Thursday
May 24, 2012
Looks
Perhaps everyone else has forgotten it,
but in the days when my mother
poured her midsection into a girdle;
when she gathered her nylons into flimsy donuts
before unrolling them, up one leg and then the other;
in the days when we, her daughters,
fastened bulky sanitary napkins
to sanitary napkin belts,
there was Dippity Do.
My mother dabbed the greenish blue gel from the jar,
reached up and slid a section of hair through her fingers,
then wound the hair around a bristly curler,
securing it against her scalp
with a plastic curler pin.
Now, my daughters trap and pull their naturally wavy hair
through the jaws of a straightener
so that their hair might be "as straight as a pin"
which is exactly the way
my mother used to describe her own hair
and, with an sense of tragedy, mine as well.
I don't know who decides whether curly or straight
is the right look for hair
and I can't say that I care,
but what matters to me still
is the way the light changed in my mother's eyes
as her gaze shifted
from her own reflection in the mirror
down to mine;
the way her exasperation eased
with the hair, the Dippity Do, the curlers;
the way the wrinkles over her cheekbones deepened,
and a smile emerged
as if we were co-conspirators,
co-creators, in some grand drama
as I handed her another curler,
another pin.
It's the birthday of novelist Michael Chabon (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1963). He loved comics as a kid, and wrote his own. When he was 10 years old, he wrote his first short story starring Sherlock Holmes.
He went to graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, and he wrote a novel as his thesis. One of his professors sent the novel off to an agent, and Chabon got a big advance. That novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was a best-seller, but soon afterward his career stalled. He spent five years working on a novel that just kept getting longer. He finally gave up completely and started a new project. In just seven months, Chabon had completed Wonder Boys (1995), which became another best-seller.
Criticized by one reviewer for not being ambitious enough, Chabon decided he needed to go in a new direction. About that time, he said: "I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved and I'd been dragging with me for 15 years. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out [...] I was struck by [...] a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there." Soon he wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), an epic story about 1940s comic book creators. The novel moves from the ghetto of Nazi-occupied Prague to the bohemian nightlife of New York City.
His new novel, Telegraph Avenue (2012), will be published this fall.
It's the birthday of poet Joseph Brodsky (books by this author), born in Leningrad (1940). His father was a professional photographer, but since the family was Jewish, he was often denied work. As a young boy, Brodsky lived through the Siege of Leningrad, and as he grew up, it was clear that the city had not recovered — that "the suffering and poverty were visible all around."
Brodsky dropped out of school when he was 15, and he worked in a morgue, a ship's boiler room, and a lighthouse. He said: "I was a normal Soviet boy [...] But something turned me upside down: [Dostoevsky's] Notes from the Underground." By the time he was 18, he was publishing poems, and was mentored by the poet Anna Akhmatova.
When he was 23, he was charged with "malicious parasitism" and arrested by the KGB. He testified in court, and his testimony was copied down and smuggled out of Russia. When the judge asked Brodsky, "Who told you that you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank?" he responded: "No one. Who assigned me to the human race?" He was sentenced to five years in a Siberian labor camp, but his testimony only made him more famous.
After 18 months of hard labor, he was released and went back to Leningrad, spending the next few years trying to make a living as a poet, but everything he did angered the authorities. In 1972, when Brodsky was 32 years old, the KGB showed up and put him on a plane to Vienna. There he was taken in by Carl Proffer, an American professor of Russian literature. Proffer introduced Brodsky to W.H. Auden, who was the young poet's hero.
Auden took a liking to him and helped secure Brodsky residency in the United States, where he was quickly offered teaching positions. In 1987, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize in literature. When he learned that he had won the prize, he said, "A big step for me, and a small step for mankind."
His books include Selected Poems (1973), A Part of Speech (1979), and To Urania (1988).
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
