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The Writer's Almanac from Sunday, July 28, 2013
"Pluma" by Gerald Stern, from Last Blue. © Norton, 2000.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
It's the birthday of poet John Ashbery, born in Rochester, New York (1927). He grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, and although they read some poetry, all of it was old. Then he won a contest, and the prize was Louis Untermeyer's anthology Modern American and British Poetry. He didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them — poems by W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. He went on to Harvard, and he published his first book, Some Trees (1956), when he was 29. He has been publishing ever since. His most recent collection is Quick Question, which came out last year. He was presented with a National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2012.
He said: "I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience."
It's the birthday of the philosopher Karl Popper, born in Vienna (1902). He was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He came up with the theory that what defines a scientific idea is that it can be falsified. He realized that the real work of scientists is not to look for evidence that their theories are correct, but to look as hard as they can for evidence that their theories are false. The closest a scientist can ever come to proving that his or her theory is true is failing to find evidence that the theory is false. Popper used this same theory to argue that astrology, metaphysics, Marxist history, and Freudian psychoanalysis were not sciences because there is no way they could ever be falsified. He published his ideas in The Logic of Discovery (1934) and became famous.
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It's the birthday of children's author Beatrix Potter, born in South Kensington, England (1866). She is best known for her 23 illustrated storybooks about Peter Rabbit.
She said, "Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest."
It's the birthday of the novelist Malcolm Lowry, born in Cheshire, England (1909) whose masterpiece is Under the Volcano, set during the Day of the Dead in Mexico, 1938, about a former British consul who, like Lowry himself, has a problem with alcohol and a troubled marriage.
Lowry died a mysterious death caused by alcohol and an overdose of sleeping pills in 1957. No one is sure if it was a suicide or not, but it happened to fall on the same date as the suicide of a childhood friend.
Lowry composed his own epitaph:
Malcom Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
And died playing the ukulele.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
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