Tuesday

May 22, 2012


Wedged

by Hal Sirowitz

You were the one who followed me
into the elevator & asked
for my phone number, she said.
I didn't lead you on. In fact,
I tried discouraging you.
I told you I had lots of problems.
I was used to being alone. But now
that you've wedged yourself into my life,
don't think leaving me will be as smooth
as our first elevator ride. It'll be
like walking up a flight of stairs.

"Wedged" by Hal Sirowitz, from Before, During & After. © Soft Skull Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of comics writer Hergé (books by this author), born Georges Prosper Remi in Brussels, Belgium (1907). He created a beloved comic strip about a boy whose life is full of adventure: The Adventures of Tintin. Tintin is a Belgian reporter who is accompanied by his fox terrier Snowy ("Milou" in French.) The two go everywhere — Soviet Russia, Palestine, Tibet, and even the moon. Hergé wrote 23 Tintin comic books. He published the first when he was just 22 years old, and he was working on a 24th book when he died in 1986 at the age of 83. The books have sold close to 350 million copies.

It's the birthday of writer Arthur Conan Doyle (books by this author), born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1859). He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and there he met Joseph Bell, his favorite professor. Bell taught his students how to make a successful diagnosis through observation and deduction.

After graduating, Doyle opened his own practice and wrote fiction in his spare time. In 1887, he published A Study in Scarlet, a mystery featuring a character based on his old professor: the detective Sherlock Holmes. He ended up writing 56 short stories and four novels with the famous detective, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

Doyle said, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

And Sherlock Holmes said to his sidekick, Dr. Watson, "You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion."

It's the birthday of writer Peter Matthiessen (books by this author), born in New York City (1927). He grew up in a wealthy family in Connecticut, where he went to boarding school before joining the Navy during WWII. He went on to Yale and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Matthiessen published his first short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, but he was barely scraping by teaching creative writing courses, when one of his Yale professors, Norman Holmes Pearson, asked if he would work for the newly formed CIA. Matthiessen didn't have much interest in politics, but he asked if he could be sent to Paris, and Pearson agreed. "So," he said, "out of sheer greed and opportunism, off I went."

The CIA thought that Matthiessen needed a better cover than struggling novelist, so they helped support his founding of The Paris Review. Most of his work for the CIA involved infiltrating the lives of French communists, but as the McCarthy trials gained attention in America, Matthiessen resigned, and he later called his work as a spy "the only adventure I've ever regretted."

He then spent three years working unsuccessfully as a commercial fisherman on Long Island. He said, "I had picked up a very wide, if not very deep, knowledge of the natural world, when I then failed as a fisherman I realized that I could write about nature." In 1956, 29-year-old Matthiessen took off across the country in his Ford with a sleeping bag, some books, and a shotgun. He wanted to visit every wildlife refuge in the country. The result was Wildlife in America (1959). It caught the eye of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker. Shawn funded Matthiessen's trip to the Amazon, where he wrote The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961), which was serialized in The New Yorker.

Matthiessen has continued to write novels, such as At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), as well as books about nature, such as The Snow Leopard (1978).

He said, "I've never been bored one day in my life. I could fill 500 years with no problem."

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

 

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  • “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
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