Two limericks excerpted from "The Rubaiyat of Carl Burell"
by Robert Frost

There was a young poet who tried
Making boxes when preoccupied;
   One day he made one
   And when he got done,
He had nailed himself on the inside.

There was a man went for to harma
Quiet but human old farmer:
   Now he wishes he'd known
   To let folks alone,
For this is the doctrine of K,arma.


Two limericks excerpted from the poem "The Rubaiyat of Carl Burell" by Robert Frost. Public domain (buy now)

It's the birthday of the man who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in literature, Miguel Ángel Asturias, (books by this author) born in Guatemala City (1899), one of the forerunners of Latin American modernism and the style of magical realism. He's best-known for his novels Men of Maize (1949) and El Señor Presidente (1946). He finished El Señor Presidente in 1933, while living in exile in Paris, but the book was not published for more than a decade after its completion because of censorship policies under Guatemala's dictatorship. El Señor Presidente is a fictional account of a real dictator: its model is Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled Guatemala for the first two decades of the 20th century — during Asturias's childhood and young adulthood.

Miguel Ángel Asturias spent much of his life in exile, and a large part of his exile in Paris. He first went there to be a student at the Sorbonne, and there he wrote poems and stories and translated into Spanish the sacred text of the Mayan people, the Popol Vuh. He put together a collection of indigenous Guatemalan myths and legends and established a magazine in Paris called Tiempos Nuevos.

He returned to Guatemala and began a diplomatic career during which he was posted all around Latin America. But when there was a change of government Asturias was expelled from his homeland and the new dictator took away his Guatemalan citizenship. In 1966 a new president was democratically elected. He welcomed Asturias back to Guatemala, reinstated his citizenship, and appointed him ambassador to France, where Asturias spent most of the rest of his life.

It's the birthday of Tracy Chevalier (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1962). After college, she moved to London to stay for six months, but she fell in love with a British man and she has never left. She started writing historical novels, and her second book, Girl With a Pearl Earring (1999), was a huge best-seller. For the book Chevalier was inspired one day when she was staring at a poster she had bought when she was 19, a copy of Johannes Vermeer's painting Girl With a Pearl Earring. She imagined what life might have been for the young woman who ended up the subject of that painting. She started the book right away, but she was pregnant and she didn't want the book to get lost in her life as a new mother, so she researched and wrote the whole novel in just eight months.

She said, "Don't write about what you know — write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself — you aren't as interesting as you think."

It's the birthday of Philip Pullman (books by this author), born in Norwich, England (1946). His father died in the air force when Philip was seven, and was awarded a medal after his death, and Philip grew up believing his father had been shot down. He learned much later that his father died in a plane crash and that he had been dropping bombs on the Mau Maus in Kenya, who had no weapons sophisticated enough to shoot down a plane.

His favorite stories as a kid were the cowboy and gangster shows on the radio, ghost stories, and also comics, especially Superman and Batman. He said:

"I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that: not 'I am a writer,' but rather 'I write stories.' If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order."

He went to Oxford but he earned the lowest class of degree. He said, "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realized that I wasn't — it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I'd have got one of those." He got a job teaching English to middle schoolers and he published a novel called The Haunted Storm (1972). He usually acts as if The Haunted Storm doesn't exist when he discusses the books he has written, although it did win an award for young writers — he was only 25 at the time it was published.

Pullman was a popular teacher and he got his start with children's literature by writing plays for his middle school students to perform. Out of those plays came the books that launched his career as a respected and popular writer, books like Count Karlstein (1982) and The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), the first in his series starring the spirited Victorian heroine Sally Lockhart.

But the books that really made him famous are a trilogy called His Dark Materials, named for a passage in Milton's Paradise Lost:

"Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds."

The first book was published as Northern Lights (1995) in Britain, but in the United States they called it The Golden Compass. The books tell the story of two children, Lyra and Will, who journey through shifting worlds, learning about a mysterious particle called Dust that the Church believes is the physical embodiment of Original Sin. They eventually take down the Kingdom of Heaven. The books are full of armored bears, witches, gypsies, people with animal companions who represent their souls, and portals between parallel universes. Despite this, Pullman said, "I've always resisted calling it a fantasy, just to be perverse, and tried to maintain that it's a story of stark realism."

Philip Pullman said, "I have always written what I wanted to write. I have never considered the audience for one second. Ever. It's none of their business what I write! Before publication, I am a despot."

When he writes a book he writes down scenes on Post-It notes and then he puts them all on a giant piece of paper and rearranges them. He said that he believes in exercise and healthful eating but that he himself doesn't practice either of those things and that the most exercise he usually gets in a day is unscrewing the whiskey bottle.

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

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