C/Kain, Springsteen and Steinbeck

Today we (Thomas, Jimmy and I) were riding in the car, listening to "The Ghost of Tom Joad," covered by Rage Against the Machine. Thomas mentioned to Jimmy (my stepson) that it was actually a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song, which led him then to relate that it was based on a John Steinbeck character from Grapes of Wrath. Then he added that Springsteen was a big fan of Steinbeck, to which Jimmy replied that "that made sense" to him. Then Thomas went on about Steinbeck and Springsteen and mentioned that he had been wanting to play the song "Adam Raised a Cain" for Jimmy. Just then we pulled up to a red light behind an SUV with a logo from JACK KAIN AUTO SALES.

Security

Thomas just played me the Peter Gabriel album Security in its entirety today. I've never heard a whole Peter Gabriel album, although individual songs of his are among my favourites. Needless to say, I loved the album. As it was winding down, I got on my computer and opened my email. There was (among other things), an e-newsletter from Hannah Mermelstein (an activist and educator) which was titled, "Security." So, I was listening to and reading SECURITY simultaneously.

Weird.

Writers are lonely people

I suppose this isn't particularly revelatory, but incidents of its proof continue to abound, popping up constantly in my life, especially of late.

I first encountered this idea when I took Humanities 101 as an undergraduate from Michael Williams, a writer himself. He once mentioned in class (in the context of his own writing life and Tolkien's) that he believed that every writer must have had a period of lonely convalescence as a child which necessitated her withdrawing from the world for a time completely into herself, thus catalyzing the nascent writer within. For Prof. Williams, I believe, he broke his leg one summer, if I'm not mistaken.

Well, I took those words to heart and have pondered them since. And recently Thomas mentioned to me an article he read in some English journal a proposal of similar kind, "coincidentally." Furthermore, this idea has been especially on my mind because Thomas and I are reading Proust together--we're just about 80 pages into the second book of Remembrance of Things Past. At the same time, I'm taking a translation class in the Spanish Department this semester, and my homework this week is to translate some Julio Cortázar. In doing a little preliminary look into his background, I discovered this, just 2 paragraphs into his Wikipedia entry:

Cortázar spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, with his mother and his only sister, who was one year younger. He never saw his father again. His childhood home, with its backyard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories. Despite this, he wrote a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (December 4, 1963) describing this period of his life as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness." He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother selected what he read, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's."

Qué casualidad... or not.