Friday Apr. 8, 2016

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Ancient Music

driving out of Pittsburgh
Brandenburg #6 on FM
Bach sent it to the Margrave
with his job application
that was turned down
the music lost for 100 years
so much sweetness hidden
I heard it first at 18
in the Cornell music room
I’d never listened much
to “classical” and now
scribbling this on the porch
that overlooks the meadow
Veryl mowed for hay
(before his early death,
crushed by machine)
I watch the hills rising,
wooded, and beyond them
mountain upon mountain and miles
and years away the ocean
below the surf anemones
and whelks—hidden, waving—
“on the shores of darkness
there is light”

“Ancient Music” by Ed Ochester from Sugar Run Road. © Autumn House Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It’s the birthday of editor and publisher Robert Giroux, born inNew Jersey, (1914). He wanted to be a journalist, but as a student at Columbia he became interested in literature, inspired by the professors Mark Van Doren and Raymond Weaver. Weaver was the first person to read the manuscript of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in 1919. This left a mark on Giroux — he liked the idea of being the one to discover a literary masterpiece.

The first major author that Giroux discovered was Jean Stafford. While traveling by train to Connecticut, Giroux took Stafford’s manuscript at random from his briefcase, and became so absorbed in reading it that he rode past his stop. When he got to know Jean Stafford, she introduced him to her then little-known husband Robert Lowell, whose first collection of poems had been published privately by a small house and had gone largely unnoticed. Giroux snatched him up, and he became one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Lowell then introduced him to a young woman named Flannery O’Conner, whom he also published.

It’s the birthday of lyricist (Edgar) Yip Harburg, born in New York City (1896). He wrote songs like “April In Paris,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” and “Hurry Sundown” for movies including Can’t Help Singing (1944), California (1946), and Centennial Summer (1946); but he’s best known as the man who wrote the lyrics and much of the script for The Wizard of Oz (1939).

It’s the birthday of political writer Seymour Hersh (books by this author), born in Chicago (1937). His parents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Poland and Lithuania who ran a dry-cleaning business on Chicago’s South Side. The family didn’t have much money, especially after his father died while Seymour was in high school, so he opted for a local junior college. At the time, he was more interested in sports and poker than in academics. He said: “Chicago was this great egghead place, but I knew nothing. I came out of a lower-middle-class background. At that time, everyone used to define themselves: Stalinist, Maoist, whatever. I thought they meant ‘miaowist.’ Seriously! Something to do with cats.”

He bonded with one of his literature professors over a shared love of baseball, and that professor recognized his student’s academic potential. One day the professor took Hersh aside and convinced him that he should transfer to the University of Chicago, and literally walked him up the street to the campus. Hersh graduated with a history major, and was admitted into the law school — mostly because the father of one of his baseball teammates taught there — but soon flunked out.

He worked for a while at Walgreens, selling beer and cigarettes for $1.50 an hour. Eventually, he found a job working for the City News Bureau, and from there moved to the Associated Press, where he worked as a Pentagon correspondent. He disliked press conferences, which he found boring, and instead sought out high-ranking officials directly to talk to them. He was transferred to the special investigations unit, and threw himself into a story about the American government overseeing the development of chemical and biological weapons. His editors cut the story by 80 percent and watered down its criticisms, and Hersh was so angry that he quit the AP altogether. He worked briefly for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, and then returned to journalism as a freelance writer, but he was barely scraping together enough money to make it.

One day, he received a tip from a young lawyer named Geoffrey Cowan who was opposed to the Vietnam War. Cowan had heard a rumor that the Army had court-martialed a soldier for murdering Vietnamese civilians. One of his Pentagon contacts gave him the name of the soldier: William Calley. Hersh found Calley at Fort Benning in Georgia and interviewed him over beers. Calley talked for hours, sharing details of how he and his fellow soldiers had brutally murdered an entire village of Vietnamese civilians — an event that became known as the My Lai Massacre. Hersh said that his first reactions were simultaneously horror and the realization that this story might earn him a Pulitzer Prize.

Hersh tracked down many of Calley’s fellow soldiers and wrote a five-part piece about My Lai. None of the major news services wanted to publish it, so Hersh approached his friend David Obst, who ran the small leftist Dispatch News Service. Thirty-six papers ran it, and the story became a huge sensation, and is often credited with turning the tide of American feeling about the Vietnam War. Just as he had anticipated, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. He expanded his pieces into a book, My Lai 4 (1970). Hersh continued his career at the New York Times, and then quit to concentrate on writing books.

His books include The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), and Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004).

Today is the birthday of American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (1955) (books by this author), who rose to fame with her very first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), about a young woman from rural Kentucky who decides to leave town and drive west toward a new life and ends up taking care of a Cherokee toddler named Turtle.

Kingsolver began her studies at DePauw University thinking she’d be a classical pianist, but then she discovered how little money they made, so she switched to biology. It wasn’t until she was graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson that she tried her hand at writing, winning a short-story contest for a Phoenix newspaper. She kept writing and eventually had something resembling a novel, which she sent to an agent, who promptly sold the book. Kingsolver says, “As long as I’ve been a novelist, I’ve been a mother.” Her first book contract arrived the same day she brought her first child home from the hospital.

All of Kingsolver’s novels since 1995, including The Poisonwood Bible (1998), The Lacuna (2009) and Flight Behavior (2012), have landed on the best-seller lists. She’s mostly concerned with social justice, biodiversity, and the relationship of humans to their environment, which led her to move from her Tucson home to a 40-acre farm in southern Virginia. It was in Virginia that she and her family decided to spend a year eating only local foods (except for coffee, grains, and olive oil), an experiment she wrote about in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007). Kingsolver and her family grew their own food, learned how to can tomatoes, and made cheese. They also had to care for and eat their own livestock, which proved difficult at times. Kingsolver said, “You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened or you can look it in the eye and know it.”

Kingsolver rises at four a.m. every day to write. She says: “What keeps me at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.”

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