Saturday May 28, 2016

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Not Naked on the Bed

Your beauty, nude
not naked on the bed,
is far more a gift
than I ever expected.
I watch languor recline
1n your wise grey eyes
while slate hummingbirds
carved as earrings
dangle from golden hooks.
I quiver in your breath
and the ceiling fan halts
in that instant.
We look at one another
with both eyes open and close.
An intimate wind,
the cause of auroras,
moves north and south,
east and west,
then we swim
into one another.

“Not Naked on the Bed” by Timothy Young from Building in Deeper Water. © The Thousands Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

On this day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. It was the first legislation to diverge from the previous official U.S. policy to respect Native Americans’ legal and political rights. Jackson announced his policy by saying, “It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.” He also said, “Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.”

The policy primarily affected five tribes: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations of the southeastern United States. In 1823, the Supreme Court ruled that the white settlers’ “right of discovery” superseded the Indians’ “right of occupancy.” The five nations resisted nonviolently at first, and tried to assimilate into Anglo-American practices of education, large-scale farming, and slave-holding, but to no avail, and about 100,000 Indians were forcibly marched thousands of miles — sometimes in manacles — to lands west of the Mississippi, most of which were deemed undesirable by white settlers. As many as 25 percent died en route.

The Cherokee nation battled the Removal Act in courts of law, and the Seminoles of Florida battled it literally; Chief Osceola said: “You have guns, and so have we. You have powder and lead, and so have we. You have men, and so have we. Your men will fight and so will ours, till the last drop of the Seminole’s blood has moistened the dust of his hunting ground.”

Today is the 100th birthday of Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). He was orphaned as a boy by his parents’ suicides: when Percy was 13, his father shot himself; his mother drove her car off a bridge two years later. Percy’s older cousin — a poet and essayist — adopted him, along with his two younger brothers, and took them to live in Greenville, Mississippi. In Greenville, Percy met the neighbor boy, Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner. Percy was overwhelmed and awestruck, and he lost his nerve; he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch. Percy and Foote would remain close friends for 60 years; Percy loaned Foote money so that he could complete his trilogy about the Civil War.

Percy studied medicine and earned his M.D. at Columbia University. His plan was to be a psychiatrist. He was doing an internship at New York’s Bellevue Hospital when he contracted tuberculosis. He spent two years in various sanatoriums, and spent much of that time reading. He particularly read Russian and European novels with strong psychological underpinnings, books by Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. Contracting TB was, he later said, “the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a chance to quit medicine. I had a respectable excuse.” When he was released from the sanatorium, he returned home to the South to become a writer.

At first, he wrote and published some philosophical essays in magazines. He later told the Paris Review: “You can’t make a living writing articles for The Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The thought crossed my mind: Why not do what French philosophers often do and Americans almost never — novelize philosophy, incarnate ideas in a person and a place, which latter is, after all, a noble Southern tradition in fiction.” For 10 years he worked on a novel, and then a second, neither of which was ever published. In the mid-1950s, he began writing what would become his first published novel: The Moviegoer (1961). It’s about a stockbroker who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and spends all his time at the movies. Percy was 45 when it was published, and it went on to win the National Book Award. He wrote and published five more novels after that, but The Moviegoer is still his most famous.

He never fully abandoned his interest in psychiatry, but rather translated it into his approach to fiction. He told Paris Review: “What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man— so what else is new? — but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the ‘normal’ denizen of the Western world who, I think it fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing.”

Or, as his character Binx Bolling, the narrator of The Moviegoer, says: “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Today is the birthday of American poet May Swenson (1913), born Anna Thilda May Swenson (books by this author) in Logan, Utah, to Swedish immigrants who moved to the United States as converts to Mormonism. Swenson was the eldest of 10 children. English was the second language in her house; her family spoke primarily Swedish when at home. As a girl, she loved reading Edgar Allan Poe.

Swenson is best known for her exuberant, adventurous wordplay. She’s credited with inventing the “iconography” style, in which the lines of the poem are shaped to create images relating to the poem’s content. For instance, her poem “The Lowering,” written as a memorial for Robert F. Kennedy, is in the shape of a folded flag.

Swenson graduated from Utah State University (1934) and found work as a manuscript reviewer, ghostwriter, stenographer, and secretary while writing her poems, which were being regularly published in Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, who paid her $49 for the poem “Snow by Morning.” She would go on to publish 59 more poems in that magazine over her lifetime. Her first collection of poetry, Another Animal, was published in 1954.

It’s the birthday of the man who created James Bond, novelist Ian Fleming (books by this author), born in London, England (1908). He wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence.

After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.

Fleming said: “James Bond is [...] the feverish dreams of the author of what he might have been — bang, bang, bang, kiss, kiss, that sort of stuff. It’s what you would expect of an adolescent mind — which I happen to possess.”

The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, sold about 7,000 copies, and Fleming followed it with four more that sold less and less well. Critics said he was good at writing about places, but that was about it. Fleming had a newborn son at home, and he was disappointed that these books weren’t making more money to help support the family, so for his next Bond story he wrote the book specifically for the movies. He filled it with more psychopaths and beautiful women than usual. No one in the movie industry was interested at the time, but the novel From Russia, with Love (1957) became a huge international best-seller.

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