Friday

Nov. 30, 2007

Life On Earth…

by David Keplinger

FRIDAY, 30 NOVEMBER, 2007
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Poem: "Life On Earth..." by David Keplinger, from The Prayers of Others. © New Issues, 2006. Reprinted with permission.(buy now)

Life On Earth...

LIFE ON EARTH is pulled down hard on a man's head. This life was made by hatters. A busy street is only coffee, bread, and hats. The smell of a man's hat-an old man's hat-is like the nostril of a horse. You are breathing in what something beautiful and ancient has breathed out. The heat and life contained in it, the silk interior. An old man's hat is necessary: You see that when he takes it off, his hair and skin abruptly float away.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the playwright David Mamet, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1947), whose father was a labor lawyer and loved to argue for the sake of arguing. Mamet said, "In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously." Mamet has gone on to write a series of plays about con men, salesmen, thieves, and liars in plays such as American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. His newest play, November, is scheduled to open on Broadway this January (2008).


It's the birthday of Jonathan Swift, (books by this author) born in Dublin (1667), who was ordained as an Anglican priest and spent much of his early life trying to curry favor with politicians in England, so he could be assigned to an English parish. But it didn't work out, and he got an assignment in his home country of Ireland, which he hated. But after a while, he began to sympathize with the Irish poor, who were being oppressed by their English rulers, and he started writing political pamphlets in protest of England's rule, and he became famous for his sarcasm and satire. In his most notorious essay, "A Modest Proposal" (1729), he suggested that perhaps the best way to deal with the Irish poor was to feed their babies as a delicacy to the English aristocracy.

Swift's masterpiece was Gulliver's Travels (1726), the story of a man journeying through a series of exotic places and meeting all kinds of strange creatures, including a race of miniature people, a race of giants, scholars who think so much that they constantly run into each other, immortals who can't remember anything, wise and virtuous horses, and a disgusting race of beings called Yahoos, which he eventually realizes are humans. The novel was full of vicious inside jokes about the politicians of the day, and Swift was so nervous about publishing it that he dropped the manuscript off at the publisher's house in the middle of the night.


It's the birthday of the man who wrote under the name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (books by this author) born in Florida, Missouri (1835), who was a Western journalist and humorist when he persuaded a San Francisco newspaper to pay for him to take a steamboat pleasure cruise to Europe and the Middle East. The result was his book The Innocents Abroad (1868), which made him famous. Travel books were popular at the time, but Twain's was the first to be written in such a distinctly American voice. He wrote, "In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."

Twain became so famous that he was accepted into the elite literary society in New England, and he began publishing his work in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. But, in 1877, Twain was invited to give a speech at the poet John Greenleaf Whittier's 70th birthday dinner, and he made the terrible mistake of turning the speech into a roast, poking fun at Whittier and other New England writers like Emerson and Longfellow. The audience reacted with horrified silence, and Twain was so embarrassed that he left the country with his family the following year.

When he came out with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, it got terrible reviews. He spent the rest of his life struggling to pay his debts, writing and publishing all kinds of things, and going on endless lecture tours. It took decades before people began to recognize Huckleberry Finn as a masterpiece. Ernest Hemingway famously said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

Mark Twain wrote, "It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened."

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

 

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