Tuesday Feb. 17, 2015

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February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and the pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

“February” by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

Today is the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell (books by this author), born in South Woodford, England (1930). Her parents were teachers, but after she graduated from high school she was determined not to become a teacher herself, so she went to work for the local paper. She covered local news, but she wasn’t the best journalist. Once, she visited a house and invented a story about the ghost of an old lady who lived there, and the homeowners threatened to sue her for lowering the value of their property. Another time, she wrote a story on the local tennis club’s annual banquet, but she didn’t actually attend the dinner, so she didn’t realize that the speaker had died in the middle of his speech. She handed in her resignation the next day, before she could be fired.

She had met her husband working on the newspaper, and for the next 10 years she stayed at home raising their son and writing in secret. She tried out various genres and worked on six different novels while she was in her 20s. She sent short stories to various magazines but was rejected over and over. She said, “People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn’t lose heart.” Then a publisher gave her £75 for her crime novel From Doon with Death (1964), and she began a career as a crime novelist.

Her more than 60 novels were mostly written under her own name, but some under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. Her books include A Judgement in Stone (1977), A Fatal Inversion (1987), The Vault (2011) and, most recently, The Girl Next Door (2014).

She wrote, “Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

It’s the birthday of French physician René Laennec, born in Quimper, Brittany (1781). During his medical studies, he was trained to use sound to help him make a diagnosis. He used the method of percussion — tapping on the chest to determine whether fluid is present, for example — but this wasn’t always fully successful. In his treatise De l’Auscultation Médiate (On Mediate Auscultation) (1819), he describes such a case. A woman had come to see him about her heart disease. Percussion was not effective, because the woman was overweight. In his search for an alternate diagnostic tool, he had a breakthrough. “I recalled a well known acoustic phenomenon: if you place your ear against one end of a wood beam the scratch of a pin at the other end is distinctly audible,” he wrote. “It occurred to me that this physical property might serve a useful purpose in the case I was dealing with. I then tightly rolled a sheet of paper, one end of which I placed over the precordium (chest) and my ear to the other. I was surprised and elated to be able to hear the beating of her heart with far greater clearness than I ever had with direct application of my ear.”

Laennec turned this discovery into one of the most ubiquitous of medical tools: the stethoscope. His early version didn’t resemble the form we’re familiar with today; after experimenting with various materials, Laennec settled on a hollow stick of wood. But it enabled him to hear the workings of the human body with much greater clarity. Laennec was able to prove his invention’s worth by following his patients as their diseases progressed, and confirming his diagnoses through autopsy after they died. In spite of the evidence, his stethoscope didn’t catch on right away. The New England Journal of Medicine didn’t bother to report its invention for two years. The founder of the American Heart Association wouldn’t use one. As late as 1885, one medical professor said, “He that hath ears to hear, let him use his ears and not a stethoscope.” Laennec was able to use his invention, which he considered his greatest legacy, to diagnose his own tuberculosis. He died at the age of 45.

On this date in 1897, the National Congress of Mothers, the forerunner of the National Parent-Teacher Association, or PTA, held its first convocation, in Washington, D.C. Founders Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst expected 200 people to attend the event; instead, they were greeted by more than 2,000 mothers, educators, fathers, laborers, and legislators from across the United States. Birney and Hearst founded the organization to better the lives of U.S. children in regard to education, health, and safety, believing that, as Birney wrote, “In the child and in our treatment of him rests the solution of the problems which confront the state and society today.” Their first concerns have remained steady to this day: the establishment of kindergarten, hot lunch programs, and mandatory immunizations. Birney and Hearst began their journey at a time when women did not have the right to vote and social activism was not popular, but they strongly believed mothers would support their mission. By 1899, membership numbers swelled to 20,000. Today, it is the largest volunteer child advocacy organization in the nation, with more than 4 million members.

It’s the birthday of economist Thomas Robert Malthus (books by this author), born in Surrey, England (1766). In 1798, he published a pamphlet called An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that the human population of the earth was growing at a faster rate than the food supply, and that war, disease, and famine were necessary in order to prevent overpopulation.

One of the things he recommended to help keep the population down was deferring marriage until middle age. Critics accused him of being cold-hearted and inhuman — but he actually had a passionate love affair as a young man, and when he was 38 he married a 28-year-old woman. He wrote in his diary: “Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love […] that does not look back to the period, as the sunny spot of his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask […] which he would most wish to live over again.”

It’s the birthday of Chaim Potok (books by this author), born in New York City (1929). His parents were immigrants from Poland, and he grew up in a strict Orthodox Jewish culture. When he was about 14 years old, he happened to pick up a copy of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and it changed his life. He said, “I lived more deeply inside the world in that book than I lived inside my own world.” And over the years, he read as much as he could, and he moved away from his parents’ strict beliefs. But when he started to write fiction, he went back to his childhood, and he wrote The Chosen (1967), a best-selling novel about two boys growing up together in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Potok continued their story in The Promise (1969), and wrote about similar conflicts between religious and secular communities in many more novels, including My Name is Asher Lev (1972), The Book of Lights (1981), and a group of three related novellas, Old Men at Midnight (2001).

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