There was a show on TV called
You Asked For It. Viewers would write in
and ask to see unusual things, such as
the world’s greatest slingshot expert.
I watched it every week
on our humble Motorola, although
the only episode I can remember now
is the one about the slingshot expert.
He was a grown man, as I recall,
and he lived in an ordinary place like New Jersey.
At a distance of ten or twenty paces
he could pulverize one marble with another.
He could hit a silver dollar
tossed into the air. He was the kind
of father I wanted to have,
an expert shot, never missing.
And I think of him now, perhaps long dead,
or frail and gray, his gift forgotten.
Just another old guy on a park bench
in Fort Lauderdale, fretting about Medicare,
grateful for the sun on his back, his slingshot
useless in this new world.
"You Asked For It” by George Bilgere. © George Bilgere. Reprinted with permission of the author. (buy now)
Today is the birthday of satirist and TV host Stephen Colbert (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1964). The youngest of 11 kids, Colbert lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash when he, Colbert, was 10 years old. He retreated into books and, later, the theater. He wasn’t particularly political until he joined the cast of The Daily Show in 1997. Colbert hosted his own political satire show, The Colbert Report, for more than nine years. He played the part of a conservative pundit on the show, a persona he describes as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot.” This past December, the final episode aired, and Colbert’s next job will be as host of The Late Show when David Letterman retires in September. As his character, Colbert said, “I cannot stand people who disagree with me on the issue of Roe v. Wade [...] which I believe is about the proper way to cross a lake.” As himself, in a commencement address to graduates of Knox College, he said: “Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it.”
It’s the birthday of poet Kathleen Jamie (books by this author), born in Renfrewshire, Scotland (1962). She’s not particularly well known, but many critics consider her to be one of the best living poets in the U.K.; and the London Times has called her “the leading Scottish poet of her generation.”
She said: “When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.” She says that Seamus Heaney, Annie Dillard, Elizabeth Bishop are writers who “attend.”
Her books include The Queen of Sheba (1994), The Way We Live (1987), Jizzen [which is the Scottish word for “childbed”] (1999), Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (2002), and Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan (2002). Her most recent poetry collection, Overhaul, was published in 2012.
It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill gave his first speech as prime minister to the House of Commons. Three days earlier, he had taken over the job from Neville Chamberlain, who resigned. Chamberlain was a controversial leader — he had signed the Munich Agreement in September of 1938, ceding a region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a decision that Churchill highly criticized at the time. After Chamberlain’s decision, Churchill had said in a speech to the House of Commons: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Sure enough, one year later Britain declared war on Germany, and eight months after that, Chamberlain stepped aside.
So although the 65-year-old Churchill had been a politician for more than 30 years and delivered plenty of speeches to the House of Commons, this was his first as prime minister. Churchill’s reception from the House of Commons was not particularly enthusiastic — plenty of Conservative members wanted Chamberlain to stay on as prime minister. But the speech Churchill gave is considered one of his greatest. He said: “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”
Churchill wrote more than 40 books — histories, biographies, memoirs, and even a novel. He is the only British prime minister who has received the Nobel Prize in literature.
It’s the birthday of novelist Daphne du Maurier (books by this author), born in London (1907). Her father was a famous actor-manager, and her mother was an actress. She grew up in a world of privilege — she spent her childhood sailing, traveling, and writing stories. One day she and her sister found an abandoned mansion called Menabilly near their family’s home in Cornwall, and du Maurier was fascinated by the gloomy stone building near the sea.
Her grandfather was a novelist and cartoonist, and it was partly because of her family connections that du Maurier’s first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), was published when she was just 24 years old. An army major named Frederick Browning read The Loving Spirit and loved it. He was particularly dazzled by du Maurier’s descriptions of the Cornish coast, and since he was an avid sailor, he took his boat to Cornwall to see the coast for himself. When he heard that the author of the book was nearby, he went to visit du Maurier, and three months later they were married.
A few years later, she was in Egypt, where her husband was stationed. She hated everything about Cairo, and was desperately homesick; she admitted later that she missed Cornwall even more than she missed her children, who had stayed behind in England with their nanny. In addition to her homesickness, she was brooding over her jealousy of a woman named Jan Ricardo, a glamorous woman who had been her husband’s first fiancée but had committed suicide. Du Maurier had found a couple of Ricardo’s notes to her husband, which she had signed in a beautiful script, with a big, curlicue “R” in her signature.
Du Maurier began a new novel. She wrote in her notebook: “Very roughly the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second [...] she is dead before the book opens. Little by little I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second [...] until wife 2 is haunted day and night [...] a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens.” She struggled to work in the heat, her fingers sticking to her typewriter keys, and she ended up throwing her first attempt in the trash.
She left Egypt, and back in England the book came together quickly. She based the house in her novel on a mansion she had visited as a girl, where she remembered meeting a tall, menacing housekeeper — but for the mood and setting she drew on Menabilly, the crumbling estate she had discovered many years before. In her novel, Menabilly became the estate of Manderley, and the opening sentence of her new novel was: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. The narrator of the novel is the second Mrs. de Winter, whose first name is never given; but the first Mrs. de Winter, now dead, gives her name to the title of the book: Rebecca. When Rebecca (1938) was published, it became an immediate best-seller. Du Maurier made enough money from the novel, and Alfred Hitchcock’s film based on it, to buy Menabilly herself. She called it her “rat-filled ruin,” and slowly fixed it up.
Du Maurier’s other books included Jamaica Inn (1936), Hungry Hill (1943), and The Birds and Other Stories (1963).