The Saints of Aprilby Todd Davis
Coltsfoot gives way to dandelion,
plum to apple blossom. Cherry fills
our woods, white petals melting
like the last late snow. Dogwood's
stigmata shine with the blood
of this season. How holy
forsythia and redbud are
as they consume their own
flowers, green leaves running
down their crowns. Here is
the shapeliness of bodies
newly formed, the rich cloth
that covers frail bones and hides
roots that hold fervently
to this dark earth.
--For Jack Ridl
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Happy Birthday, Eiffel Tower!
On this day in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated in Paris. It was built for the Paris Exposition as part of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, and also as a demonstration of the structural capabilities of iron. The tower elicited strong reactions after its opening. A petition of 300 names, including writers Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas the younger, was sent to the city government protesting its construction, declaring it "useless" and a "monstrosity."
De Maupassant hated the tower so much that he started eating in its restaurant every day, because, he said, "It is the only place in Paris where I don't have to see it."
De Maupassant hated the tower so much that he started eating in its restaurant every day, because, he said, "It is the only place in Paris where I don't have to see it."
Monday, March 29, 2010
Happy Birthday, Alaska!
On this day in 1867, the United States agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia for the sum of $7.2 million dollars. It had belonged to Russia for about 125 years, since Russians had been the first European explorers to get to the place and had proclaimed it their territory in 1741.
The American Civil War ended in 1865, and a couple years later, on this day in 1867, the deal to buy Alaska was negotiated and signed by President Andrew Johnson's secretary of state, William Seward. He announced that someday this big chunk of land would be a U.S. state. The American public by and large was not sold on the purchase of frozen tundra. People thought it was a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a faraway place, which they alternately referred to as Andrew Johnson's "polar bear garden" and "Seward's Icebox." In fact, the purchase became commonly known as "Seward's Folly."
But then gold was discovered there in the 1890s and the Klondike Gold Rush followed, with tens of thousands of people heading north to try to strike it rich. They settled in as fishers and miners and trappers and producers of minerals, and Alaska was granted territorial status in 1912. It became the 49th state of the union, the largest one (consisting of 663,268 square miles) and also the least densely populated state. In 1968, oil was discovered at the far northern part of the state, at Prudhoe Bay. A pipeline was built and began to pump oil in 1977, and now the area near Prudhoe Bay is the largest oil field in the U.S.
The American Civil War ended in 1865, and a couple years later, on this day in 1867, the deal to buy Alaska was negotiated and signed by President Andrew Johnson's secretary of state, William Seward. He announced that someday this big chunk of land would be a U.S. state. The American public by and large was not sold on the purchase of frozen tundra. People thought it was a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a faraway place, which they alternately referred to as Andrew Johnson's "polar bear garden" and "Seward's Icebox." In fact, the purchase became commonly known as "Seward's Folly."
But then gold was discovered there in the 1890s and the Klondike Gold Rush followed, with tens of thousands of people heading north to try to strike it rich. They settled in as fishers and miners and trappers and producers of minerals, and Alaska was granted territorial status in 1912. It became the 49th state of the union, the largest one (consisting of 663,268 square miles) and also the least densely populated state. In 1968, oil was discovered at the far northern part of the state, at Prudhoe Bay. A pipeline was built and began to pump oil in 1977, and now the area near Prudhoe Bay is the largest oil field in the U.S.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Breaking Silence-For My Son
The night you were conceived
your father drove up Avon Mountain
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.
I was eighteen and thin then
but the front seat of the 1956 Dodge
seemed cramped and dark,
the new diamond, I hadn't known
how to refuse, trapping flecks of light.
Even then the blackness was thick
as a muck you could swim through.
Your father pushed me down
on the scratchy seat, not roughly
but as if staking a claim,
and his face rose like
a thing-shadowed moon above me.
My legs ached in those peculiar angles,
my head bumped against the door.
I know you want me to say I loved him
but I wanted only to belong—to anyone.
So I let it happen,
the way I let all of it happen—
the marriage, his drinking, the rage.
This is not to say I loved you any less—
only I was young and didn't know yet
we can choose our lives.
It was dark in the car.
Such weight and pressure,
the wet earthy smell of night,
a slickness like glue.
And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching.
"Breaking Silence—For My Son" by Patricia Fargnoli, from Necessary Light.
your father drove up Avon Mountain
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.
I was eighteen and thin then
but the front seat of the 1956 Dodge
seemed cramped and dark,
the new diamond, I hadn't known
how to refuse, trapping flecks of light.
Even then the blackness was thick
as a muck you could swim through.
Your father pushed me down
on the scratchy seat, not roughly
but as if staking a claim,
and his face rose like
a thing-shadowed moon above me.
My legs ached in those peculiar angles,
my head bumped against the door.
I know you want me to say I loved him
but I wanted only to belong—to anyone.
So I let it happen,
the way I let all of it happen—
the marriage, his drinking, the rage.
This is not to say I loved you any less—
only I was young and didn't know yet
we can choose our lives.
It was dark in the car.
Such weight and pressure,
the wet earthy smell of night,
a slickness like glue.
And in a distant inviolate place,
as though it had nothing at all
to do with him, you were a spark
in silence catching.
"Breaking Silence—For My Son" by Patricia Fargnoli, from Necessary Light.
Flannery O'Connor
It's the birthday of Flannery O'Connor, born 85 years ago today in Savannah, Georgia (1925), who wrote two novels and 32 short stories and who said: "I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both." When she was six, she and a chicken that she taught to walk backward appeared on the news. She later said: "I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax."
After college, she went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then spent time at the Yaddo Writers' Colony. At the age of 26, she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father when she was a teenager. At the time, doctors told her she would live for another five years, but she survived for nearly 14 years. She moved back to Georgia so that her mom could take care of her, to a 500-acre family farm in Milledgeville where she raised chickens, ducks, hens, geese, and peacocks, her favorite. She arose every morning when the chickens first cackled, went to 7:00 a.m. Mass in town at Sacred Heart, returned home and wrote for a couple of hours each day, until she felt too weak or tired.
As she herself put it, she wrote about "freaks and folks." She said, "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
In her sickly 14 years on the farm with her mother, O'Connor wrote two dozen short stories and two novels filled with her freakish, obsessive characters, crazy preachers, murderers, outcasts. Her most famous stories include "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and "Good Country People," about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.
Many of Flannery O'Connor's letters are collected in a volume called The Habit of Being (1979), edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald. And despite O'Connor's premonition that "there won't be any biographies of me, because lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy," a new book about her life came out just last year, written by Brad Gooch and entitled Flannery (2009).
Flannery O'Connor said, "The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
After college, she went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then spent time at the Yaddo Writers' Colony. At the age of 26, she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father when she was a teenager. At the time, doctors told her she would live for another five years, but she survived for nearly 14 years. She moved back to Georgia so that her mom could take care of her, to a 500-acre family farm in Milledgeville where she raised chickens, ducks, hens, geese, and peacocks, her favorite. She arose every morning when the chickens first cackled, went to 7:00 a.m. Mass in town at Sacred Heart, returned home and wrote for a couple of hours each day, until she felt too weak or tired.
As she herself put it, she wrote about "freaks and folks." She said, "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
In her sickly 14 years on the farm with her mother, O'Connor wrote two dozen short stories and two novels filled with her freakish, obsessive characters, crazy preachers, murderers, outcasts. Her most famous stories include "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and "Good Country People," about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.
Many of Flannery O'Connor's letters are collected in a volume called The Habit of Being (1979), edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald. And despite O'Connor's premonition that "there won't be any biographies of me, because lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy," a new book about her life came out just last year, written by Brad Gooch and entitled Flannery (2009).
Flannery O'Connor said, "The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Jack Kerouac
It's the birthday of Jack Kerouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the author of On the Road (1957), a book that brought him instant fame and labels like "King of the Beats" and "the voice of a generation." Writers Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing. And songwriter Bob Dylan said about On the Road: "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."
Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kirouac to French-Canadian immigrants, and he didn't learn to speak English until grade school. He was a star athlete; he ran the 100-meter hurdles and played running back on the football team at Columbia University. He ended up dropping out of Columbia but staying in New York, with his girlfriend Edie Parker, who years later said of him:
"He seemed immediately larger than life. He just didn't look like anyone in New York. He had a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair. He looked like he had just walked in from the woods. ... As he often was, Jack was dead broke the night I met him."
During that time in New York, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement. It was with Neal Cassady that he would take the momentous cross-country road trip in a Cadillac limousine in 1949, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke, the trip that would form the backbone of his book On the Road.
The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they'd fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn't have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.
But there's a bit more to the story. For almost a decade, Kerouac had been keeping careful, meticulously detailed journals — notebooks full of them — about his cross-country travels, and much of the material in his journals appear in his first manuscript. And though he did sit down and have a three-week marathon session in which much of the first draft was produced in 1951, it was not until 1957 that the book was published. In those intervening years, Kerouac was constantly revising the book, trying to please publishers, who kept rejecting his manuscript. One publisher who rejected the book wrote, "His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so."
Kerouac replaced the real names of his friends with pseudonyms (publishers feared libel suits) and he removed sexually explicit passages (publishers feared obscenity charges; this was beforeGinsberg's Howl trial), and Kerouac added various literary touches and rewrote sections of the book.
And scholars have recently discovered that Kerouac had in the early 1950s written another book about his travels on the road that had never been published. It was written in a French dialect called joual that Kerouac grew up speaking, and is called Sur le Chemin, which translates to "On the Road." An additional unpublished French-language novel written by Kerouac has been found. It's entitled La nuit est ma femme.
And just last year, the curator of the Kerouac Archives at the New York Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, published a 75-page book detailing Jack Kerouac's little-known obsession with fantasy baseball, called Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats (2009). Throughout his early life, Gewirtz explains, Kerouac created elaborate teams, players, and games. Kerouac gave his players names like Wino Love, Heinie Twiett, Warby Pepper, Phegus Cody, and his teams got names like the Cincinnati Blacks and the New York Chevvies. He meticulously recorded their exploits on index cards.
In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote: "... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
Jack Kerouac was born Jean Louis Kirouac to French-Canadian immigrants, and he didn't learn to speak English until grade school. He was a star athlete; he ran the 100-meter hurdles and played running back on the football team at Columbia University. He ended up dropping out of Columbia but staying in New York, with his girlfriend Edie Parker, who years later said of him:
"He seemed immediately larger than life. He just didn't look like anyone in New York. He had a ruddy complexion and jet-black hair. He looked like he had just walked in from the woods. ... As he often was, Jack was dead broke the night I met him."
During that time in New York, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement. It was with Neal Cassady that he would take the momentous cross-country road trip in a Cadillac limousine in 1949, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke, the trip that would form the backbone of his book On the Road.
The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they'd fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn't have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.
But there's a bit more to the story. For almost a decade, Kerouac had been keeping careful, meticulously detailed journals — notebooks full of them — about his cross-country travels, and much of the material in his journals appear in his first manuscript. And though he did sit down and have a three-week marathon session in which much of the first draft was produced in 1951, it was not until 1957 that the book was published. In those intervening years, Kerouac was constantly revising the book, trying to please publishers, who kept rejecting his manuscript. One publisher who rejected the book wrote, "His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so."
Kerouac replaced the real names of his friends with pseudonyms (publishers feared libel suits) and he removed sexually explicit passages (publishers feared obscenity charges; this was beforeGinsberg's Howl trial), and Kerouac added various literary touches and rewrote sections of the book.
And scholars have recently discovered that Kerouac had in the early 1950s written another book about his travels on the road that had never been published. It was written in a French dialect called joual that Kerouac grew up speaking, and is called Sur le Chemin, which translates to "On the Road." An additional unpublished French-language novel written by Kerouac has been found. It's entitled La nuit est ma femme.
And just last year, the curator of the Kerouac Archives at the New York Public Library, Isaac Gewirtz, published a 75-page book detailing Jack Kerouac's little-known obsession with fantasy baseball, called Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats (2009). Throughout his early life, Gewirtz explains, Kerouac created elaborate teams, players, and games. Kerouac gave his players names like Wino Love, Heinie Twiett, Warby Pepper, Phegus Cody, and his teams got names like the Cincinnati Blacks and the New York Chevvies. He meticulously recorded their exploits on index cards.
In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote: "... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
Monday, March 8, 2010
Vita Sackville-West
It's the birthday of writer Vita Sackville-West, born in Knole, England (1892), born with a silver spoon in her mouth: She grew up in a mansion with 365 rooms and 52 staircases. But her childhood wasn't exactly idyllic nor happy, since she and her mother didn't get along well.
She started writing early; before her 19th birthday she'd written eight novels. And by the time she married at age 22 the dashing diplomat Harold Nicolson, she'd had several love affairs with women. As it turns out, her husband was gay. Still, it was a wonderfully companionable and happy marriage, and when the two were apart from each other, they wrote each other daily letters.
One of Vita Sackville-West's most famous romances was with writer Virginia Woolf. In January 1927, she wrote to Woolf a letter that said:
"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. ... Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — but oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don't really resent it."
Later that year, in October, Woolf had come up with the idea for a new novel, inspired by Vita, who often wore man's clothes. Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, about a transgender writer who lives for hundreds of years, came out in 1928. Vita's son Nigel called Woolf's book "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature." It was made into a movie in 1992.
Vita Sackville-West kept up one of the most famous gardens in England, and she went on to write a great many books, including the novels Seducers in Ecuador (1924), The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour (1932). She wrote several volumes of poetry and a handful of biographies, including one of St. Joan of Arc.
Vita Sackville-West said: "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?"
She started writing early; before her 19th birthday she'd written eight novels. And by the time she married at age 22 the dashing diplomat Harold Nicolson, she'd had several love affairs with women. As it turns out, her husband was gay. Still, it was a wonderfully companionable and happy marriage, and when the two were apart from each other, they wrote each other daily letters.
One of Vita Sackville-West's most famous romances was with writer Virginia Woolf. In January 1927, she wrote to Woolf a letter that said:
"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. ... Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — but oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don't really resent it."
Later that year, in October, Woolf had come up with the idea for a new novel, inspired by Vita, who often wore man's clothes. Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, about a transgender writer who lives for hundreds of years, came out in 1928. Vita's son Nigel called Woolf's book "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature." It was made into a movie in 1992.
Vita Sackville-West kept up one of the most famous gardens in England, and she went on to write a great many books, including the novels Seducers in Ecuador (1924), The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour (1932). She wrote several volumes of poetry and a handful of biographies, including one of St. Joan of Arc.
Vita Sackville-West said: "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?"
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Dr. Seuss
It's the birthday of a man considered to be the most popular children's book writer in American history, the best-selling children's book writer of all time, and a man who revolutionized the way children learned to read: Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss,was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on this day in 1904. He's the author of more than 60 children's books, including Horton Hears a Who! (1954), One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (1960), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), Hop on Pop (1963), Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! (1975), The Butter Battle Book (1984), and of course, The Cat in the Hat (1957).
He was the grandson of German immigrants, a lifelong Lutheran, a Dartmouth graduate, and an Oxford dropout. His mom was 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, a competitive platform high diver who read him bedtime stories every night. His dad inherited a brewery from his own German immigrant father a month before Prohibition began in the U.S., and eventually became a zookeeper who brought young Theodor with him to work. The future Dr. Seuss grew up around the zoo, running around in the cages with baby lions and baby tigers.
At Dartmouth, he majored in English and wrote for the campus humor magazine. But one night he was caught drinking gin with some friends; since this was during Prohibition, it was an illegal act. The Dartmouth administration did not expel him, but as a disciplinary punishment, they did make him resign from all of his extracurricular activities, including the humor magazine, of which he was the editor-in-chief. From then on, he wrote for the magazine subversively, signing his work with his mother's maiden name, Seuss.
His mother's family pronounced it "Soise," the way it's said in Germany, but people in the States kept mispronouncing it Seuss. He eventually embraced the Anglican mispronunciation: After all, it rhymed with Mother Goose, not a bad thing for an aspiring children's book writer.
In 1937, he published his first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which he said was inspired by the rhythms of a steamliner cruiser he was on. He wrote the book, and much of the rest of his life's work, in rhyming anapestic meter, also called trisyllabic meter.
The meter is very alluring and catchy, and Seuss's masterful use of it is a big part of why his books are so enjoyable to read. The meter is made up of two weak beats followed by a stressed syllable — da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM, as in "And today the Great Yertle, that Marvelous he / Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see."
A big study came out in the 1950s called "Why Johnny Can't Read." It was by an Austrian immigrant to the U.S., an education specialist who argued that the Dick and Jane primers being used to teach reading in grade school classrooms across America were boring and, worse, not an effective method for teaching reading. He called them "horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers," which went "through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children's activities that offer opportunities for reading 'Look, look' or 'Yes, yes' or 'Come, come' or 'See the funny, funny animal.'"
A publisher at Random House thought that maybe a guy named Dr. Seuss, who'd published a few not-well-known but very imaginative children's books, might be able to write a book that would be really good for teaching kids how to read. A publisher invited Dr. Seuss to dinner and said, "Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!"
Dr. Seuss spent nine months composing The Cat in the Hat. It uses just 220 different words and is 1,702 words long. He was a meticulous reviser, and he once said: "Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count."
Within a year of publication, The Cat in the Hat was selling 12,000 copies a month; within five years, it had sold a million copies. Dr. Seuss has sold more books for Random House Publishing than any other writer in its history.
He was the grandson of German immigrants, a lifelong Lutheran, a Dartmouth graduate, and an Oxford dropout. His mom was 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, a competitive platform high diver who read him bedtime stories every night. His dad inherited a brewery from his own German immigrant father a month before Prohibition began in the U.S., and eventually became a zookeeper who brought young Theodor with him to work. The future Dr. Seuss grew up around the zoo, running around in the cages with baby lions and baby tigers.
At Dartmouth, he majored in English and wrote for the campus humor magazine. But one night he was caught drinking gin with some friends; since this was during Prohibition, it was an illegal act. The Dartmouth administration did not expel him, but as a disciplinary punishment, they did make him resign from all of his extracurricular activities, including the humor magazine, of which he was the editor-in-chief. From then on, he wrote for the magazine subversively, signing his work with his mother's maiden name, Seuss.
His mother's family pronounced it "Soise," the way it's said in Germany, but people in the States kept mispronouncing it Seuss. He eventually embraced the Anglican mispronunciation: After all, it rhymed with Mother Goose, not a bad thing for an aspiring children's book writer.
In 1937, he published his first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which he said was inspired by the rhythms of a steamliner cruiser he was on. He wrote the book, and much of the rest of his life's work, in rhyming anapestic meter, also called trisyllabic meter.
The meter is very alluring and catchy, and Seuss's masterful use of it is a big part of why his books are so enjoyable to read. The meter is made up of two weak beats followed by a stressed syllable — da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM, as in "And today the Great Yertle, that Marvelous he / Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see."
A big study came out in the 1950s called "Why Johnny Can't Read." It was by an Austrian immigrant to the U.S., an education specialist who argued that the Dick and Jane primers being used to teach reading in grade school classrooms across America were boring and, worse, not an effective method for teaching reading. He called them "horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers," which went "through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children's activities that offer opportunities for reading 'Look, look' or 'Yes, yes' or 'Come, come' or 'See the funny, funny animal.'"
A publisher at Random House thought that maybe a guy named Dr. Seuss, who'd published a few not-well-known but very imaginative children's books, might be able to write a book that would be really good for teaching kids how to read. A publisher invited Dr. Seuss to dinner and said, "Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!"
Dr. Seuss spent nine months composing The Cat in the Hat. It uses just 220 different words and is 1,702 words long. He was a meticulous reviser, and he once said: "Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count."
Within a year of publication, The Cat in the Hat was selling 12,000 copies a month; within five years, it had sold a million copies. Dr. Seuss has sold more books for Random House Publishing than any other writer in its history.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Ode: Intimations of Immortality (excerpt)
by William Wordsworth
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more!
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.
From "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" by William Wordsworth.
by William Wordsworth
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more!
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.
From "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" by William Wordsworth.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Happy the Man
Happy the Man
by Horace
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite or fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
"Happy the Man" by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix.
by Horace
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite or fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
"Happy the Man" by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix.
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