| Saturday night
by John Kenney I have heard
that there are people
who go out
at night.
Weeknights.
Weekends. They go to
restaurants.
They go to shows.
Sometimes both
in the same evening.
And no, I do not know how they do this. They do not change
into some form of pajama-wear by 7 P.M.
and watch half of a movie they've likely already seen
only to begin convulsively yawning by 9. “Saturday night” by John Kenny from Love Poems (for People with Children). G.P. Putnam’s Sons © 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It's the birthday of Shirley Jackson, (books by this author) born in San Francisco (1916). Her short story "The Lottery" made her famous when it came out in The New Yorker in 1948. It's a story about a small New England town where one resident is chosen by lottery each year to be stoned to death. She also wrote The Haunting of Hill House (1959), recently adapted into a limited series on Netflix.
It was on this day in 1900 that the physicist Max Planck presented his theory of quantum mechanics to the German Physical Society. The basic idea behind quantum mechanics is that particles of light, as well as other subatomic particles, are unpredictable by nature. If you shoot them across the room, you can never predict exactly where they will end up. Max Planck died in 1947, and he never came to fully accept his own theory, which he presented on this day in 1900. But his discovery led to the development of modern electronics, including the transistor, the laser, and the computer.
It's the birthday of journalist, political essayist, radical feminist and The New Yorker magazine's first pop music critic, Ellen Willis, (books by this author) born in New York City (1941). The daughter of an NYPD officer, she grew up in the Bronx and Queens, majored in English at Barnard, and then headed off to Berkeley for grad school, but didn't stay there long. The year she turned 21, she published Questions Freshmen Ask: A Guide for College Girls (1962). In the late 1960s, when she was in her late 20s, she founded the Redstockings, an influential group of radical feminists. Her husband, Stanley Aronowitz, was New York state's 2002 Green Party candidate for governor. She's the author of the books Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll (1981); No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992); and Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999). She wrote columns and articles regularly for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The Nation, Slate, Salon, and Dissent. Ellen Willis died in 2006 from cancer. She described herself as an "anti-authoritarian democratic socialist" but also wrote, "My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect."
On this date in 1542, Mary Stuart ascended the throne of Scotland. She was only six days old when her father, James V, died. King Henry VIII of England, who was her great-uncle, tried to use the familial connection to unite England and Scotland, and drew up a treaty arranging the infant Mary's eventual marriage to his son Edward. The Scots resisted, and Henry began the six-year "War of Rough Wooing" in an effort to force the Scots to comply. The child's mother, Mary of Guise, negotiated a marriage pact with Henry II of France instead. From the age of five, Mary Stuart grew up in France, in the court of Henry II, away from the political machinations taking place in England and Scotland. She received a good education, not only in courtly pursuits like music, dancing, and horsemanship, but also in Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Greek. Though she became an enduring symbol of Scotland, her upbringing and identity were thoroughly French. When she was 16, she was wed to King Henry's eldest son, Francis, who was 14 at the time, and sickly. Mary Stuart was widowed at 18, and returned to Scotland to rule in 1561. She found the country of her birth had converted to Protestantism in her absence, but her policy of religious tolerance won them over, and it didn't hurt that she was tall, graceful, and beautiful. She married again to her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. They had a son, James. Henry was murdered two years later; and Mary married his likely murderer James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, after he abducted her. Bothwell was soon exiled by the Scottish nobles, and Mary was deposed in favor of her one-year-old son. In 1568, Mary fled to England and sought the help of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England. Rather than helping her regain the throne of Scotland Elizabeth had her imprisoned. In 1587, after 19 years of house arrest, word reached Queen Elizabeth of a Catholic plot on her life that implicated Mary. Elizabeth ordered her trial, and later, her execution for treason. Eventually, having no heirs of her own, Queen Elizabeth I named Mary’s son James as her heir. James Charles Stuart became King James I of England on March 24th, 1603.
Today is the birthday of Amy Hempel (books by this author), born in Chicago in 1951. When she was 15 and finished with high school, she moved to San Francisco. She went through a horrible two-year span, during which her mother and her aunt both killed themselves, Hempel herself was in two serious accidents, and her best friend died of leukemia. It was Hempel's guilt at failing her dying friend that led to "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," her first, and most widely anthologized, short story. Amy Hempel wrote, "Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one," she told The Paris Review. She said she always starts a story knowing the first and the last lines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
