Brotherhood

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Brotherhood

by X. J. Kennedy

Hungry at dawn, anointing slabs of bread
With oily peanut butter, I remember
The snare I'd laid. Perhaps a mouse and I

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I kneel and from beneath the sink retrieve
The spring trap, in its clasp
The forehead of a victim who'd believed

Its prize within his grasp.

Stiff frozen tail, expression of chagrin—
Into the trash compactor. Dust to dust.
It owes me nothing more, this guillotine

Sprung many times, blood-stained, springs red with rust.

Thoughtful, I chew a half-stale apple tart.
More tempting baits I've risked my neck for, but
When will that ring of fat around my heart
Snap shut?

"Brotherhood" by X.J. Kennedy, from In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007. © The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Word of the Day

Word of the Day

foudroyant \foo-DROI-uhnt\, adjective:

1. Overwhelming and sudden in effect.
2. Pathology. (Of disease) beginning in a sudden and severe form.
3. Striking as with lightning.

When it suddenly occurred to John, however, that this perhaps had some share in the ladies' hasty decision, that Mrs. Dennistoun perhaps (all that was objectionable was attributed to this poor lady) had been so abominably clear-sighted, so odiously presuming as to have suspected this, his sudden blaze of anger was foudroyant.

-- Margaret Oliphant, The marriage of Elinor

I remember myself, in childhood, to have met a niece of John Wesley the ProtoMethodist, who always spoke of the second Lord Mornington (author of the well-known glees) as a cousin, and as intimately connected with her brother the great foudroyant performer on the organ.

-- Thomas De Quincey, The note book of an English opium-eater

Foudroyant is adapted from the French foudroyer, "to strike with lightning."

Jonathan Franzen

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday [8/17] of Jonathan Franzen, born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). He grew up in St. Louis.

He graduated from Swarthmore, spent a year in Berlin on a Fulbright, and worked at Harvard in the seismology lab, studying earthquakes. When he was 22 years old, he started writing his first novel, and six years later it was published as The Twenty-Seventh City (1988). It got a lot of good reviews, but it didn't make much of a splash in more mainstream culture, and Franzen was disappointed. The same thing happened with his second novel, Strong Motion (1992). So he wrote an essay for Harper's called "Perchance to Dream" and complained that America no longer had any place for a "big, social novel" that was both literary and relevant. He said that America had become obsessed with money, technology, and celebrity.

Then he went ahead and wrote a big, social novel that the critics loved but was also a best-seller: The Corrections (2001). He wrote it over a period in which his marriage broke up, his father succumbed to Alzheimer's disease and died, and his mother got cancer and died as well. He said, "The most important experience of my life, really, to date, is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had."

Since then, Franzen has published a book of essays called How to Be Alone (2002) and a memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006). His first novel since The Corrections is coming out in a couple of weeks. It's called Freedom, and it's the story of Patty and Walter Berglund, a progressive couple from St. Paul who find themselves middle-aged and no longer in control of their lives that once seemed so perfect. Walter is working for the coal industry, their teenage son has moved out to live with Republicans, and Patty is torn between her husband and his best friend from college.

Jonathan Franzen said, "I come from a kind of old-fashioned Midwest, and I live in a technocorporate, postironic, cool, late-late-late Eastern world. The two worlds hardly ever talk to each other, but they're completely, constantly talking to one another inside me. [...] I have my parents talking to me in my head and then other parts of myself talking back. I think this is potentially an interesting conversation."

It's the birthday of Stieg Larsson

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

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It's the birthday [8/15] of Stieg Larsson, born in Skelleftehamn, Sweden (1954). He's the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, October (2007). Together the books form the Millennium trilogy, about a tattooed 20-something computer-hacking young woman with poor social skills — and her detective sidekick, a financial journalist. The books in the trilogy have sold about 30 million copies in more than 40 countries around the world.

Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004, at the age of 50, the year before his first book was actually published, so he never saw any of the massive royalties his estate is earning. In 2008, four years after his death, he was the second-best-selling author in the world, after Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. His books have been translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland, which is actually the pseudonym of Steven T. Murray of Berkeley, California. The first of Stieg Larsson's books appeared in English in 2008; the third of his trilogy was released in the U.S. just this past May. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo begins:

"It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day — which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call." (translation by Reg Keeland)