Category: Books & Writers

Truman Capote …

was born in New Orleans on this date in 1924. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

Even as a child, Capote wanted to become famous. He moved with his mother to New York City and applied to the prestigious Trinity School. He was given an IQ test as an entrance exam, and he scored 215, the highest in the school’s history. Capote said, “I was having 50 perceptions a minute to everyone else’s five. I always felt nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that’s why I started writing.” One day he read a news release about the murder of a family in western Kansas, and he decided to write about it. He moved to Holcomb, Kansas with his friend Harper Lee, and became attached to the community as it recovered from the crime. Capote compiled over 6,000 pages of notes on the crime, 80% of which he threw away. Eventually, he wrote his most famous work, In Cold Blood (1966), about the murders. He got to know the two murderers well and worked for many years to have their death sentences reduced. When the two men were hanged, Capote became physically ill. In Cold Blood introduced a new genre, the “non-fiction novel.” Capote received nearly two million dollars for text and movie rights.

Capote craved fame and spent much of his life socializing. He was an unassuming figure—small and with a high lisping voice. But he was a lively storyteller, and an expert charmer. George Plimpton said, “He knew he had to sing for his supper but, my God, what a song it was!”

The Rolex of sports cars

Pulitzer winner Dan Neil writes this week about the Porsche 911. Go read it, after all how many auto columnists begin with a discussion of Ezra Pound.

It’s fair to say I hadn’t thought of Pound since the moment I put down my pencil in graduate school — until I climbed into the cockpit of the redesigned Porsche 911 Carrera S. There, atop the richly upholstered dash, was a handsome stopwatch-style chronometer. Want to test yourself on a favorite piece of road? Tap a wand on the steering column and the instrument’s sweep-second hand and digital readout begin to march forward with unappeasable accuracy. Now you can time exactly how long it takes to lose your license.

The chronometer is a little bit of genius, design as metaphor. If you had to choose an image to capture the soul of the Porsche 911 — a car with thousands of road-racing victories to its credit, a car that virtually owns the production-based classes at Le Mans, Daytona and Sebring — that image wouldn’t be a wheel, or an engine or even the raring black stallion on the Porsche escutcheon. It would be a stopwatch.

Oh, and if you have $92,355, it’s a helluva car.

Stephen King …

was born on this date in 1947. The Writer’s Almanac has a lengthy essay on King including this:

After college, King worked jobs at a gas station and a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. He said, “Budget was not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on. It was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March.” His writing office was the furnace room of his trailer home, and all of his rough drafts were typed single-spaced, with no margins, to save paper.

He sold a series of horror stories to men’s magazines, and he said that the paychecks from these stories always seemed to arrive when one of his kids had an ear infection or the car had broken down.

His first novel was Carrie (1973), about a weird, miserable, high school girl with psychic powers. The hard cover didn’t sell very well, but when his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000, King couldn’t believe it. He said, “The only thing I could think to do was go out and buy my wife a hair dryer. I stumbled across the street to get it and thought I would probably get greased by some car.”

Interestingly enough, science fiction novelist H.G. Wells was also born on this date — in 1866.

H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken …

essayist and editor, was born on this date in 1880.

  • The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with…
  • It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
  • Courtroom—A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds in favor of Judas.
  • It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
  • The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
  • The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
  • Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
  • It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
  • Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
  • Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
  • Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
  • In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Sideline Chatter

As regular readers know, NewMexiKen is a big fan of “Sideline Chatter” the sports column written by Dwight Perry and published every weekday in The Seattle Times — “a not-so-safe haven for the humorous, offbeat and bizarre events and characters that color the sports landscape.”

Dwight is taking a few days off right now but I thought many would appreciate knowing that before today he actually published 602 consecutive weekday columns (since May 2002).

The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of the 1990s

From the American Library Association

Here’s the top ten to get you interested:

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Link via Stupid Words ….

What our neighbors think

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances Fitzgerald has written a review of History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History.

Here are a few things students in this country will not find in their history books but that students from certain other countries may know for a fact:

a) Our revolution was inspired by the work of the French Enlightenment philosophers (not the essays of John Locke).

b) We won that war largely because the British commanders were slow and blundering (not because of the wisdom and determination of George Washington).

c) What we thought of as a revolution was for many inhabitants of British North America an extended civil war, in which many were forced into exile.

d) After Gen. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the Spanish and French fleets opened full-scale war with the British in the Caribbean.

Those with a particular interest in American history should find the whole review well worth reading.

Alex Haley…

was born on this date in 1921. Haley was the author of two publishing phenomena — The Autobiography of Malcolm X (6 million copies) and Roots, which was not only a best-seller, but led to one of the most successful television series ever. Nearly half the people in the country watched the last episode in January 1977. Haley won a special Pulitizer for Roots, “the story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.”

NewMexiKen co-chaired a symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979, that included Haley. He was a very self-possessed and self-assured speaker, confident yet pleasant and informal. He spoke for some time without notes, telling the story about the story — that is, how he learned about his family. Along with the Archivist of the U.S. and Professor Wesley Johnson, I sat on the stage behind Haley as he spoke and could see the rapture on the faces of his listeners. To an audience of genealogists this was the Sermon on the Mount.

Subsequently it bothered me to learn he plagarized sections of the book and possibly fudged some of the genealogy. Clearly, that wasn’t right. Even so, the good his work did in educating both black and white America (and I include both books) was a legacy of major proportion.

Haley, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard 1939-1959, before becoming a full-time writer, died of a heart attack in 1992. The Coast Guard has named a cutter for him.

Subversive, hot-rod styling

Dan Neil on the prototypical Dodge Magnum RT consumer —

Killer was wearing a bowling shirt and baggy shorts, several earrings and a couple of ounces of high-quality tattoo ink swirling around his calves, forearms and neck — flaming dice, crossed pistols, hearts and death’s heads, Bettie Page in fishnets. You know, the illustrated psychobilly.

Killer explained that he and his wife — huh? — had been trying to find a Dodge Magnum RT in Los Angeles because they had a 2-year-old daughter — wha?! — and they needed a family car. None of the local dealers had the RT edition — with the 340-horsepower Hemi V8 — and he was thinking of driving to Las Vegas to find one.

“Aw, man,” Killer said, “that thing is just so money!”

It occurred to me as I closed the door and put down my can of “Welcome Mace” that Killer was the Magnum’s ideal demographic: a middle-finger-waving anti-establishmentarian, bad-beer connoisseur, breeder.

Sometime between being hip and breaking a hip, even kool kats need a family car.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

An excellent review of Gordon Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin:

It’s Benjamin Franklin’s time. Two years ago Edmund S. Morgan gave us a fine character sketch with ”Benjamin Franklin.” Then Walter Isaacson’s ”Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” planted itself on the New York Times best-seller list for a long stay. H. W. Brands has chimed in with ”The First American,” a more commodious biography than Isaacson’s, if a less fluent one. And now we have Gordon S. Wood’s engaging book ”The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.”

Wood has some tough acts to follow, but he is no slouch. A skilled writer with both Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes to his credit, he possesses as profound a grasp of the early days of the Republic as anyone currently working. He is the author of two books — ”The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787” and ”The Radicalism of the American Revolution” — that are essential for understanding the United States from its founding down to the present.

This study is not a biography, at least not a conventional one. Wood focuses on Franklin’s personal development and constructs his narrative around various turning points in the life, almost like a bildungsroman. We learn the choices Franklin made, the conflicts he had to resolve. This is the most dramatic of the recent Franklin books.

Continue reading the review from The New York Times.

Dan Neil

NewMexiKen just loves Dan Neil’s style:

There is nothing false, shallow or toy-like in the way the [Porsche] Carrera GT drives. This car is no gimmick, no vainglorious attempt to keep up with the Enzos. It is serious. Adult-strength. For mature audiences only. Double-black-diamond with an avalanche advisory. If you are not entirely respectful of the car’s power, it will hurt you.

*****

The Carrera GT is uncompromised and uncompromising. The first impression one gets behind the wheel is one of off-the-scale, black-hole density, a gravitas that feels rooted in the Earth’s iron core. This is the sort of vibration-free platform they build giant telescopes on.

Only a few of the cars have been made. You know, for Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen and the like.

0 to 100 in 6.8!

Tom Robbins…

is 68 today. The Writer’s Almanac tells this about Robbins:

He taught himself to read when he was five years old, and around the same time he started dictating stories to his mother. One of the stories was about a pilot who crashes on a desert island and discovers a brown cow with yellow spots. Robbins recently said, “I wouldn’t find that story out of place in what I’m doing now, and so I guess I haven’t changed all that much.”

Robbins’s best known novel is probably Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1974).

Cormac McCarthy…

is 71 today. The Writer’s Almanac has an excellent little bio.

And there’s this from the Cormac McCarthy web site —

Critics have compared Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish yet beautifully written adventure masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, with the best works of Dante, Poe, De Sade, Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and William Styron. The critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence.

Chick car

Dan Neil knows how to write about cars. The lede to today’s column —

When I drive the Lexus SC430, I feel pretty. Oh so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and let’s just leave it at that, hmmm?

The SC430 — as polished as a manor house banister, as smooth as Napoleon brandy strained through Naomi Wolf’s silk stocking — is that mightily maligned thing: a chick car.

Read more.

Oliver Sacks…

is 71 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay (which you can hear Garrison Keillor recite):

It’s the birthday of science writer Oliver Sacks, born in London (1933). He’s known for writing about the experiences of people suffering from neurological disorders in books of essays such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). Both his parents were doctors, and he grew up wanting to follow in their footsteps. After graduating from Oxford, he went to California as a doctor of neurology, and he studied people with strange disorders of the mind, such as the inability to form new memories, or the inability to recognize faces.

In the 1960s, he began to treat a group of people suffering from a rare sleeping sickness, and he tried treating them with a drug called L-dopa. He said, “Suddenly … in the lugubrious and vaulted silence … there burst forth the wonder, the laughter, the resurrection of awakenings. Patients motionless and frozen, in some cases for almost five decades, were suddenly able, once again, to walk and talk, to feel and think, with perfect freedom.” Sacks had to help them come to terms with the fact that decades had passed since they’d last been conscious. Then he watched as most of them relapsed back into their catatonic states.

He found the experience profoundly moving, and when he wrote an article about it for a scientific journal, he included his emotional responses as well as his scientific ideas. His colleagues criticized him for getting too personally involved with his subject, so he decided that they were the wrong audience for his work. He began writing a book about his observations that told the story of his experience, and included his personal and philosophical speculations. The result was Awakenings (1973), which was a great success and was eventually made into a movie with Robin Williams.

Oliver Sacks has since gone on to write many books and essays about his patients, and he says that he is trying to revive the practice of storytelling in medicine, because he believes that few things illuminate the human condition better than disease. His most recent book is Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001).

Awakenings is a truly fine film, all the more for being based on actual patients. Robert De Niro is excellent in it, as is Robin Williams.

Anna Quindlen…

was born on this date in 1953. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

She eventually got a job as a reporter for the New York Times.

Quindlen started writing a weekly column called “Life in the ’30s,” in which she talked about marriage, motherhood, religion, and other personal issues. She wrote about being raised as a Catholic, about the death of her father, and about the birth of her children. The columns were incredibly popular: they were syndicated in more than sixty newspapers, and Quindlen became known as a voice for the baby boom generation. Some people accused her of writing about trivial issues, but Quindlen once said, “Anybody who tries to convince me that foreign policy is more important than child rearing is doomed to failure.”