Frank McCourt

It seems I only mention famous writers on this blog when they die, which is sad and unfortunate, really, because Frank McCourt was a writer who probably deserved to be mentioned more.

The recent streak of celebrity deaths has taught me a lot about what we value in America in terms of celebrity. Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop" got the entire first section of the Chicago Tribune (about six pages of newsprint) dedicated to coverage of fallout from his death and wall-to-wall coverage for the next twentyfour hours on every major news network. However, Walter Cronkite, the man who brought us the news for I don't know how many years, got a very nice write up on the front page of the Trib and a mention on the nightly news. I realize, of course, that Cronkite's death was more eminent than Jackson's, but why should an entertainer get more coverage than a broadcaster?

I know that McCourt may not even make the nightly news, even though he won a Pulitzer and, more amazing to me, he taught in public schools for a great deal of his life and then went back to write his three amazing auto-biographical works on his life as an Irish American. He wrote at the beginning of Teacher Man, my favorite of the three books, that you go into teaching hoping that some day you'll write your memoirs and you'll win prizes and someone will decide to make your life into a movie and you'll be famous for teaching, and that inevitably that doesn't happen. Interestingly, his first novel, Angela's Ashes, was made into a movie with Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson and it was nominated for an Oscar. Still Mr. McCourt went on injecting his realism.

He was very realistic about the whole process of teaching, but even amidst the sandwich throwing incidents and the kids who just wouldn't behave in class and explaining the structure of a sentence through the anatomy of a pen and the many, many times he nearly got fired for doing something or another, he always showed a certain humor and humanity in the classroom. That's why I loved his books. He was a great educator and a great story-teller, and I hope someday I can be the same.

Rest in peace, Mr. McCourt. My hat's off to you, sir.

Edith Wharton

Today, my Quote of the Day email informs me, is Edith Wharton's birthday. For those of you not familiar with the Pulitzer Prize winning authoress, Edith Newbold Wharton, nee Jones, was born on January 24th, 1862 and came into her life and her writing at the turn of the century. She saw the Old New York give way to the New, and the nineteenth century bow out to the twentieth as World War One came, and went, leaving a bloody swath and a irraprable impact on world politics. Wharton wrote several novels and short stories, including a manual on interior decoration that continued to guide American fashion for many years as well as Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and the House of Mirth.

The Age of Innocence holds a special place in my revered literary canon as one of the only books I've started reading after I saw the movie, and one of the only books I thoroughly enjoyed after watching the movie. Martin Scorsese is to be commended -- his film brilliantly realized what I think is some of the greatest prose writing ever, in some places even going so far as to narrate passages straight from the novel, as if he were afraid it would loose something in visual translation. I would give anything to be able to fully realize a place in prose the way Wharton does.

Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.

The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. The Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairs. They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home.

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing- rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.

Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat late. He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room...