Sunday

Nov. 16, 2014


Utopia

by Louise Gluck

When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I
know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the
woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds
of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child
thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair
has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word,
she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language
like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.

"Utopia" by Louise Glück, from Faithful and Virtuous Night. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1913 that the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time was published (books by this author). He'd begun work on it in 1909, after taking a nibble of a French pastry cookie dipped in tea. He took it to several publishers, and it was turned down by each one of them. The editor of a prestigious French literary magazine advised that it not be published because of syntactical errors. And one editor said, "My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can't see why a chap should need 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep."

So in the end, Proust had to come up with the money himself to self-publish the book, and the first volume appeared in print on this day 101 years ago. He worked on the story for the rest of his life. It was published in seven volumes, and in total it's about 1.5 million words long.

The novel begins: "For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself, 'I'm falling asleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me. ... I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke. ... Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit."

On this date in 1973, NASA launched the fourth and final Skylab mission. NASA's goal for the project was to find out if it was possible for humans to live and work in space for extended periods of time. The station itself was launched on May 14, 1973, and there were four missions with three crews; the first mission was unmanned and involved the launch of the station by a Saturn V rocket. The first crew spent 28 days aboard Skylab; the second, 59 days. The third and final crew, launched on this date, spent 89 days in space, a record that stood for more than 20 years. Skylab served as a solar observatory, a microgravity lab, a medical lab, and an Earth-observing facility. Astronauts on the fourth mission also observed Comet Kohoutek, which was passing near Earth at that time. NASA was also interested in whether quality of life could be maintained in a space station; the astronauts had two hours free time every evening, during which they could play cards or darts, read, or listen to music. Skylab 4 commander Gerald Carr said, "The most fun was looking out the window."

NASA had originally planned for Skylab to continue orbiting for up to 10 more years while the Space Shuttle was being developed, but unexpectedly high solar activity — which heated the Earth's atmosphere and created excessive drag on the space station — caused Skylab to malfunction in 1977, and it eventually fell back to Earth in 1979. Pieces of it fell in the Shire of Esperance, near Perth in southwestern Australia; the Shire fined the United States 400 Australian dollars for littering. The fine remained unpaid for 30 years, until a radio host named Scott Barley raised the funds from his morning show listeners.

It's the birthday of the "First Lady of Radio," mostly forgotten today, Mary Margaret McBride, born in Paris, Missouri (1899). She was one of the first radio interviewers to bring the techniques of newspaper journalism to the airwaves, and in the first 20 years of her syndicated program, she interviewed more than 30,000 guests from the world of politics, literature, arts, and entertainment. In the late 1940s, she had 6 million daily listeners, most of them housewives.

She retained her Missouri twang despite spending most of her adult life in New York City. She was known for being an exceptionally well-prepared interviewer, and she stayed up late every night to read her guests' books. She never announced in advance the name of the guests who would appear on the show, so people tuned in each day not knowing whom to expect.

She made daytime radio profitable. She delivered the ads herself, and she only advertised products that she herself actually would want to use, and refused to endorse cigarettes or alcohol.

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

 

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