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Poem: "Bewitched, bothered and bewildered" from the musical "Pal Joey, by Lorenz Hart, from The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart. © Da Capo Press, 1995. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered
After one whole quart of brandy, Like a daisy I awake
With no Bromo Seltzer handy, I don't even shake.
Men are not a new sensation; I've done pretty well, I think.
But this half-pint imitation Put me on the blink
I'm wild again! Beguiled again! A simpering, whimpering child again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
Couldn't sleep And wouldn't sleep Until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
Lost my heart but what of it? My mistake I agree.
He's a laugh, but I love it Because the laugh's on me.
A pill he is But still he is All mine and I'll keep him until he is
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered like me.
Seen a lot I mean a lot! But now I'm like sweet seventeen a lot.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
I'll sing to him Each spring to him And worship the trousers that cling to him
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
When he talks He is seeking Words to get off his chest.
Horizontally speaking, He's at his very best.
Vexed again, Perplexed again, Thank God I can be over-sexed again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
Sweet again, Petite again, And on my proverbial seat again.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered am I.
What am I? Half shot am I. To think that he loves me, So hot am I.
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered am I.
Though at first we said, "No, sir." Now we're two little dears.
You might say we are closer Than Roebuck is to Sears
I'm dumb again And numb again, A rich, ready, ripe little plum again.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1961 that Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. He'd had trouble writing since he'd participated in World War II. After the war was over he said, "[It's] as though you had heard so much loud music you couldn't hear anything played delicately." He'd been struggling to write a long novel called The Sea Book, but it wasn't coming together so he was only able to publish a small part of it called The Old Man and the Sea (1952). It got great reviews, and won the Pulitzer Prize, but he was frustrated that all he'd been able to produce was a small novella.
And then, in 1953, he decided to go on a safari in Africa, and during the safari he got into two separate plane crashes. He fractured his skull, got a concussion, cracked two discs in his spine, and suffered from internal bleeding. He never really recovered from the injuries he sustained in those crashes, and he began to drink more and more as a way to self-medicate. He began to suffer from insomnia, depression, and paranoia. His wife persuaded him to check into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was subjected to electroshock therapy. The treatment did not help his depression, and he hated it. He wrote in a letter, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business?"
After being released from the hospital in January 1961, Hemingway was asked to write a tribute to John F. Kennedy for his inauguration. It took him an entire week to write four sentences. After two suicide attempts, his wife got him to go back to the hospital for more shock treatments, which left his mind so blank that he was unable to read for six weeks. It was the longest he'd gone without reading since he was a boy. He told one of his doctors, "If I can't exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible."
He was released from the hospital in June of 1961. He went back to the house where his wife was staying in Ketchum, Idaho. On the morning of July 2, 1961, he got up early, found his favorite shotgun and shot himself in the foyer, before his wife had awakened. She later said that the noise that woke her sounded like a drawer slamming shut.
It's the birthday of the first African-American to serve as a Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1908). He applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but he was rejected on the basis of race, so he enrolled at Howard University instead. The first thing he did, upon graduation, was use his law degree to sue the University of Maryland for racial discrimination, and he won.
It's the birthday of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, born in Nottinghamshire, England (1489). In the late 1520s, King Henry VIII was trying to get the Pope's permission to divorce his wife so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Cranmer suggested that the king didn't need the Pope's permission. After presiding over the divorce trial, Cranmer was made an archbishop. He helped encourage England's break from Rome, which resulted in the Anglican Church.
After the death of King Henry VIII, his daughter Mary by his first marriage became queen. She was Catholic and didn't think much of Thomas Cranmer, who had helped her father divorce her mother. She had him imprisoned for attacking the Catholic Church, and he was eventually burned at the stake.
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Poem: "The Coming of Archy" by Don Marquis from Archy & Mehitabel. © University of New England Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
The Coming of Archy
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went
into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook on life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i can't eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have
removed she nearly ate me the other night why don't she
catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay
most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it
i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems
showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he won't be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then
don't you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread
for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of playwright Tom Stoppard (books by this author), born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (1937). He had planned to become a war correspondent, but after eight years of writing all kinds of general interest articles, he fell in love with the theater and began to focus on drama criticism. He became so obsessed with drama that, at one point, he reviewed 132 plays in seven months. He eventually decided to try writing plays himself.
He produced his first one-act play in 1965 and went on to write a series of radio plays and a few television scripts. And then, he decided to write a play that would tell Hamlet from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In Stoppard's version, they spend the play worrying that their lives have no meaning, and it's only by participating in Hamlet's story that they find any purpose. The play was called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), and it made Stoppard the youngest playwright ever to have a play staged by the National Theatre in London. He was just 29 years old. When it premiered in New York, Stoppard was asked what the play was about. He said, "It's about to make me rich."
It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Franz Kafka (books by this author), born in Prague (1883). From an early age, Kafka was obsessed with his own guilt. He was constantly terrified that someday the teachers would realize their mistake and give him a failing grade. At night, he came home and listened to his father pronounce judgments on all subjects and people. In a letter he later wrote to his father, but never sent, Kafka said, "From your armchair, you ruled the world.... [And] I lost the ability to talk." Kafka grew increasingly shy, anxious, and miserable.
After law school he got a job at an insurance company, where he was responsible for finding ways to prevent industrial accidents. He was actually quite good at it, and it's estimated that he prevented thousands of factory deaths in Prague. But even though he had a good job, he continued to live at home with his parents. He wrote at the time, "I would be incomparable happier living in a desert, in a forest, on an island, rather than here in my room between my parents' bedroom and living room."
And then, on the night of September 22, 1912, Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote nonstop, from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., finishing in one sitting a short story called "The Judgment." He considered the story his first real literary success, and over the next few years he began to produce the stories that made his name, including "The Metamorphosis" (1915), about a man who wakes up to find he's become a giant insect, and "In the Penal Colony" about a machine that kills criminals by inscribing the name of their crime on their skin.
It was only in the last year of his life that Kafka found happiness with a woman named Dora he met at a Jewish holiday camp. People who knew him at the time said that he finally lost all his anxiety, became funny and cheerful. Kafka wanted to get married that year, but he died of tuberculosis. His last two novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), were left unfinished.
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Poem: "Pastoral" by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems of W.C. Williams. © New Directions, 1991. Reprinted with permission.
Pastoral
WHEN I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Independence Day, celebrating the day in 1776 that the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the United States officially broke from the rule of England.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in a second-floor room on Market Street in Philadelphia, on a little lap desk that he had designed himself. He described the task in a letter to a friend, saying, "The object of the Declaration [is] not to find out new principles, or new arguments... but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.... [It is] intended to be an expression of the American mind."
Jefferson finished the first draft after a few days work and sent it to Benjamin Franklin on the morning of June 21, asking for suggestions. Franklin made just a few changes. In the most famous passage, Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." Franklin changed it to, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
The Continental Congress made a lot more changes to Jefferson's draft when they considered its adoption. They deleted passages that attacked the British people, rather than just the king, and they cut an entire paragraph in which Jefferson had attacked the king for perpetuating the slave trade. The last five paragraphs were considered too long and rambling, and so they were reduced by half. In total, they made 86 changes, eliminating 480 words and leaving 1,337. Jefferson found the process of revision extremely painful. He later said, "I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations."
It was on this day in 1845 that Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) moved into his cabin on Walden Pond, just outside Concord, Massachusetts. He was not quite 28 years old at the time, and he had decided to try an experiment in simple living. He was inspired in part by the memory of a summer trip he took with his beloved brother John just before his brother had died of lockjaw.
Thoreau built a tiny cabin on the land, 10 feet wide and 15 feet long, with an attic and a closet, two windows, and a fireplace. It cost 28 dollars and 12 cents to build. The single biggest expenditure was $3.90 for nails. He moved into the cabin on this day, Independence Day, in 1845, to signify his new independence from his family and from civilization. But he had not exactly moved to the wilderness. There were farms in the area, and Thoreau could see the nearby railroad tracks from his cabin's window. He walked to town every day, and his mother frequently gave him bundles of food to eat.
But at his cabin, he kept a huge garden, seven miles of bean rows altogether, and he spent a lot of time weeding them and chasing away the woodchucks. He baked unleavened bread on a stone over a fire in the sand outside, and supported himself by hiring himself out as a surveyor and a builder. He found he could earn enough money if he worked for about a month and a half out of the year.
Thoreau ultimately lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days. And he wrote it all down, trying to capture how his experience changed his view of civilization, and what it was he loved so much about this small, unimportant place. He published Walden; or Life in the Woods in 1854. It sold 256 copies in its first year, but it has never gone out of print, and has been translated into virtually every language.
It's the birthday of the first great American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne (books by this author), born in Salem, Massachusetts (1804). He was an aspiring writer, working at the custom house in Boston, when he lost his job. When he came home to tell his wife the news, she said, "Now you can write your book." He asked what she proposed they live on while he wrote, and she opened a desk drawer and showed him a pile of gold pieces she'd saved out of the household allowance – $150, enough to cover their expenses for several months. He sat down at once and began work on The Scarlet Letter (1850), about a Puritan woman named Hester Prynne who has to wear the letter "A" on her chest after she commits adultery. The first edition of 5,000 copies sold out in 10 days.
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Poem: : "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke, from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. © Random House. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
My Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the first great travel writers, George Borrow (books by this author), born in Norfolk, England (1803). By the time he was 22, he could understand 12 languages, including Welsh, Hebrew, and Danish. In 1833, he was hired by the British and Foreign Bible Society to travel all over the world distributing Bible translations, and he wrote about all the thieves, revolutionaries, gypsies, soldiers, politicians, and priests that he met along the way. His most famous book was a best seller called The Bible in Spain (1843), about his adventures in Spain while attempting to distribute Spanish translations of the Bible.
Borrow said, "I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep."
It was on this day that in 1880 that George Bernard Shaw quit his job in order to write full time. He followed his mother to London when he was 20, hoping to make something of himself. His aunt got him a job at the Edison Telephone Company. He tried to write in his spare time, but eventually decided that he couldn't write and work at the same time. So on this day in 1880, when the Edison Telephone Company announced the consolidation with a competing firm, he used that as an excuse to quit. It was the last non-literary job he ever had.
At first, his decision seemed to be a disaster. He had to live on one pound a week from his father and whatever his mother could spare from her job as a music teacher. He spent his days in the British Museum Reading Room, reading and writing, but his first five novels were all rejected. He finally gave up on fiction and began to focus his energy on becoming a critic. It took 10 years after Shaw quit his job before he began to make a living as a critic and then began to produce the plays that made his name as a writer. He lived with his mother all that time, and she never complained about supporting him. He later said, "My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers; therefore take off your hat to her and blush."
It's the birthday of cartoonist Bill Watterson (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1958). He created the cartoon strip "Calvin and Hobbes," which ran from 1985 until 1995. He studied political science in college, and originally planned to become a political cartoonist. He got a job at the Cincinnati Post, but his editor insisted that he focus on local politics, and Watterson couldn't get a handle on the Cincinnati political scene. He lost his job after a few months and began drawing up plans for possible comic strips, including a strip about a 6-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger. This idea caught the attention of the United Features Syndicate, but they told Watterson they would only run the strip if he would insert a "Robotman" character that could be sold as a toy.
Watterson didn't want to turn down his first possible syndication deal, but he also didn't want to give up control over his own characters. So he rejected the offer. But his strip was eventually picked up by Universal Press Syndicate.
Once the strip became wildly popular, Watterson began to get offers to license the characters for toys, T-shirts, greeting cards, and movies. He could have made millions from all the merchandising opportunities, but he decided to refuse all the offers. He said, "My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships. [No one] would believe in the innocence of a little kid and his tiger if they cashed in on their popularity to sell overpriced knickknacks that nobody needs."
Watterson worked on the strip for 10 years, and then decided to retire and devote his time to painting. He has declined any interviews or photographs since his retirement, and hasn't shown any signs of returning to cartooning. But in 2005, he published The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a three-volume set containing every Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that ever appeared in syndication.
Bill Watterson said, "There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do."
On this day in 1954 Elvis Presley recorded his first rock and roll song and his first hit, "That's All Right (Mama)," which had originally been written and recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.
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Poem: "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" by Robert Frost. Reprinted with permission of Peter Gilbert, Trustee of Robert Frost Estate. (buy now)
Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be––
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, born just outside of Mexico City (1907). Over the course of her lifetime, she only produced about 130 paintings, most of them on relatively tiny canvases and squares of sheet metal. And almost all of her paintings were self-portraits. But in spite of her small output, she's now considered one of the greatest Mexican artists and one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century.
What made her work unique was that she mixed a 19th-century European style with elements of Mexican pop culture and Native American art, something that had never been done before. She didn't have her own major solo exhibition until 1953, the same year she had her leg amputated after a life of health problems caused by a streetcar accident when she was a teenager. She was carried into the show on a stretcher and then laid down on a four-poster bed in the middle of the gallery, as though she were one of the art works. She died the following year. She was 47 years old.
It was only after her death that her work became well known. Today, her paintings fetch prices at auctions equal to paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh.
It was on this day in 1957 that two teenagers named John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at a church dance in Liverpool, England. Lennon was performing at the dance with his band and McCartney was in the audience. McCartney was impressed by John's singing, so he introduced himself after the performance. They didn't hit it off until Paul mentioned that he played guitar, and he knew how to tune one. John was even more impressed that Paul knew the lyrics of recent rock and roll songs. John could never remember lyrics, which was why he often made up new ones while he was singing. Paul volunteered to write out the lyrics for the song "Be Bop a Lula" for John, and the two became fast friends. By 1959, they were calling themselves The Beatles.
On this day in 1862 that Samuel Clemens first started publishing stories for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada. The paper gave him his first full-time writing job, and it was the place where he first used the name Mark Twain (books by this author). He was supposed to cover the mining industry for the newspaper, but he found that he preferred writing about accidents, street fights, barroom shootings, and parties. He wasn't good with facts. He eventually realized that what he really wanted to write was fiction.
On this day in 1535, Sir Thomas More was executed for treason, as a result of his refusal to recognize King Henry VIII as the head of the Church. More was named a Saint by the Catholic Church in 1935, and in the year 2000, he was declared the patron saint of politicians.
It's the birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama (books by this author), born in Tibet (1936). He has written, in collaboration with other scholars, several dozen collections of Buddhist teachings. In 1959, he took 80,000 refugees to India rather than give in to Chinese rule in Tibet. Although he was schooled as a monk, he is also a good mechanic. When he was growing up in the monastery, he fixed broken machines of all kinds. Several years ago his younger brother gave him his first tube of Superglue. He was enchanted.
It's the birthday of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the 20th century, Peter Singer (books by this author), born in Melbourne, Australia (1946). His book Animal Liberation (1975), which is generally credited with starting the animal rights movement, has sold more than a million copies and is estimated to have converted more people to vegetarianism than any other book ever written.
But Singer has said he is disappointed by the book's impact. He said, "When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the '60s still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been."
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Poem: "How to Be Old" by May Swenson, from Nature: Poems Old and New. © Mariner Books, 2000. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
How to Be Old
It is easy to be young, (Everybody is,
at first.) It is not easy
to be old. It takes time.
Youth is given; age is achieved.
One must work a magic to mix with time
in order to become old.
Youth is given. One must put it away
like a doll in a closet,
take it out and play with it only
on holidays. One must have many dresses
and dress the doll impeccably
(but not to show the doll, to keep it hidden.)
It is necessary to adore the doll,
to remember it in the dark on the ordinary
days, and every day congratulate
one's aging face in the mirror.
In time one will be very old.
In time, one's life will be accomplished.
And in time, in time, the doll––
like new, though ancient––will be found.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the 100th birthday of one of the writers who helped invent modern science fiction: Robert Heinlein (books by this author), born in Butler, Missouri (1907). He wrote more than 50 novels and collections of short stories over a span of four decades.
He said of his childhood, "Once I found out about reading I was all in favor of it." He especially loved dime novels and the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne. But he didn't plan to become a writer. What he wanted was to be an officer in the Navy. But after serving for five years, he got discharged because he'd caught tuberculosis. The disease left him weak enough that he had a hard time working a job.
He wasn't sure what to do to make ends meet, and then he saw an ad in a pulp fiction magazine offering $50 for the best story by an unpublished author. So he sat down and in four days he had written a story called "Life-Line," about a machine that can predict a person's death. He decided it was too good for an amateur contest, so he sent it to Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and they accepted it. It came out in 1939, and Heinlein would publish 28 more stories in then next three years.
At the time, most science fiction stories were full of gimmicks and imaginary machines that had no relationship to actual science. Heinlein was one of the first science fiction authors to look at the world the way it was and try to imagine how it might actually look in the future. And he tried to make sure that all the imaginary technology in his stories could really work. He wrote about things like atomic bombs, cloning, and gay marriage years before they became realities. And he was one of the first writers to imagine how space travel could actually be accomplished.
He's best known for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), about a boy who is born during the first manned mission to Mars, who is raised by Martians, and who then returns to Earth to become a preacher. Stranger in a Strange Land was also the first book to describe a waterbed.
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Jill McCorkle (books by this author), born in Lumberton, North Carolina (1958). She's the author of the novels Tending to Virginia (1987) and Ferris Beach (1990), and the short-story collections Crash Diet (1992) and Final Vinyl Days (1999).
She wrote her first novel, The Cheer Leader (1984), while she was studying for a master's degree, but she couldn't find a publisher for it. Her next novel was July 7th (1984), about the events on a single day in a small town in North Carolina. The publisher Louis Rubin liked it so much that he published both that novel and The Cheer Leader at the same time, and they both got great reviews. In the space of a few months, McCorkle had published two books and had already established a reputation as a writer.
Her short-story collection Creatures of Habit came out in 2003. It begins: "We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things."
It's the birthday of the popular historian and biographer David McCullough (books by this author), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1933). He started out as a reporter for Sports Illustrated magazine. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968), and he wrote another book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge called The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1972). But his big breakthrough was a biography of Harry Truman called Truman (1992), one of the best-selling biographies ever published at the time.
David McCullough said, "History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have."
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Poem: "Surprises" by Maxine Kumin, from Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958-1988. © W.W. Norton. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Surprises
This morning's red sun licks dew from the hundred
California peppers that never set fruit in
my Zone-Three garden. After fifteen summers
of failure why this year do I suffer
the glut of inordinate success? They hang
in clustered pairs like newly hatched sex organs.
Doubtless this means I am approaching
the victory of poetry over death
where art wins, chaos retreats, and beauty
albeit trampled under barbarism
rises again, shiny with roses, no thorns.
No earwigs, cutworms, leaf miners either.
Mother's roses climbed the same old latticework
trellis until it shattered under their weight
and she mourned the dirtied blossoms more, I thought,
than if they'd been her children. She pulled on
goatskin gloves to deal with her arrangements
in chamberpots, pitchers, and a silver urn.
I watched, orphan at the bakeshop window.
It took all morning. Never mix species
or colors, she lectured. It cheapens them.
At the end of her long life she could reel off
the names of all the cart horses that had
trundled through her childhood, and now that I
look backward longer than forward, nothing
too small to remember, nothing too slight
to stand in awe of, her every washday
Monday baked stuffed peppers come back to me
full of the leftovers she called surprises.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer J. F. (James Farl) Powers (books by this author), born in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917): a writer who didn't have a lot of readers in his lifetime because he wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests in Minnesota. Non-Catholics weren't particularly interested in his work, and Catholics tended to think he was too critical. But after his death in 1999, many critics said he should be ranked among the greatest and funniest fiction writers of the late 20th century.
He was 25 when he published his first important short story, called "Lion, Harts, Leaping Does," about a priest named Father Didymus, who remains faithful even though he believes he's unworthy of God. The story was selected for the first edition of the Best American Short Stories anthology, and it was published in his first collection, The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947).
As he got older, his work just got funnier, and in 1962, he published his first novel, Morte D'Urban, about a priest named Father Urban Roche, who runs a parish in Great Plains in Minnesota, but who thinks of himself as a kind of businessman, using his position to get the best rooms in hotels and spending all his spare time playing golf. It begins, "Father Urban, fifty-four, tall and handsome but a trifle loose in the jowls and red of eye, smiled and put out his hand."
Powers took 25 years to write his next novel, Wheat That Springeth Green (1988). His publisher only ordered 8,500 copies to be printed. Powers begged them to print more, but they refused. When the book came out, it got amazing reviews, and the first printing sold out in a few weeks. It took so long to print more copies that by the time the book was back in bookstores, the enthusiasm had already died down. Powers said, "It was as if I were on first base but somebody had come and collected second and third base and carried them away. There was a sharp line drive to left, and I had nowhere to go."
He only published two novels and three collections of stories in his lifetime. Saul Bellow once called him one of the five great writers in America, but by the time he died, most of his books had gone out of print. But his two novels have since been republished, and his stories have been collected in The Stories of J. F. Powers, which came out in 2000.
J.F. Powers was once asked by nun in an interview for the American Benedictine Review if he had any ideas about the role of the Catholic writer. He replied, "No, I'm afraid I don't, Sister, except that obviously he should not write junk."
It was on this day in 1918 that Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) was wounded while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I. It was only one month after he'd arrived. Hemingway was passing out chocolates to Italian soldiers on the front line when he heard the sound of a trench mortar flying through the air. He later said that the explosion felt like a furnace door bursting open.
He later had 228 pieces of shrapnel removed from his leg and spent the next several weeks in the hospital. The wound he received would go on to become the central event of his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), which he considered his best book, and his experiences in Italy appeared in many short stories as well. He later said, "In Italy, when I was at the war there... my own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password."
It's the birthday of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (books by this author), born in Zurich, Switzerland (1926). She was the first medical professional to argue that dying is a natural process, and that patients who are terminally ill should not be forced to fight the dying process every step of the way. She wrote, "One might think that the scientific man of the twentieth century would have learned to deal with [death] as successfully as he has been able to add years to his life-span, or to replace human organs, or to produce children through artificial insemination. Yet... advancement of science has not contributed to but rather detracted from man's ability to accept death with dignity."
Her book On Death and Dying (1969) helped start the hospice movement, which has since spread around the world. She also introduced the now-famous concept of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
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