Monday

Jul. 16, 2001

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

by Sharon Olds

MONDAY, 16 JULY 2001
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb," by Sharon Olds from Blood, Tin, Straw (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn't
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that's been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that's been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

On this day in 1951, J. D. Salinger's first novel The Catcher in the Rye was published.

On this day in 1945, right before 5:30 in the morning, the first atomic bomb was detonated at White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico. The flash vaporized the steel tower holding the bomb and melted the sand nearby into glass. It was visible from 250 miles away. The public was told that a munitions dump had exploded. Radiation levels at the site are still 10 times that of normal background radiation.

It's the birthday of novelist Reinaldo Arenas, born in the Oriente Province of Cuba in 1943. He joined the Cuban revolution, moved to Havana, and worked for the Castro regime while writing his first novel, Singing from the Well, which won awards but was his only novel to be published in Cuba. His next novel, Hallucinations, had to be smuggled from the country and published in France. Arenas was branded a "social misfit" because he was a homosexual, and he was imprisoned for several years during the 1970s. In 1980 he escaped during the Mariel "boat lift," and settled in New York, where he was treated like a pariah by the same intellectuals who had praised his work while he lived in Cuba for his fierce anti-Castro views. Dying of AIDS, he committed suicide when he was 47. Several of his novels were published after his death, including The Doorman and The Assault.

It's the birthday of American actress Barbara Stanwyck, born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, New York, in 1907. She played "fallen women" in many, many movies.

It's the birthday of Mary Baker Eddy, born in Bow, New Hampshire, in 1821, and founder of the Christian Science religion. She was a sickly child, subject to seizures and nervous collapse, so she studied at home and became interested in spiritual healing. She heard of the success of a healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and went to Portland, Maine, in 1862, where she was, she attested, cured immediately. She became his disciple, but rejected his teachings when she suffered a relapse, and recovered a second time after taking up her Bible. She dates her discovery of Christian Science to that year—1866. In 1875, she published the first of many versions of Science and Health, which espouses the theory that the mind is the sole reality, and that infirmities are illusory and susceptible to cure by purely mental effort. In 1883, she began to publish The Christian Science Monitor, which spread her teachings beyond New England.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

«

»

  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show