The Thing Is by Ellen Bass to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” from Mules of Love. Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Bass. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org (buy now) It was on this day in 1598 that Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationers’ Register (books by this author). The entry read: “A book of The Merchant of Venice or otherwise called The Jew of Venice.” Printers were supposed to enter a work in the Stationers’ Register before printing it, but the rule was not enforced, so some works were never entered, and others were entered years after they had been written. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, the printer was probably trying to establish copyright — although copyright laws weren’t very well enforced, either. The Merchant of Venice had probably been written around 1596. By the time the title page of the first quarto was published in 1600, there was a note saying: “It hath beene divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his servants.” But there is no official record of a performance of The Merchant of Venice until 1605, when it was performed by the King’s Men for the court of King James I. James was such a fan that he asked for another performance a week later. The work’s message is debated among scholars today. In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (1998), the late literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, "One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work.” Shakespeare coined plenty of words, or changed their usage, and came up with many new phrases. The Merchant of Venice gives us the words laughable, scrubbed, and compromise, and the phrases bated breath, love is blind, and all that glitters is not gold. It’s the birthday of Emma Lazarus (books by this author), born in New York City (1849). She came from a wealthy Jewish family, and her father paid to have her first collection of poems published when she was 17. Her early work impressed Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they corresponded for many years. In the 1880s, she was horrified to hear of violent anti-Semitic attacks in Russia and Germany, and her work took on a new Zionist focus. She became concerned with the plight of the poor and of refugees, and organized relief efforts for immigrant Jewish families. The Statue of Liberty committee approached her in 1883 and asked her to write a poem that they could auction off to raise money for the monument. She responded with “The New Colossus,” which includes the famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It's the birthday of novelist Tom Robbins (books by this author), author of Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, was born on this day in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, in 1936. It's the birthday of American author and columnist Amy Vanderbilt (books by this author), born in New York City in 1908, cousin of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railway magnate. She began in journalism at the age of 16 by writing society and feature articles for the Staten Island Advance. In 1952, she wrote the 700-page Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette. It sold millions of copies and established her as the foremost authority on the subject. It is the birthday of the Moravian natural scientist and meteorologist Johann Gregor Mendel, born in Czechoslovakia in 1822. From 1856 to 1863, he performed experiments on 28,000 edible pea plants. From his observations, he developed his theory of inheritance, including the notion of recombination of genes, which became the basis of the modern science of genetics. It's the birthday of the painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing. After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He tried to re-create it in his paintings. He came back to New York and was employed as an illustrator at an ad agency, which he loathed. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons. Hopper had only sold one painting by the time he was 40 years old, but his first major exhibition — in 1933 at the Museum of Modern Art — made him famous. His pieces in that show had titles like Houses by the Railroad, Manhattan Bridge Loop, Room in Brooklyn, Roofs of Washington Square, Cold Storage Plant, Lonely House, and Girl on Bridge. Though his work was more realistic and less experimental than most other painters at the time, he painted his scenes in a way that made them seem especially lonely and eerie. Edward Hopper said: "Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." Today is the birthday of the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét (books by this author) born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1898). His father was a military man who read poetry to his children. All of the Benét kids grew up to become writers of some sort. He’s best known for a long poem that he wrote while in Paris: John Brown's Body (1928). It's an epic in eight sections and tells the story of the Civil War, beginning with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and ending just after Lincoln's assassination. He wrote, "Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® |