Wooden Church
by Charles Simic

It’s just a boarded-up shack with a tower
Under the blazing summer sky
On a back road seldom traveled
Where the shadows of tall trees
Graze peacefully like a row of gallows,
And crows with no carrion in sight
Caw to each other of better days.
The congregation may still be at prayer.
Farm folk from flyspecked photos
Standing in rows with their heads bowed
As if listening to your approaching steps.
So slow they are, you must be asking yourself
How come we are here one minute
And in the very next gone forever?
Try the locked door, then knock once.
The crows will stay out of sight.
High above you, there is the leaning spire
Still feeling the blow of the last storm.
And then the silence of the afternoon . . .
Even the unbeliever must feel its force.


Charles Simic, “Wooden Church” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M., © 2003 Harcourt, Inc. (buy now)

It is the birthday of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, born 1915 in New York City and best known for his research on the nucleus of the atom. He was the son of a salesman and attended the City College of New York. Hofstadter wanted to major in literature and philosophy until a physics professor told him, "the laws of physics could be tested and those of philosophy could not." He won the Kenyon Prize for outstanding work in physics and mathematics in 1935.

Hofstadter went on to measure the precise size and shape of the proton and neutron, the particles of the nucleus, winning the Nobel Prize on December 10, 1961, for presenting the first reasonably accurate picture of the structure and composition of atomic neutrons and protons. Hofstadter's discoveries played an important role in medicine, astronomy, military defense, and many other fields.

It’s the birthday of American novelist, poet, and painter William S. Burroughs (1914) (books by this author), who, along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, formed the nucleus of the “Beat Generation” of writers and artists during the 1950s. Burroughs is best known for his third novel, Naked Lunch (1959), which he wrote mostly while under the influence of drugs in Tangiers. Newsweek magazine said it “possessed a strange kind of genius,” but many other people found it filthy and it became the subject of an obscenity trial. Burroughs described the novel as “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

William Seward Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather had invented the adding machine, and Burroughs’s family had wisely socked away money before the Depression, so they emerged relatively unscathed and Burroughs was sent to private schools in St. Louis and New Mexico. He read a book called You Can’t Win (1926), the autobiography of a drifter and burglar named Jack Black whose lurid tales of drug use fascinated Burroughs. He graduated from Harvard and briefly went to medical school in Vienna, but found himself working as an exterminator, private detective, and a bartender. He said, “Well, I was just bored. I didn’t seem to have much interest in becoming a successful advertising executive or whatever, or living the kind of life Harvard designs for you.”

By 1944, he was living in Greenwich Village in New York City, on Bedford Street, and he had a full-blown drug habit.

He made friends with Ginsberg and Kerouac, and even wrote a novel with Kerouac called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, but it wasn’t published until 2008, long after both men were dead. Burroughs became friends with a poet named Herbert Huncke who taught him to pickpocket and roll drunks in the New York subway.

Whenever people first met Burroughs, they thought he was a private eye, or worked for the FBI, because he always wore a three-piece suit, a striped tie, and a fedora hat. From 1938 on, his parents sent him $200.00 a month, and that’s how he could bounce from New York to Paris to Tangiers, where he finished Naked Lunch. The locals in Tangiers called him “El Hombre Invisible”  — “The Invisible Man.”

William S. Burroughs’s books include Junkie (1953), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962).

On writing, he said, “The only way I can write narrative is to get right outside my body and experience it. This can be exhausting and at times dangerous. One cannot be sure of redemption.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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