Christopher Logue

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INTERVIEWER

When did you write your first poem?

LOGUE

I can’t remember. Seventeen? Eighteen? But I’d told myself I was a poet for as long as I could remember. I thought that being a poet was what made people allow you to be irresponsible. You say you are a poet and you get away with murder! Eventually, I thought it was about time I wrote a poem.

-- Christopher Loge at The Paris Review

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Poets

“We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”

-- William Wordsworth

Celebrities and Stuff

"The Moon Song ( Scarlett Johansson ) ( Karen O ) with Lyrics" (Watch on YouTube)

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1950 The Pill

This is from a book review of Jonathan Eig's "The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution".

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The story begins in 1950, with a meeting one winter night “high above Park Avenue” between “an old woman who loved sex” and a scientist once compared in the press to Frankenstein. The woman was Margaret Sanger, who had spent 40 years in a crusade to start the organization that became Planned Parenthood. The scientist was Gregory Pincus, author of controversial attempts to breed rabbits in a Petri dish. Sanger explained to Pincus her lifelong dream, an idea so outrageous as to seem magical: a cheap, simple birth-control method that would allow sex to be spontaneous — no risking mistakes in the heat of the moment. A woman should be able to use it without her sexual partner’s knowledge. It had to be safe and reversible, so that if the woman wanted to get pregnant, she could. A pill would be best. Can you do that? Sanger asked Pincus. He thought he could.

It is hard to recall today just how radical this proposition was in 1950. Sanger’s quest was to free women to have sex without the fear or possibility of pregnancy, thus allowing them to pursue education, careers, equal footing with men. The available birth control, in the form of condoms and diaphragms, had a high failure rate. Women were desperate to control the size of their families.

-- Kate Manning at The Washington Post

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