Lucky by Kirsten Dierking All this time, the life you were supposed to live has been rising around you like the walls of a house designed with warm harmonious lines. As if you had actually planned it that way. As if you had stacked up bricks at random, and built by mistake a lucky star. Kirsten Dierking, "Lucky" from Northern Oracle. © 2007 Kirsten Dierking published by Spout Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) Today is the birthday of novelist Francine Prose (books by this author), born in Brooklyn, New York (1947). Her parents were both doctors, and her father once let her watch an autopsy at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. After college she tried working on an autobiographical novel, but it wasn't going anywhere. Then her boyfriend won a fellowship to travel abroad, and she persuaded him to take her to Bombay. She got a borrower's card at the University of Bombay Library, but the library didn't have any fiction written after 1900, so she was forced to read Proust, Dostoevsky, and Isak Dinesen. That reading inspired her to write Judah the Pious (1973), a novel based on Hasidic folklore about a rabbi who tries to convince the king of Poland to reinstate Jewish burial rituals. The novel got great reviews and Prose decided that travel was the key to writing good fiction. She spent the next several years living out of a suitcase and traveling in Mexico. She went on to publish many strange and fantastical books, such as Hungry Hearts (1983) about a star of the Yiddish theater who becomes possessed by one of her roles, and Bigfoot Dreams (1987) about a reporter for a tabloid newspaper who invents a story that comes true. Her latest book is The Vixen (2021). It's the birthday of the pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, born near Novgorod, Russia (1873). He escaped from Russia just before the Revolution and spent most of the rest of his life in the United States. In 1928 he met the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and they sealed their friendship by going down into the basement of Steinway and Sons and playing Rachmaninoff's own Third Piano Concerto (1909). Horowitz played the solo part on one piano, and Rachmaninoff the orchestral reduction on another. Today is the birthday of playwright Edmond Rostand, born in Marseilles, France (1868). He's best known as the author of the play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), based on an actual person. In the play Cyrano is the most dashing, brave, and romantic man in France, able to compose sonnets while engaged in a sword fight, but he also has the largest nose anyone has ever seen. Because of his huge nose he decides he can never win over Roxanne, the love of his life. It’s the birthday of Wangari Muta Maathai (books by this author), born in Ihithe, Kenya (1940). Born to a Kikuyu family in a small village, Maathi became the first woman in Kenya to earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy. She turned her attention on environmentalism and women’s rights and founded the Green Belt Movement, an NGO which plants trees in an effort to improve lives and the environment. Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work on sustainable development. She was the first environmentalist and the first African woman to win the Peace Prize. Maathi wrote several books to communicate her philosophical and environmentalist messages, including The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2004), The Canopy of Hope: My Life Campaigning for Africa, Women, and the Environment (2002), and Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (2010). She also wrote a memoir Unbowed (2006). Wangari Muta Maathai died in 2011 of complications from ovarian cancer. She has continued to receive regognition and honors posthumously from neumerous organizations and The Green Belt Movement remains an active and thriving organization. And today is April Fools Day, a day for the celebration of practical jokes. One of the best was played by The Guardian newspaper in London 1977. They published a 7 page supplement commemorating the anniversary of the independence of San Serriffe, a completely imaginary small island nation in the Indian ocean. The nation consisted of 2 main islands which together form the shape of a semicolon. The larger island was called Upper Case and the southern island called Lower Case. The day it was published The Guardian was flooded with calls for more information, including calls from travel agents and airline companies. On this day in 1992 NPR announced that Richard Nixon was running for President again. They crafted a fake sound bite of Mr. Nixon saying “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.” Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® |