MONDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "The Summer Ends," by Wendell Berry from A Timbered Choir (Counterpoint).
IV
The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way. Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth's green fountains dried,
And fallen all the works of light.
You do not speak, and I regret
This downfall of the good we sought
As though the fault were mine. I bring
The plow to turn the shattering
Leaves and bent stems into the dark,
From which they may return. At work,
I see you leaving our bright land,
The last cut flowers in your hand.
It's the birthday of writer Clarence Day, born in
New York City, New York (1874). He wrote several collections of humorous essays,
but gained popularity when he authored the satirical portrait of his own Victorian
family household in Life with Father (1935).
It's the birthday of advice columnist Dorothy Dix, born in Montgomery County, Tennessee (1861). She wrote for the New York Journal, where she reached sixty million readers and advised them to: "Live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us."
It's the birthday of botanist Asa Gray, born in Oneida Country, New York (1810). His most famous work, Gray's Manual of Botany, remains, in successive editions, a standard work on the subject.
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (1939). She spent most of her childhood living in a research station in the cold north of Quebec with her entomologist father. In the North, there were no theaters and the radio did not work well. She became a writer in a split minute of transformation. She thought that in order to become an author of any importance she would have to give up all hope of enjoying a happy family life. She would have to become mysterious and aloof, sickly and enigmatic, living in a garret, contracting, dressing in black, smoking cigarettes, drinking absinthe, living in an attic painted black and having lovers whom, she said, "I would discard in appropriate ways, though I drew the line at bloodshed. (I was, after all, a nice Canadian girl.)" She was best known for her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985). She said, "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté."
It's the birthday of lyricist Johnny Mercer, born in Savannah, Georgia (1909). His first professional song, "Out of Breath and Scared to Death of You," was featured in the revue Garrick Gaieties in 1930. In 1942, he founded Capitol Records with two partners. In 1946, with Mercer serving as president, the company sold 42 million records, one-sixth of the total record sales in the United States. Capitol was also the first record company to provide disk jockeys with free promotional records.
It's the birthday of playwright and humorist Sir
W[illiam] S[chwenk] Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, born in London,
England (1836). It was 1870 when he met composer Arthur Sullivan. They started
working together the following year and produced a series of hits including
H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzanze (1879), Patience
(1881), The Gondoliers (1889) and others.
TUESDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Topography," by Sharon Olds from The Gold Cell (Alfred A. Knopf).
Topography
After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
On this day in 1863, President
Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of
the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After a two-hour speech by
orator Edward Everett, President Lincoln gave his ten-sentence address, which
lasted less than two minutes and many people were not even aware that he had
spoken.
It's the birthday of poet Sharon Olds, born in San Francisco, California (1942). Olds was, in her own words, raised as a "hellfire Calvinist" in Berkeley, California. She graduated from Stanford and then moved East finally to attend graduate school at Ph.D. she stood on the steps of the library at Columbia University and vowed to give up all that she learned at Columbia in order to write her own poems, even if they were bad. Her first collection, Satan Says, was published in 1980 when she was 37 years old. Over the course of five books, however, she has quickly become one of America's most highly regarded poets; her readings attract overflow audiences, and her volume The Dead and the Living won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her later works include The Father (1992), The Wellspring (1992), and Blood, Tin, Straw (1999).
It's the birthday of trombonist and bandleader Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey, born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania (1905), known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing." He was the son of a miner and self-taught musician who led a band in his spare time. The father was determined that Tommy and his older brother, Jimmy, would not follow him into the mines. He saw music as their means of escape and began giving them lessons on the cornet as soon as they could blow a horn. Both boys were soon playing in their father's band; and by the time Tommy was sixteen, they had a band of their own, Dorsey's Wild Canaries. They played with Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Venuti, and joined Paul Whiteman's orchestra. At the urging of Glenn Miller, the Dorseys had formed an eleven-piece orchestra for which Miller wrote most of the arrangements. They broke up a year later on May 30, 1935. Temperamentally, the brothers were exact opposites. The brothers' differences stemmed largely from the fact that "Tommy was always a great one for pushing," as their mother recalled, "and Jimmy for taking his own sweet time." On that day, Tommy beat the tempo for "I'll Never Say 'Never Again' Again." "Isn't that a little too fast?" asked Jimmy. "Let's do it right or not do it at all." "All right!" exclaimed Tommy. "We won't do it at all." With a derisive blast on his trombone, he walked off the bandstand.
It's the birthday of poet and novelist (John Orley) Allen
Tate, born in Winchester, Kentucky (1899). During his time at Vanderbilt,
Tate was the only undergraduate to be admitted to membership in the Fugitives,
an informal group of Southern intellectuals that included poet Robert Penn Warren.
The Fugitives met once a week to discuss poetry--their own and others'--and
to mount a defense against the notion that the South did not possess a significant
literature of its own . The Fugitives were practitioners and defenders of formal
technique in poetry and were preoccupied with the defending the traditional
values of the agrarian South against the effects of urban industrialization.
He is best known for his poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926).
WEDNESDAY, 20 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Biscuits,"
by Willa
Schneberg from In the Margins of the World (Plain View Press).
Biscuits
Mostly when I'm vacuuming the carpet
in Mr. Besdine's office
I don't worry, just do the work
and know I'll be sleeping in my own bed
when all the desks in all them offices
will have people sitting around them.
Sometimes I don't hear the vacuum cleaner
and I'm quiet like when I play
Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow
in the Mission Baptist Church.
There are other times I imagine fixing biscuits
unrolling my cloth from the coffee can,
flour still on it from the last time,
smoothing it out on the counter,
cloth white, flour white.
My mother's biscuit cutter
made from an old Pet Milk can,
not a tack of rust on it,
presses in easy as a body to a hammock.
Some like biscuits and gravy,
I myself fancy biscuits with my homemade
muscadine jelly that comes from the
muscadine grape that grows wild.
It's the birthday of author and television host Alistair
Cooke, born in Manchester, England (1908), who started out as commentator
on American affairs for the BBC in England, and host of Masterpiece Theatre,
which aired on PBS. He was also a writer who waged war against the use of the
word "area." He explained, "Airplanes used to stop at the gate.
Now they 'make a complete stop at the gate area.' From which you proceed to
the baggage claim area and on to the New York, or Dallas, or San Francisco area.
It is a cloudy word that has blanketed, and hence obliterated, the differences
between neighborhood, district, part of town, region, state, topic, theme."
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, South Africa (1923). She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She's the author of sixteen collections of stories and thirteen novels, most of which explore the issue of race in her homeland. Gordimer was born in the mining town of Springs, Transvaal, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from London and Latvia. The contrast between her own privileged background - her father was a wealthy jeweler - and the conditions of the black mine workers stirred her political conscience at an early age. She said, "If you live in a place where there are very strange things that you see going on around you, you begin to ask yourself: Do I go to this convent school, as I did, and there were only white kids there? Do I go to the cinema and we're all white? Do I use the library, and no blacks do? Is it really because they don't read or they can't read? Is it really because they wouldn't like to go to the movies? And as you begin to ask yourself these questions, you realize this isn't natural." She also said, "For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction."
It's the birthday of cartoonist Chester
Gould, born in Pawnee, Oklahoma (1900). He tried all sorts of comic
strips for the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate and finally in
1931 he offered a strip called "Plainclothes Tracy." It became the
comic strip "Dick Tracy" and was the first serious comic strip that
depicted murder, bloodshed and racketeers. Dick Tracy was a detective who was
in love with Tess Truehart. All of the villains were grotesque figures with
pronounced physical abnormalities and matching nicknames: Flattop, Pruneface,
The Mole, and The Brow. "Dick Tracy" introduced futuristic gadgets
such as two-way wrist radios and space shuttles.
THURSDAY, 21 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Call and Answer," by Robert
Bly.
Call and Answer
Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"
We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
Escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we've listened to the great criers-Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglas-and now
We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
It's the birthday of playwright Tina
Howe, born in New York City (1937). She is the author of many works
including Coastal Disturbances (1997).
It's the birthday of novelist Beryl Bainbridge, born in Liverpool, England (1934). Her works include An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) and According to Queeney (2001).
It's the birthday of novelist Olav Duun, born in Fosnes, Norway (1876). His masterpiece is a series of novels entitled The People of Juvik.
It's the birthday of jazz musician Coleman Hawkins, born in Saint Joseph, Missouri (1904). He did a great deal to bring the tenor saxophone in to prominence in jazz. It was an instrument that had previously been viewed as a sort of novelty. His mother was a pianist and organist and he studied cello and piano as a child. When he discovered the saxophone, he knew he had found his instrument. He played with a blues singer named Mamie Smith and then with the Fletcher Henderson band. In 1940, Hawkins had just finished recording several songs when a producer convinced to do one more song, Body and Soul. He had no arrangement, but agreed to try just one take, with no rehearsal. It became his most famous record. Gary Giddins, in The Antioch Review, described it this way: "If Hawkins's 'Body and Soul' isn't the single most acclaimed improvisation in jazz's first hundred years, it is unquestionably a leading contender." The pianist Teddy Wilson told Down Beat that it was "the best solo record I ever heard in jazz."
It's the birthday of the man who said, "If God did
not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" and also "He is a
hard man who is only just and a sad man who is only wise." François-Marie
Arouet, better known as Voltaire,
born in Paris, France (1694). As a young man he wrote a scathing satire of the
French government and was imprisoned in the Bastille during which he wrote his
first play. His best known work is Candide, the story of the travels
and disastrous adventures of the young and innocent man Candide and the optimistic
Doctor Pangloss, who, after surviving a botched hanging, declared: "All
is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
FRIDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "The North," by Charles Simic from The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt, Brace and Company).
The North
The ancients knew the sorrows of exile:
If you weren't hanged, they'd pack you off
To the far ends of the Earth,
To go on grumbling, writing endless petitions
That would never reach the Emperor.
The North always the place of punishment:
Unforgiving cold, rags on your back,
And the company of a few sullen barbarians
At day's end when the wind parts the clouds
And the stars seem to be mocking.
Every few years a garbled message from home.
Memory paying a call in the wee hours:
A mother's face; the company of merry friends
At the long table in the garden;
Their wives baring their throats in the
afternoon heat…
"The sages suffered, too, exiled from truth,"
That's what you tell yourself…
Not many are meant to retrace their steps
And behold the splendors of the capital
Even more seductive than when you knew them.
The North always the place of punishment.
Deep snow. Blue-veined trees and bushes
Rising against the pink-colored morning sky…
So that briefly, in that one spell,
Your heartache hushes at the beauty of it.
It's the birthday of composer Benjamin
Britten, born in Suffolk, England (1913), whose most famous operas include
Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer
Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973).
It's the birthday of novelist George Robert Gissing, born in Yorkshire, England (1857). He is best known for his novel New Grub Street (1891).
It's the birthday of prolific letter writer and first lady Abigail Adams, born in Weymouth, Massachusetts (1744).
It's the birthday of (Hoagland Howard) "Hoagy" Carmichael, born in Bloomington, Indiana (1899). He wrote many songs, including "Stardust" and "Georgia on My Mind," out of a powerful sense of inferiority, wishing he was someone like George Gershwin who seemed to be so technically adept and so flashy and so sure of himself.
It's the birthday of writer and humanist André [Paul-Guillaume] Gide, born in Paris, France (1869), who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. He used his writings to examine moral questions, in such works as The Immoralist (1902), a novel about illicit sensuality that reflected the dilemma of his own marriage and his conflicting sexual urges, and The Counterfeiters (1926), which exposes its characters hypocrisy and self-deception, and many other books. He said, "Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better." He also said, "It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not" and "one doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
It's the birthday of novelist Mary
Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, born in Warwickshire,
England (1819). She was the author of many novels including, The Mill on
the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1871).
The writer Henry James described her magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly,"
but also praised Eliot's greatness, saying, "What is remarkable, extraordinary
- and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious - is that this quiet, anxious,
sedentary, serious, English lady… without adventures, without extravagance,
assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world
was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of
the multifold life of man."
SATURDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Poema del City"
and "Poema del City 2," by Ron
Padgett from Toujours l'amour (Sun).
Poema del City
I live in the city.
It's a tough life,
often unpleasant, sometimes
downright awful. But it has what
we call its compensations.
To kill a roach, for example,
is to my mind not pleasant
but it does develop one's reflexes.
Wham!
and that's that.
Sometimes, though, the battered roach
will haul itself onto broken legs and,
wildly waving its bent antennae,
stagger off into the darkness
to warn the others, who live in the shadow
of the great waterfall in their little teepees.
Behind them rise the gleaming brown and blue mass
of the Grand Tetons, topped with white snow
that blushes, come dawn, and glows, come dusk.
Silent gray wisps rise from the smouldering campfires.
Poema del City 2
A light chill on the knees
& I sneeze
up late, alone, in my house, winter
rain against the window and glittering there
in the constant light from stoops across the street
cars hiss down from one moment to
the next hour: in an hour
I'll be asleep. Wrapped
in new sheets and old quilts
with my wife warm beside me and my son
asleep in the next room, I'll
be so comfortable and dreamy, so happy
I'm not terribly damaged or dying yet
but sailing, secure, secret and all
those other peaceful s's fading
like warm tail lights down a long landscape
with no moon at all.
Ah, it's sweet,
this living, to make you cry, or rise
& sneeze, and douse the light.
It's the birthday of poet Christopher
Logue, born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England (1926), whose works include
Wand and Quadrant (1953), The Girls (1969), Kings: An Account
of Books One and Two of Homer's Iliad (1991), and The Husbands: An Account
of Books Three and Four of Homer's Iliad (1995).
It's the birthday of anthropologist Colin Macmillan Turnbull, born in Harrow, England (1924), who conducted extensive field studies in Africa among the Pygmies in what is now Zaire and the hunters of Northern Uganda. He recorded his experiences in two best-selling books, The Forest People (1961) and The Mountain People (1972).
It's the birthday of poet Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel, in what is now Chernovsty, Romania (1920). When Romania came under Nazi control in World War Two, Celan was sent to a forced labor camp and his parents were murdered. After the War, Celan settled in Paris and wrote "Death Fugue," one of the great poems to come out of the Holocaust.
It's the birthday of novelist Shaun Herron, born in Carrickfergus, Ireland (1912). He was an ordained minister and a college professor who also wrote novels, including The Bird in Last Year's Nest (1974), The Blackmith's Daughter (1987), and At the House on Pine Street (1987). He said, "[I wrote my books] for my son to read so that, if he heeded them, he would not in his youth be the sort of fool his father was when he was young."
It's the birthday of playwright and librettist Guy Reginald
Bolton, born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, England (1884), who is best known
for his witty librettos on which he collaborated with such notables as P.D.
Wodehouse, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter. He made his fame on Broadway with scripts
for shows like Lady, Be Good (1924), Oh, Kay (1926), and Anything
Goes (1934).
SUNDAY, 24 NOVEMBER
2002
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Poem: "Shooting," by Raymond Carver from All of Us: The Selected Poems (Knopf).
Shooting
I wade through wheat up to my belly,
cradling a shotgun in my arms.
Tess is asleep back at the ranch house.
The moon pales. Then loses face completely
as the sun spears up over the mountains.
Why do I pick this moment
to remember my aunt taking me aside that time
and saying, What I am going to tell you now
you will remember every day of your life?
But that's all I can remember.
I've never been able to trust memory. My own
or anyone else's. I'd like to know what on earth
I'm doing here in this strange regalia
It's my friend's wheat-this much is true.
And right now, his dog is on point.
*
Tess is opposed to killing for sport,
or any other reason. Yet not long ago she
threatened to kill me. The dog inches forward.
I stop moving. I can't see or hear
my breath any longer.
Step by tiny step, the day advances. Suddenly,
the air explodes with birds.
Tess sleeps through it. When she wakes,
October will be over. Guns and talk
of shooting behind us.
It's the birthday of author and political
analyst Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1946). She is currently the Dean of the Annenberg
School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author
of ten books including Everything You Think You Know About Politics…and
Why You're Wrong (2000), Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy
(1992), and Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (1995).
It's the birthday of playwright, screenwriter, and director Garson Kanin, born in Rochester, New York (1912), who is perhaps best known as the author of Born Yesterday (1946). He also collaborated with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon on screenplays for several Spencer Tracy - Katharine Hepburn films, including Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952).
It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Frances (sometimes Francis) Eliza Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England (1849). Although her name is not well known, she wrote of three classic books known by millions of children around the world: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), The Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1909).
It's the birthday of author and journalist Carlo Lorenzini, better known as C. Collodi, born in Florence, Italy (1826) who in 1880, created an unforgettable story of a wooden boy named Pinocchio, whose nose grew with every lie and whose most ardent wish was to become "a real boy."
It's the birthday of author Laurence Sterne, born in Clonmel, Ireland (1713). He is best known for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760). He said: "I take a simple view of life. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it."
It's the birthday of editor and author William F(rank) Buckley, Junior, born in New York City, New York (1925). In 1955, he founded the National Review, a magazine of conservative opinion. "We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."
It's the birthday of composer and pianist Scott
Joplin, born in Bowie County, Texas (1868). He wrote the Maple Leaf
Rag and instead of selling it to the publisher for a flat fee of twenty-five
dollars, he had his lawyer draw up a royalty contract that paid him once cent
per copy. It went only to sell one million copies in sheet music.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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