The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, May 23, 2013
"Anniversary" by Davi Walders, from A More Perfect Union. © St. Martin's Press, 1999.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
Today is the birthday of poet Jane Kenyon, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1947. She was married to fellow poet Donald Hall, and in 1975 they moved to his ancestral home in New Hampshire, where she would write in the mornings and garden in the afternoons. Her poems were about rural New England life, and they were about depression, which she battled all her life. She told Bill Moyers: "It's odd but true that there really is consolation from sad poems, and it's hard to know how that happens. There is the pleasure of the thing itself, the pleasure of the poem, and somehow it works against sadness."
She only published four books of poetry and a volume of translation before her untimely death from leukemia at the age of 47.
Today is the birthday of the author of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon: Margaret Wise Brown, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1910. Brownie, as she was known to her friends, had a revolutionary idea about children's stories: Kids would rather read about things from their own world than fairy tales and fables.
She was a lovely green-eyed blonde, extravagant and a little eccentric; with her first royalty check, she bought a street vendor's entire cart full of flowers, and then threw a party at her Upper East Side apartment to show off her purchase. She was a prolific author, writing nearly a hundred picture books under several pen names and sometimes keeping six different publishers busy at once with her projects. She was known to produce a book just so she could buy a plane ticket to Europe.
At one time, she dated Juan Carlos, Prince of Spain, and she had a long-term relationship with Michael Strange, John Barrymore's ex-wife. When she was 42, she met James Stillman Rockefeller Jr., who was 26, at a party and they hit it off immediately. They had a similar whimsical take on life, and were engaged to be married when she died suddenly; she had had surgery a few weeks before, and was kicking up her leg like a can-can dancer to show her doctor how well she felt. The kick dislodged a blood clot that was in her leg, and the clot traveled to her heart, killing her.
She never had children of her own, but she left the royalties for most of her books to a nine-year-old neighbor boy, Albert Clarke. Her estate was once worth a few hundred dollars, and now amounts to about $5 million — or rather, it would, had Clarke not squandered the inheritance, spending his life in and out of jail, throwing away clothes when they get dirty, and making a succession of bad real estate deals.
She said, "A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling."
It's the birthday of Edward Norton Lorenz, born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1917. He started out as a mathematician, but turned to meteorology during World War II. In an attempt to explain why it's so difficult to make a long-range weather forecast, he spawned chaos theory, one of the 20th century's most revolutionary scientific ideas.
Chaos theory is sometimes known as "the butterfly effect," a term coined by Lorenz in an attempt to explain how small actions in a dynamic system like the atmosphere could trigger vast and unexpected changes. He discovered the effect in the early 1960s while entering values into a computer weather prediction program; instead of entering the number to the full six decimal places, he rounded it to three to save time, and the resulting weather pattern was completely different. He first framed it as the effect a seagull's wing has on the formation of a hurricane, but he changed it to the more poetic butterfly in his 1972 presentation, "Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?"
Though the term dates back to 1972, the concept actually predates Lorenz's discovery. Science fiction writers had been playing around with the idea for several years in their time-travel stories: Usually the hero goes back in time and makes some seemingly insignificant choice that ends up changing the course of history.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
Margaret Wise Brown left her estate to a neighbor boy who "squandered the entire estate". You should also explain that he had significant issues before he knew about the bequest. The money may not have made any difference in his behavior. Be fair to him and tell the whole story.
Ray Bradbury published a story, "A Sound of Thunder" in 1952 about a time traveler who steps on a butterfly. Then there is no butterfly in the modern world when he returns, and no letter "b". At least that's the gist as I remember it. It's probably been more than 60 years since I read it, but it seemed to express something important, especially since I now can't tell you what I read last night. I have always assumed the term "Butterfly Effect" came from that story.