MONDAY, 4 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "To A Sad Daughter," by Michael Ondaatje from Secular Love (W.W. Norton).

To A Sad Daughter

All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
-all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.

When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even your purple moods
when you retreat from everyone
to sit in bed under a quilt.
And when I say "like"
I mean of course "love"
but that embarrasses you.
You who feel superior to black and white movies
(coaxed for hours to see Casablanca)
though you were moved
by Creature from the Black Lagoon.

One day I'll come swimming
beside your ship or someone will
and if you hear the siren
listen to it. For if you close your ears
only nothing happens. You will never change.

I don't care if you risk
your life to angry goalies
creatures with webbed feet.
You can enter their caves and castles
their glass laboratories. Just
don't be fooled by anyone but yourself.

This is the first lecture I've given you.
You're "sweet sixteen" you said.
I'd rather be your closest friend
than your father. I'm not good at advice
you know that, but ride
the ceremonies
until they grow dark.

Sometimes you are so busy
discovering your friends
I ache with a loss
-but that is greed.
And sometimes I've gone
into my purple world
and lost you.

One afternoon I stepped
into your room. You were sitting
at the desk where I now write this.
Forsythia outside the window
and sun spilled over you
like a thick yellow miracle
as if another planet
was coaxing you out of the house
-all those possible worlds!-
and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics.

I cannot look at forsythia now
without loss, or joy for you.
You step delicately
into the wild world
and your real prize will be
the frantic search.
Want everything. If you break
break going out not in.
How you live your life I don't care
but I'll sell my arms for you,
hold your secrets for ever.

If I speak of death
which you fear now, greatly,
it is without answers,
except that each
one we know is
in our blood.

Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness.

In 1861 on this day, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States.

In 1789 on this day, the United States Constitution went into effect.

It's the birthday of novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter Alan Sillitoe, born in Nottingham, England (1928). His first novel was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), followed by his most famous work, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959).

In 1902 on this day, the Automobile Association of America was founded. Today,
there are more than forty-four million members of the organization, now known as the AAA.

TUESDAY, 5 MARCH 2002
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Poem: Sonnet 71, "No Longer Mourn For Me When I Am Dead," by William Shakespeare.

No Longer Mourn For Me When I Am Dead

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.


It's the birthday of novelist, short story writer, and poet Leslie Marmon Silko, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). Silko was raised on a Pueblo Reservation in the Laguna tradition of matrilineal families, where women own the houses and the fields, and are the authority figures. Silko studied law at the University of New Mexico, but changed her mind after taking a creative writing class. A story she wrote for the class, The Man to Send Rain Clouds (1967), was published in the New Mexico Quarterly, and started her writing career. Her first major success came in 1977, with her novel Ceremony, which tells the story of a half-breed's struggle to re-enter society after returning home from World War Two. Silko's latest novel, Gardens in the Dunes, was published in April of 2000.

It's the birthday of musician and composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1887). In 1905, he traveled throughout Brazil, collecting folklore themes he would later incorporate into his music. He returned to Rio to study at the National Institute of Music, but could not stand the strict curriculum. He went on several expeditions up the Amazon in search of authentic folk music. Soon, he began to write his own music, combining his classical knowledge with Indian melodies, rhythms, and instruments. During his lifetime, Villa-Lobos composed more than two thousand works.

It's the birthday of author Frank Norris, born in Chicago, Illinois (1870), who is known for the realistic stories that helped usher in the era of the American naturalistic novel. Norris traveled to Paris in 1887 to study art. While there, however, he began writing a medieval romance, which he sent back home in installments. In 1899, Norris began work on what he intended to be a trilogy about wheat - first its production in California, second it distribution in Chicago, and third its consumption in Europe. He completed the first two volumes, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), and The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1902), and was working on the third when he died at the age of thirty-two from an attack of appendicitis.

It's the birthday of author and illustrator Howard Pyle, born in Wilmington, Delaware (1853). He wrote and illustrated several other books, including The Garden Behind the Moon (1895), a story of the necessity of accepting death, prompted by the death of his own seven-year-old son. Other works include The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), The Rose of Paradise (1888), and Jack Ballister's Fortunes (1895).

It's the anniversary of the Boston Massacre on King's Street in Boston on this day in 1770. It was a skirmish between British troops and a crowd of civilians who were taunting them. This resulted in five colonists being killed. One of them was a runaway slave.

It's the birthday of cartographer Gerhardus Mercator, born in Rupelmonde, Belgium (1512), who was a true Renaissance man, versed in mathematics, astronomy, geography, theology, calligraphy, and engraving. He is best known, however, for his contributions to mapmaking. He published the first modern maps of Europe and Britain, and in 1569, published a map of the world designed for seamen, for which he developed the concepts of longitude and latitude in what is known as the Mercator Projection.

WEDNESDAY, 6 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "the click of miracle," by Charles Bukowski from Septuagenarian Stew (Black Sparrow Press).

the click of miracle

at the quarterhorse meet
at Hollywood Park

around 5 p.m.

if you are sitting at
ground level

in the
Pavilion

the track appears
to
be

above you

and

in the strange
shadow-
sunlight

the silks
are
so
bright

the color
is
like

fresh paint
on
canvas

and

the faces of
the
jocks
look

heroic.

it's a
grand
time

then

a perfect
and
peaceful

photograph

dream-
like.

such small
moments

keep

people
alive.

such small
moments

so
large

when

it

all

comes
together

and

holds.

It's the birthday of writer and environmentalist Rick Bass, born in Fort Worth, Texas (1958). He majored in petroleum geology, and in 1979, went to work drilling for new wells in Mississippi. He used that experience in his 1988 book, Oil Notes, meditations on the art and science of finding energy in the ground. Most of his nonfiction books celebrate the American wilderness and promote its preservation, as well as the survival of such species as grizzlies and wolves. He has adopted the remote Yaak Valley of Montana as his home, and has written several books on his life there, including Winter: Notes from Montana (1991), The Book of Yaak (1996), and Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000), as well as a number of short stories and a novel, Where the Sea Used to Be (1998).

It's the birthday of novelist, short-story writer and critic William Boyd, born in Accra, Ghana (1952). Boyd's writing career began as a television critic and fiction reviewer for the New Statesman and the London Sunday Times. In 1982, he published his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, which deals with a clumsy, blundering junior diplomat in West Africa. He often writes about Englishmen in unfamiliar surroundings, including his 1985 novel, Stars and Bars, about a London art appraiser who comes to America to free himself from his British reserve, and finds himself totally befuddled by life in the deep South.

It's the birthday of author Piers Paul Read, born in Beaconsfield, England (1941). His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966, and it was followed quickly by several others, including The Junkers (1969), Monk Dawson (1970), and The Professor's Daughter (1971). He is best known for his 1974 nonfiction work, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which tells the true story of a 1972 plane crash. The survivors, stranded for seventy-two days, decided to cannibalize those who had died in the crash in order to survive. The book sold over four million copies, and was made into a motion picture in 1993.

It's the birthday of author and educator Helen Parkhurst, born in Durand, Wisconsin (1887). In 1914, Parkhurst went to Rome to study with the innovative educator Maria Montessori, and became the first person authorized by Montessori to train teachers in her methods. In 1919, she started the Dalton School, a private institution located in New York City, which was so successful educators came from all over the world to observe Parkhurst's methods. In the late 1940s, she became an award-winning broadcast celebrity, creating several radio and television programs, including "Child's World," where children discussed their problems with her. She also recorded more than three hundred conversations with children on psychological subjects, which were used in college psychology classes throughout the country, and wrote several books, including Exploring the Child's World (1951) and Growing Pains (1962). She died in 1973 at the age of eighty-six.

It's the birthday of painter Piet Mondrian, born in Amersfoort, Netherlands (1872), who is famous for his abstract paintings based on straight lines, right angles, and primary colors.

It's the birthday of naturalist and author Luther Burbank, born in Lancaster, Massachusetts (1849). Although he only had an elementary education, during his life Burbank developed more than eight hundred strains and varieties of plants. He bought a farm at the age of twenty-one and began a plant-breeding career that lasted more than fifty years. In 1871, he developed the Burbank potato, which was introduced into Ireland to combat the blight epidemic. In addition to the Burbank potato, during his life he developed one hundred thirteen varieties of plums and prunes, ten different apples, sixteen blackberries, thirteen raspberries, eleven quinces, twenty-six kinds of vegetables, nine kinds of grains, and ninety-one different ornamental plants and flowers.

THURSDAY, 7 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "Maggie and Milly and Molly and May," by e.e. cummings from Collected Poems (Liveright).

Maggie And Milly And Molly And May

maggie and millie and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

millie befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

It's the birthday of novelist, short-story writer, journalist and political activist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in Aracataca, Colombia (1928). He spent many years traveling and working as a journalist while writing fiction, disappointed that none of his books sold more than a few hundred copies. He began work on a long fictionalized history of Colombia, set in Macondo, but couldn't find the voice for it, until he had a sudden inspiration to base it on the way his grandmother used to tell stories. He said, "She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness…. I discovered I had to…write [the stories] with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face." His epic mixture of realism and fantasy became his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which has since sold millions of copies. He now lives in Mexico City and in Bogata, Colombia.

It's the birthday of publisher Richard Leo Simon, born in New York City, New York (1899). In 1921, he made a piano sales call to a man named Max Lincoln Schuster. He didn't sell him a piano, but they found they had the love of music and the love of books in common, and they became fast friends. Simon switched from selling pianos to selling books, and eventually the two friends pooled their savings of eight thousand dollars to open their own publishing firm called, appropriately enough, Simon and Schuster. They engaged in what Simon called "planned publishing": they thought up marketable ideas and then commissioned people to write them.

It's the birthday of journalist and author Ring(gold) Lardner, born in Niles, Michigan (1885). After high school, Lardner worked at a variety of jobs, until he was hired as a sports reporter for the South Bend Times in Indiana, and went on to work for the Chicago Examiner and the Chicago Tribune. He went on the road with the White Sox, where he began to concentrate on the personalities of the players, rather than the games. From 1913 to 1919, he wrote a weekly sports column called "In the Wake of the News," but gained national fame for a series of letters he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, satirizing the hero status given to sports figures by the public. The letters were supposedly from a White Sox rookie pitcher named Jack Keefe, who had a mediocre talent, a large ego, and not much else. The letters were later collected in three books, You Know Me, Al (1916), Treat 'Em Rough (1918), and The Real Dope (1919). Lardner died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight.

It's the birthday of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, born in Durham, England (1806). A young poet, Robert Browning, read her poems and sent her an admiring letter. Eventually, he came to court her, and in 1846, when she was forty and he was thirty-four, they married - in secret and against her father's wishes - and ran away to Italy. Over the next few years, Barrett Browning wrote her most famous volume of poetry, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1958), which included the lines: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."

It's the birthday of sculptor, painter, and poet Michelangelo, born in Caprese, Italy (1475). In the late 1490s, he went to Rome, where he was able to examine many newly unearthed statues and ruins. He completed the Pieta for Saint Peter's Basilica. He was twenty-three at the time, and when he delivered the sculpture, he overheard someone say that he was too young to have created such a work. He then chiseled his name on the piece, the only work he ever signed. In 1504, he completed one of his best-known statues, the huge marble David, which became the symbol of the city of the Florence. The following year, he was commissioned by Pope Julius the Second to paint the frescoes of Sistine Chapel ceiling. For four years, Michelangelo lay on his back on scaffolding, depicting nine scenes from the Book of Genesis, with paint and fresh plaster dripping onto his face.

FRIDAY, 8 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "The Swimming Pool," by Thomas Lux from New & Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin).

The Swimming Pool

All around the apt. swimming pool
the boys stare at the girls
and the girls look everywhere but the opposite
or down or up. It is
as it was a thousand years ago: the fat
boy has it hardest, he
takes the sneers,
prefers the winter so he can wear
his heavy pants and sweater.
Today, he's here with the others.
Better they are cruel to him in his presence
than out. Of the five here now (three boys,
two girls) one is fat, three cruel,
and one, a girl, wavers to the side,
all the world tearing at her.
As yet she has no breasts
(her friend does) and were it not
for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins
in taunting, she could not bear her terror,
which is the terror
of being him. Does it make her happy
that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,
of acting fool to salve
her loneliness? She doesn't seem
so happy. She is like
the lower middle class, that fatal group
handed crumbs so they can drop a few
down lower, to the poor, so they won't kill
the rich. All around
the apt. swimming pool
there is what's everywhere: forsakenness
and fear, a disdain for those beneath us
rather than a rage
against the ones above: the exploiters,
the oblivious and unabashedly cruel.

It's the birthday of journalist and nonfiction writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931). McPhee graduated from Princeton University, where he is currently the Ferris Professor of Journalism, in 1953. In 1965 he became a staff writer for The New Yorker, a move that launched his literary career. He has written on a wide variety of subjects, including oranges, aircraft, the atomic bomb, birchbark canoes, basketball, tennis, the Merchant Marines, the Swiss Army, and, frequently, geology. His book Annals of the Former World won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1999. He traveled in Alaska for two years, writing Coming into the Country, and drove thousands of miles in the back country of Georgia for Travels in Georgia. He rarely gives interviews.

It's the birthday of author, journalist and screenwriter (Eu)Gene Fowler, born in Denver, Colorado (1890). His first years as a working journalist were at the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, where he practiced his florid writing style. By the time Fowler moved to New York in 1918, he had become the stereotypical newspaperman of the time: sensational writing coupled with sensational fighting, drinking, and womanizing. He eventually went to Hollywood and became a screenwriter, where he penned such scripts as Call of the Wild (1935), White Fang (1936), and Billy the Kid (1941). He also began to write books, notably biographies of such legendary figures as Mack Sennett, the Hollywood silent film director, and Jimmy Walker, flamboyant mayor of New York City. But his best known work was Good Night, Sweet Prince (1944), the best-selling biography of actor John Barrymore.

It's the birthday of author Kenneth Grahame, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1859). Although he dreamed of attending Oxford University, his relatives would not fund his education, instead arranging a job for him as a clerk in the Bank of England, where he stayed until 1907. While at the bank, he began to write stories and sketches with names like The Lost Centaur and Orion, most of them based on his theory that people needed to bring out their more animalistic aspects, which had been repressed by the industrial revolution. In 1893, a collection of these stories was published as Pagan Papers. His second and third collections, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), contained stories about several orphans who lived with their uncaring relatives in a large country house. The books became very popular. However, Graham's claim to fame is a book of related tales he began as bedtime stories for his young son, about a mole, a rat, a badger and a toad. The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, and met with mixed reviews. It's sales rose slowly, but it is still read by millions of children today and is now considered a classic of children's literature. Grahame wrote very little after The Wind in the Willows, preferring to live quietly in the country with his family. He died in 1932.

SATURDAY, 9 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "It Is Raining on the House of Anne Frank," by Linda Pastan from Carnival Evening (W.W. Norton).

It Is Raining on the House of Anne Frank

It is raining on the house
of Anne Frank
and on the tourists
herded together under the shadow
of their umbrellas,
on the perfectly silent
tourists who would rather be
somewhere else
but who wait here on stairs
so steep they must rise
to some occasion
high in the empty loft,
in the quaint toilet,
in the skeleton
of a kitchen
or on the map-
each of its arrows
a barb of wire-
with all the dates, the expulsions,
the forbidding shapes
of continents.
And across Amsterdam it is raining
on the Van Gogh Museum
where we will hurry next
to see how someone else
could find the pure
center of light
within the dark circle
of his demons.

It's the birthday of novelist and poet Keri Hulme, born in Christchurch, New Zealand (1947), whose first novel, The Bone People, received the prestigious Booker Prize in England in 1985. Hume, who is part Maori, combines poetry, dreams, and tribal lore in her writings. Her novel was followed by Lost Possessions (1985), a collection of poems, and The Windeater (1986), a collection of short stories. She continues to write while living as a virtual recluse for nine months of the year on the South Island in New Zealand, although she has often said she'd rather be fishing for whitebait: "Writing isn't my life…it's a part of my life, it's a lovely part of my life, I enjoy it very much and it's how I am living. But it's not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, and food…."

It's the birthday of writer Mickey Spillane, born in Brooklyn, New York (1918). In 1967, a list of the best-selling books published in America between 1895 and 1965 was published - and seven of the top twenty-nine were by Spillane.

It's the birthday of composer Samuel Barber, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania (1910).

It's the birthday of biographer, poet, and essayist Peter Quennell, born in Kent, England (1905), whom the New York Times called "a dashing English man of letters." Early in life, he resolved to be a poet, and published his first volume when he was seventeen, which won him an introduction to poet Edith Sitwell. He later said that with this meeting, "…I had entered the literary world, in which beauty, lunacy, and genius were woven together into the pattern of everyday life."

It's the birthday of poet, novelist, biographer, and garden-writer Vita Sackville-West, born in Knole, England (1892). She was born into one of the most socially prominent families in England, and lived most of her life in what her son later called "the largest house in England still in private hands." She became a landscape designer and gardening expert, with more than a dozen gardening books to her credit. She wrote a gardening column for the London Observer for fifteen years, and was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Gold Medal. She wrote several novels based on her stories of her own ancestors, including The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932). But Sackville-West has become almost as well known for her lifestyle as for her writing style. Married to the same man for forty-nine years, she nonetheless had several passionate affairs with women, including Virginia Woolf, who, it is said, based her novel Orlando on Sackville-West.

It's the birthday of explorer Amerigo Vespucci, born in Florence, Italy (1451). He explored the coast of South America and discovered the mouth of the Amazon River. He was the first explorer to identify the New World of what is now North and South America. Even though Columbus may have reached the Americas first, he never knew it. He thought he had reached Asia. Vespucci wrote letters to friends in Europe describing his travels, including the diet, religion, and sexual practices of the natives he found along his journey. In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemuller published an "Introduction to Cosmography, with the Four Voyages of Americus Vespucius," in which the name America was applied to the New World. Vespucci died of malaria in Spain in 1512 at the age of fifty-eight.


SUNDAY, 10 MARCH 2002
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Poem: "Grandfather's Cars," by Robert Phillips from Spinach Days (The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Grandfather's Cars

Every two years he traded them in ("As soon
as the ashtrays get full," he said with good humor);
always a sedate four-door sedan, always a Buick,
always dark as the inside of a tomb.

Then one spring Grandfather took off to trade,
returned, parked proudly in the driveway.
"Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits!" blared the horn.
Grandmother emerged from the kitchen into day-

light, couldn't believe her eyes. Grandfather sat
behind the wheel of a tomato-red Lincoln
convertible, the top down. "Shave-and-a-haircut,
two bits!" "Roscoe, whatever are you thinking?"

she cried. Back into the kitchen she flew.
No matter how many times he leaned on that horn,
she wouldn't return. So he went inside,
found her decapitating strawberries with scorn.

"Katie, what's wrong with that automobile?
All my life I've wanted something sporty."
He stood there wearing his Montgomery Ward
brown suit and saddle shoes. His face was warty.

She wiped her hands along her apron,
said words that cut like a band saw:
"What ails you? They'll think you've turned fool!
All our friends are dying like flies-all!

You can't drive that thing in a funeral procession."
He knew she was right. He gave her one baleful
look, left, and returned in possession
of a four-door Dodge, black, practical as nails.

Grandfather hated that car until the day he died.

It's the birthday of playwright and screenwriter David Rabe, born in Dubuque, Iowa (1940), whose play-writing career began after his return from duty in the Vietnam War. He wrote his first two plays about the war. In 1971, his first play, Pavlo Hummel, was produced by Joseph Papp, the director of the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater. Two of his most well known plays are In the Boom Boom Room (1973), about a Philadelphia stripper, and Hurlyburly (1984), about drinking, drug abuse, and loveless sex in Hollywood.

It's the birthday of jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, born in Davenport, Iowa (1903). He never learned to read music well, but he had an amazing ear even as a child. By the age of three he could play the piano, and at fourteen began to play the cornet. He parents disapproved of his musical leanings, and sent him to a military school outside of Chicago. The plan backfired, however, as Beiderbecke skipped school most of the time, and sat in with the Chicago jazz bands of the time. He was eventually expelled from school, and in 1923, joined the Chicago-based band, The Wolverines. He made several recordings with them in 1924. He became a soloist with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra. He had a unique style of playing about which guitarist Eddie Condon once said, "Bix's horn sounded like a girl saying yes." His musical success, however, was overshadowed by his heavy drinking. In 1929 the problem became so bad that Beiderbecke was forced to leave the orchestra and return home to Davenport. He died in 1931 at the age of twenty-eight. Beiderbecke was the inspiration for the popular novel of the 1930s written by Dorothy Baker, Young Man with a Horn.

It's the birthday of philosopher, critic, linguist and writer Friedrich von Schlegel, born in Dresden, Germany (1772). His real influence began when he and his brother co-founded the magazine Athenauem. In it, Schlegel put forth his ideas about Romanticism; he was the first to use the term in a literary context.

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