Saturday

Jul. 3, 2004

Girl Help

by Janet Lewis

SATURDAY, 3 JULY, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen

Poem: "Girl Help," by Janet Lewis, from Poems Old and New. © Ohio University Press. Reprinted with permission.

Girl Help

Mild and slow and young,
She moves about the room,
And stirs the summer dust
With her wide broom.
In the warm, lofted air,
Soft lips together pressed,
Soft wispy hair,
She stops to rest,
And stops to breathe,
Amid the summer hum,
The great white lilac bloom
Scented with days to come.


Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of humorist Dave Barry, born in Armonk, New York (1947). He's a columnist for the Miami Herald, and his column has been syndicated in more than 150 newspapers nationwide since 1986. He's the author of many books, including Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down! (2000) and Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway (2003).

Barry said, "I always wanted to write when I was a kid; it just never occurred to me that you could have a job that didn't involve any actual work. ... I felt it would be fun to have a job like that where you could make stuff up and be irresponsible and get paid for it."


It's the birthday of playwright Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (1937). He's the author of many plays, including his recent trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2003). His first big success was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a comic retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of Hamlet's two friends.


It's the birthday of Franz Kafka, born in Prague (1883). Many of his novels and short stories are about strange and terrible things happening to innocent people. The Trial (1925) begins, "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." And "The Metamorphosis" (1915) begins, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

Kafka had a difficult relationship with his father. When he was a young boy, he once shouted for a glass of water in the middle of the night, and his father pulled him out of bed, put him on the courtyard balcony, and locked him out of the house. He later wrote, "For years thereafter, I kept being haunted by fantasies of this giant of a man, my father, the ultimate judge, coming to get me in the middle of the night." There are a lot of fathers in Kafka's fiction. In his story "The Judgment" (1916) a young man is ordered by his father to commit suicide, and he throws himself off a bridge.

Kafka thought that a mindless bureaucratic job would be the perfect way to support his writing, but the job he took at an insurance company exhausted him. He had to work sixty hours a week on endless boring tasks. His health began to suffer, and for the rest of his life he was in and out of sanatoriums.

The first love of his life was a woman named Felice Bauer. After he met her, he spent ten days writing her a letter to re-introduce himself, and then sent her a letter almost every day for the next five years. They got engaged, but Kafka started to wonder if he should get married. He was worried it would ruin the privacy that he needed to be a writer. He started having an affair with his fiancée's best friend, and got her pregnant, but broke off the relationship with both of them. He had other affairs and proposed to other women, but he never got married.

Kafka's best friend was a sickly, hunch-backed man named Max Brod. He and Brod hung out at cafes, went to brothels, and attended séances together. Even before anyone had heard of Kafka, Brod wrote articles about him for literary journals, saying that he was a genius and the greatest writer of all time. Brod kept copies of all of Kafka's writings that he could get his hands on. Near the end of his life, Kafka asked Brod to burn all of his unpublished work. Brod refused to do so, and we have him to thank for preserving Kafka's novels. Kafka's last novel The Castle (1926) is about a man named K. who tries and tries to reach a castle, but never gets there.

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