MONDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "The Mercy," by Philip Levine from The Mercy (Knopf).
The Mercy
The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy."
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
"orange," saying it patiently over and over.
A long autumn voyage, the days darkening
with the black waters calming as night came on,
then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space
without limit rushing off to the corners
of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish
to find her family in New York, prayers
unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored
by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness
before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat
while smallpox raged among the passengers
and crew until the dead were buried at sea
with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.
"The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book
I located in a windowless room of the library
on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days
offshore in quarantine before the passengers
disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships
arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune"
registered as Danish, "Umberto IV,"
the list goes on for pages, November gives
way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.
Italian miners from Piemonte dig
under towns in western Pennsylvania
only to rediscover the same nightmare
they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.
It's the birthday of Lewis Thomas, born in Flushing, New York (1913), who wrote The Lives of a Cell (1974).
It's the birthday of Helen Hooven Santmyer, born in Xenia, Ohio (1895). She read Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street when it was published in the nineteen-twenties, and it offended her. She decided that she could write a better book about a small town. It took her fifty years to finish, but she wrote …And Ladies of the Club. It was published when she was eighty-eight.
It's the birthday of the editor and critic Leonard Woolf, born in London (1880). He was a bureaucrat who served the British crown in Sri Lanka, but who left the civil service when he married Virginia [Woolf]. One day, on impulse, they bought a hand press and a lot of lead type, which they set up in the house, thinking it would be fun to tinker with when writing was going badly. They found themselves consumed by the work of printing books; The Hogarth Press published the early work of T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster and Freud, as well as their own novels and essays. They turned down the chance to publish James Joyce's Ulysses. "Never have I read such tosh," Virginia wrote, "The third, fourth, fifth, sixth chapters--merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges." She called it a "pale" and "disheveled" "disaster."
It's the birthday of Lope
Felix de Vega, born in Madrid (1562), the first playwright in Spain
to make enough money at it to support himself. On his deathbed, assured by his
friends that the end was near, he is said to have confessed, "All right,
then, I'll say it: I never cared for Dante; he makes me sick."
TUESDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Clarity," by Michael Van Walleghen from Last Neanderthal (Pitt).
Clarity
We rented our vacation cottage
every summer of my childhood
from the same glum farmer-
a giant, cadaverous Chippewa
with ten children, who never
seemed to look at us at all.
We paid the rent, picked up
the oars for our rowboat
then drove uncertainly off
through his dolorous chickens
to whatever slapdash hovel
matched the number on our oars.
No running water, no electricity
and no gas either that I remember.
A wood stove maybe, an outhouse
but inevitably a place so small
and flimsy, so chipped or bent
in each detail, it seemed to us
just charming, doll-like really-
as if it might have been a diorama
in some museum of natural history.
Except that starting now of course
we'd have to live there. Hornets,
bats, the snake in the cupboard…
Take it easy, mother said. Relax.
She was born and raised up here
when northern Michigan was still
a dream-time, howling wilderness
of cold starvation and diphtheria.
She'd chop that snake to pieces.
And then she'd tuck me into a bed
exactly like the one she slept in
as a child. Every night, the same
huge shadows on the walls, the same
crickets, owls, and scrambling mice…
until once I even dreamt till dawn
that I could hear her baby sister
coughing. They gave her turpentine
I think, with lots of sugar in it
but she died anyway. That's why
at first light, there was so much
fog on the black water. No one
was up yet. Under our green boat
pulled halfway up on the beach
where the giant boatman left it
I found a brilliant leopard frog
beside a tiny, coal-black bullhead.
How still, how exquisite they look
even now, after all these years…
having achieved, in the mind's eye
the perfect clarity of last things.
It's the birthday of the cartoonist Charles
Schulz, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). His only formal art training
consisted of a correspondence course. He created the Peanuts cartoon
strip. Over fifty years, only two things about his cartoon strip changed: Snoopy
began to walk upright, and his thoughts appeared above his head in little balloons.
He said once to a friend of his, "You control all these characters and
the lives they live. You decide when they get up in the morning, when they're
going to fight with their friends, when they're going to lose the game. Isn't
it amazing how you have no control over your real life?"
It's the birthday of the playwright Eugene Ionesco, born in Romania (1909). His first play was The Bald Soprano; he wrote it when he was working as a proofreader, and he had just signed up for English lessons. He bought a phrase book full of empty-sounding sentences that had no relation to the real world, and he tried to make the lines in the play sound like phrases in the book.
On this day in 1864, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson sent Alice Liddell a handwritten manuscript called Alice's Adventures Underground as an early Christmas present. He published Alice in Wonderland the following year, and Queen Victoria liked it so much that she dispatched a letter to him saying she would be "pleased to accept any other works by the same pen." She soon received a copy of a book called Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry.
It's the birthday of Willis
Haviland Carrier, born in Angola, New York (1876), who figured out how
to cool machines operating at high temperatures, built cooling plants for cotton
mills and macaroni factories, and then started a company to build air conditioners
for private residences. His invention made it possible for northern people to
live in the South and Southwest; he is the man behind Florida and Arizona.
WEDNESDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Closing in on
the Harvest," by Leo Dangel from Home From the Field (Spoon River
Poetry Press).
Closing in on the Harvest
No one could stop him.
A bad heart, he still
worked in the field
and said he would die
on the tractor.
Out on the Super-M
picking corn, somehow
he got off, though,
and sat on the ground,
leaning against the tire,
where we found him.
His eyes were wide open,
looking mean as hell,
like when he was alive
and chores weren't done,
but his hand
lay on his chest, gentle,
making us think
he was pledging something.
We could smell
the dry wind.
The tractor radio was on
to the World Series-
Cardinals 7, Yankees 5,
Bob Gibson on the mound,
one out to go-
the steel corn wagon
was not quite full.
It's the birthday of James Rufus Agee, born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1909). He wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), A Death in the Family (1957), and the screenplay for The African Queen (1951). In 1936 he went to Alabama with the photographer Walker Evans to do a human interest story for Fortune magazine about the effect of the Depression on ordinary people. Evans made portraits of three sharecropping families, but Agee couldn't finish the essay that was supposed to go with them. He said that if he failed, people would feel sorry for the sharecroppers; if he succeeded, people would understand that their lives, though plain and fraught with difficulty, were, nonetheless, filled with grace. He finally finished his essay, but Fortune never published it. It was published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men five years later and sold only six hundred copies, although it is widely read today. He wrote, "Here I must say, a little anyhow: what I can hardly hope to bear out in the record: That a house of simple people which stands empty and silent in the vast Southern country morning sunlight and everything which on this morning in eternal space it by chance contains, all thus left open and defenseless to a reverent and cold-laboring spy, shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, much less impart to another."
It's the birthday of the actress Fanny Kemble, born in London (1809), who wrote Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863), an account of the conditions the slaves on her husband's plantation were forced to endure. It helped to convince the British not to support the Confederacy, but it cost her her marriage and the custody of her children.
On this day in 8 B.C., the Roman poet Horace
died. He hated the chaos of Rome, and when his patron gave him a farm in
the Italian countryside, he wrote, "I prayed for this: a modest swatch
of land/where I could garden, an ever-flowing spring/close by, and a small patch
of woods above/the house. The gods gave all I asked and more./I pray for nothing
more, but/that these blessings last my life's full term."
THURSDAY,
28 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "The Rites
of Manhood," by Alden Nowlan
from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (Nineties Press).
The Rites of Manhood
It's snowing hard enough that the taxis aren't running.
I'm walking home, my night's work finished,
long after midnight, with the whole city to myself,
when across the street I see a very young American sailor
standing over a girl who's kneeling on the sidewalk
and refuses to get up although he's yelling at her
to tell him where she lives so he can take her there
before they both freeze. The pair of them are drunk
and my guess is he picked her up in a bar
and later they got separated from his buddies
and at first it was great fun to play at being
an old salt at liberty in a port full of women with
hinges on their heels, but by now he wants only to
find a solution to the infinitely complex
problem of what to do about her before he falls into
the hands of the police or the shore patrol
-- and what keeps this from being squalid is
what's happening to him inside:
if there were other sailors here
it would be possible for him
to abandon her where she is and joke about it
later, but he's alone and the guilt can't be
divided into small forgettable pieces;
he's finding out what it means
to be a man and how different it is
from the way that only hours ago he imagined it.
It's the birthday of the poet Dennis Brutus, born in Zimbabwe (1924). He wrote Sirens, Knuckles and Bones (1962). He served a sentence of eighteen months of hard labor on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela.
It's the birthday of Stefan Zweig, born in Vienna (1881). He wrote a dozen biographies, short stories, and a memoir, The World of Yesterday (1943), in which he wrote: "In Berlin I sat in cafes with dead drunks and homosexuals and morphine addicts; very proudly I shook the hand of a rather well-known convicted con artist. All the characters in realist novels I could not bring myself to believe in crowded the small rented rooms and cafes in which I sat, and the more terrible their reputations were, the more interested I was in becoming personally acquainted with them."
It's the birthday of Sir Leslie Stephen, born in London (1832). He edited the Dictionary of National Biography, and wrote The History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century. He was Virginia Woolf's father.
It's the birthday of William
Blake, born in London (1757). He wrote Songs of Innocence and Experience
(1794) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), ignored in their own
time and forgotten for decades afterward. He lived in poverty, ignorant of the
rest of the literary world of London, scraping out a living from his trade as
an engraver, and writing and drawing under inspiration he considered divine.
He said about his long poem Milton, "I have written this poem from
immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time, without pre-meditation
and even against my will." He lived in a world of dreams and visions. One
day he and his wife were sitting naked in their garden, reciting to each other
passages from Paradise Lost. Blake was not embarrassed when a visitor
came by. He said, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know."
FRIDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Survival Skills," and "Dutch," by Kay Ryan from Say Uncle (Grove Press).
Survival Skills
Here is the virtue
in not looking up:
you will be the one
who finds the overhang
out of the sun
and something for a cup.
You will rethink meat;
you will know you have
to eat and will eat.
Despair and hope you keep
remote. You will not
think much about the boat
that sank or other boats.
When you can, you sleep.
You can go on nearly forever.
If you ever are delivered
you are not delivered.
You know now, you were
always a survivor.
Dutch
Much of life
is Dutch
one-digit
operations
in which
legions of
big robust
people crouch
behind
badly cracked
dike systems
attached
by the thumbs
their wide
balloon-pantsed rumps
up-ended to the
northern sun
while, back
in town, little
black-suspendered
tulip magnates
stride around.
It's the birthday of C[live] S[taples] Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, (1898), the author of the children's series about the land of Narnia. He also wrote The Screwtape Letters (1941), in which he wrote, "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." He was a confident Oxford philosopher, not at all prepared to find himself a Christian convert. To his friend Owen Barfield he wrote: "Terrible things have happened to me. The 'Spirit' or 'Real I' is showing an alarming tendency to becoming much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You'd better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery." He said, "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."
It's the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), but brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the Transcendentalists, of which her father was one. She's remembered now for Little Women, which she didn't care for at all and found the writing of tedious. In her journal she wrote, "I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing." She much preferred writing lurid, Gothic stories, about women who sold their souls to the devil, and governesses who looked sweet and innocent by daylight but who ruined the souls of little children by night, which she published under several pen names. Her publishers offered her more money if she would agree to publish under her own name, but she could not bring herself to embarrass her father and his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. To a friend, she wrote: "To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one's life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety."
It's the birthday of Jean-Marie
Charcot, born in Paris (1825), whose treatment of hysterical patients
with hypnosis influenced Sigmund Freud.
SATURDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2002
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Poem: "Antimatter,"
by Russell Edson from
The Tunnel (Field Translations Series).
Antimatter
On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, where
the in-
sane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first
slime of love.
And in the evening the sun is just rising.
Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood
robs
them of their pleasure.
In such a world there is much sadness which, of course,
is joy . . .
It's the birthday of the playwright David
Alan Mamet, born in Chicago, Illinois (1947), who wrote Glengarry
Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the Plow (1988). He said the revelation
of twentieth century drama is "that you can apply the Aristotelian unities
to a microcosm, to a very, very small human interchange…It [doesn't] have
to be about conquering France. It can be about who did or did not turn on the
gas on the stove."
It's the birthday of the poet Robert
Lax, born in Olean, New York (1915). He was Thomas Merton's closest
friend at Columbia, and they wrote to each other for almost thirty years after
Merton entered a Trappist monastery. Lax converted to Catholicism too, and spent
his later years living as a hermit on the Greek island called Patmos.
It's the birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery, born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island (1874), author of the Anne of Green Gables books.
It's the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri (1835), who wrote Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and his own favorite, The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1891). He was cynical and irreverent, but he had a tender spot for cats. There were always kittens in the house, and he gave them names like "Sin" and "Sour Mash." "Mamma has morals," said his daughter Suzy, "and Papa has cats." He swore constantly and without shame. His streams of profanity broke his wife's heart on a daily basis. One day he cut himself shaving, and she heard a string of oaths from the bathroom. She resolved to move him to repentance, and she repeated back to him all the bad words he had just said. He smiled at her and shook his head. "You have the words, Livy," he said, "but you'll never learn the tune." After he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he found himself awash in cash, which he invested in a typesetting machine that was very complicated and very ingenious and demanded more and more investment and in the end would not work. He had to declare bankruptcy, and he decided to go on a worldwide lecture tour, the proceeds of which he would use to pay back all of his creditors. His visits to Africa and Asia convinced him that a God who allowed Christians to believe that they were better than savages was a God he wanted no part of. He was a funny man and is remembered for his humorous sayings. He said, "It is better to keep you mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." He also said, "Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
It's the birthday of Jonathan
Swift, born in Dublin, Ireland (1667), the author of Tales of a Tub,
and Gulliver's Travels. He once said, about a book he admired, "That
is as well said as if I had said it myself."
SUNDAY, 1 DECEMBER
2002
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Poem: "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard," by Wallace Stevens from Collected Poems (Knopf).
The Well Dressed Man With a Beard
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
On this day in 1953, the first issue of Playboy magazine went on sale.
It featured photos of a nude Marilyn Monroe that no one had ever dared to publish
them, or had ever dared to test the U.S. Postal Service's regulations against
sending nude photographs through the mail.
On this day in 1913, the first gas station in the United States opened at the corner of Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It sold just thirty gallons of gas the first day it was open, at twenty-seven cents a gallon. It was a brick building with a little pagoda on top, and it offered free air for tires, restrooms, and twenty-four hour service.
On this day in 1860, the first installment of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations was published in the journal All the Year Round.
On this day in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first story about Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual.
On this day in 1859, a Norwegian immigrant wrote from California to his mother Trondhjem, "I am now living in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and you cannot imagine a more romantic country, rich as it is in the most magnificent scenery. I wish you could make a trip up here in the spring and see the flowers that cover every inch of ground…On Sunday, which is here the busiest trading day in the week, you often see the hardy miners on their way to the grocery store with bouquets of these flowers in their hands. Arriving at the store, each miner compares his bouquet with those of the others, and if there is a lady present, which is rarely the case, she is immediately chosen as judge of the flowers. But the prize for the finest bouquet is, it grieves me to report, whisky…"
It's the birthday of Woody
Allen, born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn in 1935. As a child
he was very shy, he hated school and spent most of his free time alone in his
room practicing magic tricks and his clarinet. He went to NYU where he failed
his Motion Picture Production class, but in 1978, Allen's film Annie Hall
won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Actress.
He said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to
achieve it through not dying."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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