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Poem: "It is Marvellous ..." by Elizabeth Bishop, from American Poetry Review. © Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Reprinted with permission. 
It Is Marvellous ...
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
It Is Marvellous ...
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
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Today is Midsummer Night's Eve, celebrated for thousands of years during the same week as the summer solstice. Midsummer Night's Eve is a time for lovers. An old Swedish proverb says, "Midsummer Night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking."
It's also known as St. John's Eve; St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers, and Midsummer Night's Eve is a time when the hives are full of honey. The full moon that occurs this month used to be called the Mead Moon, because honey was fermented to make mead, and that's where the word "honeymoon" comes from.
Shakespeare set his play A Midsummer Night's Dream on this night. It tells the story of two young couples who wander into a magical forest outside Athens.
good day, everyone.
peace be with you
The Writer's Almanac for June 21-27, 2004
WEDNESDAY, 23 JUNE, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "It is Marvellous ..." by Elizabeth Bishop, from American Poetry Review. © Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Reprinted with permission.
It Is Marvellous ...
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Midsummer Night's Eve, celebrated for thousands of years during the same week as the summer solstice. Midsummer Night's Eve is a time for lovers. An old Swedish proverb says, "Midsummer Night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking."
It's also known as St. John's Eve; St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers, and Midsummer Night's Eve is a time when the hives are full of honey. The full moon that occurs this month used to be called the Mead Moon, because honey was fermented to make mead, and that's where the word "honeymoon" comes from.
Shakespeare set his play A Midsummer Night's Dream on this night. It tells the story of two young couples who wander into a magical forest outside Athens.
On this day in 1868, the first typewriter was patented by Chistopher Latham Sholes. It only had capital letters and it took up as much room as a large table. Typists didn't know if they were making errors because the paper was inside the machine. Typewriters were slow sellers at first, but Mark Twain bought one almost as soon as they came out, and in 1883 Twain sent the manuscript of his book Life on the Mississippi (1883) to his publisher in typed form, the first author ever to do so.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer David Leavitt, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1961). When he was twenty-two years old and still a senior in college, he published his first short story, "Territory," in The New Yorker. It was the first story to appear in The New Yorker in which the characters were explicitly homosexual, and it created a big stir when it came out. Leavitt's Collected Stories came out last year. His latest book is a novel called The Body of Jonah Boyd, published last month.
It's the birthday of playwright Jean Anouilh, born in Bordeaux, France (1910). His work spanned five decades, and his plays include The Lark (1953), The Waltz of the Toreadors (1952) and Becket (1961).
It's the birthday of Alfred C. Kinsey, born in Hoboken, New Jersey (1894). He's known to us today as a famous sex researcher, but he started out as a zoologist who specialized in gall wasps. As a professor at Indiana University, he directed several biological explorations of the habits of the gall wasp in Mexico and Central America. He traveled more than 80,000 miles collecting the wasps, and he and his colleagues catalogued more than three million specimens, recording twenty-eight measurements on each wasp.
In 1938, Kinsey took a course at Indiana on the subject of fitting students for married life. He became interested in human sexual behavior, and he set out to study it in the same methodical way that he had studied gall wasps. In 1942, he and his team of researchers interviewed more than 5,000 men and 5,000 women, asking them questions about their sex lives.
He published his findings in his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). He revealed that masturbation, premarital sex and homosexual acts were more prevalent than people thought. The book sold more than 500,000 copies, even though it was more than 800 pages long and cost $6.50, a lot of money for a book in those days. In 1953, Kinsey published a follow-up, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which landed him on the cover of Time magazine.
(these are all from the Writer's Almanac, btw)
On the Way to Work
Life is a bitch. And then you die.
—a bumper sticker
I hated bumper stickers, hated
the notion of wanting to be known
by one glib or earnest thing.
But this time I sped up to see
a woman in her forties, cigarette,
no way to tell how serious
she was, to what degree she felt
the joke, or what she wanted from us
who'd see it, philosophers all.
If I'd had my own public answer—
"New Hope For The Dead,"
the only sticker I almost stuck—
I would have driven in front of her
and slowed down. How could we not
have become friends
or the kind of enemies
who must talk into the night,
just one mistake away from love?
I rode parallel to her,
glancing over, as one does
on an airplane at someone's book.
Short, straight hair. No make-up.
A face that had been a few places
and only come back from some.
At the stop light I smiled
at her, then made m turn
toward the half-life of work
past the placebo shops
and the beautiful park, white
like a smokescreen with snow.
She didn't follow, not in this
bitch of a life.
And I had so much to tell her
before we die
about what I'd done all these years
in between, under, and around
truths like hers. Who knows
where we would have stopped?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Stephen Dunn, born in Forest Hills, New York (1939). He published more than ten books of poetry before his collection Different Hours won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. His latest collection is Local Visitations (2003).
Dunn's first love was basketball. He was a star on the 1962 Hofstra basketball team that went twenty-five and one on the year. They called him "Radar," for his accurate jump shot. After college, he played professional basketball for the Williamsport, Pennsylvania Billies for a couple years before giving up the sport.
Dunn found a job as a brochure writer for Nabisco, and for the next seven years he rose through the ranks of the corporation until he was making a comfortable living. Finally, he started to worry that he would get stuck in a job doing something he didn't enjoy or believe in, so he quit and moved to Spain with his wife. For the first year, they lived on less than $3,000 while Dunn worked on a novel. He finished the novel, but he eventually switched to poetry, and his first collection, Looking for Holes in the Ceiling, was published in 1974.
Dunn said, "It would be a lie to say I must choose between happiness and art. I can live with many things. Just to admit that I've been married for 35 years means that I've experienced joy and diminution and quiet evenings and tumultuous evenings and betrayal and dishonesty and tenderness and withholdings and forgiveness and cowardice and boredom and friendship."
It's the birthday of journalist and novelist Pete Hamill, born in Brooklyn, New York (1935). His novels include Flesh and Blood (1977) and Forever (2003).
Hamill said, "I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful."
And, "The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a 'good murder'; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes, break on their editions."
It's the birthday of poet and essayist John Ciardi, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1916). He's remembered today for his book How Does a Poem Mean? (1959), which has become a standard textbook in high school and college poetry classes. He also published several collections of his own poetry, and his Collected Poems came out in 1997. But he may be best known for his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, published in 1954.
Ciardi said, "The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow."
And he said, "A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."
It's the birthday of essayist and short story writer Ambrose Bierce, born near Horse Cave Creek, Ohio (1842). He first made a name for himself as a columnist in San Francisco in the 1860s and '70s, at a time when the city was home to all of the best writers of the American West, including Bret Harte and Mark Twain. Today Bierce is best known for his Devil's Dictionary (1906), a book of ironic definitions.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
The Vacuum
The house is so quiet now
The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,
Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth
Grinning into the floor, maybe at my
Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.
I've lived this way long enough,
But when my old woman died her soul
Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can't bear
To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust
And the woollen mice, and begin to howl
Because there is old filth everywhere
She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair.
I know now how life is cheap as dirt,
And still the hungry, angry heart
Hangs on and howls, biting at air.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) George Orwell, born Eric Blair in a small village in Bengal, India (1903). His father was a customs officer in the British opium trade, and at an early age Orwell was sent back to England to attend boarding school. He said, "It was an expensive and snobbish school which was in the process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive. … In a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good."
He didn't do well in school, and after graduation he didn't go to college. On a whim he traveled to the British colony of Burma, where he served for five years as a colonial policeman. He eventually grew so disgusted by the imperialism he was a part of that he quit his job as a policeman and moved back to Europe to become a writer. He spent a few years living in poverty in London and Paris, working as a dishwasher and hanging around with hobos and prostitutes, and he wrote his first book about the experience, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Worried about what his parents would think of the book, he published it under the pseudonym George Orwell, the name he wrote under for the rest of his life.
Though he published a few novels in the 1930s, he was mainly known as a journalist and essayist. In order to make a living off writing, he wrote about four newspaper articles a week, averaging about 200 a year. It wasn't until he took a job with the BBC that he made as much money as he had been making as a policeman in Burma.
In 1937, he traveled to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War. When he arrived in Barcelona, communists and anarchists were running the city. At first, he saw it as a kind of utopia, where everyone was equal and no one was poor, and he signed up to fight against the Fascists. He later witnessed the Communists suppressing democracy as fervently as the Fascists had done, and he decided that revolutionaries on the left wing were every bit as dangerous as those on the right. He wrote about his experience in the book Homage to Catalonia (1938).
Orwell once said, "Every line of serious work that I have written [since the Spanish Civil War] has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism." At a time when most British intellectuals still supported Communism, Orwell became one of the first leftist writers to speak out against Stalin. He began to work on a political allegory about the Communist revolution, and that work became the novel Animal Farm (1945). Because England and Russia were still allies at the end of World War II, he had trouble publishing the book, but when Animal Farm finally came out after the war, it made Orwell famous.
By then he was already dying of tuberculosis. He spent the last years of his life writing 1984 (1949), about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He knew he didn't have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter, and when he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.
When he finished it, he told his publisher that 1984 was too dark a novel to make much money, but it became an immediate bestseller. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold more than ten million copies. With all of his work still in print in so many different languages, critics have estimated that every year one million people read George Orwell for the first time.
Orwell said, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
And he said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
It was on this day in 1950 that North Korea invaded South Korea, beginning the Korean War. At the end of World War II, Korea had been divided along the thirty-eighth parallel. The Soviet Union controlled the North and the United States controlled the South. When North Korea tried to invade and take over South Korea on this day in 1950, President Harry Truman ordered a military police action to stop the invasion.
Douglas MacArthur led the United States Army, and he almost won the war in what he called his "Home By Christmas" offensive. But near the end of November 1950, Chinese forces entered the war and drove MacArthur back to the thirty-eighth parallel. MacArthur asked for permission to attack China with nuclear weapons, but Truman refused. MacArthur took his case to the American public, and Truman fired him.
The war dragged on for months. Truce negotiations began the next year and they were the longest truce negotiations in the history of warfare: they lasted two years and seventeen days, with 575 meetings between the opposing sides. Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 on the platform that he would end the war, and when he was elected that's what he did.
The Korean War was the first war the United States had concluded without success. There were no celebrations when it ended. About 37,000 Americans and more than a million Koreans lost their lives.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/e/e_eye.htm
"He knew he didn't have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter, and when he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.
Orwell said, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
And he said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
hmmm... sounds like a Riot Act lyric, yeah?