According to the Barna research, The Da Vinci Code has been read “cover to cover” by roughly 45 million adults in the U.S. — that’s one out of every five adults (20%). That makes it the most widely read book with a spiritual theme, other than the Bible, to have penetrated American homes.
The audience profile of the book is intriguing. Despite critical comments and warnings from the Catholic hierarchy, American Catholics are more likely than Protestants to have read it (24% versus 15%, respectively). Among Protestants, those associated with a mainline church are almost three times more likely than those associated with non-mainline Protestant congregations to have read the book. Upscale individuals — i.e., those with a college degree and whose household income exceeds $60,000 — are nearly four times more likely to have read the book than are “downscale” people (i.e., those without a college degree and whose household income is $30,000 or less).
Category: Books & Writers
L. Frank Baum
… was born on this date in 1856. Mr. Baum is, of course, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in September 1900. The Library of Congress has an interesting enough online exhibit about Baum and Oz. It’s curious to contrast the drawings from the original by W.W. Denslow with our own images so indelibly formed by the 1939 film.
Inhuman Bondage
A solid review of David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage by Ira Berlin in today’s New York Times. The review includes this:
The genius of “Inhuman Bondage” is in Davis’s ability to identify the big questions: Why slavery? Why did slavery become identified with Africans and their descendants? Why was slavery so easily accepted before 1776 and so readily challenged thereafter? Why did racism outlast slavery? On each of these matters, and dozens more, Davis expertly summarizes the debates, bringing clarity to the contending arguments. “Inhuman Bondage” is a tour de force of synthetic scholarship.
But Davis is not merely a referee among historical gladiators. He gets in with the lions, forcing a rethinking of many of the most fundamental issues. He examines the twists and turns of slavery’s development and the contingencies that set human history off in unexpected directions: the patent evil that redounds to the good and the earnest benevolence that creates untold pain.
The Big Bam
NewMexiKen read Leigh Montville’s new, excellent The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth over the past few days. Recommended for anyone interested in America’s greatest sports legend.
In light of Barry Bonds’ approach to Ruth’s career home run mark (714), two Ruth home run stories. First, the third inning of the first game ever in Yankee Stadium, 1923:
“The fans were on their feet yelling and waving and throwing scorecards and half-consumed frankfurters,” van Loon wrote, “bellowing unto high heaven that the Babe was the greatest man on earth, the the Babe was some kid, and that the Babe could have their last and bottom dollar, together with the mortgage on their house, their wives and furniture.”
The Yankees won the game, 4-1, Ruth’s homer the difference. For the rest of his life, when asked about the home runs he had hit, he always would say this was his favorite. Theater never merged better with sport. He gave ’em exactly what they wanted when they wanted it.
And, his last:
This was homer number 714, the third of the day, the last of a career. The Pittsburgh crowd of 10,000, not knowing the exact implications of what it had seen but knowing this was pretty darn good, applauded as he left the game. He was Babe Ruth, dammit. … He never had another major league hit.
Ruth played over 22 seasons (1914-1935) and appeared in 10 World Series. He was 40 when he retired. He died of cancer at age 53 in 1948. Most of his life he thought he was a year older than he was.
What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?
Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”
THE WINNER:
Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
THE RUNNERS-UP:
Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (1985)
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, John Updike (1995)
‘Rabbit at Rest’ (1990), ‘Rabbit Is Rich’ (1981), ‘Rabbit Redux’ (1971), ‘Rabbit, Run’ (1960)
American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
There’s a list of books that received multiple votes, links to reviews, and more at What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? – New York Times.
Stumbling on Happiness
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is getting many favorable reviews, including this at Amazon by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.
Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?
…I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that–and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.
Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt says:
One of the best books I have read lately is “Stumbling on Happiness” by Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard.
The book is about how what we think makes us happy and what really does make us happy are often two completely different things. It is based on decades of incredibly creative psychological studies. The conclusions are amazing but compelling. It is very readable, aimed at a general audience.
Best line of the day about plagarism, so far
Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, who was paid the largest advance for an unpublished author, admitted to having “unintentionally” borrowed passages from author Megan McCafferty for her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. What do you think?
David Niles, Portrait Photographer:
“This just goes to show there are many things a Harvard education can’t teach you, like how to use a thesaurus to cover up your plagiarism.”
Little William
William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England. As customary, the entry in the baptismal registry of Holy Trinity Church announces the event in Latin: “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere.”
The poet’s birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23 because babies generally were baptized about three days after birth. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and is buried in the church where he was christened.
Although contemporary references to William Shakespeare and his family abound, the first biography of the playwright appeared in the early 18th century. In 1714, Nicholas Rowe published Some account of the life, &c., of Mr. William Shakespear, one of many rare books in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library.
A Library of Congress neighbor on Capitol Hill, the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library was built and endowed by Henry and Emily Folger to house and maintain a valuable Shakespeare collection they bequeathed to the American people. Completed in 1932, the building is made entirely of American materials, including a neoclassical exterior of Georgia marble and a Tudor interior of Appalachian oak. Shakespearean scholars come from all over the world to use the Folger’s rich holdings related to Shakespeare and his times.
The last dozen
… Pulitizer prize-winners in History.
- 2006 Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
- 2005 Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
- 2004 A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn
- 2003 An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson
- 2002 The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand
- 2001 Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
- 2000 Freedom from Fear by David M. Kennedy
- 1999 Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
- 1998 Summer for the Gods by Edward J. Larson
- 1997 Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack N. Rakove
- 1996 William Cooper’s Town by Alan Taylor
- 1995 No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Random thoughts
The price of gasoline is going up so fast around here they’re going to have to post some guy fulltime on the price signs. You know, give him a headset so he can keep up with the rise. Well over $3 most places for mid-grade or premium (and our regular is just 86 octane).
The cottonwood trees have unleashed their annual crop of cotton. It’s like snow falling at times, especially near the Rio Grande (the banks are lined with cottonwoods). At a winery/restaurant near Old Town last evening with the doors open to the patio, the barroom floor was covered. Ah Choo!
The Rio Grande Cottonwood reproduces by seeding, unlike many other flood-plain trees which regenerate by sprouting. It flowers in the spring, before it leafs out. It releases its seeds, each carried by downy white tuft, or “parachute,” in anticipation of traditional spring floods and winds, the principal mechanisms for dispersion. A mature Rio Grande Cottonwood can produce as many as 25 million seeds in a season, covering wide areas with a blanket of “cotton.” (Rio Grande Cottonwood – DesertUSA)
NewMexiKen hasn’t watched TV in nearly two weeks — at least 11-12 days. None. Nada. Don’t miss it.
T-shirt in winery: “Men are like grapes. You crush them, keep them in the dark and wait until they mature. Then they might be worth having with dinner.”
At a semi-pro soccer match last evening (Albuquerque Asylum vs. San Diego Fusion), a 9 or 10-year-old girl insisted on reading (a major novel, no less), rather than watching the game. As the night progressed the mother and father increased the pressure on the daughter to watch the game. It started out with “Honey, do you see what’s happening? It’s a corner kick.” Progressed to “You should watch the game.” Ended up with “Put the book down and watch the game.” NewMexiKen is happy to report she kept on reading. I mean, come on parents, yes it would be nice if she took in the game and shared the moment with her family, but what’s the point of demanding it? Leave her alone.
Albuquerque won 2-1. It was a warm, beautiful snow-filled night (see cottonwood item above).
Wouldn’t this have been a much happier ending?
Had Booth missed, Lincoln could have risen from his chair to confront his assassin. At that moment the president, cornered, with not only his own life in danger but also Mary’s, would almost certainly have fought back. If he did, Booth would have found himself outmatched facing not kindly Father Abraham, but the aroused fury of the Mississippi River flatboatman who fought off a gang of murderous river pirates in the dead of night, the champion wrestler who, years before, humbled the Clary’s Grove boys in New Salem in a still legendary match, or even the fifty-six-year-old president who could still pick up a long, splitting-axe by his fingertips, raise it, extend his arm out parallel with the ground, and suspend the axe in midair. Lincoln could have choked the life out of the five-foot-eight-inch, 150-pound thespian, or wrestled him over the side of the box, launching Booth on a crippling dive to the stage almost twelve feet below.
But Lincoln had not seen Booth coming.
From James L. Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. Fifty pages in, this book reads like a novel just as Jill said in a comment here last week.
Go try that thing with an axe or other long-handled tool.
Oh good, another literary novel I can start
Four years after agreeing to sell his second novel to Random House for an advance of more than $8 million, Charles Frazier, the author of the best-selling “Cold Mountain,” has handed in the first half of his final manuscript, and is expected to turn in the remaining half next week.
…The new novel, like “Cold Mountain,” takes place in the 19th-century American South and is the story of a young white man raised by Cherokee Indians who ends up representing them in Washington in their fight to preserve their land. According to Random House’s fall catalog, which goes out to booksellers this week, the new novel, “Thirteen Moons,” is also, like “Cold Mountain,” an epic love story.
NewMexiKen has tried to read Cold Mountain.
The greatest of the war correspondents
Earlier NewMexiKen noted Ernie Pyle’s death 61 years ago today. Here’s some more, this via CNN:
COMMAND POST, IE SHIMA April 18, (AP) — Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his co-workers, G.I.s and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning.
The bulletin went via radio to a ship nearby, then to the United States and on to Europe. Radio picked it up. Reporters rushed to gather comment. In Germany General Omar Bradley heard the news and could not speak. In Italy General Mark Clark said, “He helped our soldiers to victory.” Bill Mauldin, the young soldier-cartoonist whose warworn G.I.’s matched the pictures Pyle had drawn with words, said, “The only difference between Ernie’s death and that of any other good guy is that the other guy is mourned by his company. Ernie is mourned by the Army.” At the White House, still in mourning only six days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, President Harry Truman said, “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle.”
And this from the report of his death in The New York Times:
Ernie Pyle was haunted all his life by an obsession. He said over and over again, “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.”
No man could have been less justified in such a fear. Word of Pyle’s death started tears in the eyes of millions, from the White House to the poorest dwellings in the country.
President Truman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt followed his writings as avidly as any farmer’s wife or city tenement mother with sons in service.
Mrs. Roosevelt once wrote in her column “I have read everything he has sent from overseas,” and recommended his writings to all Americans.
For three years these writings had entered some 14,000,000 homes almost as personal letters from the front. Soldiers’ kin prayed for Ernie Pyle as they prayed for their own sons.
In the Eighth Avenue subway yesterday a gray-haired woman looked up, wet-eyed, from the headline “Ernie Pyle Killed in Action” and murmured “May God rest his soul” and other women, and men, around her took up the words. This was typical.
It was rather curious that a nation should have worked up such affection for a timid little man whose greatest fear was “Maybe they won’t like me.”
And here’s what Ernie Pyle had to say about his adopted hometown:
Yes, there are lots of nice places in the world. I could live with considerable pleasure in the Pacific Northwest, or in New England, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or in Key West or California or Honolulu. But there is only one of me, and I can’t live in all those places. So if we can have only one house — and that’s all we want — then it has to be in New Mexico, and preferably right at the edge of Albuquerque where it is now. Ernie Pyle, January 1942
Team of Rivals
NewMexiKen recommends Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals to all interested in the American Civil War, 19th century politics and Abraham Lincoln.
Though NewMexiKen has read many other books about Lincoln and long considered him to be the greatest of American presidents, Goodwin has put me even more in awe of this extraordinary human being.
His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.
But beyond even that, as Tolstoy wrote:
Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.
Goodwin tells the story convincingly — in 754 pages of text with 121 pages of notes. At times it moves slowly, but ultimately the detail proves valuable. There is much about Lincoln’s political rivals (who become his cabinet) and their families. William Henry Seward is shown as the great politician and gentleman he was. Mary Todd Lincoln comes off in a positive new light.
Caveat: Though it touches on the main battles and a few of the leading military personnel, this is not a military history. A reader looking for military history should look elsewhere. The best general history of the Civil War remains Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. McPherson reviewed Goodwin’s book for The New York Times.
The best biography of Lincoln is, I think, David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln.
The Virginia Quarterly Review
While NewMexiKen is in Virginia — awaiting grandchild number six — I thought I might mention The Virginia Quarterly Review, nominated this week for six National Magazine Awards.
Wow! Everyone in our office has been trying not to hyperventilate. The finalists for the 2006 National Magazine Awards (the magazine world’s equivalent to the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards) were announced today and VQR garnered six nominations! Pretty unheard of for a magazine our size. The Atlantic Monthly led all magazines with eight nominations, then came us, followed by GQ, Harper’s, National Geographic, New York, and The New Yorker with five nominations each. Pretty heady company. We received a nomination in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations under 100,000 (which we fit well under). Also nominated in this category were Aperture, The Believer, Legal Affairs, and ReadyMade.
And congrats go out to our writers whose work was chosen as finalists:
- Sven Birkerts, for Reviews & Criticism, for his essays “Humboldt’s Gift” (Summer issue) and “A Weekend at Montauk” (Winter 2005 issue),
- Pauline W. Chen in the Essay category for “Dead Enough?: The Paradox of Brain Death” (Fall 2005 issue),
- Martin Preib in the Essay category for “The Wagon” (Summer 2005 issue),
- Isabel Allende in Fiction for “The Guggenheim Lovers” (Summer 2005 issue; sorry, not available online),
- Brock Clarke in Fiction for “The Ghosts We Love” (Summer 2005 issue),
- Alan Heathcock in Fiction for “Peacekeeper” (Fall 2005 issue),
- R.T. Smith in Fiction for “Ina Grove” (Fall 2005 issue),
- And Joyce Carol Oates in Fiction for two stories, “So Help Me God” (Winter 2005 issue) and “Smother” (Fall 2005 issue). (Incredibly, Oates had another story nominated, “High Lonesome” published in Zoetrope: All Story.)
Winners will be announced on May 9 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.
Oh, that Caesar
Woman: So what book does she want?
Chick: She says Julius Caesar.
Woman: What’s that?
Chick: Is that the title or the name of the author? Call her and ask her. I can’t find it.
–Target, 225th Street
John McPhee
… the Pulitizer Prize winner is 75 today. The Writer’s Almanac has this:
It’s the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931) and considered one of the greatest living literary journalists. He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He once researched his own family tree and traced it back to a Scotsman who moved to Ohio to become a coal miner. He said, “[That coal miner] has about a hundred and thirty descendants who have sprayed out into the American milieu, and they have included railroad engineers, railroad conductors, brakemen, firemen, steelworkers, teachers, football coaches, a chemist, a chemical engineer, a policeman, a grocer and salesmen.”
In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”
Curious Guy: Malcolm Gladwell
There’s lots of great stuff in the exchange between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons, but it’s hard to top Gladwell’s take down of Las Vegas:
Simmons: Second question: Can you explain in one paragraph why you’re against Vegas?
Gladwell: Where to start? You get there. You can’t get a cab. Last time I waited 30 minutes in line at the airport. You get to your hotel, you wait another 45 minutes to check in. Its 120 degrees outside, and inside its 45 degrees and all you can think about is there’s about to be a epidemic of Legionnaires Disease. The food is terrible. Everyone loses money — everyone. The amount of plastic surgery is terrifying. There are large packs of enormous, glassy-eyed people in stretch pants, pulling the levers on slot machines. (By the way, greatest and most under-appreciated gambling story ever: William Bennett, he of one bestseller after another lecturing Americans on moral values and virtue and the bankruptcy of our culture, turns out not only to be a degenerate gambler, but a gambler who only played the slots. The slots! Had he been a great poker player — even a decent poker player — I’m in his corner. But the slots?) I digress. Back to Vegas: Why would I want to see Celine Dion, ever (and I’m Canadian)? Or white mutant tigers? Or the Village People? Or Tony Orlando and Dawn? I have more fun walking to the laundromat from my apartment in New York than I do in Vegas.
The entire exchange, beginning yesterday, is terrific. Just so you know, it is mostly a discussion of sports and sports management.
Curious Guy
Malcolm Gladwell from an exchange with ESPN’s Bill Simmons:
As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I’m not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn’t much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I’m happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I’m now to the point where I’m suspicious of people who don’t love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods.
This whole exchange, which continues tomorrow, is fascinating.
It’s the birthday
… of author Tom Wolfe. He’s 76.
“I can’t read him because he’s such a bad writer,” Irving said of Wolfe. When Solomon added that “Bonfire of the Vanities” author Wolfe is “having a war” with Updike and Mailer, Irving dismissed the notion out of hand: “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”
Irving described Wolfe’s novels as “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction … He’s a journalist … he can’t create a character. He can’t create a situation.”
… of author John Irving. He’s 64.
Reached through his publisher, Wolfe responded in writing. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” he asked about Irving. “Because he, like Updike and Mailer, has panicked. All three have seen the handwriting on the wall, and it reads: ‘A Man in Full.'”
If the literary trio don’t embrace “full-blooded realism,” Wolfe warns, “then their reputations are finished.” He also offers Irving some additional literary advice: “Irving needs to get up off his bottom and leave that farm in Vermont or wherever it is he stays and start living again. It wouldn’t be that hard. All he’d have to do is get out and take a deep breath and talk to people and see things and rediscover the fabulous and wonderfully bizarre country around him: America.”
… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Lou Reed. He’s 64.
The influence of the Velvet Underground on rock greatly exceeds their sales figures and chart numbers. They are one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, laying the groundwork in the Sixties for many tangents rock music would take in ensuing decades. Yet just two of their four original studio albums ever even made Billboard’s Top 200, and that pair – The Velvet Underground and Nico (#171) and White Light/White Heat (#199) – only barely did so. If ever a band was “ahead of its time,” it was the Velvet Underground. Brian Eno, cofounder of Roxy Music and producer of U2 and others, put it best when he said that although the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, everyone who bought one went on to form a band. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., Roxy Music and Sonic Youth have all cited the Velvet Underground as a major influence. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum)
… of Jon Bon Jovi. New Jersey’s second most famous rock-and-roller is 44.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
… was born 102 years ago today.
When Theodor Seuss Geisel was awarded an honorary degree at Princeton in 1985, the entire graduating class stood and recited Green Eggs and Ham.
Green Eggs and Ham is the third largest selling book in the English language — ever.
Green Eggs and Ham à la Sam-I-Am
1-2 tablespoons of butter or margarine
4 slices of ham
8 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
1-2 drops of green food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of pepper
It’s the birthday
… of Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward. She is 76 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times. Woodward and Paul Newman have been married 48 years.
… of two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor. She is 74 today. Miss Taylor won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
… of Ralph Nader. He’s 72.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on this date in 1807.
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Rattlesnake Valentine
NewMexiKen received a nice email from Jonathan Miller, attorney and author of Rattlesnake Lawyer, Crater County: A Legal Thriller of New Mexico and Volcano Verdict.
Miller included an article about himself, but what I really liked was this line: “I think my Valentines day date will be in my next novel. That’s not a good thing.”
R.I.P. STOP
From a fine tribute to the telegram by Dan Neil, who has more:
For all their worldwide, instantaneous bandwidth, the one thing modern electronic communications systems don’t offer is a sense of occasion, of consequence. One hundred e-mails per day does not equal better information. It’s just a snowdrift of words to be shoveled off the walk. Telegrams were sparingly used and sparingly written, but every word counted.
And, in the hands of experts, telegrams could be used like a scalpel. One of the most famous telegram exchanges pitted George Bernard Shaw against Winston Churchill. Shaw to Churchill: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend if you have any.” Churchill to Shaw: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second if there is one.”
A Hollywood favorite: Cary Grant, evasive about his age, intercepted a telegram to his agent from a reporter: “How old Cary Grant?” it read. Grant responded himself: “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”
Dorothy Parker, on her honeymoon, to an editor nagging her for late work: “Too [expletive] busy, and vice versa.”
Toni Morrison
The Writer’s Almanac has a good essay on Toni Morrison today, her 75th birthday.
It’s the birthday of novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties, working as an editor for Random House and raising two children. She wasn’t happy with her marriage and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She joined a small writing group and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969).
…Morrison’s first big success was the 1977 novel Song of Solomon, about a rich black businessman who tries to hide his working-class background. It was the first novel by a black author to be chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.
But Morrison is probably best known for her novel Beloved (1987), about a former slave named Sethe, living just after the Civil War, who is haunted by the ghost of the baby daughter she killed in order to save the girl from a life of slavery….
Toni Morrison wrote, “They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places … but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. … All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”