Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

It’s official—Annie Proulx told off her slashfic writing fans in today’s Wall Street Journal : “There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for “fixing” the story. They certainly don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you've got to stand it. Most of these ’fix-it’ tales have the character Ennis finding a husky boyfriend and living happily ever after, or discovering the character Jack is not really dead after all, or having the two men’s children meet and marry, etc, etc. Nearly all of these remedial writers are men, and most of them begin, ’I'm not gay but...’ They do not understand the original story, they know nothing of copyright infringement—ie, that the characters Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual prope...

Jack Kerouac’s editor died today at the age of 94, having lived twice as long as his legendary author. He was T.S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s 1984 , accepting it despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful. He introduced a long roster of illustrious writers, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, William Gaddis, and Susan Sontag. He also edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, and William Golding. SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE. _____

This was the poem heard on the TV in “Maidenform”, last night's episode of Mad Men . The author of this sonnet—most known to television audiences of a certain age as part of the air sign-off—was John Gillespie Magee Jr (1922-1941), an Anglo-American aviator and son of missionaries, was killed in flight while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. “High Flight” was sent to on the back of a letter to his father, then a church rector in Washington DC, and became popularized through the efforts of poet Archibald MacLeish. It now serves as the RCAF and the Royal Air Force's official poem; it also is required to be recited by memory by first year cadets at the United States Air Force Academy. Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things You have not dreame...