The Writer's Almanac for March 7, 2019 - Garrison Keillor

The Writer’s Almanac for March 7, 2019

Odysseus in the Land of Lettuce Eaters
by Michael Magee

I don’t like being a vegetarian
give me red meat to kill,
and a pair of drumsticks,
or some kippered barbarian,
a French Dip with au jus.

When you’re in a far-off place,
you need lots of protein
for hand to hand combat.
There’s nothing quite as tasty
as a plate of fresh Mesopotamians.

Or nothing like an Irish stew
made with real Celts,
and Abyssinian beef jerky,
or a nice Saracen stir-fry.
The rest is for your salad days.

“Odysseus in the Land of Lettuce Eaters” by Michael Magee from How We Move Toward Light. © MoonPath Press, 2018. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

On this day in 1923, Robert Frost’s poem (books by this author) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published in The New Republic magazine. It was Frost’s favorite of his own poems, and he called it “my best bid for remembrance.” He’s remembered for many of his poems today, but that one is his best known and one of the most popular poems in American literature.

Though it’s a poem about winter, Frost wrote the first draft on a warm morning in the middle of June. The night before, he had stayed up working at his kitchen table on a long, difficult poem called “New Hampshire” (1923). He finally finished it and then looked up and saw that it was morning. He’d never worked all night on a poem before. Feeling relieved at the work he’d finished, he went outside and watched the sunrise.

While he was outside, he suddenly got an idea for a new poem. So he rushed back inside his house and wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in just a few minutes. He said he wrote most of the poem almost without lifting his pen off the page. He said, “It was as if I’d had a hallucination.”

It was on this day in 1994 that the Supreme Court ruled that parody can be protected by the fair use clause of the Copyright Act of 1976. The case arose from a song by the rap group 2 Live Crew, which used elements of the Roy Orbison song from 1964 “Oh Pretty Woman.”

The Roy Orbison version of the song is about a man watching a pretty woman walking down the street. The 2 Live Crew version is about the subsequent relationship with that woman, who becomes a hairy woman, a bald-headed woman, and a two-timing woman. The music publishing company Acuff-Rose, which holds the copyright for the Roy Orbison song, sued 2 Live Crew for copyright violation.

Among those who sent “friend of the court” briefs in support of 2 Live Crew were Mad magazine, The Harvard Lampoon, and the Comedy Central TV channel. Among those who argued against 2 Live Crew were Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of 2 Live Crew.

Justice David H. Souter wrote, “Like less ostensibly humorous forms of criticism, [parody] can provide social benefit by shedding light on an earlier work and, in the process, creating a new one.

It’s the birthday of literary critic and James Joyce scholar William York Tindall, (books by this author) born in Williamstown, Vermont (1903). He studied literature at Columbia University and soon after graduation he traveled to Europe. He had heard about the notorious book Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, and he decided to buy a copy when he was in Paris. He said, “I went straight to Luxembourg Gardens and read the final chapters, and discovered that it wasn’t a dirty book but a fascinating one.” He also realized that by pure coincidence, he had purchased the book on June 16, which is the day on which the action takes place. He became obsessed with Joyce, and read all of his works. When he returned to the U.S., he started teaching a course in modern literature at New York University, and he was one of the first professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library. He went on to become president of the James Joyce Society, and he wrote four books about Joyce, including A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (1959) and A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake (1969).

On this date in 1857 it was wisely decided that a baseball game would be made up of nine innings instead of 21 “aces” or runs.

The National Association of Baseball Players decided this. They were a group of men in New York and Brooklyn baseball clubs playing under what was known as the “Knickerbocker Rules,” and they had just gotten together formally for the first time in January.

It’s the anniversary of the first march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (1965), known as “Bloody Sunday.” Six hundred civil rights activists left Selma to march the 54 miles to the state capitol, demonstrating for African-American voting rights. They got six blocks before state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.

ABC News interrupted a Nazi war crimes documentary to show footage of the violence. In the blink of a television set, national public opinion about civil rights shifted. Demonstrations broke out across the country.

Two weeks later, the March from Selma made it to Montgomery, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, federal court protection, and these words from President Lyndon Johnson: “There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.” When they got to Montgomery, they were 25,000 strong.

It’s the birthday of novelist Robert Harris (books by this author), born in Nottingham, England (1957). In 1987, he was working as an investigative journalist when he decided to take a vacation in Italy. He was lying on the beach, listening to the German tourists talking all around him, when he suddenly imagined that he was living in the victorious German empire. He got up and went swimming in the ocean, and by the time he came back to shore, he had an outline for a novel about what the world would be like if the Nazis had won World War II. That novel was Fatherland (1991), and it became an international best-seller.

Harris went on to write many other books, including Enigma (1995), Archangel (1998), The Fear Index (2011). His most recent novel is Munich (2017), and The Second Sleep is due out later this year.

Harris said, “It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you’re forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.”