, but he purposely fired his gun straight up into the air. Burr aimed at him anyway, and Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day.
He hasn't been as well remembered as Washington or Jefferson, but by setting up the national treasury, the national bank, the first budgetary and tax systems, and most of all by helping gather support for the U.S. Constitution, he did more to design the system of government we now live under than almost any other man.
It's the birthday of the psychologist and philosopher William James, (books by this author) born in New York City (1842). He was a professor of physiology at Harvard when he was hired to write a textbook about the new field of psychology, which was challenging the idea that the body and the mind were separate. He took 12 years to finish the book, which was called The Principles of Psychology (1890). It was used as a textbook in college classrooms, but it was also translated into a dozen different languages, and people read it all over the world.
One of the ideas he developed in the book was a theory of the human mind that he called "a stream of consciousness." Before him the common view was that a person's thoughts have a clear beginning and end, and that the thinker is in control of his or her thoughts. But William James wrote, "Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows."
James's ideas about consciousness were especially influential on writers, and novelists from James Joyce to William Faulkner began to portray streams of consciousness in their work, through language, letting characters think at length and at random on the page. Consciousness itself became one of the most important subjects of modern literature.
He also helped invent the technique of automatic writing, in which a person writes as quickly as possible whatever comes into his or her head. James encouraged audiences to take up the practice as a form of self-analysis, and one person who took his advice was a student named Gertrude Stein, who went on to use it as the basis of her writing style. William James said, "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
It's the birthday of novelist Alan Paton, (books by this author) born in the province of Natal, South Africa (1903). He's best known for his novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), which he wrote after working for 25 years as a public servant. He helped reform South Africa's penal system. And then, one night while traveling, he started writing Cry, the Beloved Country, about a Zulu pastor in search of his son, who has murdered a white man. He finished the novel in three months, writing in a series of hotel rooms. When the book was published in 1948, it became an international best-seller. It's the best-selling novel in South African history, and it still sells about 100,000 copies a year.
FRIDAY, 12 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "The Art of Storytelling" by Louis Simpson, from The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001. © BOA Editions, Ltd. Reprinted with permission.
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The Art of Storytelling
Once upon a time there was a shocket,
that is, a kosher butcher,
who went for a walk.
He was standing by the harbor
admiring the ships, all painted white,
when up came three sailors, led by an officer.
"Filth," they said, "who gave you permission?"
and they seized and carried him off.
So he was taken into the navy.
It wasn't a bad life — nothing is.
He learned how to climb and sew,
and to shout "Glad to be of service, Your Excellency!"
He sailed all round the world,
Was twice shipwrecked, and had other adventures.
Finally, he made his way back to the village ...
whereupon he put on his apron, and picked up his knife,
and continued to be a shocket.
At this point, the person telling the story
would say, "This shocket-sailor
was one of our relatives, a distant cousin."
It was always so, they knew they could depend on it.
Even if the story made no sense,
the one in the story would be a relative —
a definite connection with the family.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Jack London, (books by this author) born Jack Chancy in San Francisco (1876). Growing up, Jack London fell in love with dime novels about adventure and exotic places, but when he was 13 years old, he had to get a job at a cannery to help support the family. The job was sheer drudgery, and London began dreaming of running away.
He borrowed money from his foster mother and bought a sloop named Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate, and then Jack London became an oyster pirate himself. When his sloop became too damaged to sail, London took a job on a sealing schooner off the coast of Japan. But finally he came back to California, thinking that what he really needed was an education. He began reading books at a ferocious pace, on all subjects: philosophy, biology, history, and literature. When he heard about a special entrance exam to the University of California, he took the test and aced it, even though he hadn't even gone to high school.
But London only lasted one semester in college, because he couldn't fit in with the other more privileged students. Then, in the summer of 1897, he heard about the gold rush in the Alaskan Klondike, and off he went. He hauled his equipment over the Chilkoot Pass, and spent that winter in a shack, barely surviving the 50-below-zero temperatures. When spring came, he decided he'd had enough. He'd found no gold.
When he returned to California, he finally had some stories to write. His first big success was his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), about a dog named Buck who goes from living as a domestic pet to living on its own in the wilderness of Alaska. His most famous short story is "To Build a Fire" (1908), about a man struggling and failing to light a single fire in the snowy wilderness. It is one of the most widely anthologized and translated stories ever written by an American author.
It's the birthday of the mystery novelist Walter Mosley, (books by this author) born in the Watts section Los Angeles (1952). He was the product of an interracial marriage. His father was black and his mother came from a family of Russian Jews. When he was growing up, Mosley loved to listen to the stories his relatives told on both sides of the family. His mother's relatives talked about life in Russia, and his father's relatives talked about life in the South.
After riots erupted in his neighborhood, while he was still in high school, Mosley decided that he wanted to get as far away from Watts as he could. So he went to a small college in Vermont. He bounced around in a variety of jobs for a while, selling pottery and then working as a computer programmer. Then, in 1982, he read Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. He later said, "I'd read a lot of the French [novelists] — Camus and all that — and I love their writing. But I couldn't write like that. Then, when I read Walker, I thought, 'Oh, I could do this.'"
So he began writing a novel about a character named Easy Rawlins, living in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, and the result was his book Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). It's the story of a black World War II veteran who's just been laid off from his job when a white man hires him to find a white woman who's known to frequent the black community. It became a best-seller, and Mosley has written several more novels featuring Easy Rawlins. But his most recent novels are about a detective named Fearless Jones. His novel Fear of the Dark came out in 2006.
It's the birthday of the novelist Haruki Murakami, (books by this author) born in Kyoto, Japan (1949). He's the author of Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Norwegian Wood (1987).
SATURDAY, 13 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "Relearning Winter" by Mark Svenvold from Soul Data. © University of North Texas Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Relearning Winter
Hello Winter, hello flanneled
blanket of clouds, clouds
fueled by more clouds, hello again.
Hello afternoons,
off to the west, that silver
of sunset, rust-colored
and gone too soon.
And night (I admit to a short memory)
you climb back in with chilly fingers
and clocks, and there is no refusal:
ice cracks the water main, the garden hose
stiffens, the bladed leaves of the rhododendron
shine in the fog of a huge moon.
And rain, street lacquer,
oily puddles and spinning rubber,
mist of angels on the head of a pin,
hello,
and snow, upside-down cake of clouds,
white, freon scent, you build
even as you empty the world of texture —
hello to this new relief,
this new solitude now upon us,
upon which we feed.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Jay McInerney, (books by this author) born in Hartford, Connecticut (1955). His father was an international sales executive with the Scott Paper Company, and he had to move around a lot, so young Jay grew up in a series of cities around the world, including London, Vancouver, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He attended 18 elementary schools before he finally started high school.
After college, he wound up in New York City, where he worked for Random House and got involved in the glamorous nightlife of fashion parties and dance clubs. Then, one day, one of his co-workers introduced him to the writer Raymond Carver, and Carver told him that if he ever wanted to be a writer he had to get out of the city and away from all the parties so that he would be able to think, and that's what he did. He moved to Syracuse, New York, and in six weeks he wrote his first novel Bright Lights, Big City (1983), loosely based on the glamorous New York lifestyle he'd just given up, and that book made him famous.
It's the birthday of the novelist Horatio Alger Jr., (books by this author) born in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1832). He was one of the most influential writers in American history. He wrote more than a hundred novels, almost every single one of which tells the same story: a young boy, living in poverty, manages to find success and happiness by working hard and never giving up. But even though Alger's books were all the same, and none was a literary masterpiece, they were read by thousands of young Americans all across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been argued that Horatio Alger, more than any other person, was responsible for creating the idea of the American Dream.
For more than a hundred years after his death, almost nothing was known about the life of Alger, because when he died, his sister destroyed all of his personal papers. It's only been recently that scholars have been able to uncover the bare bones of Alger's life. He was the son of a Unitarian minister. He studied literature at Harvard, and then went into the ministry. But 15 months after his ordination, he was expelled from his parish for apparently molesting boys in his congregation. He wrote a poem at the time that suggests he considered suicide, but instead he decided to devote the rest of his life to improving the lives of the poor.
So Alger moved to New York City, and got involved in helping the homeless street kids who worked as bootblacks and newsboys. And he wrote his first book about one of those street kids. It was called Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks (1868), and it was a huge success.
Many of the successful men of the early 20th century claimed that they had been inspired by reading Horatio Alger books when they were kids. Groucho Marx once said, "Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends — that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn't regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life."
It's the birthday of short-story writer Lorrie Moore, (books by this author) born in Glens Falls, New York (1957). She's the author of the short-story collections Like Life (1990) and Birds of America (1998).
It's the birthday of the novelist Edmund White, (books by this author) born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1940). He wrote five novels about contemporary homosexual life, but he couldn't get any of them published. So finally he wrote Forgetting Elena (1973), about a man who wakes up after a party and can't remember who he is. It was the first novel White had written that didn't mention homosexuality, and it got great reviews. The writer Vladimir Nabokov called it the best new novel he'd read in years.
But even though White had had his first success with a novel that didn't address his own sexuality, he decided that if he was going to be a writer, he wanted to write about his own experiences, and so he set out to become the foremost gay novelist in America. His third novel, A Boy's Own Story (1982), was the first gay coming-of-age novel in America, and it became a best-seller in the United States and England.
SUNDAY, 14 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "My Madonna" by Robert W. Service, from The Best of Robert Service. © Dodd, Mead & Company. Reprinted with permission.
My Madonna
I haled me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model's seat
And I painted her sitting there.
I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
If the Worst had been the Best.
She laughed at my picture and went away.
Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
"'Tis Mary, the Mother of God."
So I painted a halo round her hair,
And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,
Where you and all may see.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Anchee Min, (books by this author) born in Shanghai, China (1957). She is the author of a memoir about growing up in communist China called Red Azalea (1994). The book was banned in China, but after its success here, she was invited back to her homeland to make some public appearances.
Min writes in English, even though she didn't speak it until she was 27 years old. She learned English when she came to the United States by watching Sesame Street and Oprah on television.
It's the birthday of columnist Maureen Dowd, (books by this author) born in Washington D.C. (1952). Just out of college, she got a job as an editorial assistant at the Washington Star newspaper. She spent two years writing obituaries and weather reports before she got promoted to reporter.
She was hired at The New York Times by the editor Anna Quindlen, and made her name with a story about presidential candidate Walter Mondale, his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, and their policy of absolutely never kissing each other, even on the cheek, in public. Focus groups had decided that it would be inappropriate. In that article, Dowd demonstrated her willingness to write news stories that included humorous detail and witty observations. At the time, humor was segregated to the op-ed page of the newspaper. But Dowd filled her articles with the kind of gossipy insider knowledge that reporters usually only shared with each other.
In 1995, she became the fourth woman in the history of The New York Times to have her own op-ed column. She's published several books of essays, including Are Men Necessary? (2005).
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Mary Robison, (books by this author) born in Washington, D.C. (1949). She grew up in Ohio with five brothers and two sisters. She ran away from home twice when she was young, one of those times going to Florida to look for Jack Kerouac. She always wanted to be a writer, and she kept journals and diaries and wrote poetry as a teenager.
She published a short story called "Sisters" in The New Yorker magazine in 1977, and within a few years she began to be lumped in with other writers such as Raymond Carver and Amy Hempl, who wrote about ordinary people in a stripped-down prose style. These writers were called minimalists, but Robison said, "I detested the term. I thought it reductive, misleading, inconclusive and insulting. It was the school that no one ever wanted to be in. They'd bring your name up just to kick you."
She published a few collections in the 1980s, including An Amateur's Guide to the Night (1983) and Believe Them (1988), and then suddenly, in the 1990s, she was struck with a terrible case of writer's block.
After a while of being unable to write anything, Robison began taking drastic measures. She started driving around in her car with a tape recorder, and whenever anything came into her head, she would just scream it into the tape recorder. Then she'd go home and write these things down on note cards. Eventually she had about a thousand note cards, and she realized that with a little work she could arrange them into a novel. The result was her book Why Did I Ever (2001), a very short novel told in 536 very short chapters.
It's the birthday of novelist John Dos Passos, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1896). Dos Passos attended Harvard, where he was a classmate of E. E. Cummings. He went to Spain to study architecture after he graduated, but with the outbreak of World War I, he worked as a volunteer ambulance driver instead, and that experience inspired his anti-war novels, One Man's Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). His other books include Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the famous U.S.A. Trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
Dos Passos hated talking about the literary world and avoided what he called "talking shop." He said, "If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."
