Monday, 2 July 2001
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Poem: "the old pinch hitter," by Charles Bukowski from Open All Night (Blade Sparrow Press).

the old pinch hitter

comes out of the dugout in the last of the 9th.
2 out. the winning run on 2nd base.
he's 7-for-20 in this young season: .350
he walks slowly to the plate, seems relaxed but
deliberate. faces a fireballing young pitcher
18 years younger than he is.
takes ball one. ball two. fouls off
the next two. then runs it to 3-and-2.
the fireballer gets his sign, checks 2nd
blazes it in as the runner goes
the perfect pitch
the perfect strike
knee-high and inside:
click!
nobody can handle it:
a solid liner between 1st and 2nd
the runner from 2nd scores.
the old pinch hitter touches first
then turns and walks slowly toward
the dugout.
another night's work.
that shower is going to feel
good.

It's the birthday of the American novelist Elizabeth Graver, born in Los Angeles in 1964. Her first book was a collection of short stories called Have You Seen Me?, which was about a girl who makes up stories about the missing children pictured on milk cartons. Her first novel was called Unravelling, and it is set in the 19th century mill-town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

It was on this day in 1961 that Ernest Hemingway took his own life with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. A year earlier, he'd been forced to leave his home in Cuba, and he had become paranoid and depressed. He was suffering from writer's block and had twice gone to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for electroshock therapy. About a decade earlier, in The Old Man and the Sea, he wrote: "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

It was on this day in 1937 that Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from New Guinea, headed for Howland Island on an around-the-world trip. They disappeared over the Pacific Ocean and were never seen again.

It's the birthday of children's author Jean Craighead George, born in Washington, D.C., in 1919. She is best known for My Side of the Mountain and Julie of the Wolves. They were both based on her childhood with her naturalist parents, and George grew up spending a lot of time outdoors.

It's the birthday of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908. He was named "Thoroughgood" after a grandfather, but he changed his name in grade school because he was tired of spelling it out.

It's the birthday of the theater director Sir Tyrone Guthrie, born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, in 1900. He was an announcer for the BBC and then started to write plays for radio. He became a major director at the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theaters in London during the 1930s. He directed operas in the 1940s, some of which include Carmen and Peter Grimes, performed at the Metropolitan Opera. He established the Shakespeare festival in Ontario in 1953, and 10 years later opened the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

It's the birthday of the photographer André Kertész, born in Budapest in 1894. In 1928, he bought a small handheld Leica camera and used it to capture the cultural life of Paris during the 1930s. His greatest photographs were images of ordinary life, often taken from the balcony of his apartment overlooking Washington Square Park in New York.

It's the birthday of the novelist Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. He was a pacifist, he suffered a mental breakdown during World War I, and underwent psychoanalysis. The experience found its way into his novel Demian. He was also fascinated with Eastern philosophy and wrote Siddartha, which was based on the early life of Buddha. Some of his other works include Steppenwolf, and Narcissus and Goldmund.

Tuesday, 3 July 2001
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Poem: "Old Blue," by William Stafford from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press).

Old Blue

Some day I'll crank up that Corvette, let it
mumble those marvelous oil-swimming gears
and speak its authority. I'll rock its big wheels
till they roll free onto the drive. Nobody can
stop us then: loaded with everything, we'll pick up
momentum for the hill north of town. Mona,
you didn't value me and it's too late now.
Steve, remember your refusal to go along on
those deals when you all opposed me?—you had
your chance. Goodby, you squealers and grubbies;
goodby, old house that begins to leak, neighbors
gone stodgy, days that lean casually grunting
and snoring together. For anyone who ever needs
the person they slighted, this is my address: "Gone."

It's the birthday of the English playwright Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. His father, who worked for a Czech company in Singapore, was killed after the Japanese invasion of the island at the start of World War II. The rest of the family escaped to India, where his mother married a British officer named Kenneth Stoppard, who took them to England. Tom dropped out of school at the age of 17, worked as a journalist for a while, and then began writing plays. His first big stage success was Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead, which premiered in 1965. His most recent plays include Arcadia and The Invention of Love. He has also written a number of screenplays, including Shakespeare in Love in 1998.

It's the birthday of the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor, born in Reading, Berkshire, in 1912. A shrewd observer of the domestic manners of the English middle classes, Elizabeth Taylor was hailed as the Jane Austen of her day. The first of her 12 novels, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was written in 1945. Her other novels include The Wedding Group and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Elizabeth Taylor sometimes referred to her stories as "books in which practically nothing ever happens."

It's the birthday of food writer M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher, born in Albion, Michigan, in 1908, a few minutes before midnight on July 3. If she had been born on the Fourth of July, her father, a newspaperman, would have named her Independencia. She grew up in Whittier, California, and moved to Dijon, France with her husband when she got married. She took up cooking and wrote about it in books like Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf.

It's the birthday of Franz Kafka, born in Prague, Chekslovakia, in 1883. A quiet, neurotic man, he lived with his parents until he was 31. He earned his law degree and went to work for an insurance company, but whenever he could, he found time to write. His most famous work, Metamorphosis, about a man who wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a giant insect, was first published in German in 1915. Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, leaving behind a note to his friend Max Brod, begging that all of his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed. Brod went against the Kafka's wishes, and so we are able to read The Trial, and The Castle.

It's the birthday of American actor and songwriter George M. Cohan, born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1878. He wrote "I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy," "You're a Grand Old Flag," and "Give My Regards to Broadway."

It's the birthday of the painter John Singleton Copley, born in Boston in 1738. In the 1770s, when the Revolution was brewing, Copley moved to London, where he did most of his work. Copley Square in Boston is named for him.

Wednesday, 4 July 2001
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Poem: "Young and Old," by Charles Kingsley.

Young and Old

When all the world is young, lad,
    And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
    And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
    And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
    And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,
    And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
    And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
    The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
    You loved when all was young.

It's Independence Day, the Fourth of July. It was on this day in 1776 that the Continental Congress formally accepted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, with guidance from a five-man committee that included John Adams. Jefferson and Adams went on to become great political rivals and presidents of the United States. Both men died on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1826.

It's the birthday of playwright Neil Simon, born in New York City in 1927. By the time he was a teenager, he was already selling his material to stand-up comics. In the late 1940s and '50s, he worked as a television writer before hitting Broadway with his autobiographical play Come Blow Your Horn. The play ran for two years and was the first of a string of successful Neil Simon comedies, including Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and The Sunshine Boys.

It's the birthday of Rube Goldberg, born Reuben Lucius Goldberg in San Francisco in 1883. He was a designer of sewer pipes for the San Francisco Sewer Department. Then he became a cartoonist, and created a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, who invented elaborately convoluted contraptions that performed very simple tasks.

On this day in 1862, a young Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson went boating down the Thames with Dr. Liddell and his three daughters, including ten-year old Alice. Alice asked Dodgson, or Lewis Carroll, as he was also known, to tell a story. The story began, "Alice was getting very tired of sitting by her sisters on the bank, and having nothing to do, when a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close to her..." Dodgson later wrote down the story and published it as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

On this day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau began his experiment of living alone in a small cabin near Walden Pond in Massachussets. He stayed for a little over two years.

It's the birthday of American composer Stephen Foster, born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, in 1826. His first song, "Open Thy Lattice, Love," was published in 1842, when he was just 16. He wrote "Camptown Races," "Old Folks at Home," "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair," and "Beautiful Dreamer."

It's the birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, the son of a sea captain, and a descendant of John Hawthorne, one of the three judges in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Hawthorne came to believe that his family's declining fortunes were the result of blood on his ancestor's hands. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and then spent a decade living at home, honing his writing skills. He published a novel at his own expense, and then was embarrassed by it, and tried to gather up all the copies and burn them. He collected a number of short stories in Twice-Told Tales. In 1842, he married Sophia Peabody and settled in Concord. He was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. His masterpiece is generally considered to be The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. This was followed by The House of the Seven Gables. He became a friend to Herman Melville, who dedicated his own masterpiece, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne.

Thursday, 5 July 2001
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Poem: lines from "The One Day," by Donald Hall from The One Day (Houghton Mifflin).

The One Day

There are ways to get rich: Find an old corporation,
self-insured, with capital reserves. Borrow
to buy: Then dehire managers; yellow-slip maintenance;
pay public relations to explain how winter is summer;
liquidate reserves and distribute cash in dividends:
Get out, sell stock for capital gains, reward the usurer,
and look for new plunder—leaving a milltown devastated,
workers idle on streetcorners, broken equipment, no cash
for repair or replacement, no inventory or credit.
Then vote for the candidate who abolishes foodstamps.

Or: Buy fifty acres of pasture from the widower:
Survey, cut a road, subdivide; bulldoze the unpainted
barn, selling eighteenth-century beams with bark
still on them; bulldoze foundation granite that oxen sledded;
bulldoze stone walls set with lost skill; bulldoze the Cape
the widower lived in; bulldoze his father's seven-apple tree.
Drag the trailer from the scraggly orchard to the dump:
Let the poor move into the spareroom of their town
cousins; pave garden and cornfield; build weekend houses
for skiers and swimmers; build Slope 'n' Shore; name the new

road Blueberry Muffin Lane; build Hideaway Homes
for executives retired from pricefixing for General Electric
and migrated north out of Greenwich to play bridge
with neighbors migrated north out of Darien. Build huge
centrally heated Colonial ranches—brick, stone, and wood
confounded together—on pasture slopes that were white
with clover, to block public view of Blue Mountain.
Invest in the firm foreclosing Kansas that exchanges
topsoil for soybeans. Vote for a developer as United States
senator. Vote for statutes that outlaw visible poverty.

It's the birthday of the French poet and film director Jean Cocteau, born in Maisons-Lafitte near Paris in 1891. He published his first book of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, when he was just 19. He became a friend to Picasso, and the poet Apollinaire, and the composer Satie. He created ballets with the Ballets Russes, wrote the libretto for Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus the King, wrote several plays, and wrote and directed films, including The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus. His films are filled with startling images. He said, "The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force."

It's the birthday of the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, born in Warsaw, Poland in 1879. She learned to play the piano when she was four, but single-handedly developed the techniques of modern harpsichord playing. She reintroduced the instrument to 20th-century audiences.

It's the birthday of the great showman P. T. (Phineus Taylor) Barnum, born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810. He was a newspaper publisher before he came to New York City and became a showman. He established a sort of "freak show" where he displayed the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and General Tom Thumb, the 25-inch tall man. In 1850, he turned opera impresario and brought Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to the United States for a hugely successful tour. In 1871, he founded what he called The Greatest Show on Earth with James Bailey to create the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

It's the birthday of Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the graham cracker, born in West Suffield, Connecticut, in 1794. He invented the graham cracker in 1829, intending it as a health food.

Friday, 6 July 2001
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Poem: "Something By Vivaldi," by Richard Tillinghast from Six Mile Mountain (Story Line Press).

Something By Vivaldi

There's a word—there has to be, there always is,
But today I can't locate it—for how the quotidian
Errand-running self gives legs to the leafy
Glistening part of us that now and again surfaces,
Transporting that breezelike something with a pen
And notebook from a snug seat at the Norseman
One street back from the rain-bothered Liffey,
To a caneback rocker on the porch at Sewanee

Where oakleaf and birdsong stipple down breeze-blown
Onto the page you fill—to a sunwarmed rock beside
The Big Lost River where you set your fly rod down
And write. Or your improvised niche is this brick arcade
In Seattle, discovered not by design
And not exactly by chance, where a classical busker
Rosins up and tunes up and delights the air
With a dazzle of sixteenth notes under arches of rain.

The music scaffolds its ascent up an invisible
Peak, bouncing on swells like a yacht, cloud-bound—
Elaborating story-lines around an allegorical
Citadel, sky-blue roads cutting up a spiral
Up the angle of Paradise, like an apple
Being peeled by an exacting and pleasure-loving hand,
By a hand that is itself no more than smoke.
Then it swings and plunges, and barrels along like a truck.

And all of us gasp and hum and sway
To this lightness that builds a room beyond
The bricks of the arcade, the fire in the pub grate,
The masonry, timber and commerce that build a street,
The force that cut the Big Lost River into granite
Or that puts a chair out on the porch in Tennessee.
All of us: lunching merchants, students, a blonde
Hippie in a Disneyland T-shirt, two out-of-whiskey
Greybeards on a bench; and your reporter,
Brought here for no other purpose than to get it on paper
And get it right—Tennessee sunlight,
Something by Vivaldi, rain on a Dublin street.
All these, and the self that carries the other around
And situates him for the work of his transported hand.
Let us sing, let us sing in Latin, let us stand
Up on elated feet and sing "Magnificat!"

It's the birthday of the Dalai Lama, born in Tibet in 1935. When the 13th Dalai Lama died in 1933, monks from the city of Lhasa set out to find a child who would prove to be the reincarnation of the Buddhist leader. They eventually found him in the village of Taktser, in a four-year-old boy named Llamo, whom they took back to Lhasa and installed as the 14th Dalai Lama. He fled to India in 1959 when the Chinese took over Tibet.

On this day in 1928, the first full-length talking picture, The Lights of New York, premiered at the Strand Theater in New York.

It's the birthday of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, born just outside of Mexico City in 1907. Her paintings often combine brilliant colors and striking images from Mexican folk art.

It's the birthday of children's author Beatrix Potter, born in South Kensington, Middlesex, in 1866, who wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The tale is about the young rabbit, Peter, who ventures into Mr. McGregor's garden simply because his mother tells him he must not.

It's the birthday of the founder of American ornithology, Alexander Wilson, born in Scotland in 1766. He immigrated to America, and published his American Ornithology in 1808. It's success encouraged John James Audubon to continue his own work on American birds.

Saturday, 7 July 2001
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Poem: "A Typical Manitoba Railroad Station," by Ruth Daigon from Between One Future and the Next (Papier-Mache Press).

A Typical Manitoba Railroad Station

I can still feel the slivers
as I slid on the platform, restless,
waiting for those weekend
guests. We hiked the mile back

from the depot, took the shortcut
across Thorkelson's field or the long
way round over hedge, ditch, road
raw with skid marks and sunlight.

The sun was a piece of bait to get us
up in the morning. Nothing stirred
except a grasshopper clinging to a
blade weighing it toward its roots.

Too cold for swimming, we marched
along railroad ties, careful
not to miss a single one or
we had to pay a forfeit.

Lonesome for the whistle,
we waited for a train
and when none appeared,
we watched the tracks.

Stuck in our skins, we
sat on the ties studying the dirt
under our nails with our life-
lines buried in our fists.

It's the birthday of the operatic composer Gian Carlo Menotti, born in Cadegliano, Italy, in 1911. His most popular opera is Amahl and the Night Visitors, which premiered in 1951, and which is about a lame boy who joins the Wise Men on their journey to bring gifts to the Christ child.

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, born in Butler, Missouri, in 1907. He studied physics and mathematics at UCLA and then began writing science fiction, or, as he preferred to call it, "speculative fiction." His novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, became a cult classic.

It's the birthday of the film director George Cukor, born in New York City in 1899. He directed Dinner at Eight and Little Women, and he became known as a "women's director," because he was known for bringing out some of the best performances by actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, and Judy Garland. He directed W.C. Fields in his most memorable role, as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield. Cukor's other great films include The Philadelphia Story, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady, for which he won an Oscar.

It's the birthday of the painter Marc Chagall, born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1887, to a family of devout Russian Jews. He was educated at both Jewish and Russian schools, and eventually sent off to study art in St. Petersburg. In 1910, he moved to Paris, where he absorbed the bohemian atmosphere and produced some of his best early works. He lived for most of his life in France, while traveling the world to fulfill a number of high-profile commissions. He designed stained glass windows for the United Nations headquarters in New York, two large murals for the Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center, and painted a new ceiling for the Paris Opera . He designed sets and costumes for ballets and opera, and he also painted.

It's the birthday of journalist Abraham Cahan, born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1860. In 1897, he helped to found the Yiddish-language daily newspaper, Jewish Daily Forward. He became the paper's editor in 1902, a job he held for the next forty years.

It's the birthday of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, born in Kaliste, Bohemia in 1860. He studied piano as a child, entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of 15, and turned to conducting to support himself. At the age of 37, he was named conductor of the Vienna Court Opera. When he was 47, he became the conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York. He produced nine massive symphonies and several song cycles, including Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) and Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).

Sunday, 8 July 2001
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Poem: "Familiars," by Pamela Stewart from The Red Window (University of Georgia Press).

Familiars

Sniffing juice and drip from the still
warm barbeque, a gray cat splays
his six-toed paws, glares in
where a family sits eating. The woman rises,
opens the door onto its wild face.
Its eyes daze to panic.
He leaps away, slashes the air
then slams each corner of the fenced yard to escape.
It's June. Strawberries splatter
in their huge steel pot.
The hot blue flames suck and drift.
The softer family cat slips upstairs
where two small children curl against summery dreams.
Beyond, night thickens in the forest
and those who hunger edge closer.

It's the birthday of the novelist and syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1953. She went Barnard College, wrote for the New York Post, and then moved to the New York Times, where she stayed for 17 years. In 1985, she took time off to be with her children and to write a novel, then returned to write her Life in the 30s column, which was picked up in syndication by 60 newspapers across the country. After another leave of absence when her daughter was born, she began her Public and Private column, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1992. She finally left the Times for good in 1994, and began to concentrate on writing novels, which include Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue.

It's the birthday of singer and songwriter Raffi Cavoukian, better known to millions of children and parents simply as Raffi, born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1948. His family moved to Canada when he was ten, and a few years later he started to play the guitar. In the late 1960s, he began performing as a folk singer, but didn't have much success until he was put in front of an audience of nursery school children. Using his own money, he put out the record Singable Songs for the Very Young in 1976. The record was a hit, and Raffi was on his way to becoming a superstar for the preschool set. His albums include Baby Beluga, One Light, One Sun, and Everything Grows.

It's the birthday of the physician and author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1926. As a teenager, she hitchhiked through Europe, and visited recently-liberated concentration camps. The experience shaped her entire career. She became a doctor and moved to America, where she was appalled by the sterile and isolated ways in which people died. She began to interview terminally ill patients, and came up with her famous stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She published the results of her research in her most famous book, On Death and Dying, in 1969.

It's the birthday of the jazz singer and bandleader Billy Eckstein, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1914. He gave many musicians their start, including Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker.

On this date in 1822, the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Livorno, Italy. He was sailing in his boat, the Don Juan, when a sudden squall came up and swamped the boat. His body washed ashore several days later, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the grave of John Keats. When he heard the news of Shelley's death, Lord Byron wrote: "Shelley was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew."

It's the birthday of the French poet Jean de la Fontaine, born in Château-Thierry in 1621. He was able to line up a number of wealthy patrons who gave him the freedom to pursue a career as a writer. His greatest work was his Fables, 240 poems in free verse which came out in twelve books between 1668 and 1693. The Fables include familiar tales like "The Tortoise and the Hare" and "The Crow and the Fox."

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