MONDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER
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Poem: "Perfect," by R.T. Smith, inscribed "For Jerome Ward," from Trespasser (Louisiana State University Press).
Perfect
Preparing the salad,
you said the word
perfect in botanydenotes a species
bisexual and self-sufficient,
while we cut carrotroots, inflorescence
of broccoli, the ripened
ovaries of oliveand the bulb of the red
onion. Every seed,
you said, holdsan embryo inside. It's
all so simple, and we call
plants primal becausethey survive without
devouring one another
and often work theirincrease alone. Still, we
never envy the spiral
of cabbage leaves ora potato's albino eye,
as perfect comes from
the Latin for complete,and we prefer this
process of emerging,
two imperfect menhappily whittling dinner
for their loved ones,
as windblown pollendusts the windows, our
bright knives clicking
on the board.
It was on this day in 1967 that Swedish drivers switched lanes and began driving on the right side of the road instead of the left. Sweden was the only other European country to drive on the left besides England, and accidents were commonplace when Swedes crossed the border into Norway, and vice-versa.
It was on this day in 1939 that Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM respectively, and what had begun as a German invasion of Poland two days earlier officially became World War II. American journalist William Shirer was covering the war for CBS Radio and wrote: "It has been a lovely September day, the sun shining, the air balmy, the sort of day the Berliner loves to spend in the woods or on the lakes nearby. I walked the streets. On the faces of the people astonishment, depression. Stunned. In Mein Kampf, Hitler says the greatest mistake the Kaiser made was to fight England, and Germany must never repeat that mistake. In 1914, I believe, the excitement in Berlin on the first day of the World War was tremendous. Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever. There is not even any hate for the French and British. Germans cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war."
It's the birthday of the American architect Louis Henry Sullivan, 1856, Boston. His heyday was in Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s when the city was booming with new immigrants, grain trading, and railroads. Sullivan designed over 100 buildings for the city, including its early skyscrapers—innovations in their day for using a kind of experimental skeleton construction on the inside, and intricate, subtle ornamentation outside.
It's the birthday of writer Sarah Orne Jewett, born 1849 in South Berwick, Maine, best known for her short novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
The U.S. War of Independence officially ended on this day in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The war, which began at Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775, had more or less been over for two years (after Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown), but the American navy continued harassing the British, and by the time the treaty was signed the American fleet had captured dozens of British ships. The treaty required Britain to recognize the independence of the United States and to cede all lands east of the Mississippi to former colonies.
TUESDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2001
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Poem: "I Stop Writing the Poem," by Tess Gallagher from They Say This (Poetry East #47, 48, De Paul University).
I Stop Writing the Poem
to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.
It was on this day in 1957 that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to bar nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. In response, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division to make sure they could enroll. A few days later, Eisenhower made a prime-time, live televised speech to the nation in which he said, "Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts."
It's the birthday of the historical novelist Mary Challans, born in 1905, London, who wrote under the pen name Mary Renault. She's best known for The King Must Die (1958), set in ancient Greece.
It's the birthday outside of Natchez, Mississippi, 1904, of novelist, poet, and essayist Richard Wright. His family moved around the South a lot when he was a boy, and Wright was largely self-taught and never attended any school after 15. He spent his free time at libraries, particularly in Memphis, where he began reading H. L. Mencken. Since in the library there was a "whites only" library, he forged a note from a white patron that said: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" Wright made his way up to Chicago, became an activist in the Communist Party in the '30s, and started writing short stories as a part of the Depression-era Federal Writer's Project. His best-known work is Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, a petty thief who is hired as a chauffeur by a rich white man. He kills the man's daughter, then his own girlfriend, then is finally arrested, tried, and condemned. The novel was controversial because, in the book, Bigger's lawyer argues that Bigger can't be held responsible for his crimes, that the real guilt lies with a society that won't accept him as a full human being, which drove him to kill. Wright left America, not long after Native Son came out, and settled in Paris where he published novels, short stories, plays, essays, poems, and memoirs before his death in 1960.
It was on this day in 1888, in Rochester, New York, that George Eastman received a patent for his new, easy-to-use camera, the Kodak.
It's the birthday of architect and city planner Daniel H. Burnham, born in Henderson, New York, in 1846, founder of the influential "White City" style of architecture around the turn of the century. He was just 27 when he and architect John Wellborn Root went to work together to find new ways to build taller fireproof buildings. Theirs were the first skyscrapers, and Burnham went on to design the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. From there he turned to urban planning. He was the chief architect of Chicago's 1893 World's Colombian Exposition, and he built an elaborate fairground of grand boulevards, classical building façades, and lush gardens. This was the "White City" model, and the style spread around the nation. His greatest claim to fame, though, was the city of Chicago itself, for which he laid a plan out in 1909.
WEDNESDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 2001
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Poem: "What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried To Bring Home A Pit Bulldog or What His Daddy Said To Him that Day," by David Lee from A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press).
What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried To Bring Home A Pit Bulldog
or
What His Daddy Said To Him that DaySon
let me tell you the story
of the man who saved
a baby grizzly bear
from a forest fire
and brought it home
nursed it
fed it
kept it like his ownAnd how the last thing
that man ever learned on earth
when it grown up
and he tried to keep it
out of the hog pen one morning
was the lesson
of what a grizzly bear
is at lastAnd it had
a final exam
he couldn't help
but pass
Jack Kerouac's novel On The Road came out on this day in 1957, the story of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty roaring across America—the book that defined the Beat Generation. In the opening pages, Kerouac wrote: "I'd been poring over maps of the United States for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I'll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself, and confidently started." The book got good reviews: The September 5 New York Times review called it "the most beautifully executed utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat'."
It's the birthday of journalist and fiction writer Ward Just, born 1935, in Michigan City, Indiana. He's the author of several novels about the Vietnam War and politics in Washington, including A Soldier of the Revolution (1970) and Stringer (1974).
It's the anniversary of America's first Labor Day parade, in 1882, when 10,000 workers marched from New York's City Hall to Union Square, then gathered in Reservoir Park for a picnic. The idea came from a carpenter, Peter J. McGuire, who a year earlier founded the precursor of the AFL (American Federation of Labor). McGuire had suggested a holiday in September to honor workers and give them a break during the long stretch between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. The first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, but the holiday was soon moved to the first Monday in September. In 1884, Congress made Labor Day a national holiday.
Today is the anniversary of the First Continental Congress, 1774, in Philadelphia. Forty-five men crowded into the main room of a brand-new building in town called Carpenter's Hall. Most of them were lawyers and they met to debate the latest acts of Parliament, like the closing of Boston Harbor, and the Quartering Act which allowed authorities the right to evict anyone from their house in order to provide shelter for British troops. Hardly any of the delegates knew each other. John Adams wrote to a friend, "We have numberless prejudices to remove here, and are obliged to act with great delicacy and caution." A few days later, news came from Boston that British ships were bombarding the city. A Connecticut delegate wrote in his diary "all is confusion here, every tongue pronounces revenge." The Congress ended in October with a call for each colony to arm itself against the British, and the following April 1775, war broke out at Lexington and Concord.
THURSDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Waving Good-Bye," by Gerald Stern from This Time: New And Selected Poems (W.W.Norton).
Waving Good-Bye
I wanted to know what it was like before we
had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we
had minds to move us through our actions
and tears to help us over our feelings,
so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend
and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her
as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her,
walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek,
and turned my head after them as an animal would,
watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts,
her smiling face and her small hand just visible
over the giant pillows and coat hangers
as they made their turn into the empty highway.
On this day in 1936, British aviator Beryl Markham flew across the Atlantic from east to west—the first pilot ever to do so. She took off in England and landed in Nova Scotia, a flight recounted in her 1942 memoir, West with the Night.
It's the birthday of writer Robert Pirsig, born in Minneapolis (1928). He's best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), which 120 editors turned down before one finally offered a standard $3000 advance. The book is about the 1968 motorcycle trip he made from Minneapolis to San Francisco with his 12-year-old son Christopher. But the trip is really a backdrop for Pirsig's philosophical meditations on nature and technology. It was a completely unexpected best seller. He wrote: "The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower."
On this day in 1890, when the captain of the riverboat Roi de Belges died of a tropical fever on the Congo River, Joseph Conrad was made master of the ship. He later drew on this experience in his novella Heart of Darkness (1902), in which the protagonist, Marlow, is ordered to take command of a cargo boat stranded in the interior of Africa.
On this day in 1847, Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond and moved back to his father's house in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau had lived in the hut for two years, leading a simple life of gardening and contemplation, subsisting on a daily budget of 27-1/2 cents. When he moved back to Concord, he took with him the first draft of his book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, strung together from 10 years of journal entries.
It's the birthday of the general and aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette, born in Chavaniac, France (1757). He was a 19-year-old captain in the French army when he sailed to America (1777) and offered to help the revolutionary cause. He was appreciated for his powerful court connections, and George Washington made him a major general. He led six light infantry battalions (1780), and a Light Corps (1781), and, in the closing days of the war helped confine General Cornwallis's army to the coast of Virginia.
FRIDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Parting," by Emily Dickinson.
Parting
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to meSo huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
It's the birthday of singer and songwriter Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holly, born in Lubbock, Texas, in1936. By the age of 13, Holly was playing what he called "Western Bop" at local clubs. He was 19 when an agent discovered him and signed him to a contract with Decca records. The following year, Holly returned to Lubbock and, with three friends, formed The Crickets, who then released "That'll Be The Day," which sold over a million copies. Buddy Holly's career was short: He died in February of 1959 in a plane crash in northern Iowa. Soon after, an English band that admired The Crickets decided to call themselves The Beatles.
It's the birthday of Sonny Rollins, born Theodore Rollins in New York, in 1930, the tenor saxophonist who recorded with the greats of jazz: Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Max Roach, and John Coltrane. Rollins first began recording bebop music in 1949. In the early '50s he began recording with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. In 1954 he took a year off from music to deal with his addiction to heroin. And in 1959, dissatisfied with his own playing, he took another sabbatical and practiced every day on the Williamsburg Bridge over the East River in New York. In 1962, he returned to performing and recorded an album entitled The Bridge, which marked the beginning of his "avant-garde" period.
It's the birthday of director and author Elia Kazan, born in Istanbul, Turkey (1909), to Greek parents who moved to America when Kazan was four. Kazan became an actor in the Group Theater in New York, and joined the Communist Party, which he quit shortly thereafter. Kazan became an acclaimed Broadway director in the '40s for such productions as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and around that time began his distinguished film career, directing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman's Agreement, On the Waterfront and East of Eden (1955). In his 1988 autobiography, A Life, he told how, in 1952, he chose to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming at least eight of his friends as Communists—thus getting them blacklisted and making it virtually impossible for them to get work. Kazan said. "I thought I would be doing a terrible thing to pretend ignorance." On the other hand, he said, "Maybe I did wrong—probably did. Anyone who informs on other people is doing something disturbing and even disgusting. It doesn't sit well on the anyone's conscience."
It's the birthday of Dame Edith Sitwell, born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England (1887), raised by eccentric parents, and who became a famous one herself, dressing in elaborate baroque costumes and. publicizing herself and her poetry. She came into her own as a poet during WWII, when her collections, Street Songs (1942), Green Song (1944), and Song of the Cold (1945). She was friends with Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, an early supporter of Dylan Thomas. She became a popular television personality in England and, on her 75th birthday, was given a public celebration in the Albert Hall. Her autobiography, Taken Care Of, was published posthumously in 1965.
It's the birthday of the brilliant and unfortunate William Friese-Greene, born in Bristol, England (1855). Between 1885 and 1890 he built a series of four prototype motion-picture cameras and was granted a patent for a camera to record movement. He went bankrupt in the process and sold the rights to the patent for 500 pounds. During his lifetime, he took out more than 70 patents for other inventions, including X-ray and light printing on paper fabrics, ink-less printing, and electrical transmission of images, but earned little money from them and was on the verge of bankruptcy all his life.
SATURDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Black Umbrellas," by Rick Agran from Crow Milk (Oyster River Press).
Black Umbrellas
On a rainy day in Seattle stumble into any coffee shop
and look wounded by the rain.Say Last time I was in I left my black umbrella here.
A waitress in a blue beret will pull a black umbrellafrom behind the counter and surrender it to you
like a sword at your knighting.Unlike New Englanders, she'll never ask you
to describe it, never ask what day you came in,she's intimate with rain and its appointments.
Look positively reunited with this black umbrellaand proceed to Belltown and Pike Place.
Sip cappuccino at the Cowgirl Luncheonette on First Ave.Visit Buster selling tin salmon silhouettes
undulant in the wind, nosing ever into the oncoming,meandering watery worlds, like you and the black umbrella,
the one you will lose on purpose at the day's endso you can go the way you came
into the world, wet looking.
It's the birthday, in Washington, D.C., 1947, of writer Anne Beattie, the author of novels and short stories about Americans who came of age in the 1960s. Her first writings appeared in the early 1970s, when The New Yorker began accepting her short stories. She became something of a legend for how fast she worked: 22 stories in a year, then a complete draft of her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, in three weeks.
It's the birthday in 1930, Evansville, Indiana, of writer Marilyn Durham, author of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1972). The story, set in the Wyoming Territory of the 1880s, is about John Grobart, a train robber who years earlier had married a young Shoshone girl named Cat Dancing.
It was on this day in 1900 that a hurricane leveled Galveston, Texas, and left 5,000 people dead. The storm kept up for 18 hours, with winds clocked at 120 m.p.h. Most of Galveston was built at sea level, and huge waves swept through the streets and flattened businesses and homes.
It was on this day in 1892 that an early version of The Pledge of Allegiance appeared in a magazine called The Youth's Companion. It read: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and Justice for all."
It was on this day in 1664 that the Dutch surrendered the city of New Amsterdam to the British, who renamed it New York. The English navigator Henry Hudson claimed credit as the city's discoverer in 1609, when he sailed into its harbor and up the river that now bears his name, looking for a passage to India. Hudson was sailing for the Dutch West India Company, so it was the Dutch who moved in and settled the area in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Forty years later, New Amsterdam became a city; its population, 800. In the 1660s the Dutch and English were at war, and on September 8, 1664, a fleet sent by the Duke of York seized the city and changed the name to New York.
It was on this day in 1565 that a Spanish expedition established the first permanent European settlement in North America at St. Augustine, in northeastern Florida, making it the oldest continuously settled city in the United States.
SUNDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Prophecy," by Elinor Wylie from Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf).
Prophecy
I shall lie hidden in a hut
In the middle of an alder wood,
With the back door blind and bolted shut,
And the front door locked for good.I shall lie folded like a saint,
Lapped in a scented linen sheet,
On a bedspread striped with bright-blue paint,
Narrow and cold and neat.The midnight will be glassy black
Behind the panes, with wind about
To set his mouth against a crack
And blow the candle out.
It's the birthday of soul singer and songwriter Otis Redding, born in Dawson, Georgia (1941), who dropped out of high school to play in Little Richard's band. His biggest hit, in 1967, was "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," which was released after his death in an airplane crash. "Sittin' in the morning sun, I'll be sitting when the evening come, Watching the ships roll in, And I'll watch 'em roll away again, yeah."
It's the birthday of novelist, poet, and playwright Paul Goodman, born in New York City in 1911. He was an academic, a teacher, whose anarchism and sexual mores caused him many professional difficulties. He was fired from every teaching job he ever had because he insisted on his right to fall in love with his students, even though he had a wife and family. During the 1940s he wrote furiously, producing five novels, 100 short stories, and numerous plays and poems, all while supplementing his income by writing plot synopses of French novels for the MGM story department for $5 apiece. Goodman turned from writing fiction to writing social criticism, and is best known for his 1960 work, Growing Up Absurd.
It's the birthday of poet, novelist, and translator Cesare Pavese, born in Santo Stefano Belbo, Italy, in 1908. In the 1930s, Pavese edited the anti-Fascist review "La Cultura," for which he was arrested and imprisoned by the Mussolini government. He translated many American writers of the time, including Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner. After WWII, Pavese wrote several novels of his own, including The Comrade (1948), Among Women Only (1953), and The Moon and The Bonfire (1950). In 1950, unhappy with his personal life and the political climate of postwar Italy, he committed suicide.
It's the birthday of novelist and screenwriter James Hilton, born in Lancashire, England (1900), an instructor at Cambridge University and the author of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, about Mr. Chipping, a classics teacher who sacrifices his academic career because he is caught up in the lives of his students. Another of Hilton's novels became a best seller: Lost Horizon, about a Utopian paradise hidden high in the Tibetan mountains.
It's the birthday of chef and entrepreneur Harland Sanders, born near Henryville, Indiana (1890), a streetcar conductor, a soldier, a railroad fireman, an insurance salesman, and a service station operator, and in 1929, when he was about 40 years old, he opened Sanders' Café at the rear of his service station in Corbin, Kentucky, where he developed a secret combination of eleven herbs and spices and learned how to fry chicken in a pressure cooker, techniques which he then franchised. This was the beginning of Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
It's the birthday of poet and short-story writer Elinor Wylie, born in Somerville, New Jersey (1885), to a wealthy family. At the age of 25, she left her husband and son and ran away with a man named Horace Wylie, also married. They moved to England, where she published her first book of poetry, Incidental Numbers. In 1928, she wrote what many consider her best poems in a collection called Angels and Earthly Creatures. On December 15th of that year, she finished the last poem, and prepared the manuscript for the printer. She died the following day.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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