Monday Feb. 2, 2015

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The Coyote

If you stripped a dog of its social eagerness,
gave it a loping indifference to human presence
and starved it, you’d have a coyote,
stalking like a shadow among the garbage cans
at the top of Pearl Street, near the Fine Arts Work Center.
We’re heading back to our car through a fine mist,
the streetlights haloing amid the black trees,
and we stop, watching him appear and disappear
gaunt as a Giacometti. He’s nothing
like a dog bounding into the street.
Does he care if this is a street?—or just a hard place
under his paws. Ever since childhood
I’ve tried to be alert to what people are up to,
but why not see the coyote’s point of view?—
how he prefers to ignore them,
following his own track through the darkness.

“The Coyote” by Alan Feldman from Immortality. © University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.   (buy now)

It was on this day in 1876 that the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs was formed, known today as the National League. The first official, recorded baseball game in America had taken place just 30 years earlier, in Hoboken, New Jersey, when the Knickerbocker Baseball Club played the New York Nine; the Knickerbockers lost 23-1. Baseball gained popularity, and the first convention was held in 1857 and attended by 15 teams, all from New York. Participation declined dramatically during the Civil War but then rose again. The first professional club was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, formed in 1869. The team averaged $1,000 in ticket sales for each exhibition game. Seeing the success of the Red Stockings, professional teams began forming in cities from New York to Indiana, Pennsylvania to Illinois. In 1871, these teams formed the first professional league: the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Unfortunately, this league was terribly managed, rampant gambling was influencing game outcomes, teams were springing up in cities much too small to support them, and one team — the Boston Red Stockings — completely dominated the league.

William Hulbert, a businessman and the owner of the Chicago White Stockings, decided that a reorganization was needed. He created a new professional league, this one with a restricted number of teams, a highly organized structure and roster, and a clear distinction between players and owners. He organized a meeting in New York City, and on this day in 1876, eight of the strongest existing teams signed a charter to join his new league: the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. The new league quickly put its predecessor out of business.

Mark Twain said, “Base ball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”

It was on this day in 1922 that Ulysses by James Joyce was published (books by this author). It was Joyce’s 40th birthday — he had chosen it as the publication date for good luck. Ulysses had taken seven years to write and edit. By the end, Joyce estimated that he had spent 20,000 hours on the book. During the years that he wrote it, his eyesight worsened. He lived with his family in a series of apartments — mostly small and shabby — in Trieste, Zurich, and finally Paris. He wrote wherever he could, at the kitchen table or in bed. Despite an eye operation in 1917, by the end of the process he struggled to make out print, and editing was painful. The editing process was complicated even without Joyce’s poor eyesight. His publisher, Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, was a generous and tireless champion of the book, but she was inexperienced. She found an excellent French printer in Dijon, but the printing was happening 160 miles from Paris, and the printer enlisted more than 20 people who did not know English to set type for the novel, so errors crept in. Joyce continued to revise his novel, adding 100,000 words to the page proofs during the printing process. The printers could not always decipher his handwriting, and although Joyce tried to fix all the errors, he missed quite a few because of his eyesight and the sheer volume of pages. In the end, the first printing of Ulysses contained this note on the title page: “The publisher asks the reader’s indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances.” Joyce was frustrated by the mistakes; he wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver: “I am extremely irritated by all those printer’s errors. Working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel, I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half. Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not.” In 1984, a new version of Ulysses was published claiming to correct more than 5,000 errors, although many Joyce scholars discredited it.

On this day in 1922, the first two copies of Ulysses arrived via train from Dijon — one copy for Joyce and the other for Shakespeare & Company. That night, Joyce went out with friends to a celebratory dinner at an Italian restaurant, Ferrari’s, and he brought his copy along.

It is the birthday of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (books by this author), born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia (1905). In 1917, she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony. A communist gang took over her father’s shop, and her family was immediately reduced to poverty. After college, Rand worked as a guide in a historical museum, but when she got a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, she vowed never to return to Russia.

Within six months of living in America, Rand moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. She published her first screenplay in 1932, and that allowed her to work on novels in her spare time. Her first important novel was one that she’d planned to write about skyscrapers: The Fountainhead (1943), about an architect named Howard Roark who blows up a housing project he built because his design was corrupted by the influence of others. When he is put on trial, he explains his philosophy that, in order to achieve greatness, individuals have to be allowed to realize their own personal vision, and not be tied down by the concerns of society. These ideas became the basis of Rand’s philosophy, called Objectivism, which she also explored in her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957).

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