MONDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "So Much Happiness," by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press).
So Much Happiness
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
It's the birthday of American novelist and short story writer Judith Freeman, born in Ogden, Utah (1946). Her first book was a collection of short stories called Family Attraction (1988). She followed this up with her first novel, The Chinchilla Farm (1989), a road novel about a Mormon woman who packs all of her belongings into a livestock trailer and heads for L.A. after her husband walks out.
It's the birthday of William Timothy (Tim) O'Brien, born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). He won the National Book Award in 1979 for his novel Going After Cacciato (1978), about the experiences of a soldier in Vietnam. O'Brien was drafted and sent to Vietnam soon after his graduation from Macalester College in 1968. He served in the Army for three years, reached the rank of sergeant, and was awarded a Purple Heart. When he came back home, he started turning his wartime experiences into material for fiction. His first book was If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), a semi-autobiographical story of an infantryman's year in Vietnam. His other books include The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), and Tomcat in Love (1998). Writing good stories, he says, "requires a sense of passion, and my passion as a human being and as a writer intersect in Vietnam, not in the physical stuff but in the issues of Vietnam: of courage, rectitude, enlightenment, holiness, trying to do the right thing in the world."
It's the birthday of historian and Librarian of Congress emeritus Daniel Joseph Boorstin, born in Atlanta, Georgia (1914). As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he took first-class honors in jurisprudence and was admitted as a barrister to the Inner Temple in 1937. Two years later, he returned to the United States to teach history, first at Harvard and then at the University of Chicago. He left Chicago in 1969 to become the director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and in 1975 moved on to become the Librarian of Congress, a post he held until 1987. He's best-known for his three-volume history, The Americans. The third volume, titled The Americans: The Democratic Experience, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
It's the birthday of American poet Louis Untermeyer, born in New York City (1885). After he dropped out of high school, he went to work as a salesman for his father's jewelry manufacturing business. In 1923 he resigned from the company to devote himself to his literary interests. In the next 54 years, before his death in 1977, he published 22 books of his own poetry but became best known for the poetry anthologies he edited.
On this date in 1856, the Revue de Paris published the first installment of Gustave Flaubert's tragic story of a disappointed country doctor's wife, Madame Bovary. The novel's realistic treatment of adultery and suicide prompted obscenity charges to be brought against the author in the following year. He was acquitted, and the novel became a classic of French literature.
TUESDAY, 2 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "Time Does Not Bring Relief," by Edna St. Vincent Millay from Collected Poems (Harper Collins).
Time Does Not Bring Relief
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountainside,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
Today is Sukkot, the Feast of the Tabernacles, when the Jewish people commemorate their 40 years in the desert and thank God for the fall harvest.
Today is also the date of the annual Harvest Moon, so called because the light of the full moon enables farmers to spend more time in the field getting in their crops.
It's the birthday of the American photographer Annie Leibovitz, born Anna-Lou Leibovitz, in Westbury, Connecticut (1949). From her hundreds of photographs for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and countless advertising campaigns, Annie Leibovitz has become known as "the portraitist of the rock generation." In 1991, the National Portrait Gallery honored her with a 20-year retrospective of her work—only the second time this had been done for a living photographer.
It's the birthday of British novelist Graham (Henry) Greene, born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England (1902). He published over 60 books, including books of poetry, short stories, film criticism, plays, and novels. His novels include This Gun for Hire (1936), Brighton Rock (1938), The Third Man (1950), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), and A Burnt-Out Case (1961).
It's the birthday of the South African poet Roy Campbell, born Ignatius Roy Dunnachie Campbell in Durban, Natal (1901). After he failed his exams at Oxford, he walked across France, lived with fishermen in Wales, taught Shakespeare to workers, won a steer-throwing championship, and fought with Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. He also published eighteen volumes of poetry. His masterpiece was his first book, The Flaming Terrapin, published in 1928.
It's the birthday of American poet Wallace Stevens, born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). As a young man, he studied law at New York University, was admitted to the bar in 1904, and went on to have a long career in the legal department of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company in Hartford, Connecticut. Meanwhile, he was writing poetry. In 1914, when he was 35, his first poems appeared in the pages of Poetry magazine, under the pen name "Peter Parasol." Before his death in 1955, he published over 400 poems and 20 books of poetry, including Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1954). He was a large, quiet, intensely private man, for whom poetry was "a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right."
It's the birthday of Indian religious and political leader Mohandas Gandhi, born in Porbandar, north of Bombay, India (1869). He was born into the merchant caste, and as a young man went to England to study law. After being admitted to the bar, he accepted a position in South Africa, as the legal representative for a firm of Moslems. While traveling in the first-class compartment of the train, he was asked by a white man to leave. This experience of racial discrimination pointed him down the path of political activism, guided by the concept of satyagraha, or soul force. "Satyagraha," he said, "is not predominantly civil disobedience, but a quiet and irresistible pursuit of truth."
WEDNESDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "A Usual Prayer," by John Berryman from Collected Poems (Farrar Straus Giroux).
A Usual Prayer
According to Thy will: That this day only
I may avoid the vile
and baritone away in a broader chorus
of to each other decent forebearance & even aid.Merely sensational let's have today,
lacking mostly thinking,—
men's thinking being eighteen-tenths deluded.
Did I get this figure out of St Isaac of Syria?For fun: find me among my self-indulgent artbooks
a new drawing by Ingres!
For discipline, two self-denying minus-strokes
and my wonted isometrics, barbells, & antiphons.Lord of happenings, & little things,
muster me westward fitter to my end—
which has got to be Your strange end for me—
and toughen me effective to the tribes en route.
It's the birthday of American novelist Gore Vidal, born Eugene Luther Vidal, in West Point, New York (1925). When he was a boy, the biggest influence on his life was his grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, Oklahoma's first United States Senator. His first novel was Williwaw (1946), written when he was 19. He's best-known for his historical novels, including Julian (1964), about the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, as well as Burr (1974), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln (1984).
It's the birthday of British novelist and veterinarian James Herriot, born James Alfred Wight, in Sunderland, England (1916). He wrote his first book when he was 50. As a practicing veterinarian, he worried that it would be considered unprofessional for him to publish under his own name. His first book, If Only They Could Talk, was published in 1970, and sold only 1,200 copies. Two years later. his first and second books were published in a single volume under the title All Creatures Great and Small (1972). The book was an instant success, and was followed by three more books in the series: All Things Bright and Beautiful (1974), All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977) and The Lord God Made Them All (1982). The titles all come from a popular English hymn.
It's the birthday of American novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina (1900). He entered the University of North Carolina at 15, then went off to Harvard University, where several of his plays were produced. He left Harvard for New York in 1923, hoping for success as a playwright. He ended up writing a massive autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). This was followed with a sequel in 1935, Of Time and the River. When he died, of complications from pneumonia, in 1938, he left behind an eight-foot stack of manuscripts, from which his editor managed to extract two more novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940).
It's the birthday of the French painter Pierre Bonnard, born in Fontenay-aux-Rose, France (1867). He's known for the intense colors of his interior scenes, paintings of dining rooms and bathing nudes, as well as for his colorful still-lifes and garden scenes.
It's the birthday of George Bancroft, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1800). He's known for his 10-volume History of the United States, published between 1834 and 1874, the first comprehensive study of American history.
It's the birthday of Cherokee chief John Ross, born near Lookout Mountain in Tennessee (1790). In 1838 Ross was forced to lead his people across the Mississippi River to what is now Oklahoma. More than 4,000 Cherokee people died on the forced march west, which became known as the "Trail of Tears."
THURSDAY, 4 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "For Translation into Latin," by Gavin Ewart from Selected Poems 1933-1988 (New Directions).
For Translation into Latin
The sailors love the beautiful girls.
The wise poets love the sailors.
The girls often love the sailors.
The bad poets love the beautiful girls.
The bad girls love the farmers.
All the poets hate the farmers.
The bad girls hate the good girls.
The good girls love all the sailors.
The bad girls love the bad girls.
The farmers hate all the poets.
The good girls love the bad poets.
The bad poets hate the good poets.
Today is the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. He was born in Assisi, in central Italy, in 1182. He started out as a wealthy man-about-town, until he fell into a serious illness in his 19th year. He was praying in the dilapidated Church of St. Damiano one day in 1206, and he heard the voice of Christ saying, "Go, Francis, and repair my house which, as you see, is well-nigh in ruins." He went and took some of his father's money for the project. He went on to found the Franciscan Order, which was dedicated to poverty, penance, and the relief of the sick.
In 1582, Pope Gregory the Thirteenth declared that the day following October 4, 1582, would be Friday, October 15, 1582. By leaping over ten days, the Pope corrected the Julian calendar, which was ten days out of sync with the seasons. The new calendar became known as the Gregorian Calendar.
It was on this day in 1957 that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into space.
It's the birthday of novelist Anne Rice, born in New Orleans (1941). She began working on her first novel, Interview with a Vampire (1976), after the death of her six-year old daughter in 1970 enabled her to identify with the main character, the vampire Louis. She wrote: "Suddenly, in the guise of Louis, a fantasy figure, I was able to touch the growing reality that was mine ... Through Louis's eyes, everything became accessible." She followed up the success of Interview with a Vampire with several more vampire novels, including The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988).
It's the birthday of journalist and short story writer Damon Runyon, born in Manhattan, Kansas (1884). At the age of 14, he ran off to Minnesota, where he convinced the 13th Minnesota Volunteers that he was 18 and got himself shipped off to fight in the Spanish-American War. After two years of guerrilla warfare in the Philippines, he became a reporter, eventually ending up as a sports reporter covering baseball for the New York American. He began writing stories about the bookies and gamblers and other denizens of a seedy section of Broadway, and published it as Guys and Dolls (1931). Jimmy Breslin said of him: "He practically invented at least two decades of his times, and had everybody believing that his street, Broadway, actually existed."
It's the birthday of the Western artist Frederic Remington, born in Canton, New York (1861). He studied art at Yale, and in 1881 he made his first trip out West. His first commercial publication was of a Wyoming cowboy, in the February 1882 Harper's Weekly. Later in his career, he began to work in bronze, and produced the famous sculptures The Bronco Buster and Coming Through the Rye.
FRIDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "the last song," by Charles Bukowski from Bone Palace Ballet (Black Sparrow Press).
the last song
driving the freeway while
listening to the Country and Western boys
sing about a broken heart
and the honkytonk blues,
it seems that things just don't work
most of the time
and when they do it will be for a
short time
only.
well, that's not news.
nothing's news.
it's the same old thing in
disguise.
only one thing comes without a
disguise and you only see it
once, or
maybe never.
like getting hit by a freight
train.
makes us realize that all our
moaning about long lost girls
in gingham dresses
is not so important
after
all.
Today is the opening day of the three-day National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. It's the oldest festival in the country devoted to traditional storytelling. Storytellers from various oral traditions will be there, including Appalachian, Western, American Indian, and Jewish storytellers.
It's the birthday of architect Maya Lin, born in Athens, Ohio (1959). As a new student majoring in architecture at Yale, she often took walks in Grove Street Cemetery and photographed the old gravestones. These pictures became the basis of her best-known design, the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. The monument was inspired by the sense of peacefulness that she had experienced in her cemetery walks.
It's the birthday of Czech president and playwright Václav Havel, born in Prague in 1936. His wealthy father's property was confiscated by the Communists in 1948, and he had to scrounge for an education. He went on to work as a stagehand in a Prague theater and soon began writing his own plays. His first play was The Garden Party (1963), an absurdist play about the functioning of bureaucracy. His best-known play was The Memorandum (1965). By 1968, he was the resident playwright at the Theater of the Balustrade, and took an active part in the liberal reforms that year, known as the "Prague Spring." He became a prominent dissident in Czechoslovakia and eventually spent four years in prison (1979-1983). When the Czechoslovak union dissolved in 1992, he became the first President of the new Czech Republic.
It's the birthday of Irish novelist Brian O'Nolan, better known as Flann O'Brien, born in Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland (1911). In 1935 he entered the Irish civil service and, four years later, published his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The book, now considered his masterpiece, was not a success. In the following year, however, he was asked to write a tri-weekly column for The Irish Times, which continued until his death in 1966. At Swim-Two-Birds was described by John Updike as "a fantastic parodistic stew of drunken banter, journalese, pulp fiction, and Celtic myth," and Dylan Thomas called it "just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."
On this day in 1877, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce surrendered to U.S. troops in northern Montana. He had been leading his people to Canada in an effort to escape retaliation for the massacre of white settlers by members of his tribe. As he surrendered, just 40 miles from the Canadian border, he said: "Hear me, my chiefs; my heart is sick and sad. From where the Sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
It's the birthday of the French philosopher Denis Diderot, born in Langres, France (1713). In 1746, when he was 32, he became the general editor of the 10-volume Encyclopédie. The aim of the work, according to Diderot, was "to assemble the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth; to explain the general plan to the men with whom we live so that we may not die without having deserved well of the human race."
SATURDAY, 6 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "Sonnet: They May Not Mean To, But They Do," by Gavin Ewart from Selected Poems 1933-1988 (New Directions).
Sonnet: They May Not Mean To, But They Do
With his drunkenness, my father frightened me.
He was a sleeping volcano and I was over-awed,
for years I was hostile to any kind of authority
(although, as a child, I didn't know it was drunkenness).
Our mother, in opposition, was completely protective.
She was too kind, she did everything for us,
tempting my sisters to treat her like a servant.
This was bad for their characters, as my father was bad for mine.So. Bad parents can make a child timid and unconfident.
Good parents can make a child bossy and uncaring.
These are the two moving rocks, the Scylla and Charybdis.
Many scrape through—but you can be unlucky.
My mother sacrificed herself, you could say, for her family.
My father sacrificed his family (me mainly) to himself.
Fall is apple season in many parts of the country, and there are apple festivals this weekend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Westin, Missouri; and Springfield, Vermont. In Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, it's an Apple Butter Festival.
It's the birthday of the Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, born in Larvik, Norway (1914). In 1941, he first published his theory that Polynesia had been colonized by immigrants who traveled from Peru on balsa rafts. To test his theory, he and five companions built a balsa raft and in 1947 made the 4,300-mile sea journey from Peru to Polynesia. The journey took 101 days. He wrote about the journey in his book Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft (1950). In 1970, based on his research into ancient Egyptian shipbuilding and navigation, he built a boat out of papyrus reeds and sailed it across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados. This proved that the trans-Atlantic sea voyage could have been made many centuries ahead of Columbus.
It's the birthday of author Elizabeth Gray Vining, born in Philadelphia (1902). She published her first book, Meredith's Ann in 1929, and received the Newbery Award in 1943 for her children's novel, Adam of the Road, about a boy's search for his father in medieval England. She was a Quaker, and was working for the American Friends Service Committee in 1946 when she was summoned to serve as an English tutor for Crown Prince Akihito of Japan. She wrote about her experiences in Japan in the 1952 bestseller, Windows for the Crown Prince.
It's the birthday of novelist and critic Caroline Gordon, born in Trenton, Kentucky (1895). As a girl, she studied the classics with her father, a schoolteacher who believed that Latin, Greek, and mathematics should be the basis of a good education. She went on to become a schoolteacher herself before her marriage to poet Alan Tate in 1924. Her first novel, Penhally, was published in 1931. Her other novels include The Garden of Adonis (1937), The Strange Children (1944), and The Glory of Hera (1972). She also wrote books of literary criticism, including How to Read a Novel (1957). Flannery O'Connor said of Gordon's writing: "You walk through her stories like you are walking in a complete real world. And watch how the meaning comes from the things themselves and not from her imposing anything."
On this day in 1536, William Tyndale was executed for heresy in Antwerp. In 1526, he published his English translation of the New Testament. It was the first English-language version of the Bible. When the book was sold in London, the authorities gathered up all the copies they could find and burned them. He published a new edition in 1535, and was at work on an English translation of the Old Testament when local authorities in Antwerp arrested him for spreading heresy. Tyndale's translation of the Bible soon received official approval in England, and became the basis of the King James Version.
SUNDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2001
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Poem: "Knowledge," and "Snowflakes," by Howard Nemerov from Trying Conclusions (University of Chicago Press).
Knowledge
Not living for each other's sake,
Mind and the world will rarely rime;
The raindrops aiming at the lake
Are right on target every time.Snowflakes
Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form
In heaven, but by the blind self of the storm
Spun off, each driven individual
Perfected in the moment of his fall.
It's the birthday of Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, born in Wauchope, New South Wales, Australia (1935). His grandfather had come to Australia from County Cork, Ireland. As a young man, Keneally entered a Catholic seminary in New South Wales with the intention of becoming a priest. He quit the seminary six months before his scheduled ordination and became a teacher at a Catholic high school. While he was teaching, he wrote his first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964). He achieved his greatest success with novels based upon historical events, including The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), based on a revolt of Aborigines in 1900, and Schindler's List (1982), about a German industrialist who saved the Jews assigned to work in his factory during WWII. Schindler's List won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982, despite some confusion over whether the book was, in fact, fiction. The book was based on extensive historical research and actual interviews with Holocaust survivors. Keneally said: "There are two kinds of eloquence. Non-fiction is trying to tell the truth, and fiction is trying to tell the truth by trying to make up divine lies. There is no question which is the premiere art form—definitely fiction."
It's the birthday of poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, born Everett LeRoy Jones, in Newark, New Jersey (1934). In the early 1960s he was one of the Beat poets on New York's Lower East Side. His first book of poetry was Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961). As the '60s wore on, he moved away from Beat poetry and became more preoccupied with issues of race and politics. He had an off-Broadway success in 1964 with his play Dutchman, and in the following year he opened the influential Black Arts Repertory Theater and School. In 1968 he moved back to Newark and became active in promoting the cause of the African-American community. He also became a follower of the Kawaida faith, a combination of Islam and traditional African religion, and changed his name from Leroy Jones to Amiri Baraka, which means "blessed prince."
It's the birthday of Scottish-American suspense novelist Helen Clark MacInnes, born in Glasgow (1907). She was married to an Oxford classicist, Gilbert Highet, whose wartime work for British intelligence inspired her first novel, Above Suspicion (1941), about a husband and wife who are recruited to locate a missing British agent. It was the first of over 20 novels of espionage and suspense that she wrote over the next 40 years, including Decision at Delphi (1960) and The Salzburg Connection (1968). She wrote: "In my stories, suspense is not achieved by hiding things from the reader. The question is, when is the event going to take place and how can you stop it? A reader may know everything, but still be scared stiff by the situation."
It's the birthday of the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, born in Greenfield, Indiana (1849). As a young man, he had a passion for acting. He first acted in shows staged in a barn loft, then went on the road with a traveling medicine show. He recited poetry, told stories, and played the banjo and fiddle. He began to write poems in the Hoosier dialect, about ordinary people, about the Indiana countryside. Soon he was publishing as many as a hundred poems a year, most of them in dialect. He wrote "When the Frost is on the Punkin," "Little Orphant Annie," and "The Raggedy Man." His first book of poems, The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems came out in 1883. At the turn of the century, he was the most popular poet in the United States.
