Psalm 23
by Anonymous

The Lord to me a shepherd is,
want therefore shall not I:
He in the folds of tender grass,
doth cause me down to lie:
To waters calm me gently leads
restore my soul doth he:
He doth in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake lead me.
Yea, though in valley of death's shade
I walk, none ill I'll fear:
Because thou art with me, thy rod,
and staff my comfort are.
For me a table thou hast spread,
in presence of my foes:
Thou dost anoint my head with oil;
my cup it overflows.
Goodness and mercy surely shall
all my days follow me:
And in the Lord's house I shall dwell
so long as days shall be.

"Psalm 23" from The Bay Psalm Book. Public domain. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of the "founding mother of the historical romance genre": Kathleen Woodiwiss (1939) (books by this author), born Kathleen Erin Hogg in Alexandria, Louisiana. She met her future husband, Air Force Lieutenant Ross Woodiwiss, at a dance when she was 16, and they eloped. She worked part-time as a fashion model and saved her money to buy a typewriter, which she gave to her husband one Christmas. She told him it was for him to write his poetry on; she really bought it for herself, and she worked on her first novel, The Flame and the Flower, during his absences, afraid to tell him what she was up to. The hefty manuscript was turned down eight times, but then she sent it to some paperback publishers; an editor at Avon, raiding the slush pile for something to read on a rainy afternoon, was captivated, and the book sold 600,000 copies on its publication in 1972.

Woodiwiss single-handedly remade the romance genre, setting the standard for nearly every bodice-ripper to follow. Previously, romance novels had been pretty thin, literally and figuratively. Her books were often 700 pages long, heavily plotted, and full of carefully researched historical detail and steamy sex scenes. Her heroines were strong and dynamic, considering the genre and the time period.

Woodiwiss wrote 12 more books after The Flame and the Flower, taking her time on each one to get the historical details right. She died of cancer in 2007, and her last book, Everlasting, was published posthumously.

It's the 84th birthday of author Larry McMurtry (1936) (books by this author), born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and raised in nearby Archer City. His hometown is about 80 miles from the town of Thalia, which is the setting for several of McMurtry's novels, like his first, Horseman, Pass By (1961), as well as Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1966) and its four sequels. He writes a lot about small-town life in Texas, and sometimes he writes historical novels about the frontier, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove (1985), although he strongly resists romanticizing the Old West and doesn't hold a very high opinion of cowboys in general.

In the early 1960s, when he was at Stanford on a Wallace Stegner fellowship, he began working as a rare-book scout, haunting used-book stores in search of first editions and other valuable books, which he would buy on behalf of antiquarian booksellers. It was a great job for a bookish kid who liked to hang around and browse the shelves, and when he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1970, he opened his own store in Georgetown, called Booked Up. In 1988, he opened a second Booked Up in his hometown of Archer City, in four large buildings that once housed a car dealership.

It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, (books by this author) born Irwin Allen Ginsberg in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His parents were leftists, coming out of the 1920s New York Jewish counterculture. He grew up in Paterson, where his father Louis was a high school English teacher and also a poet, who encouraged his son to read and write poetry. His mother, Naomi, was a Communist and a nudist. Ginsberg said of his parents: "They were old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers. My father would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T.S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' My mother made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.' I grew suspicious of both sides.'' But Naomi also had some severe mental health problems. She was hospitalized on and off with what was probably paranoid schizophrenia.

In high school, his home life was difficult, as he tried to deal with his mother's strange episodes and with his own growing awareness that he was gay. But he loved poetry, especially Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. He got a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson to attend Columbia University in New York, where he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Ginsberg got kicked out of Columbia for a year for drawing an obscene picture and writing obscene phrases in the dust on his dorm room window, to annoy the cleaning lady — he thought that she was being anti-Semitic and not cleaning his room.

During that year, Ginsberg read constantly, locking himself up in his apartment and not seeing any of his friends. He was upset by the hatred and anti-Semitism he perceived in the world, and he was at odds with what to do with himself. He had strange bouts of euphoria where he saw God and heard William Blake speaking to him. Finally, he got himself together, finished school, and took in his old friend Herbert Huncke, who was involved in all sorts of criminal activity. He stored stolen goods and lots of illegal drugs at their apartment, and was eventually arrested. Ginsberg too was arrested but pleaded psychological disability, so instead of going to jail he went to a psychiatric institution for eight months.

After Ginsberg left the hospital, he introduced himself to William Carlos Williams, a fellow New Jersey poet, who became his mentor. He worked at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, but he couldn't stand the corporate world, so in 1954 he left for San Francisco with a letter of introduction to Kenneth Rexroth, written by Williams. He threw himself into writing, and in October of 1955 he read his new poem, "Howl," at the Six Gallery Reading — the poem that begins with the lines: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, / who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated."

And suddenly, Allen Ginsberg was famous.

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

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