MONDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2001
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Poem: "A Little Tooth," by Thomas Lux from The Drowned River (Houghton Mifflin).
A Little Tooth
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all
over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.
It was on this day in 1862 that mathematician Charles Lutdwidge Dodgson sent a handwritten manuscript called Alice's Adventures Under Ground as a present to Alice Liddell, the ten-year-old daughter of a colleague. Dodgson had improvised the story about a girl who falls down a rabbit hole during a boating trip on the Thames with her family. In 1865, Dodgson published the story at his own expense, titling it Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and using the pen name Lewis Carroll.
It's the birthday of the religious leader Ellen Gould Harmon White, born in Gorham, Maine in 1927. In her teenage years, she became a devout follower of a traveling Adventist preacher named William Miller who predicted that the world would end in 1844 with Christ's Second Coming. When that time passed without incident, Ellen had the first of many visions that explained why Miller had been wrong. She married James White, another follower of Miller, in 1846, and they traveled the U.S., preaching about the existence of the devil, the Second Coming, and the need to observe the Sabbath on Saturday. In 1863, she founded the Seventh Day Adventist Church based on those beliefs. In her lifetime, she wrote 55 books with help from her supporters.
It's the birthday of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1922. He's known for his comic strip "Peanuts," which debuted under the name "Lil' Folks" on December 7, 1947, in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.
It's the birthday of the French surrealist playwright Eugene Ionesco, born in Slatina, Romania in 1909. His first and best-known work, The Bald Soprano, premiered in France in 1950 to an audience of three people and contained no mention or appearance of a bald soprano. Ionesco wrote 20 more absurdist plays in his career.
It was on this day in 1919 that William Faulkner's first short story was published in the Mississippian, the campus newspaper of the University of Mississippi. It was called "Landing in Luck," and it was about a military cadet who lost his landing gear on his first solo flight, ran out of gas, survived the crash landing, and then bragged about it as though it were his skill that had saved him. In 1918, Faulkner enlisted in the U. S. Air Force, but he was rejected because he was too short. Not to be dissuaded, he joined the Canadian Air Force instead, pretending to be British, and trained in Toronto until the war ended and he was honorably discharged. Although he never saw combat, on his return he led his friends to believe he had, telling untrue war stories and exaggerating his accomplishments. He turned some of those stories into published works, including his first novel, Soldier's Pay.
TUESDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Therapist," by Robert Lax from Fables (Pendo).
Therapist
a man came to me with the
following problem:
<<my mother-in-law, he said, <<despises me;
my creditors, once friendly, are now all over
me; my wife threatens to leave me tomorrow
unless i put the children in a better school;
my employers criticize the tone of my work
for what they call a failure of nerve. what do
you suggest i do?>>
i turned a somersault for him & he felt
better.
It's the birthday of Fanny Kemble, born in London in 1809 to a stage family. She made her debut at the age of 20 in the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at London's Covent Garden Theatre. In 1832 she toured the United States and Canada with her father—at the time, Shakespeare was newly popular in American theater. She wowed her audiences, including Walt Whitman, though she never liked acting. She once wrote about it: "I never presented myself before an audience without a shrinking feeling of reluctance, or withdrew from their presence without thinking the excitement I had undergone was unhealthy, and the personal exhibition odious." She was married in 1834 to a conservative southern planter and stopped acting. The marriage was troubled from the beginning, partly because her abolitionist beliefs clashed with his—he owned slaves and she abhorred how he treated them—and partly because he disapproved of her having a public career. She began to write, concentrating first on a memoir about her experiences in America called Journal of Frances Anne Butler, and though her husband offered the publisher a bribe to not print the book, it was published anyway. She divorced her husband in 1848 and moved back to England in 1877 where she continued writing autobiographical journals and the novel Far Away and Long Ago.
It's the birthday of writer and journalist Gail Sheey, born in 1937 in Mamaroneck, New York. She is best known for her "Passages" series of self-help books on life's stages, including Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, The Silent Passage: Menopause, and New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time. Gail Sheehy, who wrote, "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another."
It's the birthday of Charles Austin Beard, born near Knightstown, Indiana, in 1974. A historian and political scientist, he's best known for his controversial work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in which he argued that the Founding Fathers were guided as much by their own economic interests as by political ones when they drafted the Constitution. Beard taught political science at Columbia University from 1904 until 1917, when several faculty members were fired for subversion—they'd criticized the government's war policy. With his wife Mary, he co-authored a four-volume history of the United States, the first two called The Rise of the American Civilization and the others titled America in Midpassage and The American Spirit.
It's the birthday of James Agee, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909. He is best known for his novel A Death in the Family, which is about his father's death in a car crash when Agee was six years old. He spent almost 20 years writing it, off and on, and it was only published after his death and won the Pulitzer Prize. Agee also worked with photographer Walker Evans on a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about the sharecroppers in the South. The book only sold 600 copies when it was first published, but it went on to become more popular after Agee's death. By the mid 1940s, Agee had been married three times, and was addicted to alcohol, tobacco, and Benzedrine. His health failed, but even so, he kept writing, focusing mostly on television and movie scripts. His most notable films were The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. Agee died in 1959 of heart failure in the back of a New York City taxi cab. He left no will, had no insurance, and had only $450 to his name.
WEDNESDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Holy Thursday," by William Blake.
Holy Thursday
'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green,
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames' waters flow.
O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor;
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
It's the birthday of William Blake, born in London in 1757. Blake was a Romantic poet, a painter, an engraver, and a visionary mystic. He was educated in school long enough only to learn to read and write; after that, his father noticed his knack for drawing and arranged for him to be an engraver's apprentice. He married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate woman, at the age of 25, and taught her to read, write, and help him in his printing work. The two collaborated on his most famous works, his hand-illustrated poetry books Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Blake engraved his words and pictures into copper printing plates, and Catherine printed them and painted the illustrations with watercolor. When Blake was nine years old, he said he'd seen a tree full of angels, and in his adult life he often said that spirits would visit his studio to sit for portraits. He was never rich; he died in poverty and neglect, unnoticed for his work until after his death. William Blake, who wrote: "To see a world in a grain of sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour."
It's the birthday of French-Canadian author Yves Thériault, born in Québec City in 1915. Theriault's masterpiece is considered to be his novel Agaguk, published in 1958, about an Eskimo family who live a nomadic and primitive life in the far north and who struggle against the laws of white men.
It's the birthday of Nancy Mitford, born in London in 1904, the author of satirical novels about upper-class life, including a trio of novels titled The Pursuit of Love, The Blessing, and Don't Tell Alfred.
It's the birthday of Sir Stephen Leslie, born in London in 1832, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, an essayist, and one of the first serious critics of novels. He edited the first 26 volumes of the Dictionary, as well as writing some important social and philosophical works including History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf.
It's the birthday of Friedrich Engels, born in Barmen, Prussia, in 1820. He was Karl Marx's earliest collaborator in the foundation of modern communism, and co-author of Communist Manifesto. Engels was the son of a wealthy textiles manufacturer, and when he toured the factory at the age of 6, he was horrified by the working conditions of the workers, many of whom were children nearly his own age. When he confided his worries to his mother, she consoled him and told him to thank God that the factory belonged to the family, so he'd never have to work in conditions like those. She said, "Don't trouble your little head about it. No one can change things, even you." The next morning, he said to his mother in response, "Suppose I want to change thing. Then what?" Engels met Marx in Paris in 1944, beginning their lifelong partnership.
THURSDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2001
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Poem: Some lines from the "Love-Songs, At Once Tender and Informative," by Samuel Hoffenstein from Poems In Praise of Practically Nothing (Horace Liveright).
Love-Songs, At Once Tender and Informative
Oh, the sweetness of it!
She gave me her hand—
The petiteness of it!
She gave me herself—
Oh, the wonder of it!
I have her myself—
Oh, the blunder of it!
We'll both be friendly and untrue.
Your little feet,
Your little mouth—
Oh, God, how sweet!
Your little nose,
Your little ears,
Your eyes, that shed
Such little tears!
Your little voice,
So soft and kind;
Your little soul,
Your little mind!
Who has no peer beneath the sun;
But mortal truths have mortal sequels—
Beneath the moon I know her equals.
You stood 'mong women all alone;
When I let the magic go,
You stood with women in a row.
It's the birthday of C.S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, a great Christian thinker and writer of theological works, then of science fiction novels, and later of popular children's books including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the other six tales in the "Chronicles of Narnia." Lewis studied at Oxford and later became a tutor and lecturer there for more than 20 years. In 1933, he befriended J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, and from their discussions Lewis gained a deep passion for Christianity—he became a devout Christian and began writing important works like The Pilgrim's Recess: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity and later, The Screwtape Letters. In 1950 Lewis received a letter from an American fan named Joy Davidman who had converted to Christianity from Judaism because of reading The Screwtape Letters. It was the start of a long and friendly correspondence between the two, which eventually ended in their marriage. They married primarily because it was the only way she could renew her visa and continue to live in England, but when she was diagnosed with bone cancer, the trauma drew the couple together in love. Lewis wrote to a friend that "It's funny having at 59 the kind of happiness most men have in their 20s." They redid the marriage ceremony, this time at Joy's bedside, and prepared for her to die. But she didn't for a while—she went into a surprising remission and the two lived happily together until her death in 1960. To deal with his grief, Lewis wrote, under a pseudonym, A Grief Observed.
It's the birthday of the author Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. She began to write, hoping to contribute to her family financially, but nothing was widely successful until she was asked to write a book for girls, an offer she accepted only because she needed the money. The book was Little Women, in which she based the character Jo on herself and the other characters on her mother and sisters.
It's the birthday of Madeleine L'Engle, born in Manhattan in 1918. She is best known for her novels The Small Rain, Meet the Austins, and A Wrinkle in Time.
It's the birthday of Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1797. He wrote 75 operas in Italian and French, including the popular Lucia di Lammermore, most of which were overshadowed by the works of his more critically acclaimed contemporaries, Rossini and Verdi. Donizetti's career was cut short by syphilis, from which he suffered a long and painful decline into insanity and paralysis.
FRIDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2001
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Poem: "Worked Late on a Tuesday Night," by Deborah Garrison from A Working Girl Can't Win (Random House).
Worked Late on a Tuesday Night
Again.
Midtown is blasted out and silent,
drained of the crowd and its doggy day.
I trample the scraps of deli lunches
some ate outdoors as they stared dumbly
or hooted at us career girls—the haggard
beauties, the vivid can-dos, open raincoats aflap
in the March wind as we crossed to and fro
in front of the Public Library.
Never thought you'd be one of them,
did you, little Lady?
Little Miss Phi Beta Kappa,
with your closetful of pleated
skirts, twenty-nine till death do us
part! Don't you see?
The good schoolgirl turns thirty,
forty, singing the song of time management
all day long, lugging the briefcase
home. So at 10:00 PM
you're standing here
with your hand in the air,
cold but too stubborn to reach
into your pocket for a glove, cursing
the freezing rain as though it were
your difficulty. It's pathetic,
and nobody's fault but
your own. Now
the tears,
down into the collar.
Cabs, cabs, but none for hire.
I haven't had dinner; I'm not half
of what I meant to be.
Among other things, the mother
of three. Too tired, tonight,
to seduce the father.
Today is the Feast of Saint Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, and the older brother of Saint Peter.
It's the birthday of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He wrote of the place in his autobiography, published in 1924: "The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by one percent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town." Twain's most enduring fictions were autobiographical, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He wrote in his autobiography: "Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written."
It's the birthday of Sir Winston Churchill, born in Oxfordshire in 1874. When Churchill was a young man, he was in Africa working as a reporter when he was captured. He wrote a book about his adventures called From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. He was scheduled to speak at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, an event which brought the 65-year-old Mark Twain and Churchill face to face. Though the two had some arguments, Churchill was pleased to meet Twain and asked him to sign a set of his works. Twain obliged, writing inside the cover a message to Churchill which said: "To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble."
It's the birthday of Jonathan Swift, born in Dublin in 1667. He is best known for Gulliver's Travels, a project that took him four years to write.
It's the birthday of the playwright David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947 and the author of works such as Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross. He has also written many screenplays.
It's the birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery, born in 1874 in Canada in Clifton on Prince Edward Island. She wrote many children's novels, but her greatest success was her first among them, Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908.
It's the birthday of the American poet Robert Lax, born in Olean, New York, in 1915. He went to Columbia University where he became good friends with Thomas Merton, the religious philosopher. The two remained close friends, mostly through letters—Lax was something of a nomad in his adult life, moving back and forth from the United States and Europe. He was a screenwriter for a while, then a critic, and finally settled on the Greek island of Patmos in the 1970s where he wrote prolifically for 25 years.
SATURDAY, 1 DECEMBER 2001
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Poem: "The Firemen," by Deborah Garrison from A Working Girl Can't Win (Random House).
The Firemen
God forgive me—
It's the firemen,
leaning in the firehouse garage
with their sleeves rolled up
on the hottest day of the year.
As usual, the darkest one is handsomest.
The oldest is handsomest.
The one with the thin, wiry arms is handsomest.
The young one already going bald is handsomest.
And so on.
Every day I pass them at their station:
the word sexy wouldn't do them justice.
Such idle men are divine—
especially in summer, when my hair
sticks to the back of my neck,
a dirty wind from the subway grate
blows my skirt up, and I feel vulgar,
lifting my hair, gathering it together,
tying it back while they watch
as a kind of relief.
Once, one of them walked beside me
to the corner. Looked into my eyes.
He said, "Will I never see you again?"
Gutsy, I thought.
I'm afraid not, I thought.
What I said was I'm sorry.
But how could he look into my eyes
if I didn't look equally into his?
I'm sorry: as though he'd come close, as though
this really were a near miss.
It's the birthday of the architect Minoru Yamasaki, born in Seattle in 1912. He's most famous for designing the World Trade Center. He was selected for the project over 12 other American candidates, with an assignment to create a space of 12 million square feet of floor area on a 16-acre site, for a budget of under $500 million. The center was completed in 1976.
It's the birthday of Woody Allen, born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn in 1935. He adopted his pseudonym when he first began writing one-liners, at age 15, mostly for newspapers, and then wrote for television comedy programs for three years. In 1960 he worked for awhile as a standup comedian and gained fame, landing guest spots on TV shows, including The Tonight Show. He has won Academy Awards for his screenplays Annie Hall and Hannah and her Sisters. Woody Allen, who wrote: "The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep."
It was on this day in 1830 that French novelist Victor Hugo was due to deliver the final draft of his novel Notre Dame de Paris to his publisher, according to their agreement. But Hugo was late; it was several months later that he completed the epic story, which was published in 1831, and eventually re-published under the title The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo, who wrote: "I perceived, at the end of a certain time, that I was, for one reason or another, fit for nothing. So I decided to become a poet ... It's a profession one can always take up, if one is a vagabond."
It's the birthday of the Jewish writer and poet Ernst Toller, born in Samotschin, Germany in 1893. Toller fought in WWI, suffered a mental and physical breakdown, and was discharged. In the aftermath, he wrote bitterly against the war. He became an active socialist and pacifist and a member of the Independent Socialist Party. He was a vocal supporter of the German Revolution beginning in 1918 and was arrested in 1919 for high treason. He would have been executed if not for an international campaign to save his life, and was sentenced to only five years in prison. In prison, he wrote plays such as The Transformation, Once a Bourgeois Always a Bourgeois, and Miracle in America. When Hitler came to power in Germany, Toller's works were banned and he moved to England, where he published his autobiography and wrote more plays. In 1939, when word reached him that his sister and brother had been captured and sent to concentration camps, Toller committed suicide in a New York hotel room at the age of 48.
SUNDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2001
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Poem: "The Pessimist," by Ben King.
The Pessimist
Nothing to do but work,
Nothing to eat but food,
Nothing to wear but clothes
To keep one from going nude.
Nothing to breathe but air
Quick as a flash't is gone;
Nowhere to fall but off,
Nowhere to stand but on.
Nothing to comb but hair,
Nowhere to sleep but in bed,
Nothing to weep but tears,
Nothing to bury but dead.
Nothing to sing but songs,
Ah well, alas! alack!
Nowhere to go but out,
Nowhere to come but back.
Nothing to see but sights,
Nothing to quench but thirst,
Nothing to have but what we've got;
Thus thro' life we are cursed.
Nothing to strike but a gait;
Everything moves that goes.
Nothing at all but common sense
Can ever withstand these woes.
On this day in 1697, London celebrated the grand opening of Saint Paul's Cathedral, which was designed by Christopher Wren and which replaced the cathedral destroyed in the great fires of 1666. King Charles II appointed Wren to oversee the rebuilding of London, and Wren submitted his first design for the cathedral, which was rejected for being too modern. When King Charles gave Wren the warrant for approving the design, he added that Wren was free to make changes. Construction of the cathedral began in 1675, and Wren used some of the stones from the old cathedral. The cathedral took 35 years to complete—Wren laid the final stone himself in 1710. When Wren died in 1723, he was buried in the crypt at St. Paul's, the first person to be buried there. A Latin inscription on his tomb reads, "Reader, if you seek his memorial, look about you."
It was on this day in 1823 that President Monroe presented his Monroe Doctrine during his annual speech before Congress. The doctrine called for an end to European colonization and interference in the Americas.
It was on this day in 1867 that Charles Dickens gave the first public reading of his works in America, in New York City. Dickens stayed for five months and gave 76 performances, most of which were sold out and one of which—a reading from David Copperfield—was attended by Mark Twain. Twain was a fan of Dickens' writing, but he wasn't impressed by the performance he saw. He wrote: "I was a good deal disappointed in Mr. Dickens' reading—I will go further and say, a great deal disappointed. The Herald and Tribune critics must have been carried away by their imaginations when they wrote their extravagant praises of it. Mr. Dickens' reading is rather monotonous, as a general thing; his voice is husky; his pathos is only the beautiful pathos of his language—there is no heart, no feeling in it—it is glittering frostwork; his rich humor cannot fail to tickle an audience into ecstasies save when he reads to himself."
It's the birthday of Dr. Joseph Bell, born in 1837, the Scottish physician who was the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes. The two men met in 1877, when Doyle was attending the University of Edinburgh Medical School.
It was on this day in 1859 that abolitionist John Brown was hanged for treason in Charleston, Virginia. His capture, trial, and public execution prompted many sympathetic writers to rally to his defense, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau said of John Brown: "He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature ..."
