Tuesday
Jun. 16, 1998
Lazy
Today's Reading: "Lazy" by David Lee from MY TOWN, published by Copper Canyon Press.
It's BLOOMSDAY today in Dublin, Ireland, the setting of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. The book takes place in a single day, June 16, 1904, and details the life in Dublin of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, his wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus. Though the action takes place in one day, the book took Joyce eight years to write. In Dublin today, people dress up like characters in the novel, and there are readings of Ulysses in museums and theaters.
It's the birthday in 1938, in the Erie Canal town of Millersport, New York, of writer JOYCE CAROL OATES. When she was in high school she started writing at a terrific pace, something she keeps up today. She teaches at Princeton, and has more than 20 short story collections now, a half-dozen collections of essays and criticism. Some of the best known novels are: Them (1969), Bellefleur (1980), and What I Lived For (1994). Her most recent, novel number 26, came out last fall: We Were the Mulvaneys, set on a farm in upstate New York and following a family through 25 years of prosperity and ruin.
It's the birthday in 1938, in Västerbottenk, in the far north of Sweden, of novelist and poet TORGNY LINDGREN, author of novels like The Way of the Serpent (1990) and short story collections like Merab's Beauty (1990), both of which have been translated into English.
It's the birthday in Gothenburg, 1925, of the Swedish writer OSTEN SJOSTRAND, best known as a poet and author of, in English translation, The Hidden Music, but also famous in Sweden for his essays and criticism.
It's the birthday of KATHARINE GRAHAM, born in New York, 1917, former publisher The Washington Post and the recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography for her book Personal History. She said her "credentials were pathetically thin" when she took over the Post in 1963 after her husband's suicide. She'd been on the editorial staff of the paper, but had also been busy raising four children and keeping a house going while her husband was president of the paper. She was at the helm during the Pentagon Papers affair in 1971, and when reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal in 1972.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®