Category: Books & Writers

William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway

… were married on this date in 1582. He was 18, she 26. As with many facets of Shakespeare’s life, there is some confusion about the marriage. Among other things, Shakespeare received a marriage license with an Anne Whatley the day before. Secondly, relatives of Anne Hathaway (or Hathwey) posted bond so that her marriage to Shakespeare could proceed with only one reading of the bans. Perhaps the confusion is best resolved by noting that on May 26, 1583, William and Anne’s daughter Susanna was christened. It appears the Bard had a shotgun wedding.

A slippery bunch of varmints

Steve Terrell has a review of Jay Miller’s Billy the Kid Rides Again. Steve begins:

Untold numbers of books have been written about New Mexico’s most famous outlaw, Billy the Kid. However, a new one, Billy the Kid Rides Again: Digging for the Truth, by longtime Santa Fe political columnist Jay Miller, is as much about Bill the Governor as Billy the Kid.

Barely six months into Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration, the governor called a news conference where he announced the state would get involved in a new investigation into the death of the outlaw — whom most serious historians believe was shot and killed in Fort Sumner in 1881.

A trio of law-enforcement officials — DeBaca County Sheriff Gary Grays, Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan and Capitan Mayor Steve Sederwall (a Lincoln County reserve officer) — had started the investigation.

“This is not a publicity stunt,” Richardson — with a straight face — told reporters at the announcement. “It’s an effort to get to the truth.”

The review continues and Steve has more background on his blog.

Holiday Sports Book and DVD Buying Guide

The Sports Prof has put together a nice list of sports-related books and DVDs just in time for your Christmas list (giving or receiving). His Best Sports Movie Ever? entry has an even longer list of films.

His top movie — Eight Men Out; number two is Hoosiers. NewMexiKen hasn’t seen Eight Men Out, so can’t compare, but my favorite baseball movies are Bull Durham and Bang the Drum Slowly.

The SportsProf’s top-rated sports book is The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter, about the early stars of baseball. It is indeed a fine book. The Prof says his personal copy cost $2.95 when his dad gave it to him. My copy was $10.

Joseph Wood Krutch

… was born on this date in 1893. He graduated from the University of Tennessee and received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia. He became an author and lecturer and was drama critic for The Nation during the years 1924-1952. He wrote two criticially acclaimed biographies, Samuel Johnson (1944) and Henry David Thoreau (1948).

Krutch moved to Tucson in 1952 and turned his focus primarily to nature writing. Among his notable works were The Desert Year, The Voice of the Desert and The Great Chain of Life.

From The Voice of the Desert:

Here in the West, as in the country at large, a war more or less concealed under the guise of a “conflict of interests” rages between the “practical” conservationist and the defenders of the national parks and other public lands; between cattlemen and lumberers on the one hand, and the “sentimentalists” on the other. The pressure to allow the hunter, the rancher, or the woodcutter to invade the public domain is constant and the plea is always that we should “use” what is assumed to be useless unless it is adding to material welfare. But unless somebody teaches love, there can be no ultimate protection to what is lusted after. Without some “love of nature” for itself there is no possibility of solving “the problem of conservation.”

Romeo and Juliet 2005 SMS

SMS stands for Short Message Service — like the kind you send/receive on your cell phone (you do text message don’t you?).

Now you can get plot outlines in SMS. Here’s Romeo and Juliet:

FeudTween 2hses- Montague&Capulet. RomeoMfalls_<3w/_JulietC@mary Secretly Bt R kils J’s Coz &&is banishd. J fakes Death. As Part of Plan2b-w/R Bt_leter Bt It Nvr Reachs Him. Evry1confuzd-bothLuvrs kil Emselves

More here.

Or perhaps you’d prefer the tabloid version.

As for NewMexiKen, I’m still contemplating: 2b? Nt2b? …

The way we were

An interesting take on children’s literature by a Brandeis professor in The Boston Globe: The way we were.

Our adult delight in children’s literature is not an innocent delight. As adult readers of children’s stories, we’re aware, as children are not, that their robust confidence in the world, at least while they are enraptured by a story, is ephemeral and fragile, endangered by every step they take toward adulthood. For us, the child becomes almost another character in the story, responding with a wonderfully heedless delight or dismay to things as unreal as the adult world she imagines. But we know what’s coming, how evanescent the child’s world is-and we feel for her what she cannot possibly feel for herself.

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

My First Literary Crush

“Slate asked journalists, cable-news personalities, novelists, Hollywood types, and other great thinkers a question: What’s the most influential book you read in college? What made you slam down your café au lait and set out to conquer the world?”

The answers.

For NewMexiKen’s part, I didn’t drink café au lait or even coffee in college, but I think I might have set down my Orange Julius for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At least I can remember reading Kesey’s book in college and not many others are coming to mind, though I did read some Tolstoy — in Russian. (Толстой to you).

One Well-Read Home Has Some New Pets: 1,082 Penguins

It is the Land of Enchantment and Kathryn Gursky is enchanted with classic literature. This from The New York Times:

Rushing to evacuate her home as a forest fire lapped at the edges of this high-desert town in May 2000, Kathryn Gursky took with her just one book, a British edition of “The World of Pooh,” by A. A. Milne, bought when she and her husband were vacationing in Dorset some 11 years earlier.

When she returned to Los Alamos after the fire, Ms. Gursky, a 49-year-old former librarian, found that the rest of her 2,300-volume personal library had burned, along with her house and everything in it.

Thousands of scorched tree trunks still range up the hillside across the street from Ms. Gursky’s new home here, but inside the house, her library is well on the way to recovery. In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000.

Restless Giant

Charles Peters likes Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore.

This is first-rate history by a first-rate historian. Unlike many of his brethren, James T. Patterson can write, and he understands the value of vivid detail, using “Annie Hall,” “Norma Rae” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to help explain the women’s movement. What’s more, he can think, and he offers analysis and interpretation that is consistently sensible, if sometimes a trifle Panglossian.

The events he describes make up the history – social, economic and political – of the United States during the final quarter of the 20th century, from Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House and America’s departure from Vietnam to the bitter partisanship of Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Bush v. Gore.

In between, he recalls the Ford and Carter administrations and the Iranian hostage crisis, the rise of Ronald Reagan and the resurgence of American conservatism, Bush 1 and Iraq 1, and President Clinton’s economic triumphs and missed opportunities.

…

Still, despite its faults, “Restless Giant” is a splendid book that will come to be regarded as indispensable to everyone who cares about the history of this country.

A literature lover strikes it rich

Thar’s gold — and books! — in them there hills. From an article in the Los Angeles Times:

No less a personage than Richard Booth, who turned Hay-on-Wye in Wales into the world’s first book town, had given his blessing to the Gold Cities Book Town Assn., placing the neighboring Gold Rush hamlets of Grass Valley and Nevada City, Calif., in the company of such other bookish venues as Larry McMurtry’s Archer City, Texas; Kedah Darul Aman, Malaysia; St.-Pierre-de-Clages, Switzerland; and Fjaerland, Norway.

Not only was the Gold Country a lot closer than Fjaerland, but it also promised to be at least as pleasant, an area whose relaxed ambience, crisp mountain air and splendid scenery had turned writers including poet Gary Snyder into permanent residents. The location, a couple of hours north of Sacramento, proved as charming as the wine country without the hurly-burly of the consumption industry.

Key quote: Biblioholism — “the habitual longing to purchase, read, store, admire and consume books in excess.”

NewMexiKen pleads guilty, as charged.

Friends of Abe

Eminent Civil War historian James McPherson reviews Doris Kearns Goodwin’s newest book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. McPherson begins:

More books about Abraham Lincoln line the shelves of libraries than about any other American. Can there be anything new to say about our 16th president? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Having previously offered fresh insights into Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Doris Kearns Goodwin has written an elegant, incisive study of Lincoln and leading members of his cabinet that will appeal to experts as well as to those whose knowledge of Lincoln is an amalgam of high school history and popular mythology.

Author Robert Caro

… was born on this date in 1936. The Writer’s Almanac tells us about Caro today, including this:

Since 1974, Caro has been working on a four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. He says he picked Johnson to write about because he wanted to write about political power, and he believes Lyndon Johnson was the most masterful getter and user of political power in the 20th century. For his research on Johnson, Caro has gone through 34 million documents at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, and he has conducted more than 1,000 interviews. He lived in Johnson’s hometown for three years so that he could get to know the people there well enough that they would open up to him. He also tracked down every living member of Johnson’s grammar school class.

Caro eventually uncovered the fact that Johnson had committed an unprecedented series of lies, manipulations, and vote tampering on his way to becoming a United States Senator. But what fascinated Caro was the fact that a politician who would commit such crimes in order to get power could still use that power for good. He points out that, when Johnson got into office, he became the greatest advocate for civil rights of any politician since Abraham Lincoln. Caro’s most recent volume about Johnson, Master of the Senate, came out in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize.

Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard is 80 today.

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip” — one of Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing.

Elmore has written a serial novel for the New York Times Sunday Magazine which will appear in the magazine between September 18 and December 18, 2005. The first chapter is, “The Hanging of Willi Martz.” The setting is Camp Deep Fork, a German POW camp in October, 1944 outside of Okmulgee, Oklahoma where a couple thousand of the hundreds of thousands of German POWS imprisoned in America during the war are kept. Carl Webster (from The Hot Kid, Elmore’s latest hardcover novel) is sent to investigate a death in the camp. Was it suicide or murder?

Read the serialized novel.

(If you hadn’t guessed, yes, NewMexiKen is an Elmore Leonard fan.)

The Mournful Giant

From William Lee Miller’s excellent review of Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk:

In 1998, Shenk (a young essayist who frankly mentions his own battles with depression) read a reference to Lincoln’s melancholy in an essay on suicide and set about learning more. In his researcher’s zeal, he read Lincoln scholars and also sought them out and interviewed them; he went to Lincoln’s birthplace and Ford’s Theater, stood where Lincoln delivered the “house divided” speech, held in his hand Lincoln’s letters to his friend Joshua Speed, saw the fatal assassin’s bullet and, since heredity is one ingredient inclining a person to depression, obtained the records admitting Mary Jane Lincoln, Lincoln’s father’s cousin, to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane in 1867. He even attended a convention of Lincoln impersonators, borrowed a Lincoln suit for himself and joined in. His book has page after page of acknowledgments, to the point that one may be tempted to say: No wonder a writer with this many friends could produce such a strong book.

“The goal,” Shenk writes, “has been to see what we can learn about Lincoln by looking at him through the lens of his melancholy, and to see what we can learn about melancholy by looking at it in light of Lincoln’s experience.” He has effectively cast light in both directions.

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week 2005 is September 24 through October 1.

“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.” — Mark Twain

The Ten Most Challenged Books of 2004:

  • “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoint, being unsuited to age group and violence
  • “Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, offensive language and violence
  • “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy and political viewpoint
  • Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey, for offensive language and modeling bad behavior
  • “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexual content and offensive language
  • “What My Mother Doesn’t Know” by Sonya Sones, for sexual content and offensive language
  • “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak, for nudity and offensive language
  • “King & King” by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, for homosexuality
  • “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, for racism, homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language and unsuited to age group
  • “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, for racism, offensive language and violence

Thanks to Debby for the reminder.

It’s the birthday

Bill Murray is 55 today. Nominated for an Oscar for Lost in Translation, NewMexiKen still thinks Murray’s best effort was as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day.

Stephen King is 58. The Writer’s Almanac tells us about King:

It’s the birthday of the novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine (1947). His father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Stephen was just two. He has no memories of his father, but one day he found a whole box full of his father’s science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and that box of his father’s books inspired him to start writing horror stories.

He studied creative writing in college. He tried to write some literary stories, but he found that writing about giant man-eating rats was a lot more fun. He worked at a gas station after college and at a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. He did his writing in the furnace room of his trailer home. He did the first drafts typed single-spaced and no margins to save paper.

He was working as a teacher when he wrote his first novel about a weird high school girl with psychic powers named Carrie White. He gave up on the book at one point and threw it in the trash. His wife rescued it. Carrie was published in 1973. The hard cover didn’t sell well, but then his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000.

In praise of the novel

Author Carlos Fuentes on the saving grace of literature. He begins:

Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: Name the novel that you consider the best ever written.

Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered: “Don Quixote de la Mancha” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, in that order.

Quotable

“At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.”

— P. G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money