Friday
Aug. 30, 2002
Aunt Julia
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Poem: "Aunt Julia," by Norman MacCaig from Collected Poems (Random House).
Aunt Julia
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
I could not answer her -
I could not understand her.
She wore men's boots
When she wore any.
-I can see her strong foot,
stained with peat,
paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel
while her right hand drew yarn
marvelously out of the air.
Hers was the only house
where I've lain at night
in the absolute darkness
of a box bed, listening to
crickets being friendly.
She was buckets
and water flouncing into them.
She was winds pouring wetly
round house-ends.
She was brown eggs, black skirts
and a keeper of threepennybits
in a teapot.
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
By the time I had learned
a little, she lay
silenced in the absolute black
of a sandy grave
at Luskentyre.
But I hear her still, welcoming me
with a seagull's voice
across a hundred yards
of peatscrapes and lazybeds
and getting angry, getting angry
with so many questions
unanswered.
It's the birthday of Robert
Crumb, born in Philadelphia (1943). He drew Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural,
Snoids, the Vulture Demonesses, and a host of other underground comic book heroes.
He worked at the American Greeting Card Company for a while, then moved to San
Francisco in 1967. There he started drawing Zap Comix, and people began to point
him out to each other on the street. Zap Comix brought him obscenity charges,
copyright battles, and trouble with the IRS. In the eighties, his fortunes reversed;
his work attained the status of high art. Mainstream magazines featured pieces
on his comics, and big art museums held retrospectives. A critic called him
"The Breughel of the last half of the 20th century." Crumb decided
to leave the country, and he traded away several of his early sketchbooks to
a collector in exchange for a villa in the south of France.
It's the birthday of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley, born in London (1797). She was the daughter
of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Her mother died ten days after she was born, and her father taught her to read
by having her trace the letters on her mother's gravestone. When she was sixteen,
Percy Shelley came to the house to visit her father. He fell in love with her,
and they ran away together, even though he was married to someone else. They
spent the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron. There were a lot of
thunderstorms that summer, and the Shelleys stayed up late with Byron and his
friends, reading German fairy tales and reciting poetry. Byron dared them all
to write a ghost story, and they recalled a passage from a book they had read
which speculated "
whether scientists could galvanize a corpse of
manufactured humanoid." Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein the following
year. She was twenty.
On this day in 1637, Governor
John Winthrop banished Anne Hutchinson from The Massachusetts Bay Colony.
She had been holding prayer meetings in her home, attended by eighty or ninety
people at a time. She preached that salvation could not be bought, that God
spoke directly to the faithful, and that Indians were not damned.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®