MONDAY, 28 OCTOBER 2002
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Poem: "ruin," by Charles Bukowski from Septuagenarian Stew (Black Sparrow Press).

ruin

William Saroyan said, "I ruined my
life by marrying the same woman
twice."

there will always be something
to ruin our lives,
William,
it all depends upon
what or which
finds us
first,
we are always
ripe and ready
to be
taken.

ruined lives are
normal
both for the wise
and
others.

it is only when
that life
ruined
becomes ours
we realize
then
that the suicides, the
drunkards, the mad, the
jailed, the dopers
and etc. etc.
are just as common
a part of existence
as the gladiola, the
rainbow
the
hurricane
and nothing
left
on the kitchen
shelf.

On this day in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland.

It's the birthday of Russian novelist, poet, and playwright Ivan Turgenev, born in the Ukraine region of Russia (1818). He wrote Fathers and Sons, the publication of which aroused such hostile criticism, and forced him to leave Russia.

It's the birthday of American composer and conductor Howard Hanson, born in Wahoo, Nebraska (1896). He wrote one opera, Merry Mount. It was put on by the Metropolitan Opera and at its premier it received fifty curtain which is still a house record at the Met.

It's the birthday the man who took the National Geographic Magazine from being a scholarly journal to being magazine for every reader, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, born in Constantinople (1875). He turned down the scholarly articles that were being sent to the magazine and looked for articles written for anybody of any scholarly background. Under his editorial leadership, the magazine grew from a circulation of just a few hundred to 5,000,000.

It is the birthday of poet John Hollander, born in New York City in 1929. He wrote many collections of poems including Movie-Going (1962). He served his apprenticeship translating Baudelaire. He wrote, "When Adam found his rib was gone he cursed and sighed and cried and swore and looked with cold resentment on the creature God has used it for."

It's the birthday of the great English satarist and novelist Evelyn [Arthur St. John] Waugh, born in London (1903). His mother named him Evelyn on a whim, there being no real explanation for his name other than that. Interestingly, his first wife was named Evelyn. At the age of twenty-four, unsure of where his life was going he wrote the following in his journal: "It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters." With that, he began his writing career. His books include Decline and Fall (1928) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). He said, "Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography" and "Punctuality is a virtue of the bored."

TUESDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2002
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Poem: "Riding Lesson," by Henry Taylor from An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (University of Utah Press).

Riding Lesson

I learned two things
from an early riding teacher.
He held a nervous filly
in one hand and gestured
with the other, saying "Listen.
Keep one leg on one side,
the other leg on the other side,
and your mind in the middle."

He turned and mounted.
She took two steps, then left
the ground, I thought for good.
But she came down hard, humped
her back, swallowed her neck,
and threw her rider as you'd
throw a rock. He rose, brushed
his pants and caught his breath,
and said, "See that's the way
to do it When you see
they're gonna throw you, get off."

This day in 1929 was Black Tuesday, the day of the Stock Market crash, and the beginning of the Great Depression. The New York Stock Exchange reached its all-time high in September 1929. During this time, investors bought borrowed money from their brokers. The brokers went to banks to get the money. Stocks started failing, investors needed to default, and the money was lost. The economy was also slowing down at this time, adding to the crash of 1929.

On this day in 1787, Mozart's opera Don Giovanni opened in Prague. The opera was a huge success. Mozart described the opera as a "dramatic comedy," and it's the story of Giovanni, an infamous seducer. He has "destroyed the virtues" of over 1,800 woman, and in the last scene is confronted by the ghost of the father of a young woman he tried to seduce. He refuses to repent for his sins and is condemned to hell.

It was on this day in 1956 that Maria Callas made her opera debut in New York City in the opera Norma. She said, "An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house."

It's the birthday of Henry Vincent Yorke, born in Gloucestershire, England (1905). He would later be published as Henry Green. His nine novels include Living (1929), Loving (1945), and Concluding (1948) as well as a memoir, Pack My Bag (1952).

It's the birthday of war correspondent and cartoonist Bill Maudlin, born in New Mexico (1921). His cartoons featured two recurring infantrymen, Willie and Joe, creating the image of G.I. Joe for American culture.

It's the birthday of Scottish author and biographer James Boswell, born in Edinburgh (1740). He became famous for A Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest biographies of all time. Many of Samuel Johnson's friends did not care for Boswell since he stuck so close to Johnson and was taking notes during conversations and recording all that the great man said. His biography was published in 1791, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of their first meeting.

WEDNESDAY, 30 OCTOBER 2002
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Poem: "Envoy to Jimmy," by David Budbill from Judevine (Chelsea Green).

Envoy to Jimmy

First I've got to tell you
there's only one radio station around here
anybody ever listens to
because it's the one with the farm news
and the local news and the Trading Post
and comes on at five so folks have music to milk cows by.

Everybody listens to it while they're going down the road.
It's nice because
everybody's head bounces to the same tempo.

I was coming home one day up the river road
and saw Jimmy coming toward me in the pickup
headed for the sawmill or the feed store.

I was going to toot and wave, I always do,
mostly everybody does. Then I saw him
in the cab in that instant
as we passed each other
his arms stretched straight against the wheel,
his head thrown back, eyes almost closed,
his mouth     wide     with     song.

It's the birthday of the impressionist landscape painter Alfred Sisley, born in Paris (1839) to English parents. He trained under Renoir.

It's the birthday of the novelist, poet and essayist Larry Woiwode, born in Carrington, North Dakota (1941). He's best known for his novel Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1965), parts of which were published in The New Yorker Magazine. Some of his other work includes Indian Affairs (1992), The Neumiller Stories (1989), Born Brothers (1988), Poppa John (1981), and a volume of poetry, Even Tide (1977).

On this day in 1938, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds was broadcast over the radio by Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. People listening panicked, imagining that the drama was an actual alien invasion.

It's the birthday of Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez, born in the province of Alicante (1910). His most successful book was The Unending Thunderbolt in 1936, largely a collection of erotic sonnets.

It's the birthday of poet Ezra Pound, born in Hailey, Idaho (1885). He grew up in Philadelphia and began attending the University of Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen. He was such a prodigy, he spoke nine languages at the time. This is where he met William Carlos Williams. He then launched into his great lifetime work, The Cantos, the 800-page epic. He was a friend of T.S. Eliot and helped to edit The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. He was a friend of Yeats and he was the one who discovered Joyce before anybody else knew about him. He said, "Nothing written for pay is worth printing," and "We should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

It's the birthday of author Irma Rombauer, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1877), and best known for The Joy of Cooking, which she wrote after her husband died in 1930. She was left with very little money and decided to write a cookbook. She published it herself and it was the only cookbook chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 Most Influential Books of Our Time.

THURSDAY, 31 OCTOBER 2002
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Poem: "Bright Star," by John Keats.

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No-yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

Today is Halloween. It refers to the Eve of All Hallows Day, a Catholic day in honor of saints. In the 5th century BC, it was also the official end of the summer in Celtic Ireland. According to legend, on that day the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was to be their only hope for the afterlife. The Celts believed that all laws of space and time were suspended during this time, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living.

It's the birthday of Juliette Gordon Low, born in Savannah, Georgia (1860). She founded the Girl Scouts. She was born into high society and was groomed to be the perfect "Southern Lady." She founded the Girl Scouts because she felt that she herself did not possess the skills necessary for everyday life.

It's the birthday of the poet John Keats, born in London (1795). He was the oldest of four children and he took care of his brothers and sister while they were growing up. His father died early, his mother's second husband took all the inheritance, and his mother ran off with a third man, leaving behind her children. He studied anatomy and physiology to become a surgeon. He studied poetry as well, translating the Aeneid and reading for the first time Ovid, Milton, and Spenser's Faerie Queen. In 1815 he became a licensed surgeon and did very well. He passed all the tests to be certified but in the end turned to poetry. He had a long courtship with Fanny Brawne, to whom he was engaged. She inspired The Eve of St. Agnes, a long poem about romance and desire. He wrote other poems on romantic subjects such as Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, in which he said, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." He was a doctor so when he first contracted tuberculosis, he knew enough to know what he had when he saw the blood on his pillow. He knew it was his death warrant. He went to Rome to try to recover and died there in his room near the fountain at the Spanish Steps. "There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."

FRIDAY, 1 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Here and There," by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton).

Here and There

Here and there nightfall
without fanfare
presses down, utterly
expected, not an omen in sight.
Here and there a husband
at the usual time
goes to bed with his wife
and doesn't dream of other women.
Occasionally a terrible sigh
is heard, the kind that is
theatrical, to be ignored.
Or a car backfires
and reminds us of a car
backfiring, not of a gunshot.
Here and there a man says
what he means and people hear him
and are not confused.
Here and there a missing teenage girl
comes home unscarred.
Sometimes dawn just brings another
day, full of minor
pleasures and small complaints.
And when the newspaper arrives
with the world,
people make kindling of it
and sit together while it burns.

Today is All Saints Day. Historically, this day commemorated all the saints and martyrs.

It was on this day in 1967 that the first issue of Rolling Stone hit newsstands. The magazine started in San Francisco and embraced the counterculture during the early 1960s and 1970s. The editor and founder, Jann Wenner said that the key to Rolling Stone's continued success was "Change -- the ability to see it and live with it."

It was on this day in 1604 that Shakespeare's Othello was performed for the first time. Also on this day in 1611, his play The Tempest was performed for the first time.

It's the birthday of Lee Smith, born in Grundy, Virginia (1944). She wrote Fancy Strut (1973), Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), The Devil's Dream (1992), and The Last Girls (2002). As a child, she spent time in her father's store, watching customers through a peep hole in the ceiling. She would study their interactions and voices, which she would later use in her stories. She said, "I discovered a down-home narrative voice that would allow me to write about these people without writing down to them."

It's the birthday of playwright A(lbert) R(amsdell) Gurney, Jr., born in Buffalo, New York (1930). He joined the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, and got his start in writing by creating entertaining sketches to entertain his fellow troops. He produced many plays including The Cocktail Hour and Love Letters.

It's the birthday of the man who coined the phrase, "It isn't whether you win or lose, but how you played the game" sportswriter Grantland Rice, born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1880.

It's the birthday of Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch, born in Poland in 1880. He lived back and forth between the United States and Europe for most of his life, but eventually settled in Israel in 1956. He said: "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

It's the birthday of the novelist Stephen Crane, born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871. He was just twenty-two when he wrote his first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) and just twenty-four when he wrote his famous book The Red Badge of Courage (1895).

SATURDAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "a wild, fresh wind blowing…," by Charles Bukowski from Septuagenarian Stew (Black Sparrow Press).

a wild, fresh wind blowing…

I should not have blamed only my father, but,
he was the first to introduce me to
raw and stupid hatred.
he was really best at it: anything and everything made him
mad-things of the slightest consequence brought his hatred quickly
to the surface
and I seemed to be the main source of his
irritation.
I did not fear him
but his rages made me ill at heart
for he was most of my world then
and it was a world of horror but I should not have blamed only
my father
for when I left that… home… I found his counterparts
everywhere: my father was only a small part of the
whole, though he was the best at hatred
I was ever to meet.
but others were very good at it too: some of the
foremen, some of the street bums, some of the women
I was to live with,
most of the women, were gifted at
hating-blaming my voice, my actions, my presence
blaming me
for what they, in retrospect, had failed
at.
I was simply the target of their discontent
and in some real sense
they blamed me
for not being able to rouse them
out of a failed past; what they didn't consider was
that I had my troubles too-most of them caused by
simply living with them.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even
stupidly happy almost without cause
and left alone I am mostly content.

but I've lived so often and so long with this hatred
that
my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from
them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where-
some fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee
is in comparison
like a fresh wild wind blowing.

It's the birthday of explorer, woodsman and pathfinder Daniel Boone, born near Reading, Pennsylvania (1734). He said that whenever he could see the smoke from another chimney, he felt the neighborhood was getting too crowded and it was time to move on. He was one of the first to explore the Cumberland Gap in the late 1760s, and in 1775, he and the Transylvania Company established the first road through the Cumberland Gap. He said that he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." During the American Revolution, while searching for salt in the Blue Licks of the Licking River, he was captured by Shawnee Indians, and spent time in British prison in Detroit, before an escape back to Kentucky. He published his memoir, Adventures, in 1784, which made him even more legendary. He said, "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."

It's the birthday of Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, born in Austria (1755). She married the prince of France at the age of 15, and she moved to Versailles to live in her new homeland. When King Louis XV died in 1774, she became queen as her husband was named King Louis XVI. Convicted of treason, she was sentenced to be executed at the guillotine on October 16, 1793. On the scaffold, she accidentally stepped on the executioner's foot, and said "Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose." Those were her last words.

It was on this day in 1920 that the first government-licensed regularly scheduled radio broadcast in the United States, on KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA.

SUNDAY, 3 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Sister," by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton).

Sister

The sister I never had
enters my wife when I am
sleeping next to her.
So many times
I've watched my sister
come from her separate room,
the room that long ago
in a house of brothers
was an extra room
down the hall from where
I would dream her alive.
She climbs into bed
on my wife's side
and I touch my wife awake
for now my sister and she
are the woman I must talk to
about incompleteness and love.
Awake, she doesn't know
my sister is in her,
she doesn't know why my embrace
has so much gratefulness in it,
why my questions are all
whispered as if
a father could overhear us.
She thinks I want to
make love but I remove
her hand and hold it,
ask another question
about high school and loss,
the kind of loss
that repeats itself every day
like being born
without a leg.
I watch my sister leave
as my wife takes me
in her arms, says hush
you've been talking again,
sleep now,
and I curl into her
as if it were possible
she could be everything to me,
alone like this,
just ourselves.

It's the birthday of Martin Cruz Smith born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1942). He is the author of the Arkady Renko series of detective novels, including Gorky Park, and other works such as Stallion Gate, about the first atom bomb. He also wrote the novel Rose.

It's the birthday of Aboriginal activist and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal or Kath Walker, born in Brisbane, Australia (1920). Her two collections of poetry, We are Going and The Dawn is at Hand, were the first Aboriginal works to be published in English in Australia.

It's the birthday of Walker Evans, American photographer, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1903). He began his career by photographing the rural South during the depression. He also illustrated Hart Crane's 1930 epic poem, "The Bridge," with his series of photos of the Brooklyn Bridge. These photos led to his most famous work, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, a collaboration with poet James Agee depicting Appalachian sharecropping families during the Depression.

It's the birthday of novelist, orator, and social reformer Ignatius Donnelly, born in Philadelphia (1831). He served in congress and published Atlantis in 1882, which traced the origins of human civilization to the legend of the lost continent of Atlantis. He went on to publish two more novels, and two books, The Great Cryptogram and The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone (1888 &1899), which attempted to prove that Francis Bacon had written the works of Shakespeare.

It's the birthday of the poet, publisher, and lawyer William Cullen Bryant, born in Cummington, Massachusetts (1794). Many of his early poems, including "Thanatopsis" and "To a Waterfowl," were among his best known and written before he was 30 years old. He then had a happy life as a lawyer and newspaper editor in New York City.

It's the birthday of the French novelist Andre Malraux, born in Paris (1901). He went of to Cambodia as an archaeologist in the late 1920's, he fought in the Spanish Civil War and was part of the French Resistance. His novels include Man's Fate (1933), and Man's Hope (1938).