MONDAY, 5 February 2001
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Poem: "To Elsie," by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (New Directions).

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum—
which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

It's the birthday of Elizabeth Swados, born in Buffalo, New York (1951), into a family of artists and performers. She was part of the avant-garde La Mama Theatre Group in New York, where she did an adaptation of Medea (1972) that used Greek and Latin words chosen for sound rather than sense. She created similar versions of The Trojan Women and Electra, incorporating Asian, African, Mayan, Aztec and Native American languages. She has also written several novels, most recently Flamboyant (1999), and a memoir of her family entitled The Four of Us (1991).

It's the birthday of playwright John Guare, born in New York City (1938). In grade school he went to the theater every week and listened to Broadway albums by the hour. When he started writing plays at the age of ten, his parents gave him a typewriter that he still uses. To promote his first production, when he was eleven, he and a friend called Newsday and said, "Two boys are putting on a play in a garage and giving all the money to orphans," and they got their pictures in the paper. His works include House of Blue Leaves (1971), and Six Degrees of Separation (1990).

"I always tell my students...Whatever it is that wakes you up at four o'clock in the morning, that's what you have to write about. You have to write about the nightmares."

It's the birthday of baseball player Hank (Henry) Aaron, born in Mobile, Alabama (1934). He started off in the Negro Leagues with the Indianapolis Clowns, then spent 20 years with the Milwaukee (later, Atlanta) Braves. He hit 755 home runs—40 more than the record set by Babe Ruth.

The first issue of Reader's Digest magazine was published on this day in 1922: thirty-one condensed articles, edited by DeWitt Wallace.

It's the birthday of William S. Burroughs, born in St. Louis (1914). Most of his books are about heroin addiction, his homosexuality, or the drug culture. His first novel, Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1951), was followed by Naked Lunch (1959) and many others, including Queen (1985).

TUESDAY, 6 February 2001
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Poem: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," by Christopher Marlowe.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs.
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning.
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love.

It's the birthday of television anchorman Tom Brokaw, born in Webster, South Dakota (1940). He was NBC's Washington correspondent during the Watergate scandal, then became anchor of the NBC Nightly News. In 1984 he visited Normandy to prepare a documentary on the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings. That trip, and a return visit ten years later, inspired his first book, The Greatest Generation.

It's the birthday of film director François Truffaut, born in Paris (1932). His parents didn't want him around, and he spent his childhood with his grandmother, forgetting his loneliness through books and movies. He estimates that he watched about two thousand movies between his tenth and fifteenth birthdays. He and a friend formed a cinema-club, and he became a writer for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. His first feature film, The 400 Blows, was followed by Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and many others.

It's the birthday of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, born in Tampico, Illinois (1911). His father was a Democrat and heavy drinker, while his mother was sweet-tempered and a theater lover. Reagan got a job as a sportscaster covering the Chicago Cubs, and, in 1937, he was discovered by a Hollywood scout while on Catalina Island for the Cubs' spring training. A few years later he starred in Knute Rockne—All American, as the doomed football hero, George Gipp. He turned Republican in 1962, and won the governorship of California in 1966. He ran for president in 1976 and lost; but he won in 1980, and won a second term in 1984 by a landslide.

It's the birthday of baseball great George Herman Ruth, better known as Babe Ruth, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1895). He was also called "The Bambino" and "The Sultan of Swat," because of his legendary prowess at bat. But the record he was most proud of was the 29 and 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings that he pitched for the Boston Red Sox in two World Series.

It's the birthday of playwright Christopher Marlowe, born in Canterbury, England (1564). His plays include Tamburlaine the Great (1590), Dr. Faustus (1604), The Jew of Malta (1633), and Edward II (1594). He was stabbed to death at the age of 29 at a brothel in Deptford. The circumstances of his death have never been explained: it may have resulted from a quarrel over a bill, or it may have been a political assassination. He undoubtedly collaborated with many of his contemporaries, including Shakespeare, but on which plays and to what extent, nobody can be sure.

WEDNESDAY, 7 February 2001
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Poem: from "Endymion," by John Keats.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made of our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

It's the birthday of writer Sinclair Lewis, born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885), the son of a country doctor. He made his name with Main Street (1920), a novel portraying a small town in Minnesota called Gopher Prairie. His next novel, Babbit (1922), was about a banal businessman, and "babbitry" became a synonym for middle-class conventionality. Sixteen of his twenty-two novels have Midwestern protagonists or settings.

It's the birthday of writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, born in Pepin, Wisconsin (1867). The Ingalls family moved repeatedly—to Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Iowa and finally to De Smet, South Dakota. Laura married a farmer named Almanzo Wilder, and they settled in the Ozarks on a chicken farm. She wrote columns for local newspapers about farm life and raising poultry, and, at her daughter Rose's urging, she wrote her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, in 1931. This was followed by Little House on the Prairie and other books.

It's the birthday of lexicographer Sir James A. H. Murray, born in Denholm, Scotland (1837), editor of the earliest version of the Oxford English Dictionary. He worked nearly every waking hour on the Dictionary, and enlisted his eleven children to help on the project, too. He died in 1915 at the age of seventy-eight, having seen the Dictionary about halfway through to completion. It was finished thirteen years later.

It's the birthday of Charles Dickens, born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England (1812). He enjoyed an Idyllic childhood until he was 12, when his father—a man hopeless with money—sank so far into debt he was sent to debtors' prison. Charles was put to work pasting labels on bottles in a blacking warehouse, an experience he found so humiliating that his own wife and children didn't learn of it until after his death. But memories of that time inspired much of his fiction, especially the early chapters of David Copperfield (1850). He learned shorthand, became a reporter, and when his first serialized novel came out, The Pickwick Papers (1837), he was the most popular writer in England. Later novels include Nicholas Nickleby (1838), Bleak House (1853), Great Expectations (1861), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). He continued to work intensely until he died suddenly of a stroke at the age of 58.

It's the birthday of Sir Thomas More, born in London (1478). He was Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, but denied the king's title as supreme head of the Church of England, and for that was beheaded. On his way to the scaffold, he said to his guard, "See me safe up. For my coming down, I can shift for myself."

THURSDAY, 8 February 2001
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Poem: "O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie," by Philip Appleman, from Selected Poems (University of Arkansas).

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,
gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice—
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good—
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.

It's the birthday of novelist John Grisham, born in Jonesboro, Arkansas (1955). He went to law school at the University of Mississippi, was admitted to the bar, and then was elected to the state legislature. His first novel, A Time to Kill, didn't sell well when it was published in 1989. But when his second novel, The Firm, came out two years later, it was the beginning of his best-selling career.

It's the birthday of poet Philip Appleman, born in Kendallville, Indiana (1926)

It's the birthday of novelist Henry Roth, born in Tysmenitz, in what is now Ukraine (1906). He cane out with his first novel, Call It Sleep, in 1934. Then, except for a few articles and short stories, he wrote nothing for the next forty-four years—one of the most famous cases of writer's block in literary history. Part of his problem was that he was Communist, and felt he should be writing something with a social message. He burned many of his previous manuscripts in an effort to purge his literary past. Roth finally started another novel at the age of 73: a huge work, in which an elderly writer recalls his childhood in New York. It was published in separate volumes under the collective title Mercy of a Rude Stream.

It's the birthday of writer Kate Chopin, born Kate O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri (1850). She's best known for The Awakening (1898), a novel that deals frankly with a young wife and mother's sensuality. Readers were shocked, and the reviews were so harsh that her publisher cancelled publication of her upcoming short story collection, A Vocation and a Voice. It was finally published in 1991.

It's the birthday of novelist Jules Verne, considered the first science-fiction writer, born in Nantes, France (1828). He was a stockbroker, but he would wake up every morning at 5:00 a.m. to get in a few hours of writing before he went down to the stock exchange. His first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon (1850), sold so well that he quit his job to write full-time. His other books include Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). He foresaw a number of scientific developments, including the submarine, the aqualung, the airplane, television, and space travel.

It's the birthday of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, born in Lancaster, Ohio (1820). He's known for his "March to the Sea," in which he led his troops to Atlanta, burned the city, and kept on going to Savannah. When the Republicans tried to nominate him for president in 1884, he told the convention, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." He died in 1891.

It's the birthday of critic and social theorist John Ruskin, born in London (1819). His two most influential works were The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848), and the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851-3).

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it."

FRIDAY, 9 February 2001
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Poem: "To the Days," by Adrienne Rich, from Dark Fields of the Republic (W.W. Norton).

To the Days

From you I want more than I've ever asked,
all of it—the newscasters' terrible stories
of life in my time, the knowing it's worse than that,
much worse—the knowing what it means to be lied to.

Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,
coffee and bread with sour plum jam.
Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.
Lives ticking on as if.

A typewriter's torrent, suddenly still.
Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.
Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.
Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.

Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.
To smell another woman's hair, to taste her skin.
To know the bodies drifting underwater.
To be human, said Rosa—I can't teach you that.

A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds—his moment.
Surely the love of life is never ending,
the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?
I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.

Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn
in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.
Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment
with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.

It's the birthday of humorist and playwright George Ade, born in Kentland, Indiana (1866). His daily column for the Chicago Record, "Stories of the Streets and of the Town," evolved into the popular Fables in Slang (1899). The book was a best seller, and he followed with 11 more humorous volumes. He turned to the theater with equal success, and at one point had three plays running simultaneously in New York. He bought a 2,400-acre estate near his home town and entertained lavishly.

 "My enthusiasms include golf, travel, horse-racing and the spoken drama. My antipathies are social show-offs, bigots on religion, fanatics on total abstinence, and all persons who take themselves seriously."

It's the birthday of writer and playwright Brendan Behan, born in Dublin, Ireland (1923), into a working-class family. His father was a Republican activist; his uncle wrote the Irish national anthem. Behan was arrested for activities connected to the IRA, and sentenced to an English borstal, or reform school—an experience he later recounted in his autobiographical novel, Borstal Boy (1958). His first play, The Quare Fellow, is set in a prison. It was rejected by both the Abbey and the Gate theaters before being staged at the experimental Pike Theater, to great acclaim

"I've never seen a situation so dismal a policeman couldn't make it worse."

It's the birthday of poet Amy Lowell, born in Brookline, Massachusetts (1874), the daughter of a prominent Boston family. One brother became president of Harvard University and another was a distinguished astronomer. She wrote her first serious poem at 28 after seeing a performance by the actress Eleanora Duse. She gave readings and lectures all over the country, telling reticent audiences, "Well, clap or hiss, I don't care which, but for Christ's sake, do something!" She was a large, outspoken woman who liked cigars, dogs and detective stories. She was intrigued by the Imagist movement in poetry—Ezra Pound referred to her followers as "Amygists." When her brother was president of Harvard, he got a call from an auto mechanic saying, "Some big, fat dame whose engine broke down wants to charge the bill to you—claims she's your sister. She's across the road, sittin' on a stone wall, smokin' a cigar." The president of Harvard said, "That's my sister, all right."

SATURDAY, 10 February 2001
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Poem: "Sparrows," by Bill Holm, from The Dead Get By With Everything (Milkweed).

Sparrows

Morning after first snow—
outside my kitchen window,
gray sparrows flap up
and down on a sagging clothesline.
It is a corn dance
in honor of sunshine on snow.

What joy in a sparrow's body
as he jumps and eats—
a world of red barns,
snow, old clotheslines
and corn kernels is enough.
No brooding on hunger and death,
no suspicion among the sparrows.

I return from seeing a woman,
full of joy and dancing in my body—
lie awake all night
putting away old dreams like a man
packing for a long trip.

Now it is clear: her face
come to me, and I sink
into sleep like childhood,
rising hours later to bright sun,
sparrows dancing on the clothesline.

In a world of grief, no one
has any right to such gifts
as I am given; I take them,
put on my feathers, and go
dance in the snow.

It's the birthday of children's author, E. L. Konigsburg, born Elaine Lobl, in New York City (1930), the first author to have two titles on the list for the Newbery Medal. She won her first for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), about two children who run away from home and hide out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She won it again in 1997 for The View From Saturday.

It's the birthday of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, born in Augsburg, Germany (1898). He started out writing expressionist plays—Drums in the Night, Baal, and Man is Man (1926). He wanted to combine drama and music, and he collaborated with composer Kurt Weill on the production that established his reputation: The Threepenny Opera (1928). When Hitler came to power in 1933, Brecht sought asylum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, finally settling in Hollywood in 1941. It was during this period that he wrote most of his great plays: Mother Courage (1941), The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958). He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and shortly thereafter accepted the East German government's offer of a theater there. He formed his own company, The Berliner Ensemble, that produced all of his later work, and he stayed there until he died, in 1956.

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, born near Moscow (1890). His father was a painter, his mother was a concert pianist, and Boris studied composition for six years under Scriabin. His first volume of poetry was published when he was 23, and with the publication of Over the Barriers (1917), and My Sister—Life (1922), he was recognized as a major new lyrical voice. His poetry was considered avant-garde by Russian standards, and he had to support himself with his translations of Shakespeare, Rilke, and English Romantic poets. His first novel, Doctor Zhivago, was rejected by a leading Moscow monthly in 1956. But it was smuggled to Italy where it was published, and an English version came out in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize, which brought him a torrent of abuse within the Soviet Union: Pasternak was ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers, and threatened with deportation. He begged Premier Nikita Khruschev to let him stay, saying, "Leaving my country is equivalent to death for me," and he turned down the prize. He died two years later, in 1960.

SUNDAY, 11 February 2001
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Poem: "She Walks in Beauty," by George Gordon, Lord Byron.

She walks in beauty, like the night
    Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
    Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
    Which heaven to gaudy day denies

One shade the more, one ray the less,
    had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven trees,
    Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
    How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
    So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, that tints that glow,
    But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
    A heart whose love is innocent!

It's the feast day of St. Caedmon, the first poet known to compose in English. He was a shepherd who was so embarrassed by his poor singing voice that he used to excuse himself from feasts when he thought he might have to take a turn singing. After doing so one evening, he went out to sleep in the stable. He dreamed a voice said to him, "Caedmon, sing something to me. Sing the beginning of created things." And he did—in verses he'd never heard before. He remembered them when he awoke, and added more. He showed them to the abbess of the local monastery, and the abbess urged him to take holy vows, as he had obviously been given a gift by God.

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Roy Fuller, born in Oldham, Lancashire, England (1912). He wrote thirty-one volumes of poetry, including Owls and Artificers (1971) and Professors and Gods (1973).

It's the birthday of screenwriter Philip Dunne, born in New York City (1908). He wrote 36 films, including How Green Was My Valley and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and directed ten others. He was one of the founders of the Screen Writers Guild.

It's the birthday of physicist Leo Szilard, born in Budapest, Hungary (1898). In 1939, a few years after coming to America, knowing that German scientists had discovered nuclear fission, he drafted the famous letter that Albert Einstein sent to President Roosevelt advocating the development of an atomic bomb. Three years later, in the Manhattan Project, he and Enrico Fermi oversaw the first nuclear chain reaction. "We turned the switch and saw the flashes," he wrote later. "We watched them for a little while and then we switched everything off and went home. That night there was no doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief." In 1961 he published a book of satirical fantasies on the misuse of science called The Voice of the Dolphin, and the following year he founded the Council for a Livable World, a lobbying group for arms control.

It's the birthday of Thomas Alva Edison, born in Milan, Ohio (1847). His favorite invention was the phonograph, but he didn't see any use for it and put it away for ten years. He also invented the means of showing motion pictures; the stock ticker; and, though he didn't invent the incandescent light bulb, he perfected it and made its widespread use practical. Within three years of perfecting the light bulb, he had invented the generating, switching and transmitting devices necessary to use it on a large scale, and was operating the world's first power station.

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