MONDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2002
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Poem: "Sonnet 65," by William Shakespeare.

Sonnet 65

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?
O fearful meditation, where alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

On this day in 1950, "Your Show of Shows" debuted, one of the most successful variety shows television has ever seen. Starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, it featured ninety minutes of original comedy sketches performed live in front of a studio audience. Writers for the show included Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon. When asked recently why he was not still performing, Caesar replied that he'd looked a tape of himself and said, "I'm never going to do it as well as I did when I was 25 and 30 and 35. Rather than not do it well, I'd rather not do it."

It's the birthday of novelist, Anthony Burgess, born in Manchester, England (1917). The author of more than fifty books and dozens of musical compositions, he's best known as the author of A Clockwork Orange (1962).

It's the birthday of journalist Will Yolen, born in Waterbury, Connecticut (1908). He worked as a journalist and in public relations, but his real passion was kite flying. He once kept 178 kites in the air at one time.

It's the birthday of publisher John C. Farrar, born in Burlington, Vermont (1896). He got into publishing in 1927 as an editor at Doubleday. Later he founded the firm of Farrar and Rinehart, which later became Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. He also founded the Breadloaf Writer's Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont.

It's the birthday of writer and playwright Marcel Paul Pagnol, born in Aubagne, France (1895). He's best known for his novels Jean de Florette, and Manon of the Spring, both adapted into films.

It's the birthday of tenor Enrico Caruso, born in Naples, Italy (1873). He sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for eighteen years, and was the first major tenor to be recorded on gramophone records.

It's the birthday of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He and several of his fellow students and artists-including Monet, Cézanne, and Pissarro-began to break away from the traditions of nineteenth century painting. They got out of the studio and painted directly from nature, employing a style characterized by short brush strokes of bright colors to represent the effect of light on objects. The style came to be known as Impressionism.

TUESDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 2002
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Poem: "A Man in Maine," by Philip Booth from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 (Viking).

A Man in Maine

North. The bare time.
The same quick dark
from Rutland to Nome,

the utter chill.
Winter stars. After
work, splitting birch

by the light outside
his back door, a man
in Maine thinks what

his father told him,
splitting outside
this same back door:

every November, his
father said, he thought
when he split wood

of what his father
said the night he
right here died: just

after supper, his
father said, his father
came out back, looked

out at the sky
the way he had
for years, picked up

his ax, struck
the oak clean, and
was himself struck

down; before he
died he just had
this to say:

this time of
year the stars
come close some fierce.

On this day in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee unveiled a prototype of the Web browser at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, a tool for physicists around the world to share their research. The first commercially-available Web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993.

It's the birthday of country western singer and songwriter Johnny Cash, born in Kingsland, Arkansas (1932). After getting out of the Air Force in 1954, he settled in Memphis and worked as an appliance salesman while fronting the band "Tennessee Two." He recorded his first singles for Sun Records in 1955: "Hey Porter," and "Cry, Cry, Cry," which was his first big hit.

It's the birthday of children's author and mystery novelist Mary Shura Craig, born in Pratt, Kansas (1923). She's the author of nearly seventy books, including the children's books Simple Spigott (1960), and The Nearsighted Knight (1964) and mystery novels such as The Third Blonde (1985) and Flash Point (1987).

On this day in 1919, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona was established by an act of Congress. When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon in 1903, he called it "the one great sight which every American should see." In 1975, Congress nearly doubled the size of the park, which now covers 1,904 square miles.

On this day in 1848, the Communist Manifesto was published in London, in German. It was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

It's the birthday of Levi Strauss, born in Bavaria, Germany (1829). He came to America when he was eighteen to work as a peddler, then made his way to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush of 1849. He started making clothing for the miners, including a pair of pants that came to be named for him-"Levis."

It's the birthday of Victor Hugo, born in Besançon, France (1802), best known for his novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Miserables (1862). He also wrote a number of successful plays, including Hernani (1830) and Le Roi s'amuse (1832), on which Verdi based his opera Rigoletto. He was active in French politics as a member of the Legislative Assembly, but was driven into exile when Napoleon the Third came to power. He returned to Paris nearly twenty years later, and was made a senator of the Third Republic when he was seventy-four years old. When he died in May 1885, he lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe, and a million Parisians were part of his funeral procession.

WEDNESDAY, 27 FEBRUARY 2002
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Poem: "The Cross of Snow," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Cross of Snow

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face-the face of one long dead-
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

It's the birthday of teacher, poet, and playwright Kenneth Koch, born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1925). Along with poets John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, he became a part of the "New York School" of poetry in the 1950's.

It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer James T. Farrell, born in Chicago (1904). He's best known for his series of novels set among the Irish Catholic population of Chicago's South Side-the Studs Lonigan trilogy: Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935).

It's the birthday of novelist John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California (1902). His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), was followed by two other unsuccessful books before he won recognition with Tortilla Flat (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937). His greatest popular and critical success came in 1939 with The Grapes of Wrath, the classic story of the Joads, a family of "Okies" who flee the Dust Bowl to come to California.

It's the birthday of contralto Marian Anderson, born in Philadelphia (1897), the first African American to be named a permanent member of the Metropolitan Opera Company.

It's the birthday of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born in Portland, Maine (1807). He was the author of some of the most widely read, memorized-and parodied-poems of the nineteenth century: poems such as "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," "The Wreck of the Hesperus," and "The Song of Hiawatha." When he graduated from Bowdoin College, he wanted to go into literature. His father replied, "A literary life, to one who has means of support, must be very pleasant. But there is not wealth and munificence enough in this country to afford sufficient encouragement and patronage to merely literary men." Longfellow set out to prove his father wrong. He started out as a teacher at Bowdoin college, but gradually the success of his poetry enabled him to devote himself entirely to writing-he became America's first writer to support himself through his own work. In 1861, however, his second wife died from burns after her dress caught fire. In his grief, he turned away from the sort of poems that had made him famous, and produced an English translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-1867).

THURSDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 2002
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Poem: "Run Before Dawn," by William Stafford from An Oregon Message (Harper and Row).

Run Before Dawn

Most mornings I get away, slip out
the door before light, set forth on the dim gray
road, letting my feet find a cadence
that softly carries me on. Nobody
is up-all alone my journey begins.

Some days it's escape: the city is burning
behind me, cars have stalled in their tracks,
and everybody is fleeing like me but some other direction.
My stride is for life, a far place.

Other days it is hunting: maybe some game will cross
my path and my stride will follow for hours, matching
all turns. My breathing has caught the right beat
for endurance; familiar trancelike scenes glide by.

And sometimes it's a dream of motion, streetlights coming near,
passing, shadows that lean before me, lengthened
then fading, and a sound from a tree: a soul, or an owl.

These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.

It's the birthday of the English poet and critic Sir Stephen Spender, born in London (1909). At Oxford he struck up friendships with W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Christopher Isherwood. His collections include Vienna (1934), The Still Centre (1939), and Collected Poems (1955).

It's the birthday of novelist Donald Coldsmith, born in Iola, Kansas (1926). He practiced medicine for many years, and wrote a newspaper column. He then retired and wrote a series of novels set in the west in the 17th and 18th centuries during the age of Spanish exploration. Some of his works include Daughter of the Eagle, Thunderstick, Bearer of the Pipe.

It's the birthday of historian Dee Brown, born in Alberta, Louisiana (1908). He was a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when he started writing a book about the West: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970).

It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Ben Hecht, born in New York City (1894), but raised in Racine, Wisconsin. He got a job as a columnist for the Chicago Daily News when he was just a teenager. In his late twenties, he headed out to Hollywood and wrote screenplays, often in collaboration with Charles MacArthur. Their 1928 stage play, The Front Page, was filmed three times. His other screenplays include Gunga Din (1938), Wuthering Heights (1939), Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946).

It's the birthday of illustrator John Tenniel, born in London (1820), best known for his illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872).

It's the birthday of essayist Michel de Montaigne, born at Périgord, in Bordeaux, France (1533). The son of a wealthy Catholic landowner, he studied law at the University of Toulouse, and practiced in Bordeaux. After his father's death, Montaigne retired to the family chateau and devoted himself to writing and study, remaining aloof from the political and religious quarrels of France. His first book of Essays was published in 1580, and contained the essay, "On Friendship."

FRIDAY, 1 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "Hitchhiker," by Galway Kinnell from Imperfect Thirst (Houghton Mifflin).]]

Hitchhiker

After a moment, the driver, a salesman
for Travelers Insurance heading for
Topeka, said, "What was that?"
I, in my Navy uniform, still useful
for hitchhiking though the war was over,
said, "I think you hit somebody."
I knew he had. The round face, opening
in surprise as the man bounced off the fender,
had given me a look as he swept past.
"Why didn't you say something?" The salesman
stepped hard on the brakes. "I thought you saw,"
I said. I didn't know why. It came to me
I could have sat next to this man all the way
to Topeka without saying a word about it.
He opened the car door and looked back.
I did the same. At the roadside,
in the glow of a streetlight, was a body.
A man was bending over it. For an instant
it was myself, in a time to come,
bending over the body of my father.
The man stood and shouted at us, "Forget it!
He gets hit all the time!" Oh.
A bum. We were happy to forget it.
The rest of the way, into dawn in Kansas,
when the salesman dropped me off, we did not speak,
except, as I got out, I said, "Thanks,"
and he said, "Don't mention it."

It's the birthday of English novelist Jim Crace, born in Hertfordshire, England (1946). He's the author of many novels, including Continent (1987), Arcadia (1992), Quarantine (1997), and Being Dead (2000), which starts off with the murder of two middle-aged lovers on a remote beach.

It's the birthday of American poet Robert Hass, born in San Francisco (1942), the author of six collections of poetry, and translator of the work of Czeslaw Milosz.

It's the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur, born in New York City (1921).

It's the birthday of poet, novelist, and critic Howard Nemerov, born in New York (1920).

It's the birthday of novelist Ralph (Waldo) Ellison, born in Oklahoma City (1914). After serving in the Merchant Marine during World War Two, he was invited to spend some time at the home of a friend in Vermont. One day, he sat down at a typewriter and typed out the words, "I am an invisible man." He didn't know where the words would lead him, but they stayed with him, and eventually grew into a 572-page novel, Invisible Man (1952), the story of a young black man who leaves the South for New York City. The novel won the National Book Award, and became a classic of American fiction. For the rest of his life, Ellison worked on his second novel, much of which went up in flames in 1967, when his house burned. He spent nearly 3 decades rewriting it, and when he died in 1994 it had grown to 2,000 pages. Ellison's literary executor cut it down to 400 pages, titled it Juneteenth, and released the book in 1999.

On this date in 1872, Yellowstone National Park was created-the first national park. It covers an area of over two million acres.

It's the birthday of novelist and critic William Dean Howells, born in Martin Ferry, Ohio (1837). He wrote a campaign biography of Lincoln in 1860, and was given an appointment as consul in Venice, where he produced the first of his many travel books. His first novels didn't do very well, but when he turned to realism with The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), he became a leading novelist. He was a literary mentor of Mark Twain, Thorstein Veblen, and Stephen Crane.

SATURDAY, 2 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "First Lesson," by Philip Booth from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 (Viking).

First Lesson

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

It's the birthday of novelist Peter Straub, born in Milwaukee (1943). He started out writing poetry, got a couple of his collections published, then tried his hand at a novel, Marriages (1973). When it didn't sell well, Straub said, "It unnerved me. I knew I could never hold a real job-that I'd be an impossible employee anywhere. I had to save my life by writing a book that could make some money." After his agent suggested horror stories, Straub brought out Ghost Story in 1979. He then paired up with his friend Steven King to write a collaborative novel: The Talisman (1984).

It's the birthday of novelist John Irving, born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1942). He spent some time as an assistant wrestling coach at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and wrestling makes an appearance in his fourth and most widely read novel, The World According to Garp (1978). His other books include The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), and A Widow for One Year (1998). Irving says he begins his novels by creating "a character in whom the reader will make a substantial emotional investment - and then visit upon that character an unbearable amount of pain."

It's the birthday of naturalist and translator Janet Lembke, born in Cleveland, Ohio (1933), a classics scholar who has produced several translations of Greek tragedy, including Euripides' Electra (1994) and Aeschylus's Persians (1991). She is better known, however, as a nature writer, for her books Looking for Eagles: Reflections of a Classical Naturalist (1990), Dangerous Birds: A Naturalist's Aviary (1996) and River Time (1997).

It's the birthday of novelist and social commentator Tom Wolfe, Jr., born in Richmond, Virginia (1931). The son of a gentleman farmer, Wolfe went off to Yale University, then worked as a reporter for several newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune. He went to California in 1963 on an assignment for Esquire magazine, and came back with a lot of notes but no story. He told the editor he could deliver the notes, but somebody else would have to write the story. By the time he finished the notes, they were 49 pages long, and Esquire ran the piece as it was. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby became the title piece of Wolfe's first book, a collection of 22 magazine and newspaper pieces published in 1965. His book The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) was one of the top ten best-selling books of the 80s.

On this day in 1923, Time magazine hit the newsstands for the first time, selling for 15 cents a copy.

It's the birthday of Doctor Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), born in Springfield, Massachussets (1904), who wrote The Cat in the Hat (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), and dozens of other children's books. His first book for children was To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), and was rejected by 27 publishers before Vanguard Press picked it up.

SUNDAY, 3 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "Getting through Sundays," by Sonia Gernes from Women at Forty (University of Notre Dame Press).

Getting through Sundays

The ghosts of Sunday are small.
Even as a child you felt the gap
in the afternoon, the restlessness
you could not exorcise, tipping dominos
in your grandmother's house, the men
snoring in their chairs, the women smiling
like sisters-in-law. It was a space
too pale to be labeled grief, a concave fret
of something missed, as though
you knew in advance the lovers
you'd lose, the clocks that would tick
long past their last winding. Once

in a high coastal town, the future
beckoning across the bright water,
you waited through Sunday anesthetized,
while up in the turret, a window dropped,
trapped a hundred butterflies
who died there in the sun.
the next day was dark.
You swept frail and folded corpses in a dustpan,
threw splinters of flight to the wind.

Now you listen to the radio,
to rain that falls on all of Indiana.
You pick dead leaves from your plants,
think of all the letters you owe,
and how strange you feel-as though
some hollow behind your eyes
were suddenly enclosed-as though
under your skin, vaporous wings
stirred, stuttered awake, and rose.

It's the birthday of poet James Merrill, born in New York City (1926). He was the son of investment banker Charles E. Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch. At the age of eight, young James was already writing a poem a day. His parents divorced when he was thirteen, and the event had a profound influence on his life, becoming a recurring theme in his poetry. His collection, First Poems, was published in 1951, to great acclaim. He followed with fourteen more volumes of poetry, including the award-winning Nights and Days (1966, National Book Award), Braving the Elements (1972, Bollingen Prize), and Divine Comedies (1976, Pulitzer Prize). He died of a heart attack in 1995.

It's the birthday of writer Cliff Faulknor, born in Vancouver (1913). He wrote popular adventure stories for young readers, including the trilogy: The White Calf, The White Peril, and The Smoke Horse.

On this day in 1915, D.W. Griffith's controversial film The Birth of a Nation received its premier. The film, starring Lillian Gish and a cast of thousands, was based on a play called The Clansman, and was immediately denounced by the NAACP as "the meanest vilification of the Negro race." Despite its racism, the film was responsible for dozens of technical innovations, particularly in the use of tracking shots and close-ups. In its first decade, the film grossed eighteen million dollars, making it one of the most lucrative films of all time.

It's the birthday of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1847), the inventor of the telephone. In the 1870s, he invented the photophone, which transmitted sound on a beam of light. The invention was the precursor of modern fiber-optic communications.

On this day in 1802, Ludwig van Beethoven published one of the most famous piano pieces ever written, the "Moonlight Sonata." Its official title is Sonata number 14 in C Sharp Minor, Opus 27, number 2.

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