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Naming the Baby
When you are dreaming of the name
you are also dreaming of who they
might be. They are invented in darkness —
under cloak of skin — and, for the better
part of a year, are a swelling
or a set of symptoms. The name
books are like a box of chocolates
and when you open them you see
how many kinds there really are.
There are names of people you
have known and disliked and names
that make the wrong sounds and names
that suggest your child will be
like everyone else's. There are names
that turn your child into a character
in a novel and names that recall
the time when your great grandmother
was young. Naming the baby is a way
of dreaming about a creature who is
almost but not quite. It is a way of
imagining the soul of a person you
are making but have not made.
The name is the first way you see
the baby: their title, the syllables
that conjure a shape from the lantern.
"Naming the Baby"
by Faith Shearin from The Empty House. © Word Press, 2008. Reprinted
with permission. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of
poet Allen Ginsberg (1926) (books by this author). He was born in Newark,
New Jersey, and grew up in Paterson. His father, Louis, was a poet and high
school teacher; his mother, Naomi, was a communist and a paranoid
schizophrenic. Naomi and Allen were very close; when she was in the grip of
her delusions, he was the only one she trusted, and he often accompanied
her to her therapy appointments. She spent much of his childhood
institutionalized. Ginsberg spent eight months in a mental institution
himself in the late 1940s, when he was arrested for harboring stolen goods;
he chose to plead insanity.
He went to Columbia University, first
intending to study law, but during his freshman year he met Jack Kerouac,
Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. He later said, "I think it was
when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs — when I was 17 — that I realized I
was talking through an empty skull ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or
saying my own thoughts." Ginsberg left Columbia in 1948, traveled, and
worked some odd jobs, and in 1954, he moved to San Francisco. He met poet
Peter Orlovsky there; they fell in love and were partners until Ginsberg's
death. In October 1955, Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" at the Six
Gallery. The next day, bookstore owner and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti
sent him a telegram quoting Emerson's letter to Whitman: "I greet you
at the beginning of a great career." "Howl," which was
written to be read aloud, revived oral poetry. Ginsberg said that it, along
with the rest of his work, was autobiographical, and that at its core was
his pain at dealing with his mother's schizophrenia.
His mother died in 1956; two days later, he
received a letter from her in the mail, in which she had written, "The
key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window — I have the
key — Get married Allen don't take drugs — the key is in the bars, in the
sunlight in the window." He had wanted to have a kaddish — the Jewish
mourners' prayer — recited at her funeral, but there weren't enough Jewish
men present, so he wrote his poem "Kaddish" (1961) in reparation:
Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school,
and learning to be mad, in a dream — what is this life?
Toward the Key in the window — and the great Key lays its head of light on
top of
Manhattan, and over the floor, and lays down
on the sidewalk — in a single vast
beam, moving, as I walk down First toward the
Yiddish Theater — and the place of
poverty
you knew, and I know, but without caring now [...]
He said, "Poetry is not an expression
of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you
really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet
does."
Today is the birthday of
the "founding mother of the historical romance genre": Kathleen Woodiwiss (1939) (books by this author), born Kathleen Erin Hogg
in Alexandria, Louisiana. She met her future husband, Air Force Lieutenant
Ross Woodiwiss, at a dance when she was 16, and they eloped. She worked
part-time as a fashion model and saved her money to buy a typewriter, which
she gave to her husband one Christmas. She told him it was for him to write
his poetry on; she really bought it for herself, and she worked on her
first novel, The Flame and the Flower, during his absences, afraid
to tell him what she was up to. The hefty manuscript was turned down eight
times, but then she sent it to some paperback publishers; an editor at
Avon, raiding the slush pile for something to read on a rainy afternoon,
was captivated, and the book sold 600,000 copies on its publication in
1972.
Woodiwiss single-handedly remade the romance
genre, setting the standard for nearly every bodice-ripper to follow.
Previously, romance novels had been pretty thin, literally and
figuratively. Her books were often 700 pages long, heavily plotted, and
full of carefully researched historical detail and steamy sex scenes. Her
heroines were strong and dynamic, considering the genre and the time
period.
Woodiwiss wrote 12 more books after The
Flame and the Flower, taking her time on each one to get the historical
details right. She died of cancer in 2007, and her last book,
Everlasting, was published posthumously.
It's the birthday of author Larry McMurtry (1936) (books by this author), born in Wichita Falls,
Texas, and raised in nearby Archer City. His hometown is about 80 miles
from the town of Thalia, which is the setting for several of McMurtry's
novels, like his first, Horseman, Pass By (1961), as well as Leaving
Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966) and its four
sequels. He writes a lot about small-town life in Texas, and sometimes he
writes historical novels about the frontier, like his Pulitzer
Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove (1985), although he strongly
resists romanticizing the Old West and doesn't hold a very high opinion of
cowboys in general.
In the early 1960s, when he was at Stanford
on a Wallace Stegner fellowship, he began working as a rare-book scout,
haunting used-book stores in search of first editions and other valuable
books, which he would buy on behalf of antiquarian booksellers. It was a
great job for a bookish kid who liked to hang around and browse the
shelves, and when he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1970, he opened his own
store in Georgetown, called Booked Up. In 1988, he opened a second Booked
Up in his hometown of Archer City, in four large buildings that once housed
a car dealership. He bought up the stock of failing independent bookstores
all over the country, and he filled the towering white shelves with
hundreds of thousands of volumes.
He doesn't see his current vocations —
author and bookseller — as entirely different from his cattle-ranch roots.
He told The New York Times: "The tradition I was born
into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals
across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding
cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into
little paragraphlike clusters." He occasionally talks about giving up
fiction, but he'll never give up the bookstores.
Be
well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
sponsor
The
Poetry Foundation
National broadcasts of The Writer's Almanac are supported by The Poetry Foundation
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