Speaking of Dana Gioia and Yehuda Amichai, check out today’s Writer’s Almanac.
A Ferlinghetti of the Mind
March 24, 2012 by 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.”
Instant Best-Seller
March 16, 2012 by 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.
Judas?
February 26, 2012 by 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.
It Only Takes a Spark
February 1, 2012 by at 9:11 am
From today’s TWA:
It’s the birthday of novelist Muriel Spark (books by this author), born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1918). When she was growing up, she wrote love letters to herself, signed them with men’s names, and hid them in the sofa cushions in the hope of shocking her mother.
She was a prolific novelist. She’s best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Her last novel, The Finishing School (2004), was published when she was 86 years old. She died in 2006.
Happy Hundred-and-Twentieth Birthday
January 3, 2012 by at 10:11 am
From The Writer’s Almanac
Today is the birthday of J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien (1892) (books by this author), born to English parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father was working in a bank. Tolkien was always fascinated with languages, he went to school at Oxford, first studying Classics, and later, English Language and Literature. He came across an Old English poem by Cynewulf, which contained a couplet that fascinated him: “Hail Earendel brightest of angels / Over Middle Earth sent to men.” The couplet found new life in the universe of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1955), which takes place in Middle Earth and includes a half-Elven character named Earendil the Mariner, who eventually becomes a star.
In 1925, Tolkien returned to Oxford University as a professor of Anglo-Saxon and, later, English Language and Literature. One day, while grading exams, he discovered that a student had left one whole page in his examination booklet blank. Tolkien, for reasons unknown even to him, wrote on the page, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This single line turned into a bedtime story that he told his children, and from there, a book: The Hobbit (1937).
Image by Robert Brown
See also: Lewis and Tolkien Debate Myths and Lies (h/t Cubeland Mystic)
Apocalypssissippi
December 16, 2011 by at 12:02 am
From The Writer’s Almanac:
Two hundred years ago today, in 1811, [coincidentally on Jane Austin's birthday and the same year she published Sense and Sensibility] two mega-earthquakes struck the Louisiana Territory. They were the first two in a series of four quakes that rocked the New Madrid fault line, which runs through the region near the borders of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee; the New Madrid earthquakes remain the most severe quakes ever to strike the Eastern United States, with an estimated magnitude of around 8.0 on the Richter scale.
The epicenter was in what is now northeastern Arkansas, and structural damage was minimal because the area was sparsely populated, but the effects were felt over an area of a million square miles. Eyewitnesses reported that the Mississippi River appeared to reverse its course, the soil liquefied, and plumes of sulfurous gas shot up from the ground. The midnight quakes reportedly woke people in Pittsburgh, rang church bells in Boston, and toppled chimneys in Maine.
The zone is still active, and some seismologists believe that the region is overdue for a repeat performance. If a similar quake along the New Madrid fault were to happen now, given the current population density and the presence of 15 nuclear power plants within the quake zone, the results would be apocalyptic.
Jacksie
November 29, 2011 by at 9:36 pm
From The Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of Irish author C.S. [Clive Staples] Lewis (books by this author), born in Belfast in 1898. When he was four, his dog Jacksie was hit by a car and killed; the boy declared he was changing his name to “Jacksie,” and for a while he wouldn’t answer to anything else. For the rest of his life, he was known as “Jack” to his family and close friends.
Raised in the Church of Ireland, he became an atheist in his teens and eventually returned to the church after a series of long theological arguments with his friend and colleague J.R.R. Tolkien. “I gave up Christianity at about 14,” he said. “Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn’t want to. I’m not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.” He wrote Mere Christianity (1952), a classic of Christian apologetics; and The Screwtape Letters (1942), an epistolary novel that consists of letters from a demon to his apprentice nephew, giving him pointers on leading a man astray. He’s also the author of the seven-book allegorical fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, which he wrote for children. He thought it would be a good way to introduce Christian themes to children without beating them over the head, something that had turned him off as a young man. “An obligation to feel can freeze feelings,” he once said.
One of his books, Miracles (1947), had a profound effect on a writer from New York. Joy Davidman Gresham had been raised Jewish, but, like Lewis, had become an atheist. She was separated from her husband, who was an alcoholic, and she was raising their two sons by herself when she came upon Lewis’s book. After she read it, she began praying, and started attending services at a Presbyterian church. She also began a correspondence with Lewis that eventually led to their marriage in 1957. Joy was diagnosed with bone cancer, and she married Lewis from her hospital bed; the doctors sent her home to die, but she went into remission instead, and they had almost four wonderful years together. After her death in 1960, Lewis was devastated. He wrote a book, A Grief Observed (1961), which contained his thoughts, questions, and observations. It was so raw and personal that he published it under a pseudonym. Friends actually recommended the book to him, to help with his grief, unaware that he’d written it. His authorship wasn’t made known until after his death in 1963. In the book, he writes that he doesn’t believe people are reunited with their loved ones in the next life. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
Walker’s Friend Shelby’s Birthday
November 17, 2011 by at 5:00 am
From The Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of author Shelby Foote (1916) (books by this author). He was born in Greenville, Mississippi, joined the Army in 1940, and became battery captain of field artillery in Europe during World War II; he was discharged in 1944 when he was caught sneaking off to visit a girlfriend in Ireland. After the war, he got a job as a reporter with the Delta Democrat Times, but spent too much office time writing fiction, according to the publisher. It paid off for Foote, however, because he sold his first story to The Saturday Evening Post in 1946, and his first novel, Tournament (1949) not long after that.
In the early 1950s, Bennett Cerf of Random House sent him a letter asking him to produce a short account of the Civil War in time for the war’s centennial. Cerf wanted about 200,000 words; it wound up being almost eight times longer. The Civil War: A Narrative took 20 years to write and ended up spanning almost 3,000 pages in three volumes. It was published from 1958 to 1974; he wrote 500 to 600 words a day, longhand, using an old-fashioned dip pen. It took him four times longer to write about the war than it did to fight it, but whenever people pointed that out to him, he retorted, “There were a good many more of them than there was of me.” Based on a recommendation by Robert Penn Warren, filmmaker Ken Burns approached Foote in 1985 and asked him to serve as consultant on an 11-hour Civil War documentary Burns was making for PBS. Foote agreed, and he became a national celebrity after the show aired in 1990; at one point he was receiving 20 calls a day from people who just wanted to have dinner with him.
Evelyn Waugh
October 28, 2011 by at 2:32 am
From The Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (books by this author), born in London, England in 1903. His family was affluent, and he was upset when he found out that he couldn’t attend the same prestigious school as his father and brother. He wasn’t allowed in because his brother, Alec Waugh, had a homosexual relationship, was dismissed from the school, and then wrote a book about it. So Evelyn went to a less prestigious school, where he thought all his classmates were unsophisticated. Then he went to Hertford, one of the Oxford Colleges, where he did art and wrote and drank, and neglected his academics. When someone asked him if he’d done any sports at college, he replied, “I drank for Hertford.” He left Oxford without a degree. He tried teaching and he hated it, he was in debt, so he attempted suicide by drowning himself in the ocean, but he got stung by a jellyfish so he ran back out. He decided to give his life another chance, and he wrote his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928). It’s about an innocent schoolteacher named Paul Pennyfeather who is expelled from Oxford for running across campus without his trousers, and has no choice but to become a schoolteacher. He’s surrounded by bigots, drunks, and pedophiles, and he almost marries the mother of one of his students, but it turns out she makes her money trafficking in brothels in South America. Evelyn Waugh went on to write many novels, including Brideshead Revisited (1945).
Evelyn Waugh said, “The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”
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