July Entertainments
Life is hard right now -- hard and hot and damp -- and it’s been mostly like that for me since the week of Independence Day. My temper and my energy are both short. It feels like all the things I care about are perched on the edge of a crumbling precipice. I know how this is supposed to go and I know what I’m supposed do but I’m mired somewhere inside of myself. I keep trying to put on a bright and shiny face but, even when I’m caught up in that mood, I sense the brittleness of its nature behind the glitteriness.
I’m tired of giving myself pep-talks meant to inspire productivity and I’m tired of having nothing to show for my days. I’m tired of me.
But. It’s late and I want to go curl up with a horror-book in my air-conditioned bedroom so I’m simply going to post some stuff that I managed to organize today.
I have some new folks on my flist these days … people who haven’t ever seen me do an entertainments post. I subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac. Most of the stuff that goes into a post like this comes from those daily emails. I’m sort of passively gathering information about writers and history for inspiration and for a future project that involves intertwining the history of my family with that of the larger world. I don’t post links to my finds because, all too often, web pages go missing. For that reason I archive entire pieces here in my journal behind cuts. This is one of those entires. It's a long one because I've been collecting all month.
I want to read me some James M. Cain:
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Mildred Pierce
Double Indemnity
July 1st-
It's the birthday of crime writer James M. Cain, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1892). He's the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Most crime novelists at the time wrote about the detectives who investigated crimes. Cain wrote his novel from the point of view of a drifter who helps a woman murder her husband. The book got great reviews and became a best-seller. He went on to write other novels such as Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943).
Knowing absolutely nothing about Kafka, but somehow put off by his very name despite that ignorance, I was surprised to read a rather touching biography about him.
July 3rd-
It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Franz Kafka, born in Prague (1883). His father was a self-made man who had been forced to become a peddler as a teenager, and then worked his way up to owning a shop that specialized in clothing, walking sticks, and parasols. Kafka later complained that his father drove him crazy going on and on about his own miserable childhood. Kafka wrote, "No one denies that for years, as a result of insufficient winter clothing, [my father] had open sores on his legs, that he often went hungry, that when he was only ten he had to push a cart through the villages ... but to hear all this in a boastful and quarrelsome tone is torment."
From an early age, Kafka was obsessed with his own guilt. He did well in school, but he was constantly terrified that someday the teachers would realize their mistake and give him a failing grade. At night, he came home and listened to his father pronounce judgments on all subjects and people. In a letter he later wrote to his father, but never sent, Kafka said, "From your armchair, you ruled the world. ... [And] I lost the ability to talk." Kafka grew increasingly shy, anxious, and miserable.
After law school, he got a job at an insurance company, where he was responsible for finding ways to prevent industrial accidents. He was actually quite good at it, and it's estimated that he prevented thousands of factory deaths in Prague. But he found the job exhausting. He wrote to a friend, "I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware."
Even though he had a good job, he continued to live at home with his parents. He tried to write at night, but was constantly annoyed by the sounds his parents made in the room next door. And then, on the night of September 22, 1912, Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote nonstop, from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., finishing in one sitting a short story called "The Judgment." It's the story of a young man who announces to his father that he's going to get married, whereupon his father orders the son to drown himself in the river. The son, as though against his own will, runs out of the house and throws himself off a bridge. Kafka considered the story his first real literary success.
He would rarely write in such long stretches again, but over the next few years he began to produce the stories that made his name, including "The Metamorphosis" (1915), about a man who wakes up to find he's become a giant insect, and "In the Penal Colony," about a machine that kills criminals by inscribing the name of their crime on their skin.
It was only in the last year of his life that Kafka found happiness with a woman named Dora, whom he met at a Jewish holiday camp. People who knew him at the time said that he finally lost all his anxiety, became funny and cheerful. Once, while out for a walk with Dora, he met a little girl who was crying over a lost doll. Kafka spent the next several weeks writing letters to the girl from the lost doll, explaining where the doll had gone and what it was up to, and finally announcing that it, the doll, was getting married. Kafka wanted to get married that year too, but he died of tuberculosis. His last two novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), were left unfinished.
Franz Kafka wrote, "We need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Though I’m not an active fan of poetry, particular poems catch me every now and then. Here are two that did. (The first poem mentions a town named Arden -- the same as my own fictionalized town. I didn't notice that until I was reviewing this entry for proper spacing.)
Poem: "Service Is Our Business"
by Michael McFee from Shinemaster
Service Is Our Business
It used to be black as the insides of a Penzoil can
whenever we drove this ten-mile stretch of Highway 25
at night from lit-up Asheville back to our gloomy house
in Arden, no stoplights or streetlights anywhere, nothing.
And there's where (during the day) mom would stop for gas,
a Shell filling station in the curve at the foot of a long hill,
a couple of pumps and a little office and a double bay
over which "Service Is Our Business" shone in red plastic
as the smiling proprietor emerged, wiping his large hands,
looking like Glenn Miller on the 78-rpm records she'd play
(I still have them, maiden initials scratched on each label),
like some veteran still wearing his crisp khaki uniform.
He'd bend to the open window and speak to her, then us,
sun polishing his wire rims, starching his cursive name,
brightening the yellow scallop shell stitched to his chest
and the huge one slowly revolving overhead as he began
hooking the nozzle in the tank (gas rushing behind us),
checking (obscured but heard) the oil and radiator water,
cleaning each window (mom laughing loud through hers),
topping off (when needed) the fluids or the air in tires,
then lowering the heavy hood gently, not slamming it down,
and firmly replacing the gas cap behind the license plate,
and taking her offered bills with a thank-you and half-bow
before watching us drive off, shading his eyes as if saluting.
That was 40 years ago. Gas was 28.2. Now that I'm the age
she was then, I wonder: Who was that guy? A former boyfriend?
A harmless but steady flirtation? And what was she to him
another nice housewife to flatter, to keep the business going?
Or were they just a couple of decent lonely people
who enjoyed each other's company for a few public minutes
before returning to work and turning up their tinny radios,
longing to hear "In the Mood" or "Moonlight Serenade". ...
That station's long gone. Now it's ten pumps and a mini-mart.
Service was his business. And service was her business, too,
a mother serving children every day for over twenty years
until they were old enough to drive their cars away from her.
I pump my own gas then climb into town past strip mall
after strip mall, this local branch of the Dixie Highway
lifting its newly affluent glare into the lost sky every night.
We used to look up at countless stars. Mom loved "Stardust."
I tidy my parents' graves at the cemetery behind K-Mart.
Dusk lurks. That man with the ovaled name might be here
on this hillside with my mother, just one of many customers
queued up in the darkest dark of all, waiting to be served.
Poem: "1959"
by Arlene Weiner from Escape Velocity.
1959
Is it hot enough for you?
the neighbor said on the stairs
to the girl in gloves. Hot enough
for you? said the subway conductor,
closing the doors. Hot
enough? the elevator man
to the girl in a shirtwaist dress,
one of many white girls,
in summer gloves, hair damp
on her neck, on her way
to the typing pool. She laughed
for the colored man moving
the brass control through its arc.
In the big room where the men
yelled into phones at debtors
fans turned. Ribbons fluttered
on the round cages to indicate breezes.
In the center of the room
an iron mesh, floor to ceiling,
surrounded the typists. Little jackets
hung on the backs of their chairs.
After work, elevator, subway,
stairs, supper. Maybe a movie,
Twenty degrees cooler inside.
Maybe an Esther Williams.
They never said, Fast enough
for you? Deep enough? High enough?
They never said then, Far enough?
Far enough for any of us?
Here’s a little info about a Minnesota author I didn’t know about. I think I’d like to give one of his works a try too … in part because the bio says:
”… he wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests in Minnesota. Non-Catholics weren't particularly interested in his work, and Catholics tended to think he was too critical. But after his death in 1999, many critics said he should be ranked among the greatest and funniest fiction writers of the late twentieth century…”
July 8th-
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer J.F. (James Farl) Powers born in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917): a writer who didn't have a lot of readers in his lifetime because he wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests in Minnesota. Non-Catholics weren't particularly interested in his work, and Catholics tended to think he was too critical. But after his death in 1999, many critics said he should be ranked among the greatest and funniest fiction writers of the late twentieth century.
He grew up in town with few Catholics other than his own family and he later said, "The town was Protestant. The best people were Protestants and you felt that. That, to some extent, made a philosopher out of me. It made me mad." He was twenty-five when he published his first important short story, called "Lion, Harts, Leaping Does," about a priest named Father Didymus, who remains faithful even though he believes he's unworthy of God. The story was selected for the first edition of the Best American Short Stories anthology, and it was published in his first collection, The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947).
As he got older, his work just got funnier, and in 1962, he published his first novel, Morte D'Urban, about a priest named Father Urban Roche, who runs a parish in Great Plains in Minnesota, but who thinks of himself as a kind of businessman, using his position to get the best rooms in hotels and spending all his spare time playing golf. Morte D'Urban won the National Book Award, but it only sold 25,000 copies. Powers was deeply disappointed. He said, "I thought when I'd finished it that it was a good bookand I guess it was, because nobody bought it."
He only published two novels and three collections of stories in his lifetime. Saul Bellow once called him one of the five great writers in America, but by the time he died, most of his books had gone out of print. But his two novels have since been republished, and his stories have been collected in The Stories of J.F. Powers, which came out in 2000.
J.F. Powers was once asked by nun in an interview for The American Benedictine Review if he had any ideas about the role of the Catholic writer. He replied, "No, I'm afraid I don't, Sister, except that obviously he should not write junk."
These are short enough that I won’t cut them:
July 9th-
It's the birthday of the 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) and Awakenings (1973). Oliver Sacks said, "Classical fables have archetypal figures-heroes, victims, martyrs, warriors. Neurological patients are all of these. ... They are travelers to unimaginable lands-lands of which otherwise we should have no idea or conception."
Also July 9th-
It's the birthday of best-selling author Dean Koontz, born in Everett, Pennsylvania (1945). He's the author of more than seventy supernatural and science fiction thrillers, many of which have been best-sellers. But he's never gone on a talk show or done a nationwide book tour, because he refuses to fly.
Maybe I just need a divorce. BITE MY TONGUE! Oh lord, I am SO kidding.
July 10th-
It's the birthday of the short-story writer Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up and moved away from her hometown as soon as she could. She became a housewife and tried to write, but she didn't have much success until her marriage broke up in the 1970s, and she took a trip back to her hometown to help care for her aging father. She had planned only to stay for a year, but she found that the rural landscape she'd hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world.
She has gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since.
July 16th-
It was on this day in 1945 that the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., one hundred and twenty miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started in 1939. The bomb contained a ball of plutonium about the size of a baseball, surrounded by a ring of uranium and a series of detonators. Its main pieces were placed on the backseat of an army jeep and driven to the test site, where the bomb was assembled and positioned at the top of a hundred-foot steel tower for the test explosion.
At 2:00 a.m. on this day in 1945, a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico. The men assembling the bomb had to do so in the midst of a lightning storm, wondering what would happen if lightning struck the tower. But the weather cleared up just before dawn. They started the countdown fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. The physicists and military men watched from about 10,000 yards away. They all wore Welder's glasses and suntan lotion.
One of the physicists who was there that day said, "We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. ... Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen ... it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. ... There was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one."
The ball of fire rose rapidly, releasing four times the heat of the interior of the sun, followed by a mushroom cloud that extended forty thousand feet into the sky. Tests showed that it had released energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT. The burst of light was so bright that it lit up the moon. An army captain in Albuquerque who knew about the test could see the explosion from his hotel room, more than a hundred miles away.
Later, when the scientists went to examine the site of the explosion, they found a crater in the ground 1200 feet in diameter. The ground was covered with a green, glassy substance, which was actually sand that had been fused into glass by the heat.
At the time, the military announced that an ammunitions dump had exploded, and a few weeks later the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Now here’s a weird realization: My mother was 10 years old at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. I’m not as good at history as I would like to be … somehow, I thought all that happened much longer ago.
July 17th-
It was on this day in 1936 that Nationalist rebels launched a military uprising all across Spain, signaling the start of the Spanish Civil War. In February of 1936, a coalition of left-wing parties had come into office by less than two percentage points. The right-wing Nationalist Party, made up of the rich, the church, and the military, decided to take back power by force. General Francisco Franco amassed his army in Morocco, and he invaded Spain from the south and marched north toward Madrid.
It was one of the first wars in history to be covered minute by minute by the news media around the globe. Photography had been modernized to the extent that journalists could take action shots of battle, so it was the first time that newspapers could show pictures of actual warfare, rather than just the aftermath.
Hitler and Mussolini began providing support to Franco, and Stalin provided support to the Republicans. Intellectuals, writers, and artists joined the fight against the Nationalists. A relatively unknown journalist named George Orwell joined a workers' militia in Catalonia. Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos both covered the war as journalists, and both wrote novels about the warHemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Dos Passos, The Adventures of a Young Man (1939). The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca tried to remain neutral at first, but he eventually became a supporter of the Republicans, and he was assassinated by the Nationalists. The French novelist André Malraux recruited a squadron of airplanes and helped lead bombing raids against the fascists.
But Franco was an accomplished general and a brutally decisive leader. The Republicans, on the other hand, were split among their many factions, and they had no central leadership. And so Franco eventually won the war by March of 1939.
The French writer Albert Camus said, "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward."
More locust stuff:
July 20th-
It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
The locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path. Similar locust swarms occurred in the following years, but by the mid-1880s, the swarms died down. Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct.
July 23rd-
It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested eighty-five black men and began loading them into vans.
The riot that broke out raged for five days. Thousands of soldiers from the Michigan National Guard were called in, along with tanks. The National Guardsmen fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of the riot.
Forty-three people were killed and whole blocks of the city went up in flames. After the riots, many of the white residents of the city moved to the suburbs. Thousands of homes were abandoned, and the city's population plunged from 1.6 million to 992,000 in just a few years. By 1990, Detroit was one of the poorest cities in America, with one in every three residents living in poverty.
I’m tired of giving myself pep-talks meant to inspire productivity and I’m tired of having nothing to show for my days. I’m tired of me.
But. It’s late and I want to go curl up with a horror-book in my air-conditioned bedroom so I’m simply going to post some stuff that I managed to organize today.
I have some new folks on my flist these days … people who haven’t ever seen me do an entertainments post. I subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac. Most of the stuff that goes into a post like this comes from those daily emails. I’m sort of passively gathering information about writers and history for inspiration and for a future project that involves intertwining the history of my family with that of the larger world. I don’t post links to my finds because, all too often, web pages go missing. For that reason I archive entire pieces here in my journal behind cuts. This is one of those entires. It's a long one because I've been collecting all month.
I want to read me some James M. Cain:
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Mildred Pierce
Double Indemnity
July 1st-
It's the birthday of crime writer James M. Cain, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1892). He's the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Most crime novelists at the time wrote about the detectives who investigated crimes. Cain wrote his novel from the point of view of a drifter who helps a woman murder her husband. The book got great reviews and became a best-seller. He went on to write other novels such as Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943).
Knowing absolutely nothing about Kafka, but somehow put off by his very name despite that ignorance, I was surprised to read a rather touching biography about him.
July 3rd-
It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Franz Kafka, born in Prague (1883). His father was a self-made man who had been forced to become a peddler as a teenager, and then worked his way up to owning a shop that specialized in clothing, walking sticks, and parasols. Kafka later complained that his father drove him crazy going on and on about his own miserable childhood. Kafka wrote, "No one denies that for years, as a result of insufficient winter clothing, [my father] had open sores on his legs, that he often went hungry, that when he was only ten he had to push a cart through the villages ... but to hear all this in a boastful and quarrelsome tone is torment."
From an early age, Kafka was obsessed with his own guilt. He did well in school, but he was constantly terrified that someday the teachers would realize their mistake and give him a failing grade. At night, he came home and listened to his father pronounce judgments on all subjects and people. In a letter he later wrote to his father, but never sent, Kafka said, "From your armchair, you ruled the world. ... [And] I lost the ability to talk." Kafka grew increasingly shy, anxious, and miserable.
After law school, he got a job at an insurance company, where he was responsible for finding ways to prevent industrial accidents. He was actually quite good at it, and it's estimated that he prevented thousands of factory deaths in Prague. But he found the job exhausting. He wrote to a friend, "I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware."
Even though he had a good job, he continued to live at home with his parents. He tried to write at night, but was constantly annoyed by the sounds his parents made in the room next door. And then, on the night of September 22, 1912, Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote nonstop, from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., finishing in one sitting a short story called "The Judgment." It's the story of a young man who announces to his father that he's going to get married, whereupon his father orders the son to drown himself in the river. The son, as though against his own will, runs out of the house and throws himself off a bridge. Kafka considered the story his first real literary success.
He would rarely write in such long stretches again, but over the next few years he began to produce the stories that made his name, including "The Metamorphosis" (1915), about a man who wakes up to find he's become a giant insect, and "In the Penal Colony," about a machine that kills criminals by inscribing the name of their crime on their skin.
It was only in the last year of his life that Kafka found happiness with a woman named Dora, whom he met at a Jewish holiday camp. People who knew him at the time said that he finally lost all his anxiety, became funny and cheerful. Once, while out for a walk with Dora, he met a little girl who was crying over a lost doll. Kafka spent the next several weeks writing letters to the girl from the lost doll, explaining where the doll had gone and what it was up to, and finally announcing that it, the doll, was getting married. Kafka wanted to get married that year too, but he died of tuberculosis. His last two novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), were left unfinished.
Franz Kafka wrote, "We need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Though I’m not an active fan of poetry, particular poems catch me every now and then. Here are two that did. (The first poem mentions a town named Arden -- the same as my own fictionalized town. I didn't notice that until I was reviewing this entry for proper spacing.)
Poem: "Service Is Our Business"
by Michael McFee from Shinemaster
Service Is Our Business
It used to be black as the insides of a Penzoil can
whenever we drove this ten-mile stretch of Highway 25
at night from lit-up Asheville back to our gloomy house
in Arden, no stoplights or streetlights anywhere, nothing.
And there's where (during the day) mom would stop for gas,
a Shell filling station in the curve at the foot of a long hill,
a couple of pumps and a little office and a double bay
over which "Service Is Our Business" shone in red plastic
as the smiling proprietor emerged, wiping his large hands,
looking like Glenn Miller on the 78-rpm records she'd play
(I still have them, maiden initials scratched on each label),
like some veteran still wearing his crisp khaki uniform.
He'd bend to the open window and speak to her, then us,
sun polishing his wire rims, starching his cursive name,
brightening the yellow scallop shell stitched to his chest
and the huge one slowly revolving overhead as he began
hooking the nozzle in the tank (gas rushing behind us),
checking (obscured but heard) the oil and radiator water,
cleaning each window (mom laughing loud through hers),
topping off (when needed) the fluids or the air in tires,
then lowering the heavy hood gently, not slamming it down,
and firmly replacing the gas cap behind the license plate,
and taking her offered bills with a thank-you and half-bow
before watching us drive off, shading his eyes as if saluting.
That was 40 years ago. Gas was 28.2. Now that I'm the age
she was then, I wonder: Who was that guy? A former boyfriend?
A harmless but steady flirtation? And what was she to him
another nice housewife to flatter, to keep the business going?
Or were they just a couple of decent lonely people
who enjoyed each other's company for a few public minutes
before returning to work and turning up their tinny radios,
longing to hear "In the Mood" or "Moonlight Serenade". ...
That station's long gone. Now it's ten pumps and a mini-mart.
Service was his business. And service was her business, too,
a mother serving children every day for over twenty years
until they were old enough to drive their cars away from her.
I pump my own gas then climb into town past strip mall
after strip mall, this local branch of the Dixie Highway
lifting its newly affluent glare into the lost sky every night.
We used to look up at countless stars. Mom loved "Stardust."
I tidy my parents' graves at the cemetery behind K-Mart.
Dusk lurks. That man with the ovaled name might be here
on this hillside with my mother, just one of many customers
queued up in the darkest dark of all, waiting to be served.
Poem: "1959"
by Arlene Weiner from Escape Velocity.
1959
Is it hot enough for you?
the neighbor said on the stairs
to the girl in gloves. Hot enough
for you? said the subway conductor,
closing the doors. Hot
enough? the elevator man
to the girl in a shirtwaist dress,
one of many white girls,
in summer gloves, hair damp
on her neck, on her way
to the typing pool. She laughed
for the colored man moving
the brass control through its arc.
In the big room where the men
yelled into phones at debtors
fans turned. Ribbons fluttered
on the round cages to indicate breezes.
In the center of the room
an iron mesh, floor to ceiling,
surrounded the typists. Little jackets
hung on the backs of their chairs.
After work, elevator, subway,
stairs, supper. Maybe a movie,
Twenty degrees cooler inside.
Maybe an Esther Williams.
They never said, Fast enough
for you? Deep enough? High enough?
They never said then, Far enough?
Far enough for any of us?
Here’s a little info about a Minnesota author I didn’t know about. I think I’d like to give one of his works a try too … in part because the bio says:
”… he wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests in Minnesota. Non-Catholics weren't particularly interested in his work, and Catholics tended to think he was too critical. But after his death in 1999, many critics said he should be ranked among the greatest and funniest fiction writers of the late twentieth century…”
July 8th-
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer J.F. (James Farl) Powers born in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917): a writer who didn't have a lot of readers in his lifetime because he wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests in Minnesota. Non-Catholics weren't particularly interested in his work, and Catholics tended to think he was too critical. But after his death in 1999, many critics said he should be ranked among the greatest and funniest fiction writers of the late twentieth century.
He grew up in town with few Catholics other than his own family and he later said, "The town was Protestant. The best people were Protestants and you felt that. That, to some extent, made a philosopher out of me. It made me mad." He was twenty-five when he published his first important short story, called "Lion, Harts, Leaping Does," about a priest named Father Didymus, who remains faithful even though he believes he's unworthy of God. The story was selected for the first edition of the Best American Short Stories anthology, and it was published in his first collection, The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947).
As he got older, his work just got funnier, and in 1962, he published his first novel, Morte D'Urban, about a priest named Father Urban Roche, who runs a parish in Great Plains in Minnesota, but who thinks of himself as a kind of businessman, using his position to get the best rooms in hotels and spending all his spare time playing golf. Morte D'Urban won the National Book Award, but it only sold 25,000 copies. Powers was deeply disappointed. He said, "I thought when I'd finished it that it was a good bookand I guess it was, because nobody bought it."
He only published two novels and three collections of stories in his lifetime. Saul Bellow once called him one of the five great writers in America, but by the time he died, most of his books had gone out of print. But his two novels have since been republished, and his stories have been collected in The Stories of J.F. Powers, which came out in 2000.
J.F. Powers was once asked by nun in an interview for The American Benedictine Review if he had any ideas about the role of the Catholic writer. He replied, "No, I'm afraid I don't, Sister, except that obviously he should not write junk."
These are short enough that I won’t cut them:
July 9th-
It's the birthday of the 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) and Awakenings (1973). Oliver Sacks said, "Classical fables have archetypal figures-heroes, victims, martyrs, warriors. Neurological patients are all of these. ... They are travelers to unimaginable lands-lands of which otherwise we should have no idea or conception."
Also July 9th-
It's the birthday of best-selling author Dean Koontz, born in Everett, Pennsylvania (1945). He's the author of more than seventy supernatural and science fiction thrillers, many of which have been best-sellers. But he's never gone on a talk show or done a nationwide book tour, because he refuses to fly.
Maybe I just need a divorce. BITE MY TONGUE! Oh lord, I am SO kidding.
July 10th-
It's the birthday of the short-story writer Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up and moved away from her hometown as soon as she could. She became a housewife and tried to write, but she didn't have much success until her marriage broke up in the 1970s, and she took a trip back to her hometown to help care for her aging father. She had planned only to stay for a year, but she found that the rural landscape she'd hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world.
She has gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since.
July 16th-
It was on this day in 1945 that the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., one hundred and twenty miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started in 1939. The bomb contained a ball of plutonium about the size of a baseball, surrounded by a ring of uranium and a series of detonators. Its main pieces were placed on the backseat of an army jeep and driven to the test site, where the bomb was assembled and positioned at the top of a hundred-foot steel tower for the test explosion.
At 2:00 a.m. on this day in 1945, a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico. The men assembling the bomb had to do so in the midst of a lightning storm, wondering what would happen if lightning struck the tower. But the weather cleared up just before dawn. They started the countdown fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. The physicists and military men watched from about 10,000 yards away. They all wore Welder's glasses and suntan lotion.
One of the physicists who was there that day said, "We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. ... Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen ... it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. ... There was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one."
The ball of fire rose rapidly, releasing four times the heat of the interior of the sun, followed by a mushroom cloud that extended forty thousand feet into the sky. Tests showed that it had released energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT. The burst of light was so bright that it lit up the moon. An army captain in Albuquerque who knew about the test could see the explosion from his hotel room, more than a hundred miles away.
Later, when the scientists went to examine the site of the explosion, they found a crater in the ground 1200 feet in diameter. The ground was covered with a green, glassy substance, which was actually sand that had been fused into glass by the heat.
At the time, the military announced that an ammunitions dump had exploded, and a few weeks later the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Now here’s a weird realization: My mother was 10 years old at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. I’m not as good at history as I would like to be … somehow, I thought all that happened much longer ago.
July 17th-
It was on this day in 1936 that Nationalist rebels launched a military uprising all across Spain, signaling the start of the Spanish Civil War. In February of 1936, a coalition of left-wing parties had come into office by less than two percentage points. The right-wing Nationalist Party, made up of the rich, the church, and the military, decided to take back power by force. General Francisco Franco amassed his army in Morocco, and he invaded Spain from the south and marched north toward Madrid.
It was one of the first wars in history to be covered minute by minute by the news media around the globe. Photography had been modernized to the extent that journalists could take action shots of battle, so it was the first time that newspapers could show pictures of actual warfare, rather than just the aftermath.
Hitler and Mussolini began providing support to Franco, and Stalin provided support to the Republicans. Intellectuals, writers, and artists joined the fight against the Nationalists. A relatively unknown journalist named George Orwell joined a workers' militia in Catalonia. Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos both covered the war as journalists, and both wrote novels about the warHemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and Dos Passos, The Adventures of a Young Man (1939). The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca tried to remain neutral at first, but he eventually became a supporter of the Republicans, and he was assassinated by the Nationalists. The French novelist André Malraux recruited a squadron of airplanes and helped lead bombing raids against the fascists.
But Franco was an accomplished general and a brutally decisive leader. The Republicans, on the other hand, were split among their many factions, and they had no central leadership. And so Franco eventually won the war by March of 1939.
The French writer Albert Camus said, "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward."
More locust stuff:
July 20th-
It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
The locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path. Similar locust swarms occurred in the following years, but by the mid-1880s, the swarms died down. Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct.
July 23rd-
It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested eighty-five black men and began loading them into vans.
The riot that broke out raged for five days. Thousands of soldiers from the Michigan National Guard were called in, along with tanks. The National Guardsmen fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of the riot.
Forty-three people were killed and whole blocks of the city went up in flames. After the riots, many of the white residents of the city moved to the suburbs. Thousands of homes were abandoned, and the city's population plunged from 1.6 million to 992,000 in just a few years. By 1990, Detroit was one of the poorest cities in America, with one in every three residents living in poverty.