Tuesday Jan. 20, 2015

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Walking Home from Oak-Head

The text of today’s poem is not available online. Listen to it here.

“Walking Home from Oak-Head” by Mary Oliver from Thirst. © Beacon Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission.   (buy now)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first president to take the oath of office on January 20, back in 1937. Originally, the Presidential Inauguration Day had been March 4th to allow the new president time to get to Washington D.C. Due to the speed of modern transportation and communication, Congress decided there was no need to wait so long between the election and the oath of office, so they established the new date with the passage of the Twentieth Amendment. It was FDR’s second inaugural, and in his address he examined the progress the nation had made in the intervening four years. He said: “Have we reached the goal of our vision of that fourth day of March 1933? Have we found our happy valley? I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of natural resources [...] I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown [...] But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens [...] who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life [...] The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

LaMarcus Thompson patented the first Coney Island roller coaster on this date in 1885. It was called the Gravity Switchback Railway, it cost a nickel to ride, and it was an immediate success, drawing huge crowds and bringing in $600 a day. It’s considered the first commercially successful roller coaster, and it was the first roller coaster specifically built as an amusement park ride. Thompson had based his design on a coal mining rail system in Pennsylvania. Riders climbed a tower, where they boarded the train and coasted down 600 feet of track to another tower, where the train was switched to a return track. The Gravity Switchback Railway reached speeds as high as six miles per hour. Last summer, Coney Island debuted its latest roller coaster, the Thunderbolt. It boasts a 90-degree drop and more than 2,200 feet of track, and it reaches speeds up to 55 miles an hour.

It was on this day in 1900 that 18-year-old student James Joyce (books by this author) presented his lecture “Drama and Life” to the Literary and Historical Society of Dublin. Joyce was worried about the speech, which he’d written 10 days before. It was full of controversial ideas, it was long, and he feared it would go over the heads of his audience, whose respect was very important to him. His anxiety showed, and he read it without much enthusiasm — he discussed the merits of literature as an art form, dismissed Shakespeare as passé, and praised the writer Henrik Ibsen, who at the time was considered amoral and unworthy of attention, let alone praise. His fears were well founded: the college president threatened to ban the paper, and his peers railed him with challenges and arguments afterward. One of Joyce’s friends wrote about what happened next: “Joyce rose to reply at about 10 o’clock, when the bell was ringing on the landing outside to signal that it was time to wind up the proceedings. He spoke without a note for at least 30 minutes and dealt with each of his critics in turn. It was a masterly performance and delivered to the accompaniment of rounds of applause from the back benches.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Susan Vreeland (books by this author), born in Racine, Wisconsin (1946). She taught high school English in San Diego, California, for 30 years, and had done a little writing, including a novel called What Love Sees (1988). But she didn’t really embark on her writing career full-bore until after she was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1996. She had chemotherapy and operations, and during her recovery she couldn’t do much but look at art books. She found the paintings of Vermeer very soothing, so in her hiatus from teaching, she decided to write a book about him. Vermeer only turned out 30-some paintings, so Vreeland began a novel with the premise that he had painted one more, called Girl in Hyacinth Blue. It became a best-seller in 1999.

Her most recent novel is Lisette's List (2014).

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