SONG OF BELOVED
[2.05.06] The operatic adaptation to Toni Morrison's major magical realist undertaking, Beloved, moved its way into Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that "[r]arely is the best-known person in an opera program so far down in the billing. But no matter where Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison is in the pecking order of Margaret Garner—the new opera composed by Richard Danielpour, starring Denyce Graves and co-commissioned by the Opera Company of Philadelphia—you can be sure she did more than contribute the words of the libretto. The force of her values, opinions and vision was felt in the set, stage direction, and even the manner of the music."

FAMOUS FIRST WORDS
[2.04.06] Here's something fun. Central Illinois's Pantagraph.com reported on a "100 Best First Lines" list written by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University. Perhaps you can identify the books to which these lines belong? [If so, contact Margin's editor]

#3. "A screaming comes across the sky." — (1973)

#4. "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." — (1967) [Editor's note: Wait a minute, this should be #1!]

#13. "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."—(1925)

#14. "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler."—(1979)

#19. "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me."—(1759)

#23. "One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."—(1966)

#26. "124 was spiteful."—(1987)

#27. "Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."—(1605)

#44. "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."—(1937)

#52. "We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall."—(1988)

#66. " 'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.' " — (1988)

#71. "Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me."—(1959)

#73. "Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World."—(1966)

#79. "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen."—(1980)

#81. "Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash."—(1973)

#83. " 'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.' " —(1983)

#99. "They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did."—(1966)

REMEMBRANCE
[2.01.06] One way to honor the recent passing of Coretta Scott King would be to read Toni Morrison's Remember: The Journey to School Integration, suggests The Philadelphia Daily News. Morrison's book won the Coretta Scott King Author Award, given by the American Library Association, just last year.

NOT EVERYONE IS A FAN, I GUESS…
[1.26.06] Parents Lisa Friedrichsen and and Sherry Millen of Johnson County, KS, lost their bid to pull a Toni Morrison title off the library shelves in the Blue Valley School District. Both cited that The Song of Solomon (among various other titles by other authors) contained inappropriate language and graphic sex and violence. This is the second bid against a Morrison book by Friedrichsen, who also tried to censor Beloved earlier in this academic year.

OUR ETERNAL THANKS
[1.23.06] Nellie Kay, who was among the first to champion the work of African American authors, Toni Morrison in particular, passed away on January 22. Madison, WI's Capital Times writes: "McKay was best known as the co-editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, written with Henry Louis Gates Jr. She was a pioneer in the movement to make black studies an academic area of higher education. … She was the author of a 1988 volume, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, the first full book on Morrison, who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for literature." Sending you our eternal thanks, Nellie.