The Writer's Almanac for Friday, September 27, 2019

A Song for the Middle of the Night
by James Wright
By way of explaining to my son the following curse by
Eustace Deschamps: "Happy is he who has no children;
for babies bring nothing but crying and stench. "

Now first of all he means the night
You beat the crib and cried
And brought me spinning out of bed
To powder your backside.
I rolled your buttocks over
And I could not complain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.

Now second of all he means the day
You dappled out of doors
And dragged a dead cat Billy-be-damned
Across the kitchen floors.
I rolled your buttocks over
And made you sing for pain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.

But third of all my father once
Laid me across his knee
And solved the trouble when he beat
The yowling out of me.
He rocked me on his shoulder
When razor straps were vain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.

So roll upon your belly, boy,
And bother being cursed.
You turn the household upside down,
But you are not the first.
Deschamps the poet blubbered too,
For all his fool disdain:
Legs up, la la, legs down, la la,
Back to sleep again.

“A Song for the Middle of the Night" by James Wright from Above the River: The Complete Poems © 1990 by Anne Wright. Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of Scottish writer Irvine Welsh (books by this author), born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1958. He's best known for his first novel, Trainspotting, which became a cult hit after it was published in 1993. A few years later, the book was adapted into a movie directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor. By the end of the decade, Irvine Welsh was one of Scotland's highest-earning writers.

Welsh grew up in the Leith, Edinburgh, housing projects, hanging out with folks who used their dole money to support their heroin addictions. He trained as a TV repairman, but after receiving a big electrical jolt, he decided to quit. He moved to London, joined the punk scene, played guitar in some bands, and was arrested for a bunch of different petty crimes. After one judge decided to suspend Welsh's sentence rather than making him serve, Welsh decided he'd take the chance to reform his ways.

He enrolled in a computer skills program, worked in real estate, and completed an MBA degree. And he found an old diary of his, from 1982, about druggie life in the Edinburgh projects. His diary, along with a journal full of notes he'd taken on a Greyhound bus ride from Los Angeles to New York, became the basis for his book Trainspotting. It's full of obscene language and vulgarity, and many critics found it offensive, but the book was still longlisted for the Booker Prize. And it was a huge best-seller.

Welsh is also the author of the novels Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Filth (1998), and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006). His most recent novel is Dead Men’s Trousers (2019).

It's the birthday of writer Joyce Johnson (books by this author), born Joyce Glassman in New York City (1935). She ran away to Greenwich Village when she was still a teenager, and got to know people at the center of the emerging Beat Generation. Her troubled, two-year affair with Jack Kerouac is recounted in her memoir Minor Characters, A Young Woman's Coming of Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac (1999), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also published Doors Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters 1957-1958, the letters she and Kerouac exchanged during their relationship.

And it is the birthday of one of science's most famous equations: E = mc².

1905 was a banner year for Albert Einstein: his annus mirabilis. It was the year he completed his doctoral thesis: "A new determination of molecular dimensions." And he also published four groundbreaking papers in the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics). In March, he submitted a paper that proved that light could behave as a particle as well as a wave, and gave rise to quantum theory ("On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light"). In May, he used Brownian motion — the irregular movement of small but visible particles suspended in a liquid or gas — to prove empirically that atoms exist. In June, in his paper "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies," he laid out his theory of Special Relativity, which deals with the way the speed of light affects the measurement of time and space.

And on September 27, 1905, he submitted a paper that asked, "Does an object's inertia depend on its energy content?" He used the equation E = mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared) to reveal that matter and energy are deeply connected. In the course of working through his theory of Special Relativity, his calculations led him to a surprising insight: if an object emits energy, the object's mass must decrease by a proportionate amount. Einstein wrote to a friend, "This thought is amusing and infectious, but I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does not laugh at it and has led me up the garden path." In a 1948 film called Atomic Physics, he explained, "It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind." Physicist and mathematician Brian Greene explains it to the average 21st-century mind this way, in a 2005 op-ed piece for The New York Times: "When you drive your car, E = mc2 is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline's mass into energy, in accord with Einstein's formula."

Einstein's equation also led to the discovery that a small amount of mass can be converted into a large amount of energy. This discovery eventually led to the development of nuclear energy — and the atomic bomb — when scientists found a way to harness the energy that binds atoms together. As Brian Greene explains, "A little bit of mass can thus yield enormous energy. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fueled by converting less than an ounce of matter into energy; the energy consumed by New York City in a month is less than that contained in the newspaper you're holding." Splitting apart the nucleus of an atom releases that binding energy and causes a chain reaction to spread throughout the nuclei of nearby atoms. Einstein's theory didn't tell scientists how to do this, but it did give them a measurement tool to determine which types of atoms had the strongest bonds and therefore the most potential energy.

On the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis, to honor his achievements, the United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Physics. And to celebrate the 100th birthday of E = mc2, a group of physicists used 21st-century technology to put Einstein's theory to the test. They measured the mass of radioactive atoms before and after the atoms emitted gamma radiation, and they also measured the energy contained in the gamma rays. They plugged the numbers into Einstein's famous equation and found that it was accurate within four hundred thousandths of one percent.

Today is the birthday of the man often called the "father of the American cartoon," Thomas Nast (books by this illustrator), born in Landau, Germany (1840). His father had socialist leanings and found the political climate of Germany unpleasant. He sent the family to New York when Thomas was just six, and joined them three years later. As a teenager, Nash studied art at the National Academy of Design, and landed work as a draftsman with Harper's Weekly. By the time he was 20, he was covering conflicts overseas for papers in England and at home. He spoke out firmly on behalf of the Union at the dawn of the Civil War, drawing cartoons for Harper's that showed the horrors of slavery. Lincoln called him his "best recruitment sergeant," and Grant credited his re-election victory in 1868 to "the sword of Sherman and the pencil of Nast."

Cartoons by Nast were frequently printed in large two-page spreads, sometimes close to two feet wide. He is the first cartoonist to have had the platform of a weekly nationally distributed magazine. After the war, his reputation led to great success as a book illustrator, working on 110 books over the course of his career. Nast is also credited with first drawing the elephant of the Republican Party and one of the most popular images of Santa Claus.

In the late 1860s, Nast and the editors at Harper's and The New York Times set their sights on the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall administration and their leader William "Boss" Tweed, who at one point was the third-largest landowner in New York. Nast's cartoons depicted Tweed as a bloated, thuggish politician, and the drawings were so effective that Tweed is said to have ordered his lackeys to "Stop them pictures! My constituents can't read, but they can see those pictures!" Tweed's group was thrown out in the election of 1871, and when he escaped from jail and fled to Vigo, Spain, in 1876, it was the popular caricature by Nast that led to his discovery by authorities.

Nast was most comfortable fighting, and one critic described him as "content to see the world as a struggle between good and evil." When the political currents began to shift after the war, he didn't shift with them. As literacy grew, magazines and papers were increasingly read by women and immigrants, and his distrust of Roman Catholics led to some nasty depictions of the Irish. When a new editor took over at Harper's, the two couldn't agree, and Nast left to freelance and launch his own paper, which soon failed. Out of work and desperate, he took an appointment as ambassador to Ecuador in 1902, where he died of yellow fever after just six months.

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