Monday
Nov. 1, 1999
Poem: "Picture" by Robe rt Pinsky from The Want Bone published by Ecco Press.
It's the birthday in Grundy, Virginia, 1944 of writer LEE SMITH, author of the novels Black Mountain Breakdown (1980), Devil's Dream (1992), and the short story collection News of the Spirit (1997), all books about small-town life in the South. She says she'd been making up stories and writing them down ever since she could hold a pencil, and her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, came out the year after she graduated from college. Smith is best known for the Southern dialect her characters speak, but she says: "I started out using a standard third-person narration, and every time one of my characters spoke up, it sounded like a voice from 'Hee Haw.' So I scrapped the first hundred pages of my first book and began letting the characters tell their own stories."
It's the birthday in Jerusalem, 1935, of the American writer and critic EDWARD SAID (sa-EED), best known for his music reviews in The Nation, political essays syndicated in newspapers, and for his 1978 book Orientalism. Said's family, who was Palestinian, got caught up in the turmoil that led to statehood for Israel in 1948, and they fled to Cairo. When Israel refused to let them back into the country they settled in the U.S. His memoir Out of Place, published a few weeks ago, is the story of his boyhood in a sleepy summer town in Lebanon, and growing up in Cairo.
It was on this day in 1897 that THE FIRST LIBRARY OF CONGRESS building opened its doors TO THE PUBLIC in Washington. The library was founded in 1800 strictly for congressmen to use, but over the years librarians there kept adding so many popular books to the collection that the public began asking for access, too. The new building was the largest and most expensive library in the world. Today, the Library of Congress houses most of its collections in three Capitol Hill buildings.
It's the birthday of writer STEPHEN CRANE, author of the Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, born the youngest of 14 children in 1871, Newark, New Jersey. Crane never fought in any war, but worked as a journalist covering them for New York newspapers. He'd moved there after dropping out of college after one year, and his first short story, Maggie, about a New York girl's descent into prostitution, shocked everyone and made him famous; the story is set in the grimiest of slums where people beat each other, and Maggie eventually kills herself. Two years later Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, the first war novel to tell the story from the perspective of an ordinary soldier, Union private Henry Fleming.
It was on this day in 1512 that Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of THE SISTINE CHAPEL were first exhibited. The Pope himself asked Michelangelo to decorate the thirty-year-old chapel's ceiling with scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo took four years to complete the frescoes, lying on scaffolding for months at a time with his face inches from the ceiling.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®