| Snow
by Anne Sexton
Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.
There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don’t bite till you know
if it’s bread or stone.
What I bite is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.
There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.
Anne Sexton, "Snow" from The Awful Rowing Toward God. © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) It's the birthday of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (books by this author), born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht in Augsburg, Bavaria (1898). He studied philosophy, drama and medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he first experimented with writing poetry and plays. Following the death of his mother in 1920 he began writing plays in earnest. His first major runaway success was The Threepenny Opera (1928), a creative collaboration with composer Kurt Weill. The Threepenny Opera was an adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and it offered a harsh critique of capitalism from a Socialist perspective. It was during this time that Brecht developed his theory of "epic theater" which asks the audience to acknowledge the stage as a stage, the actors as actors, and not some make-believe world of real people. With Hitler's rise to power in 1933 Brecht sought asylum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, and journeyed across Russia and Persia. He produced some of his most famous anti-war works during that time, including Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). He eventually settled in Santa Monica where he wrote more than 50 screenplays in six years, but only one of them was accepted: Hangmen Also Die (1943), an anti-Nazi film that came out in the middle of World War II. He later said, "The intellectual isolation [in Hollywood] is enormous. Compared to Hollywood, Svendborg is a world center." In 1947 he was blacklisted by the studios when he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being a Communist sympathizer. Brecht stated in front of the HUAC: "We are living in a dangerous world. Our state of civilization is such that mankind already is capable of becoming enormously wealthy but, as a whole, is still poverty-ridden. Great wars have been suffered, greater ones are imminent, we are told. One of them might well wipe out mankind, as a whole. We might be the last generation of the specimen man on this earth. The ideas about how to make use of the new capabilities of production have not been developed much since the days when the horse had to do what man could not do. Do you not think that, in such a predicament, every new idea should be examined carefully and freely? Art can present clear and even make nobler such ideas." He made his way to East Germany in 1949 and went on to run the Berliner Ensemble, which soon became the country's most famous theater company. Brecht died of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 58 and is buried in Berlin. He wrote, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it." It's the birthday of Fleur Adcock (books by this author), born in Papakura, New Zealand (1934), who is the author of the poetry collections The Eye of the Hurricane (1964), High Tide in the Garden (1971), Time Zones (1991), and Dragon Talk (2010). It's the birthday of the novelist Mary McGarry Morris (books by this author), born in Meriden, Connecticut (1943). She's the author of the big best-seller Songs in Ordinary Time (1995), and most recently Light from a Distant Star (2011). It's the birthday of the man who wrote Doctor Zhivago (1957), Boris Pasternak (books by this author), born in Moscow (1890). His father was a painter and his mother was a famous pianist, and they encouraged his love of literature from a young age. He spent hours alone in his bedroom reading the classics of Russian literature — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Pushkin. His first two books were collections of poetry, A Twin in the Clouds (1914) and Over the Barriers (1917). After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 he decided that prose could better address the nation's problems and so he started writing fiction. In the early '30s he began work on his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, an epic novel that follows the lives of more than 60 characters through the first half of 20th-century Russia. He wrote, "I always dreamt of a novel in which, as in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world." He finally finished it in 1955 and smuggled it out of the Soviet Union to a publisher in Italy. Pasternak said at the time that he knew he was signing his own death warrant but he felt he had to go through with it. The novel came out in 1957. It was immediately banned in the Soviet Union but it became an international best-seller, selling 7 million copies worldwide. The next year Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature but he was forced to refuse it. He spent the last two years of his life living in a writers' colony, satisfied with the knowledge that his novel had been published, even if he couldn't see a printed copy. He died in 1960. In 1989, his son finally accepted the Nobel Prize on his behalf. It's the birthday of Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad (books by this author), born in Oslo (1970). She's best known for her work The Bookseller of Kabul (2003), which was an international best-seller. After college in Norway, she began a nomadic existence. She went to China to study Chinese and to Berlin to learn German, Moscow to work for a news agency, and to Belgrade to live in an artists' colony. She also lived in Mexico, France, and Italy. She's fluent in five languages, and is "okay," as she puts it, in four more languages. After September 11, 2001, she spent six weeks in rural parts of Afghanistan with the commandos of the Northern Alliance, traveling on the back of trucks and in military vehicles and sleeping on stone floors and in mud huts. She rode into Kabul with the Northern Alliance in November 2001. She found a great bookstore, a place owned by an Afghan man who was well-educated and loved to talk about politics and writing. After weeks spent in the war-torn countryside, "among gunpowder and rubble, where conversations centered on the tactics of war and military advance," she said, "it was refreshing to leaf through books and talk about literature and history." So she stopped by that bookshop often to peruse the books and to chat with the owner, a man so passionate about books that he'd hid them from police to prevent them from being burned during different sieges — and had gone to prison. The bookstore owner invited her to a meal with his family. She said, "The atmosphere was unrestrained, a huge contrast to the simple meals with the commandos in the mountains. ... When I left I said to myself this is Afghanistan. How interesting it would be to write a book about this family." She visited him the next day to tell him about her idea of writing a book about his family. She asked if she could live with him and his family and follow them around in order to write this book. He agreed and she moved in with his extended family in February 2002. She stayed for three months. The book she wrote about his family, The Bookseller of Kabul, was a huge success. The New York Times called it "the most intimate description of an Afghan household ever produced by a Western journalist." But the thinly disguised bookseller of Kabul, Shah Mohammed Rais — "Sultan Khan" in the book — was not happy about the way he had been portrayed and flew to Norway to launch his own publicity campaign. He wrote his own book, called Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul (2007). It's about how two Norwegian trolls visit Afghanistan with preconceived notions and then abuse his family's hospitality in order to frame a colorful, detail-oriented portrait to fit those preconceived notions. Åsne Seierstad’s latest book is One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (2015). Breivik’s murdered 77 people on the 22nd of July 2011. Sentenced to 21 years, Norway’s strictest sentence, this January he requested parole, a request which has been denied. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 