Notes in the Margin Weblog

Annie Proulx no longer at home on the range - Los Angeles Times:

“I wish I’d never written it,” prize-winning author Annie Proulx says of her most famous story, “Brokeback Mountain,” which was made into a popular movie.

Now Proulx, age 73, who “has often criticized the literary establishment for knowing nothing about what goes on in America outside its cities,” is ready to move from the Wyoming land that has figured prominently in much of her work.

Le Clezio — who’s he? - Los Angeles Times:

This year’s Nobel laureate for literature is little-known in the States. Perhaps this is evidence of our bias. Or maybe it’s a product of the Swedish Academy’s willful dismissal of U.S. writers.

Stephen King turns 61 today. Long live the King.

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Robert McCloskey, . . . the author and illustrator of children’s books, born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1914. He grew up loving music, especially the harmonica. He said, “The musician’s life was the life for me — that is, until I became interested in things electrical and mechanical. … The inventor’s life was the life for me — that is, until I started making drawings for the high school annual.” He got a scholarship to art school in Boston, and he did well there. But afterward, he couldn’t make it as an artist, and all he sold were a few watercolors of Cape Cod. One day, he went to visit an editor of children’s books in New York City, and he brought along his portfolio. It was filled with fantasy scenes, with magic and strange beasts. He took the images and the characters and the stories from life there, and he wrote and illustrated a picture book about a regular boy in a regular Midwestern town. The boy can’t whistle, so he learns to play the harmonica, and the boy and his harmonica save the day when the mayor’s homecoming celebration is almost ruined. This book was called Lentil (1940), and the next year he published Make Way for Ducklings (1941), which won a Caldecott. In 1987, bronze sculptures of Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings from the book were installed in the Boston Public Garden. McCloskey also wrote Blueberries for Sal (1948) and Time of Wonder (1957).

Robert McCloskey said, “I get a lot of letters. Not only from children but from adults, too. Almost every week, every month, clippings come in from some part of the world where ducks are crossing the street.”

The Writer’s Almanac is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.

The photo above is of the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture in Boston.

Newfound Tapes Offer Clues to Agatha Christie’s Life - NYTimes.com:

Agatha Christie’s only grandson has discovered a box of audiotapes in one of Christie’s former houses:

The tapes — 27 reels running a total of more than 13 hours — are filled with Christie’s painstaking dictation of her life story, rough material recorded in the early 1960s that eventually made up her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. It stands as one of only a handful of recordings of Christie, the British mystery writer, who rarely agreed to be interviewed.

Walker on mission | Denton Record-Chronicle | News for Denton County, Texas | Local News
Herschel Walker, winner of the Heisman Trophy (an award for college football players) and former member of the Dallas Cowboys, has written a book about his experience with dissociative identity disorder (DID, commonly known as multiple personality disorder) and his efforts to overcome the disorder. He has been touring to promote the book, Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder. This article reports on his appearance in Denton, TX, in association with University Behavioral Health (UBH) of Denton:

‘He [Walker] has a mission for himself of bringing a message out to people who have mental health issues, that it’s a strength to ask for help, not a weakness,’ said UBH of Denton Chief Executive Officer Susan Young. ‘He wants people to know he’s had issues and he sees that as something very positive. He doesn’t want anybody to be uncomfortable or ashamed.’

Walker’s own condition surfaced about 10 years ago, when he suddenly developed anger problems. His search for the cause of his problem finally led to the diagnosis of DID. He wants to let people with mental health issues, including substance abuse, know that it’s all right to seek help. He is critical of the National Football League’s substance abuse policy, which, he says, suspends players for abuse without providing treatment.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Is Dead at 89 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

From the always-eager-to-sell-you-a-book folks at Amazon comes this notification:

As someone who has purchased Harry Potter products from Amazon.com, you might be happy to hear that The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling’s book of fairy tales written to supplement the Harry Potter series, will be published in two new editions on December 4, 2008.

Now, as a full-time student, I’ve been buried under mounds of textbooks for the past three years, and I was completely unaware of this literary gem. Apparently Rowling penned it and then auctioned it off, with the proceeds going to a children’s charity. You can read all about it at the Amazon page:

Amazon.com: The Fairy Tales of J.K. Rowling

Be sure to scroll all the way down the page to look at the photographs, which include some of Rowling’s hand-drawn illustrations. And, if you really have some time on your hands, follow the links to the comments at the bottom of the page.

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress)

This is a site you’ll definitely want to bookmark.

What if you wanted to locate Robert Burton’s masterful 17th century opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy? But wait: You can’t remember his name or the name of the book. That’s where you should know to click on over to this delightful and helpful reference guide created by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist at the Library of Congress. The intent of this guide is to “help readers identify a literary work when they know only its plot or subject, or other textual information such as a character’s name, a line of poetry, or a unique word or phrase”. The guide is divided into three separate sections: “Finding Novels”, “Finding Short Stories”, and “Finding Poems”. Each section offers a host of resources that include general search engines, online book databases, library catalogs, listservs, message boards, and physical print resources available in many public libraries. This guide is rounded out by a selection of related resources, including a primer on how to find poems in the Library of Congress.

>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2008. http://scout.wisc.edu/

This is from The Writer’s Almanac, which is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media:

It’s the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee, (books by this author) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a friend from childhood of Truman Capote, and she later traveled to Kansas with him to help with the research of his work for In Cold Blood (1966). In college, she worked on the humor magazine Ramma-Jamma. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but dropped out before earning a degree, moving to New York to pursue a writing career. She later said that her years in law school were “good training for a writer.”

To support herself while writing, she worked for several years as a reservation clerk at British Overseas Airline Corporation and at Eastern Air Lines. In December of 1956, some of her New York friends gave her a year’s salary along with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” She decided to devote herself to writing and moved into an apartment with only cold water and improvised furniture.

Lee wrote very slowly, extensively revising for two and a half years on the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird (which she had called at different times “Go Set a Watchman” and “Atticus”). She called herself “more a rewriter than writer,” and on a winter night in 1958, she was so frustrated with the progress of her novel and its many drafts that she threw the manuscripts out the window of her New York apartment into the deep snow below. She called her editor to tell him, and he convinced her to go outside and collect the papers.

To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960 and was immediately a popular and critical success. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. A review in The Washington Post read, “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Lee later said, “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”