… So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship …—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941

James Agee was born on this date in 1909.

* * * *
San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot and killed by a disgruntled former city supervisor while at work in City Hall on this date in 1978.
Read More

Anarchy for the UK
It’s coming sometime, and maybe
I give a wrong time, stop a traffic line
Your future dream is a shopping scheme—Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the U.K.”

The debut single from the Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” was released 40 years ago today.

I am a cranky “get off my lawn” old man in my want-to-be-a-punk tastes. This is because I am a cranky old man, deep down, deeper than any punk can reach. (Or this makes me very punk, but no one can declare themselves that.) In the late 1970s one of my schoolmates was an import from London named Dan (I literally remember his name as “Dan English,” which it could not have been), and he already had terrible teeth (we were 10 or 11), a gaudy accent, and he wore torn t-shirts and played music whose major point was its loudness. (Or so it seemed to my ears.) I wish I could write that in 1977-’78 I was friends with a London kid who introduced me to the Sex Pistols and The Clash, but I can not. I detested what he was playing for me. I was also introduced to rap music around then or even earlier: another elementary school classmate was rapping like Gil Scott-Heron in 1976, but we were eight years old so what little rap that I remember him performing was about his upcoming birthday party and words like “cupcakes” were used non-metaphorically.
Read More

Helen Hooven Santmyer was born on this date in 1895. She became an overnight literary star at the age of 88 in 1983 when her first novel, …And Ladies of the Club, was finally published, hit the bestseller lists, and was turned into a miniseries.

The novel had been published by Ohio State University Press the year before to no fanfare, as it was OSU Press’ first work of fiction, and she was an unknown writer whose most recent work was a local interest memoir published twenty years earlier. Thus, her publishing history was short: a couple unnoticed novels in the 1920s, a memoir in the 1960s, and then a 1400-page novel about the life of a woman’s book club from the 1860s through the 1930s.

One day, an Ohio library patron (Santmyer lived in Ohio) heard a reader declare that the book was the best she’d ever read, so she signed the book out. This reader agreed with the assessment and phoned her son, who worked for a Hollywood agent. Hollywood came calling, and Santmyer, by now a nursing home resident, landed on the front page of the New York Times, the personification of a kind of patience.
Read More