Armistead Maupin, 1944 -

American writer Armistead Maupin was born Armistead Jones, in Washington, D.C. (1944). After he graduated from college in 1966, he worked for a while at a North Carolina television station managed by the future Senator Jesse Helms. From there, he joined the Navy, served in Vietnam, then returned to the United States to launch a career in journalism. In 1975, he moved from South Carolina to San Francisco, where he landed a job as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the pages of the Chronicle that he ran his popular serial "Tales of the City." The stories were later published as a series of six books, beginning with Tales of the City in 1978. The tales follow the adventures and relationships of a group of gay and straight characters living in a boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane. He said: "When you're a gay person, it's much easier to observe the gulf between truth and illusion, because you're often a part of creating it. You learn at a very early age to wear disguises. My work is about taking off those disguises."

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

The poet Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His father was a lawyer with a strong interest in literature. Wallace went to Harvard and then got a law degree from New York University. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Although he wrote highly imaginative poems, he led a simple, uneventful life as an executive at a Hartford, Connecticut insurance company. Stevens kept his life as a poet separate from his life as an executive. He would wake up at six o'clock to read for two hours before going to work, and he wrote many of his poems while walking home from the office in the evening. He wrote some of his best poetry after he reached the age of sixty, including the collections Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).

One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.

Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds." The following poem is called The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Song of the Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

David Henry Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau, was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He's the author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849).

He became the first member of his family to go to college when he enrolled at Harvard in 1833 at age sixteen. He wasn't especially happy with the teaching methods used at Harvard. Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have remarked that most of the branches of learning were taught at Harvard and Thoreau to have replied, "Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots." He graduated in 1837, ninth in his class, and refused a diploma, thinking there were better ways to spend five dollars.

He changed his name to Henry David and became a teacher. When criticized by the supervisor of the local public school for not using corporal punishment on his students, Thoreau thrashed a random group of his pupils to illustrate the senselessness of it all and resigned from the school.

When Emerson moved to Concord, Thoreau lived with him and did odd jobs around the house. Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write poetry, and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do his entire life.

In 1845, when Thoreau was twenty-seven, he built a small cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, and moved there. His motto was "Simplify, simplify, simplify." He said that his goal was "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." And he said, "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." Walden was published in 1854.

Thoreau said, "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

Prayer

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

Walden (1854). Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Salman Rushdie, 1947 -

The novelist Salman Rushdie, was born in Bombay, India (1947). His parents sent him to school in England, where he didn't get along with his classmates, and he missed India terribly. And then, while he was in school, his parents were forced to leave Bombay and move to Pakistan because they were Muslims. Rushdie was crushed. He didn't want to stay in England, but now he no longer had a home in India. So he enrolled at Cambridge and then got a job writing copy for an advertising company.
Working at the advertising company just two days a week, he took five years to produce Midnight's Children (1981), about the India that he missed so much. It's the story of a group of 1,001 children all born in the hour after midnight on the day that India gained independence. In the novel, each of those children gains magical powers. The novel is told from the point of view of a boy who receives the power to read minds, and who attempts to draw together all the other midnight's children, even as India and Pakistan are sliding toward war.
The book won the Booker Prize and became a huge success, among both Westerners and Indians. Only Rushdie's family hated the book, because he had incorporated a lot of family secrets into the storyline.
Rushdie published his third novel, Shame, in 1983, and then in 1987, he came out with a book called The Satanic Verses, which got mixed reviews. Most Western critics didn't notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. But turned out that Rushdie had made a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion in the book, and one section of The Satanic Verses seemed to suggest that the Quran is not the direct word of God. A month after the book came out, it was banned in India and book burnings throughout the Muslim world followed. The Ayatollah Khomeini eventually announced that Rushdie should be sentenced to death for blasphemy, and he placed a $1.5 million bounty on Rushdie's head.
Rushdie had to go into hiding. His Italian translator was threatened and stabbed. His Japanese translator was murdered. His Norwegian publisher was attacked and left for dead. Rushdie spent the next nine years moving from place to place. He lived in more than 30 houses. He found it difficult to write, so he helped set up an international organization for the protection of persecuted writers. The death sentence was finally lifted in 1998.
Rushdie later said, "The experience taught me ... a lot about the human capacity for hatred. But it also taught me the opposite: the capacity for solidarity and friendship. ... My Norwegian publisher was shot three times in the back and ... his first reaction, upon recovering from the bullet wounds, was to reprint the book. That's courage."
Back when he was still in hiding, a group of writers and literary critics distributed a series of buttons that said, "I am Salman Rushdie," to express their solidarity with him. Rushdie has since acquired a few of those buttons, and he said, "I still wear them sometimes, because, after all, I am Salman Rushdie."
Salman Rushdie said, "A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 - 1950

American poet Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1868. Masters grew up in the small town of Lewiston, Illinois, in the Spoon River valley. His father was a lawyer who didn't approve of his son's ambition to write, so Masters became a lawyer in Chicago. While he practiced law, he started to write and publish poetry and plays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace, including A Book of Verses (1898) and Maximilian (1902), but he didn't write anything particularly successful. He dreamed of writing a novel about the small-town Illinois of his childhood.
Then in 1909, he got a gift from Marion Reedy, the editor of Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis. Masters had been submitting poems to the journal, and Reedy rejected all his poems, but he liked corresponding with Masters, and he sent him a copy of Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, a book of poems from the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of these poems are in the form of epigrams. After Masters read the Greek Anthology, he decided to change the form of his novel and make it into a series of monologues. These monologues would be set in a graveyard, and they would be anecdotes spoken by more than 200 dead citizens of a small town. He based the small town on a combination of Lewiston, where he grew up, and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents had their farm, but he named it after the river that ran by these towns, and these monologues became Spoon River Anthology (1915). It was an immediate commercial success, one of the most popular books of poetry in American history. But the monologues were often cynical and showed the hypocrisies of small-town life, and so Spoon River Anthology wasn't popular with everyone. It made Masters an outcast from the small towns where he grew up — he had based many of his characters directly on people there, hadn't even changed their last names, and many of them were horrified by his unflattering depictions of them. And even beyond these towns, lots of people were scandalized by Masters's cynical view of small-town America and considered him unpatriotic. He continued writing but he never achieved the same level of success that he had with Spoon River Anthology.
Edgar Lee Masters said, "How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?"
And he wrote in Spoon River Anthology:
"Mickey M'Grew"
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower —
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged
Through bellowing darkness!

Touched by an Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

Maya Angelou

Dorothy Parker, August 22 1893 - June 7 1967

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey (1893). She's remembered as one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, even though she only wrote a few books of poetry and short stories. She started her career just after World War I, in an era when slick magazines were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The writers for these magazines wrote in a jaded, wisecracking tone of voice, and it was Dorothy Parker who proved that women could wisecrack just as well as any man.

Parker was four feet and eleven inches tall, and she loved to swear. The drama critic Alexander Woollcott described her as, "A blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." She said, "[I'm] just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute."

She was the only woman who belonged to the famous group of New York writers who met every day at the Round Table of the Algonquin Hotel to trade wit and gossip. That circle included Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker, and he said he borrowed the tone of voice for his magazine from those Algonquin meetings. He later hired Parker as a columnist.

Much of her writing was collected in the Portable Dorothy Parker, which has been in print since 1944. Of the first ten Portables published by Viking, only the Portable Shakespeare and the Portable Bible sold as well and as steadily as the Portable Parker.

Dorothy Parker said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."

And, "People are more fun than anybody."

I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

• I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

• Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

• I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

• You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

• Women and elephants never forget.

• I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.

• Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

• Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

• A girl's best friend is her mutter.

• I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

• Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

• Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

• Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

• The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'

• If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

• The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

• It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.

• All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

• Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

• Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

• Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.

• That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

• People are more fun than anybody.

• I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.

• I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

• You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

• Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

• The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.

• Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

• She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

• The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

Mrs. George Reece by Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 - 1950

"Mrs. George Reece" by Edgar Lee Masters from Spoon River Anthology

Mrs. George Reece

To this generation I would say:
Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.
It may serve a turn in your life.
My husband had nothing to do
With the fall of the bank—he was only cashier.
The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,
And his vain, unscrupulous son.
Yet my husband was sent to prison,
And I was left with the children,
To feed and clothe and school them.
And I did it, and sent them forth
Into the world all clean and strong,
And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:
"Act well your part, there all the honor lies."

______________________

Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology. 1916.

John M. Church

I WAS attorney for the “Q”
And the Indemnity Company which insured
The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury,
And the upper courts, to beat the claims
Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,
And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises
In a high-flown resolution.
And the floral tributes were many—
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull!

Unreliable narrator

An unreliable narrator, a narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the ‘true’ understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author. The discrepancy between the unreliable narrator's view of events and the view that readers suspect to be more accurate creates a sense of irony. The term does not necessarily mean that such a narrator is morally untrustworthy or a habitual liar (although this may be true in some cases), since the category also includes harmlessly naïve, ‘fallible’, or ill‐informed narrators. A classic case is Huck in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): this 14‐year‐oldnarrator does not understand the full significance of the events he is relating and commenting on. Other kinds of unreliable narrator seem to be falsifying their accounts from motives of vanity or malice. In either case, the reader is offered the pleasure of picking up ‘clues’ in the narrative that betray the true state of affairs. This kind of first‐person narrative is particularly favoured in 20th‐century fiction: a virtuoso display of its use is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1928), which employs three unreliable narrators—an imbecile, a suicidal student, and an irritable racist bigot.

Delta Autumn by William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962

William (Cuthbert) Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He grew up listening to stories about his family, including several stories about his great-grandfather, a colonel in the Civil War, who once killed a man with a bowie knife and later killed another man who tried to avenge the first man's death. And then there were stories about Faulkner's father, who was once sitting in a drug store with a girl when the girl's spurned boyfriend walked in and shot Faulkner's father in the back with a shotgun. Somehow, Faulkner's father survived.
Aside from family lore, Faulkner's literary education came not from school but from an older friend named Phil Stone, who had gone to Yale. At that time, Faulkner had been reading Moby-Dick and Shakespeare, but it was Phil Stone who introduced him to modern literature like the works of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.
After dropping out of high school, Faulkner spent several years trying to figure out what to do with himself. He went to the University of Mississippi for a year, where he got a D in his English class. He went to New York City, where he was fired from a job at a bookstore because he told the customers they were reading trash. Then he worked for a while at a post office, until he lost that job because he failed to deliver the mail and often closed down early to go golfing.
He published a book of poems and two relatively conventional novels, and then he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who advised him to write about his hometown. So Faulkner began observing Oxford, Mississippi, more closely, and he began to invent an imaginary version of Oxford he called Jefferson, located in an imaginary county he called Yoknapatawpha.
He later said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top."
One of the first novels he wrote about his new imaginary landscape was The Sound and the Fury, about a wild young woman named Caddy Compson and her three brothers: Benjy, who is mentally handicapped; Quentin, who falls in love with her; and Jason, who feels she has ruined the family's name by getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Faulkner went on writing through the 1930s, but he never really broke through to popular success. By 1944, all but one of his books were out of print. But in 1945, Malcolm Cowley helped publish a Portable Faulkner edition, which brought attention back to his work. Then in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. All his books were brought back into print, and they have stayed in print ever since.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

.............

* The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

*Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
...............

Characters:

Isaac McCaslin (Uncle Ike): The main character. He is an old man who is deeply committed to nature and hunting. He has trouble sleeping while on the hunting trip. He meets the mother of Roth's child while everyone is hunting.

Carothers Edmonds (Roth): One of the other main characters. He has a secret child with a negro woman. He is attempting to pay her off and keep the child a secret. At the end of the story he is the one who shot the doe.

Will Legate: Another main character. He hints at that fact that Roth has a secret relationship. When Roth kills the doe, Legate refuses to say whether it was a doe or a buck.

Girl with baby: She is the woman who Roth has a secret child and relationship with. SHe lives near the hunting camp. Additionally, she is the granddaughtor of Tennies's son James Beauchamp (a man who used to go hunting with Isaac).

Isham: One of the slaves. He cooked the meals and helped set up camp.

Maya Angelou, 1928 -

Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri (1928), the author of six autobiographical volumes, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). As a teenager, she and her mom and brother moved to San Francisco. There she became a streetcar conductor, the first black person and the first woman to be one there. She was only 16. A few months after graduating from high school, she gave birth to a son. Later, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos and began using a variation of his surname — Angelou — for her stage name at the Purple Onion cabaret in San Francisco, where she was a calypso dancer. She toured Europe as a dancer in a government-sponsored production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and when she returned to the U.S., she settled in New York City, where she performed off-Broadway, sang at the Apollo Theater, and started going to meetings of the Harlem Writer's Guild. She met James Baldwin and Jules Feiffer, who thought that she should write about her life in the manner that she spoke, in the "same rhythmical cadences with which she mesmerized" her friends and others with whom she interacted. She did, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The sixth volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, came out in 2002.

Stephen Crane, 1871 - 1900

In Heaven


Some little blades of grass
Stood before God.
“What did you do?”
Then all save one of the little blades
Began eagerly to relate
The merits of their lives.
This one stayed a small way behind
Ashamed.
Presently God said:
“And what did you do?”
The little blade answered: “Oh, my lord,
“Memory is bitter to me
“For if I did good deeds
“I know not of them.”
Then God in all His splendor
Arose from His throne.
“Oh, best little blade of grass,” He said.

The Jewbird

is is a summary of Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird." The story is an allegory demonstrating that a homeland for Jews was a humanitarian necessity. Israel must continue to exist as a safe haven for those who need one and for those who choose to make Israel their nation. During the Holocost, escaping Jews were turned away from the United States, Palestine (then occupied by the British), and most other countries. They had to return to the places from which they had escaped only to be exterminated. There was no safe haven. This is the reason that the Israelis must weaken or destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no other choice for them.

"The Jewbird". by Bernard Malamud Reporter, 28 (April 11, 1963), pp. 33-36.

Major Characters:
Schwartz: A crow-like talking bird that can speak Yiddish and English and even make Jewish prayers. He calls himself a Jewbird, once removed from a Jewfish. He is running from "Anti-Semeets" and flows in "Harry Cohen's top-floor apartment on First Avenue near the lower East River."
Harry Cohen: A frozen food salesman. "A heavy man with hairy chest," whose mother is dying in her flat in the Bronx.
Edie Cohen: Harry's wife. A kind-hearted skinny woman, not courageous enough to protect Schwartz from her husband.
Morris Cohen: Harry and Edie's ten-year-old son. He is named after her father but they call him Maurie. "A nice kid though not overly bright." According to Schwartz, he is a kind of boy that "won't be a shicker or a wifebeater" and will never be a scholor but "maybe a good mechanic."
Chronology of Events:
"On a hot August evening a year ago": Schwartz, a skinny bird, wearily flows in through the open kitchen window of Harry's apartment ["That's how it goes. It's open, you're in. Closed, you're out and that's your fate."] and lands on the table when the Cohens are having supper. The Jewbird tells them that he is running from "Anti-Semeets" and vultures and that he goes "where there's charity." After "davening" he gets marinated herring. Although Harry does not want him to stay, he lets him stay the night because of Maurie: "Let him stay, papa....He's only a bird."
"In the morning": Cohen orders Schwartz to leave but Maurie cries, so he reluctantly lets the bird to stay for a while:
"So all right," said Cohen, "but I'm dead set against it. I warn you he ain't gonna stay here long."
"What have you got against the poor bird?" [said Edie.]
"Poor bird, my ass. He's a foxy bastard. He thinks he's a Jew."
"What difference does it make what he thinks?"
"A Jewbird, what a chuzpah. One false move and he's out on his drumsticks."

Although Schwartz wants to stay inside, he lives out on the balcony at Harry's insistence, in a new wooden birdhouse Edie gets for him.
"When Cohen brought home a bird feeder full of dried corn": Schwartz says, "Impossible" and Cohen is annoyed. Edie gets herring for him.
"When school began in September": Cohen once again suggests the bird to leave but Edie prevailes on him to wait a little while until Maurie adjusts to school. Though nobody has asked, Schwartz takes on full responsibility for Maurie's performance in school: he oversees the boy's school lessons and violin practice.
Maurie's work improves in school and even his violin teacher admits his playing is better. When "there was nothing lower than C minuses on Maurie's report card," Schwartz celebrates with a little schnapps on Edie's insitence. But he angers Harry not agreeing with his hope to send his boy to an Ivy League college.
"One night when Edie was at the movies and Maurie was taking a shower": Harry begins a quarrel with Schwartz:
"For Christ sake, why don't you wash yourself sometimes? Why must you always stink like a dead fish?"
"Mr. Cohen, if you'll pardon me, if somebody eats garlic he will smell from garlic. I eat herring three times a day. Feed me flowers and I will smell like flowers."
"Who's obligated to feed you anything at all? You're lucky to get herring."
"Excuse me, I'm not complaining." said the bird. "You're complaining."
...."All in all you are a goddamn pest and free loader. Next thing you'll want to sleep in bed next to my wife."
"Mr. Cohen," said Schwartz, "on this, rest assured. A bird is a bird."

The quarrel deeply disturbs Schwartz and he sleeps badly. He tries to stay out of Cohen's way and keeps to the birdhouse as much as possible. Sensing his unhappiness, Edie advises him to take a bath so that he can get along better with her husband. The bird's reply: "Everybody smells. Some people smell because of their thoughts or because who they are. My bad smell comes from the food I eat. What does his come from?"
"In late November": Schwartz freezes on the balcony, already feels twinges of rheumatism. Cohen, after reading articles about the migration of birds, orders him to leave soon. But the bird stubbonly refuses to depart so Cohen embarks on a campaign of harassing him. He brings a cat into the house, supposedly a gift for Maurie. The bird complains but Edie only says: "Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won't try to catch you any more."
Weeks go by, "on the day Cohen's mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmatic test": Cohen, enraged, waits until Edie takes Maurie to his violin lessons, openly attacks the bird. He grabs Schwartz's leggs and whirls him around and around his head. The bird manages to catch Cohen's nose in his beak. Cohen punches the bird and flings him into the night. "Schwartz sank like a stone into the street."
"In the spring": Maurie looks for Schwartz and finds "a dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean."
"Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?" Maurie wept.
"Anti-Semeets," Edie said later.

Wordsmith

psephology\see-FAH-luh-jee\
DEFINITION
noun

: the scientific study of elections
EXAMPLES
Erin is a political science major with a particular interest in psephology.

"To help voters make up their minds, this issue contains a 20-page briefing on personality, policy and psephology." -- From an article in The Economist, April 10, 2010


shellacking noun
Definition of SHELLACKING

: a decisive defeat : drubbing
Examples of SHELLACKING

They took a shellacking in yesterday's game.


op·er·a·tive   
[op-er-uh-tiv, op-ruh-tiv, op-uh-rey-tiv]
significant; key: The operative word in that sentence is “sometimes.”

mis·ceg·e·na·tion   
[mi-sej-uh-ney-shuhn, mis-i-juh-]
–noun
1.
marriage or cohabitation between a man and woman of different races, esp., in the U.S., between a black and a white person.
2.
interbreeding between members of different races.
3.
the mixing or a mixture of races by interbreeding.

in·e·luc·ta·ble   
[in-i-luhk-tuh-buhl]
–adjective
incapable of being evaded; inescapable: an ineluctable destiny.
Origin:
1615–25; < L inēluctābilis, equiv. to in- in-3 + ēluctā ( rī ) to force a way out or over, surmount ( ē- e- + luctārī to wrestle) + -bilis -ble

—Related forms
in·e·luc·ta·bil·i·ty, noun
in·e·luc·ta·bly, adverb

—Synonyms
inevitable, unavoidable.