Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

August 29

1974 "It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody's arm up close." Nixon had just quit, and Dylan Ebdus, heading into fifth grad, and Mingus Rude, heading into sixth and new to the Brooklyn neighborhood—call it Boerum Hill or Gowanus, depending on whether you were trying to gentrify or not—had just met. Dylan, white, was local but uncomfortable there; Mingus, new, made himself at home, the son...

August 28

NO YEAR It's a simple proposition at the end of a night of poker: cut the cards, and if Nashe and Pozzi get the high card, they get the $5,000 back they owe, but if Flower and Stone win then Nashe and Pozzi are down $10,000 they don't have. The result—seven of hearts for Flower, four of diamonds for Nashe—leads to another proposition:the losers can pay off their debt by building a massive wall from the...

August 27

1959 Frank O'Hara was half-joking when, at lunch on this day with LeRoi Jones, he proposed a new literary movement, "Personism," and followed through a week later with "Personism: A Manifesto" for Jone's magazine, Yugen. In a tone as off-handedly and evocatively conversational as his poems, he promised nothing—"What can we expect of Personism? ... Everything , but we won't get it"—but still managed to ...

August 26

1945

...in American fiction: Sonny the hothead, Freddo the dutiful coward, and Michael the sceptic independent, who sits at a far table with his future wife, Kay, and decides how much of his family's business to reveal to her while, back in his office, the Don blandly promises Johnny Fontaine that he'll take care of the studio boss who's been giving him trouble; "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.'

August 25

1909 Fat and thin, Catholic and skeptic, individualist and socialist, carnivore and vegetarian, tippler and teetotaler, moustachioed and bearded: G. K. Chesterton and G. B. Shaw were seen as almost comical opposites when they regularly and affectionately locked antlers at the turn of the twentieth century, a combat that culminated in Chesterton's biography of Shaw in 1909, which Shaw himself reviewed...

1925 "The thing I think about most", Every Waugh wrote to Laura Herbert from Ethiopia, "is your eyelashes making a noise like a bat on the pillow."

August 23

1956 Attacked by the Nazis in Germany and hounded out of Norway in the '30s, Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychoanalyst who claimed to have discovered a life force known as 'orgone energy," had a quieter time of it during his first eight years in the United States, where his work attracted the attention of, among others, Norman Mailer and William Steig. But after a series of articles in the New Republic ...

August 22

1903 One reason William James has remained an interesting thinker is that he paired a desire to establish a Big Idea with a skepticism that such a thing was possiible or even worthwhile. "I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease,," he wrote a friend on this day while snuggling to compose a major work of philosophy. I actually dread to die until I have settled the ...

August 21

1921... book Winnie-the-Pooh was published with illustrations by E.H. Shepard. Shepard based his drawings of Christopher Robin on the real Christopher Milne (who like his father would later weary of the way these stories defined him to the world), but as his model for the immortal Bear of Very Little Brain Shepard used not the real "Pooh" but a teeny bear, known as "Growler," owned by his own son Graham.

August 20

1979 ... Majors—on the cover was not a statement of approval or disapproval of Farrah or her talent, as might have once been the case. Instead it was in the spirit of what Trow with grim relish called "the important moment in the history of television," when Richard Dawson asked Family Feud contestants to guess, not the correct answer to a question, but what a hundred other Americans had already guessed.

August 19

1938 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's card tricks convinced André Gide he must be clairvoyant.

August 18

1912 ...two poems and offering to keep her "in touch with whatever is most dynamic in artistic thought....I do see nearly everyone that matters." Over the next few years he brought T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and H.D. among others, to Poetry before breaking with the magazine in a series of letters whose tone he hinted at in this first note when he added, "However I need not bore you with jeremiads,"

August 17

1918 Louis Untermeyer, in the New Republic, on Ezra Pound's Pavannes and Divisions: "It is the record of a creative talent grown sterile, of a disorderly retreat into the mazes of technique and pedantry."

August 16

1898 ... a bundle of documents into his hands, including a birth certificate and passport showing years of European travel and a birth date on this day. Mustafa soon disappears from the village, but not before burdening the narrator with the tragic story of his own travels north. For years after, like a figure out of Poe, Mustafa haunts him as a phantom, a double whose legacy he feels doomed to follow.

August 15

1973 Passing herself off as Zora Neale Hurston's niece to discourage "foot-dragging" among those who could tell her something about the late writer, who had died in poverty and obscurity, thirteen years before, Alice Walker arrived in Eatonville, Florida, the tiny, all-black town Hurston had grown up in. Soon she and a fellow Hurston scholar, Charlotte Hunt, were directed to the graveyard where Hurston ...

August 14

1947 "So how did your grandmother die?" "Natural causes." "What?". "Flood." Michael Ondaatje recounted his family's history in Sri Lanka in stories that retain the polished, elliptical style of legend, including the life and death of his grandmother Layla. An eccentric, alcoholholic widow who lived according to means she no longer possessed, Lalla imagined a great death for hers3l and found it: as storm...

August 13

1912... with his manuscript that night: "I was completely under the influence of the girl." A month later he wrote his first of over five hundred lettesr to her, promising—falsely, as it would turn out —that he was an "erratic letter writer" and "never expected[ed] a letter to be answered by return," and closing with words that would be innocuous were he not Franz Kafka: "You might well give me a trial."

August 12

1984 Published: Bright Lights, Big city by Jay McInerney )Vintage Contemporaries, New York)

August 11

1937 ... in his editor Maxwell Perkins's office, he pulled open his shirt to reveal his full, authentic pelt. Before long the two men were grappling on the floor. They continued their battle for days in the New York papers, with Eastman claiming he had stood the younger man on his hid while Hemingway offered a rematch: for $1,000, they would be left alone in a room and "the best man unlocks the door."

August 10

1958 Glenn Gould was not averse to placing his idiosyncratically brilliant piano career in a literary context, as in a self-interview he conducted in which he suggested to himself that the Salzburg Festspielhaus, where he played a concert on this day, would, with its "Kafka-like setting at the base o a cliff," be a perfect site for "the martyr's end you so desire." And others have been equally willing ...

August 9

1945 "Did I tell you what Jean-Paul Sartre said about your work? He's a little man with bad teeth, absolutely the best talker I ever met," Malcolm Cowley wrote to William Faulkner. "Pour les jeaunes en France, Faulkner c'est un dieu." Faulkner, mired in Hollywood with his books out of print could hardly have minded being called a god, nor did he resist Cowley's pitch in the same letter to construct a ...

August 8

1969 When her friend Rex Reed decided he was too tired to go out that night, Jacqueline Susann called Sharon Tate, who had starred in the movie of her book Valley of the Dolls, and told her she wouldn't be able to make her dinner party.

August 7

1958. ...a moonshiner and a man of mysterious wealth and local power "went hunting and came home dead." In David Bradley's novel, it becomes the obsessive burden of Moses's son John, a professor of history, to return to his hometown and unearth the truth behind both incidents and the connection between them, a task that will require his scholarly skill as well as the full means of his humanity to fulfil.

August 6

1945 ...the suburbs. soon after the Japanese surrender, John Hersey gathered the stories of theses six survivors of the atomic blast into Hiroshima, a spare, declarative account that ws given an entire issue of The New Yorker, read aloud for four straight nights on ABC radio, and sent for free to all Book-of-the-Month Club members, although the Allied occupying authorities kept if from circulating in Japan.