And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I’d carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we’d build a town in the basement
from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until
one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.
Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us—it was usually
a boy—became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.
Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,
Walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.
Ten o’clock and all is well.
And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted…
Eleven o’clock and all is well.
Twelve o’clock. One o’clock. Two o’clock…
and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.
“The Game” by Marie Howe, from What the Living Do. © Norton, 1998. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It's the birthday of poet and memoirist Mary Karr (books by this author), born in Groves, Texas (1955). She had a rough childhood: Her parents were both heavy drinkers. Her dad worked at an oil refinery and told a good story. Her mom was an artist, mentally unstable, and she'd been married seven times. But her mom was a voracious reader, about the only real escapism that the small town offered. As Karr told the Paris Review: "[R]eading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you're not there anymore. It's better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal."
Though she's always thought of herself as a poet, and has published four volumes of poetry, she became famous as a memoirist. She wrote her first memoir, The Liars' Club (1995), because she needed the money. It took two and a half years, because she only worked on it every other weekend, when her son was with his father. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year; she followed it up with two more memoirs: Cherry (2000) and Lit (2009).
Today is the birthday of novelist, essayist, and cultural critic Susan Sontag (books by this author), born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City (1933). She grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles. She graduated from high school when she was 15, went to the University of California at Berkeley for a semester, and then transferred to the University of Chicago. It was there, during her sophomore year, that she met Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old sociology instructor. They were married 10 days after they met, and had a son, David, in 1952. She and Rieff divorced in 1958, and the next year she moved to New York with "$70, two suitcases, and a seven year old."
When she was 26, she met William Phillips, one of the founding editors of Partisan Review, at a cocktail party. She asked him how she might write for the journal, and he said, "All you have to do is ask." She replied, "I'm asking." She began to write provocative essays on culture, both high and low. One in particular that became famous in 1964 was called "Notes on Camp," and she dedicated it to Oscar Wilde. It was a direct challenge to the cultural establishment. She wrote: "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste."
She wrote another essay that year called "Against Interpretation" (1964), in which she argues that people should stop trying to analyze and interpret art and just enjoy the experience on a spiritual and sensual level. She wrote: "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of meanings."
Book One of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (books by this author) was published on this date in 1605. It's considered to be the first modern novel. It's about a middle-aged landowner from a village in La Mancha who stays awake at night reading books about chivalry, forgets to eat and sleep, insanely believes the tales to be true, and sets off on a skinny nag in a heroic quest to resurrect old-fashioned chivalry and heroism in the modern world.
From Don Quixote: "All I know is that while I'm asleep, I'm never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level."