the writer’s almanac

Spokane’s Resident Poet

November 10, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 5:42 am

From the Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the poet Vachel Lindsay (books by this author), born in Springfield, Illinois (1879). His parents wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school after three years and tried to make a living drawing pictures and writing poetry. After struggling for several years and working for a time in the toy department of Marshall Field’s, he decided to walk across the United States, trading his poems and pictures for food and shelter along the way. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as he thought it would be. He said, “No one cared for my pictures, no one cared for my verse, and I turned beggar in sheer desperation … [but] I was entirely prepared to die for my work, if necessary, by the side of the road, and was almost at the point of it at times.” In 1913, Poetry magazine published Lindsay’s poem “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” and it was a big hit. He went on to write many collections of poetry for adults and children, including The Tree of the Laughing Bells (1905) and Every Soul Is a Circus (1929).

Vachel Lindsay lived in Spokane from 1924 to 1929.

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Denis the Menace

October 5, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 7:54 am

From The Writer’s Almanac:

Today is the birthday of French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot (books by this author), born in Langres (1713). He was a prominent thinker during the French Enlightenment, and he was good friends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The two men met regularly at cafés in Paris to discuss music, philosophy, and their troubles with women.

From 1745 to 1772, Diderot was the chief editor of Encyclopédie, a book meant to replace the Bible as the source of knowledge. It was the first book of its kind to subject all the entries to rational analysis, debunking a lot of ancient wisdom along the way. For instance, it included an entry on Noah’s ark that tried to estimate how many man-hours Noah and his sons must have spent shoveling manure off their boat. Previous encyclopedias restricted themselves to serious topics like theology and philosophy and science, but Diderot tried to cover everything he could think of: emotions, coal mines, fleas, duels, bladder surgery, stockings, the metaphysics of the human soul, and how to make soup.

Diderot, who said, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Forthcoming from Korrektiv Press: The Korrektiv Encyclopedia, in the spirit of Diderot, but Diderot turned on his head.

9 Comments Filed Under: bookish, cut and paste, the devil and/or his minions, the writer's almanac, Things to discuss with Walker Percy over drinks

Speaking of Fires

September 2, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 4:53 pm

From The Writer’s Almanac:

The Great Fire of London started on this date in 1666. The fire broke out near London Bridge, at the house of Thomas Farynor, the king’s baker. One of his workers awoke at two in the morning to the smell of smoke, and the family fled over the rooftops. The blaze spread rapidly, helped by strong winds and drought conditions. Samuel Pepys, who lived nearby, took matters into his own hands and went to Whitehall to inform King Charles II of the situation. Pepys then went home to evacuate his own household and join the throngs of escaping Londoners choking the streets and the River Thames. He reported digging a hole to bury “[his] Parmazan cheese as well as [his] wine and some other things,” and contemplated ways to slow or stop the blaze. “Blowing up houses … stopped the fire when it was done, bringing down the houses in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it.”

It was the worst fire in London’s history. It burned for four days and destroyed 80 percent of the city: most civic buildings, more than 13,000 homes, and nearly 90 churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose lead roof melted and flowed away down Ludgate Hill. A catastrophic fire of this sort was inevitable, really; the buildings were made of timber and pitch, and the lanes were narrow and crowded; overhanging upper stories nearly touched their counterparts across the way. Remarkably, there were only four reported casualties, although the death toll was probably much higher. There was one positive outcome from the fire, though: It may have halted the progress of the plague, which had been ravaging the city for the past few years. The rats and their disease-carrying fleas perished in large numbers.

Within days of the fire, architects Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, and diarist John Evelyn, had all submitted plans for the rebuilding of the city; all of them called for making the streets more regular. In the end, almost all the original layout of the city was preserved, although the streets were widened. Wren was given the task of rebuilding 50 of the churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, which remains one of his masterpieces.

Cf. Seattle …

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Happy Blaise Days

June 19, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 8:24 am

From The Writer’s Almanac

Today is the birthday of mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (books by this author), born in Clermont-Ferrand, France. He was a child prodigy, and by the time he was 19, he had already perfected the first mechanical calculator for sale to the public. In the field of physics, he discovered that air has weight and proved that vacuums are possible in nature. In mathematics, he founded the theory of probabilities and developed an early form of integral calculus. He also invented the syringe and the hydraulic press.

He was often torn between a spiritual life and a scientific one. When he was 23, he began to feel the need to withdraw from the world and devote his life to God. He did just that, for a while, but soon threw himself back into his scientific pursuits, working so hard he made himself ill. He returned to religion for good after a mystical conversion experience, which he called the “night of fire,” in 1654, and entered the Abbey of Port-Royal in January 1655. He lived as an informal hermit, and he never again published under his own name. He only wrote things that the monks requested, and he produced two great works of religious philosophy: Provincial Letters (1657) and Thoughts (1658).

He wrote, “In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.”

2 Comments Filed Under: Catholic with a capital K, Catholicish writers, fragments of philosophy, happy birthday, Pascal, the writer's almanac Tagged With: Blazes of Glory

The Great Seattle Fire in Onegin Sonnet Stanzas

June 6, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 1:15 am

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the father of modern Russian literature: Aleksandr Pushkin (books by this author), born in Moscow (1799). He died at the age of 38, but in his brief life, he worked in nearly every literary form. His masterpiece was the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1833), about a man who kills his friend in a duel, and loses the one woman he loves.

Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova who was described at the time as the most beautiful woman in Russia. She had many admirers, including Czar Nicholas. One of her suitors was so persistent that Pushkin finally challenged him to a pistol duel in 1837. Pushkin died two days later.

The government initially tried to cover up the death, because Pushkin was so popular among common Russians that they thought his death might spark an uprising. When word of his death finally did get out, people all over the country went into mourning. One man, weeping openly in the street, was asked by a newspaper man if he had known Pushkin personally. He replied, “No, but I am a Russian.”

The Great Seattle Fire destroyed downtown Seattle on this date in 1889. The fire started in the basement of a cabinet shop on the corner of Front and Madison. An employee had set a pot of glue on top of a lit stove, and the glue caught fire. Over the next 18 hours, the blaze wiped out the town’s business district and waterfront. Miraculously, there were no human fatalities.

In a year’s time, Seattle had nearly been rebuilt. All the construction jobs sparked a population boom, and Seattle grew from a town of 25,000 into a full-fledged city of more than 40,000.

1 Comment Filed Under: dead poets, happy birthday, Happy Birthday Dear Pushkin, pushkin, Seattle, the writer's almanac

Happy Birthday Dr. Percy

May 28, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 7:49 am

Walker Percy
Toasts to mercy
And he drinks
To Kate and Binx.

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Southern writer Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). Percy’s early life was marked by tragedy: his grandfather and father both committed suicide with shotguns, and his mother drowned when her car ran off the road into a stream. When his uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, adopted Percy and his little brothers, things took a turn for the better; it was there that he met his lifelong best friend, the neighbor boy Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner — Percy was so overwhelmed that he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch.

Percy went off to college in Chapel Hill, and later to New York for medical school. He contracted tuberculosis and spent the next two years at a sanitarium. It was, he later said, “the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a chance to quit medicine. I had a respectable excuse.”

Instead, Percy decided to be a full-time writer. He finished two novels—one was based on his experience at the sanitarium—neither of which he could not get published. [sic] But he kept at it, and his novel The Moviegoer (1961) came out when he was 45. A year later it won the National Book Award. Percy published five more novels and many essays.

In 1976 Percy was a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans when a woman called him, asking him to read her son’s manuscript. He felt guilty turning her down—the woman’s son had committed suicide in part because of his despair over not being able to find a publisher for his novel—so Percy agreed, and was so impressed that he conspired to get it published. The Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, went on to win a Pulitzer.

4 Comments Filed Under: bloggerel verse, happy birthday, the writer's almanac, Walker Percy

Korrektiv-TWA Konvergence

May 3, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 4:57 pm

Speaking of Dana Gioia and Yehuda Amichai, check out today’s Writer’s Almanac.

5 Comments Filed Under: Catholicish writers, dead poets, site news, the writer's almanac

A Ferlinghetti of the Mind

March 24, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 9:51 am

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (books by this author), born in Yonkers, New York (1919). His father, an Italian immigrant, died before the boy was born and his mother was committed to an asylum while he was still an infant. A French aunt took over custody of young Lawrence and moved him to France. After a few years, they returned to New York, where his aunt got a job as a governess with a wealthy family. Then his aunt took off, abandoning her nephew, but the family liked the boy so much that they took him in.

Ferlinghetti had access to good schools, went to college at the University of North Carolina, and then joined the Navy during World War II, where he was the commander of 110-foot ship. He said: “Any smaller than us you weren’t a ship, you were a boat. But we could order anything a battleship could order so we got an entire set of the Modern Library. We had all the classics stacked everywhere all over the ship, including the john. We also got a lot of medicinal brandy the same way.”

After the war, he went to the Sorbonne, and then settled in San Francisco. He loved the North Beach neighborhood, full of Italian immigrants, and he decided to open a bookstore there. In 1953, he opened City Lights, a bookstore and publishing house, which made its name printing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Ferlinghetti did not publish his own book, A Coney Island of the Mind, but New Directions did in 1958, and it sold over a million copies.

Ferlinghetti wrote: “I have a feeling I’m falling / on rare occasions / but most of the time I have my feet on the ground / I can’t help it if the ground itself is falling.”

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Instant Best-Seller

March 16, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 7:01 am

From The Writer’s Almanac:

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was published on this date in 1850 (books by this author). He didn’t expect the book to sell well, although he did feel that “some parts of the book are powerfully written.” As it happened, the book was an instant best-seller, selling 2,500 copies in 10 days. The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in America, and it was likewise distributed quickly, so more people were reading it at once and talking about it. The word of mouth drove sales of the book, a relatively new phenomenon at that time. The second edition, a run of 1,500 copies, sold out in just three days.

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Judas?

February 26, 2012 by Jonathan Potter at 8:39 am

From The Writer’s Almanac:

Playwright Christopher Marlowe (books by this author) was baptized in Canterbury, England, on this date in 1564. The son of a shoemaker, he was so intellectually gifted that he was accepted into Cambridge on a scholarship meant for men entering the clergy. He chose to write plays rather than pursue holy orders, and he was frequently absent, possibly because he was spying for Queen Elizabeth I, an occupation he may have held until the end of his life. He may have been posing as a Catholic to gather intelligence on any plots against the Protestant queen; he was almost denied his diploma because it was rumored he had converted to Roman Catholicism, and he was only granted his degree after the queen’s Privy Council intervened on his behalf.

Marlowe was one of the bad boys of the Renaissance. We don’t know too much about him — even less than we know about Shakespeare, which isn’t much — but his plays reveal an author who was cynical about nearly everything: religion, society, and politics. He was most likely gay and an atheist in a time when it was very dangerous to be either, let alone both. But he was also a brilliant poet and dramatist, breaking away from the traditional dramatic form of rhymed couplets to work in blank verse, and inspiring Shakespeare to do the same. One of the plays he wrote while at Cambridge was Tamburlaine the Great, and it was produced in London in 1587. It did well enough that he wrote a sequel; these were the only of Marlowe’s plays produced before his untimely death at 29, when he was stabbed in a dispute over a tavern bill. Marlowe also wrote Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and The Massacre at Paris.