MONDAY, 24 FEBRUARY 2003
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Poem: "The Parade," by Billy Collins from Nine Horses (Random House).

The Parade

How exhilarating it was to march
along the great boulevards
in the sunflash of trumpets
and under all the waving flags--
the flag of desire, the flag of ambition.

So many of us streaming along--
all of humanity, really--
moving in perfect sync,
yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

How stimulating the scenery of the world,
the rows of roadside trees,
the huge blue sheet of the sky.

How endless it seemed until we veered
off the broad turnpike
into a pasture of high grass,
heading toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.

Generation after generation,
we shoulder forward
under the play of clouds
until we high-step off the sharp lip into space.

So I should not have to remind you
that little time is given here
to rest on a wayside bench,
to stop and bend to the wildflowers,
or to study a bird on a branch--

not when the young
keep shoving from behind,
not when the old are tugging us forward,
pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

It's the birthday of writer August (William) Derleth, born in Sauk City, Wisconsin (1909). He wrote novels about his hometown, which he called "Sac Prairie."

It's the birthday of educator and writer Mary Ellen Chase, born in Blue Hill, Maine (1887). She wrote novels about people living along the coast of Maine and taught at Smith College for almost thirty years, influencing students including Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Sylvia Plath, and Betty Friedan.

It's the birthday of a man considered by many to be the greatest player ever in the history of baseball, Honus Wagner (John Peter Wagner), known as "The Flying Dutchman," born in Carnegie, Pennsylvania (1874). He played shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It's the birthday of educator and entomologist John Henry Comstock, born in Janesville, Wisconsin (1849). His studies of scale insects and butterflies provided the basis for systematic classification of these insects.

It's the birthday of painter Winslow Homer, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1836). As a young man, Homer apprenticed to a lithographer and then began contributing illustrations to the popular magazine, Harper's Weekly. During the Civil War, he was sent to the battlefront as a correspondent for the magazine. Unlike most other artists of the time, he drew representations of everyday camp life, rather than dramatic battle scenes. In his later years, Homer moved to the coast of Maine, where he produced many paintings of the sea and of fishermen and their families.

It's the birthday of folklorist Wilhelm Karl Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1786), famous -- with his brother Jacob -- for Children's and Household Tales (1812), eventually known as Grimm's Fairy Tales (1857). Among the best known stories are "Hansel and Gretel," "Cinderella," "Rumpelstiltskin," and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." The Grimm brothers wrote down most of the tales from oral narrations, collecting the materials mainly from German peasants. Wilhelm, the more sociable and amiable of the two brothers, selected and arranged the stories, while Jacob was the more scholarly of the two. Wilhelm continually reshaped the tales through their many editions, removing some of the violence, such as the end of "Snow White" where the wicked queen was originally forced to don red-hot slippers and dance until she dies. He also edited out sexual references in the story of Rapunzel and the prince who climbs up into her tower.

TUESDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2003
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Poem: "too sweet," by Charles Bukowski from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way (Ecco Press).

too sweet

I have been going to the track for so
long that
all the employees know
me,
and now with winter here
it's dark before the last
race.
as I walk to the parking lot
the valet recognizes my
slouching gait
and before I reach him
my car is waiting for me,
lights on, engine warm.
the other patrons
(still waiting)
ask,
"who the hell is that
guy?"

I slip the valet a
tip, the size depending upon the
luck of the
day (and my luck has been amazingly
good lately)
and I then am in the machine and out on
the street
as the horses break
from the gate.

I drive east down Century Blvd.
turning on the radio to get the result of that
last race.

at first the announcer is concerned only with
bad weather and poor freeway
conditions.
we are old friends: I have listened to his
voice for decades but,
of course, the time will finally come
when neither one of us will need to
clip our toenails or
heed the complaints of our
women any longer.

meanwhile, there is a certain rhythm
to the essentials that now need
attending to.
I light my cigarette
check the dashboard
adjust the seat and
weave between a Volks and a Fiat.
as flecks of rain spatter the
windshield
I decide not to die just
yet:
this good life just smells too
sweet.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist, composer, and critic Anthony Burgess, born in Manchester, England (1917). He is the author of more than fifty books and dozens of musical compositions, from operas to choral works to symphonies and concertos. He also wrote radio and television scripts and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. He is, however, best known as the author of A Clockwork Orange (1962; filmed by Stanley Kubrik in 1971). It is set in a future London and written in a dialect called "nadstat," a combination of Russian and British slang, invented by the author. In the book, a juvenile delinquent named Alex is brainwashed by the authorities to rid him of his aggressive tendencies. The book opens, "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in a Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry." Burgess said, "I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of as a novelist who writes music on the side…Music is a purer art."

It's the birthday of nutritionist and author Adelle Davis, born in Lizton, Indiana (1904). She gave us the phrase "You are what you eat."

It's the birthday of tenor Enrico Caruso, born in Naples, Italy (1873), the eighteenth of twenty-one children and the first to survive past infancy. He was determined to become a singer, but several teachers told him he had neither voice nor talent. He finally persuaded one teacher to let him observe other students' lessons; eventually he was given his own private classes. Legend has it that when the young tenor was asked to sing as Rodolfo in La Bohéme, he first had to get permission from Puccini himself. After listening to Caruso sing a few pages, Puccini allegedly leapt from his chair and cried, "Who sent you to me? God!?!" In 1902, Caruso made his debut in Rigoletto at London's Covent Garden, and the following year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He was engaged there continually for the next eighteen years. Caruso has often been called the greatest tenor of the twentieth century, known for his brilliant high notes and his dramatic interpretations. He was immensely popular, partly because he was the first major tenor to be recorded on gramophone records.

In 1950 on this day, Your Show of Shows debuted, one of the most successful variety shows television has ever seen. The weekly series, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, was ninety minutes of original comedy sketches performed live in front of a studio audience, without the benefit of cue cards or teleprompters. Writers for the show included Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon.

WEDNESDAY, 26 FEBRUARY 2003
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Poem: "On the Slow Train Passing Through," by Ruth Stone from In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press).

On the Slow Train Passing Through

Here's Moody Furniture and the town of Moody. Also the display
for Temple Chemicals, a wire fence, some rubble and bare ground.
Privy to this endless street along the tracks, I watch
ongoing traffic move around something in the road.
It's a man on the center line lying on his back;
a woman bending down to touch him.
The cars move on. The train slides past.
And yet, in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1907, when grandma's
house was on fire, the passing trolley stopped and everyone
got off and ran up the hill to help, even though there was no easy water.
Three members of a Baptist choir endangered their whiskers,
their business attires, their waistcoats and themselves, to carry
out grandma's organ and her cherry sitting room furniture.
Although the upstairs burned through the roof and my mother's
new treadle sewing machine and her new tailored suit were
among the traumatic losses; they all did what they could.
It was the dignity of a communal disaster. No one was going
anywhere more important than that. The trolley horse had been
unhitched and loosely tethered to graze and eventually they heard
the far off sound of the approaching fire brigade. Meanwhile,
grandpa had been fetched from the foundry. Afterward, those women
who had done all they could to save my grandma's belongings,
total strangers, each in her own way commiserated with grandma.
The men washed at the pump and they all walked down the hill.
The conductor hitched up the trolley and they went on with their
            regular day.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of writer Sharon Bell Mathis, born in Atlantic City, New Jersey (1937). She wrote Brooklyn Story (1970), Sidewalk Story (1971), Teacup Full of Roses (1972), and The Hundred Penny Box (1975).

It's the birthday of the man who wrote the words, "I hear the train a comin'; it's rollin' 'round the bend,/And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when," Johnny Cash, born in Kingsland, Arkansas (1932). He made his first big hit, "Cry, Cry, Cry," for Sun Records in 1955.

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, born in Staten Island, New York (1918). His career began to bloom during science fiction's "golden age" of the 1940s. He authored hundreds of books during his lifetime, including Venus Plus X (1960), Sturgeon in Orbit (1964), Slow Sculpture (1982), and Alien Cargo (1984), but was an eccentric who lived mostly in poverty and obscurity.

It's the birthday of cartoonist Rudolph Dirks, born in Heinde, Germany (1877), who created the comic strip "The Katzenjammer Kids" in 1897.

It's the birthday of John Harvey Kellogg, born in Tyrone, Michigan (1852). At the age of twenty-four he became the staff physician at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a position he held for sixty-two years. He was a vegetarian who advocated low calorie diets and gave us Kellogg cereals.

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

It's the birthday of writer who gave us The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833) and Les Miserables (1862), Victor Hugo, born in Besançon, France (1802). The Hunchback of Notre Dame, set in 15th century Paris, tells a moving story of a gypsy girl Esmeralda and the deformed, deaf bell-ringer, Quasimodo, who loves her. Les Misérables is an epic set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, about an escaped convict, Jean Valjean, and his search for grace and redemption. He said, "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world: and that is an idea whose time has come."

THURSDAY, 27 FEBRUARY 2003
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Poem: "Ultima Thule: Dedication to G.W.G.," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Ultima Thule: Dedication to G.W.G.

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.

How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
The land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!

Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.

Literary Notes:

The poet Kenneth Koch was born on this day in Cincinnati, Ohio (1925), who, along with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, became part of the "New York School" of poets in the 1950s.

It's the birthday of novelist Lawrence Durrell, born in Jullundur, India (1912). He is best known for his series of books called The Alexandria Quartet, published between 1957 and 1960.

It's the birthday of novelist Irwin Shaw, born in New York City (1913). He wrote many short stories for The New Yorker magazine. He became famous in 1948 with the publication of his book, The Young Lions, although his most commercially successful novel was Rich Man, Poor Man (1970).

It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Peter De Vries, born in Chicago, Illinois (1910), who has made a career of satirizing society's shortcomings. His best-known books include The Blood of the Lamb (1962), Slouching towards Kalamazoo (1983), and Peckham's Marbles (1986). He said, "Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, 'What's in it for me?'"

It's the birthday of novelist, short story writer, and social critic James T(homas) Farrell, born in Chicago, Illinois (1904). While studying at the University of Chicago, he wrote a story called Studs, which he later expanded into Young Lonigan (1932), a semi-autobiographical novel about a troubled fifteen-year-old growing up in Chicago. It opens, "Studs Lonigan, on the verge of fifteen, and wearing his first suit of long trousers, stood in the bathroom with a Sweet Caporal pasted in his mug. His hands were jammed in his trouser pockets, and he sneered. He puffed, drew the fag out of his mouth, inhaled and said to himself: 'Well I'm kissin' the old dump goodbye tonight.'"

It's the birthday of novelist John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California (1902). His most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize. The novel tells the story of the Joads, a poor Oklahoma farming family, who migrate to California in search of a better life during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Through the inspiration of the labor organizer Jim Casy, the Joads learn that the poor must work together in order to survive. While he developed his writing career, Steinbeck worked many jobs, as a manual laborer, a caretaker, a surveyor, and a fruit-picker. Steinbeck set much of his fiction in and around his birthplace of Salinas. He wrote The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and Tortilla Flat (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937), about Lennie and George.

It's the birthday of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born in Portland, Maine (1807). He was the most popular poet in America during the nineteenth century. A number of his phrases, such as "ships that pass in the night," "the patter of little feet," and "I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I know not where" have become common sayings. Longfellow was one of the first American writers to use native themes. He wrote about the American scene and landscape. He wrote about the American Indian in "Song of Hiawatha," and about American history and tradition in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," "Evangeline," and, of course, "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." He taught modern languages at Bowdoin College, his alma mater and then at Harvard where he was quite a romantic figure, with flowing hair and yellow gloves and flowered waistcoats. Eventually, the success of his poems allowed to him to make a living for himself and his family. He became one of America's first writers to support himself through his own work.

FRIDAY, 28 FEBRUARY 2003
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Poem: "Ants," by Daniel Hoffman from Beyond Silence (Louisiana State University Press).

Ants

Theirs is a perfection of pure form.
Nobody but has his proper place and knows it.
Everything they do is functional.
Each foray in a zigzag line
Each prodigious lifting
Of thirty-two times their own weight
Each excavation into the earth's core
Each erection
Of a crumbly parapetted tower-

None of these feats is a private pleasure,
None of them done
For the sake of the skill alone-

They've got a going concern down there,
A full egg-hatchery
A wet-nursery of aphids
A trained troop of maintenance engineers
Sanitation experts
A corps of hunters
And butchers
An army

A queen
Each
Is nothing without the others, each being a part
Of something greater than all of them put together
A purpose which none of them knows
Since each is only
The one thing that he does. There is
A true consistency
Toward which their actions tend.
The ants have bred and inbred to perfection.
The strains of their genes that survive survive.
Every possible contingency
Has been foreseen and written into the plan.

Nothing they do will be wrong.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of writer, playwright and filmmaker Marcel Paul Pagnol, born in Aubagne, France (1895). His first major success was called Topaze (1928), a story of the corruptive powers of money that was made into a film in 1933 starring John Barrymore. He is perhaps best known for his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, both of which were adapted into films.

It's the birthday of novelist and educator Donna Jo Napoli, born in Miami, Florida (1948), who is chair of the linguistics department at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and also is a popular author of young adult novels, such as Jimmy, the Pickpocket of the Palace (1996) and others.

It's the birthday of novelist Donald (Charles) Coldsmith, born in Iola, Kansas (1926). He is the author of numerous historical western novels, most of which are set in the American Great Plains and West between 1540 and 1700, and are told from the point of view of the American Indians who were already here when the Spanish and the French arrived.

It's the birthday of writer Milton (Arthur) Caniff, born in Hillsboro, Ohio (1907), who was the creator of the classic comic strips "Terry and the Pirates" and "Steve Canyon."

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

It's the birthday of historian Dee Brown, born in Alberta, Louisiana (1908). During the 1950s and 60s, Brown was an academic librarian and part-time writer who published seventeen books, mostly in the field of nonfiction history. Then, beginning in 1968, Brown would come home from the library every day and imagine himself an Indian elder in the nineteenth century relating the events of the years 1860 to 1890 in which the last of the Native Americans were driven from their land. These imaginings became the 1970 bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

It's the birthday of essayist Michel de Montaigne, born in Perigord, in Bordeaux, France (1533). He is considered by many to be the creator of the personal essay, in which he used self-portrayal as a mirror of humanity in general. Writers up to the present time have imitated his informal, conversational style. He said, "The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness: such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene."

It's the birthday of chemist and writer Linus Pauling, born in Portland, Oregon (1901), who was the first to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes in separate fields: Chemistry in 1954, and Peace in 1962. Pauling won the chemistry prize for his research on the nature of chemical bonds and the study of amino acids. Pauling won his second Nobel Prize for his efforts to ban nuclear weapons, especially his campaign against nuclear weapons testing.

It's the birthday of screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist Ben Hecht, born in New York City (1893). He wrote many great films including His Girl Friday (1940), The Outlaw (1943), Twentieth Century (1934), Some Like It Hot (1939), Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946).

SATURDAY, 1 MARCH 2003
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Poem: "The Word," by John Masefield.

The Word

My friend, my bonny friend, when we are old,
    And hand in hand go tottering down the hill,
May we be rich in love's refinèd gold,
    May love's gold coin be current with us still.

May love be sweeter for the vanished days,
    And your most perfect beauty still as dear
As when your troubled singer stood at gaze
    In the dear March of a most sacred year.

May what we are be all we might have been,
    And that potential, perfect, O my friend,
And may there still be many sheafs to glean
    In our love's acre, comrade, till the end.

And may we find when ended is the page
Death but a tavern on our pilgrimage.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Jim Crace, born in Hertfordshire, England (1946). His first novel, The Gift of Stones (1988) was set in a Stone Age village famous for its ability to work stone into tools of exquisite quality until the discovery of bronze threatens the villagers' traditional way of life.

It's the birthday of poet Robert Hass, born in San Francisco, California (1942). He is known for his translations of the works of Czeslaw Milosz.

It's the birthday of novelist Judith Rossner, born in New York City (1935). She received critical acclaim for her 1983 novel, August, but is most famous for an earlier work, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975), a work that was inspired by the true-life murder of a teacher by a man she met in a singles' bar. She was first hired by Esquire magazine to write an article about the murder, but the magazine's lawyers killed the story.

It's the birthday of the man who gave us Mad magazine, publisher William M(axwell) Gaines, born in New York City (1922). In the late 1940s, Gaines presided over his father's comic book empire, EC Comics, which published such classics as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear. In 1952, he ventured into satire and irreverence when he began publishing Mad magazine.

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

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

It's the birthday of biographer and critic (Giles) Lytton Strachey, born in London (1880). He was one of the leading members of the Bloomsbury Group and is credited with having revolutionized the art of writing biography. He rejected the dull scholarship of the nineteenth century and decided to write books that were lively, critical, witty, and artistic. He said, "Discretion is not the better part of biography."

It's the birthday of composer Frederic Chopin, born near Warsaw, Poland (1810), the son of a French émigré schoolteacher and a cultured Polish mother. A child prodigy, Chopin played the piano in public when he was only 8 years old. He began to compose soon after. As a pianist, Chopin was somewhat left to his own devices, as there were no piano teachers of note in Warsaw. Chopin was well aware of his own originality and his style baffled other pianists of the time. He expressed this style in his Twenty-four Etudes, Opp. 10 and 25.

It's the birthday of novelist Ralph (Waldo) Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (1914). He went to New York's Harlem as a young man, where he met the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist Richard Wright, who encouraged Ellison to become a writer. Growing up as a black man in Oklahoma City, Ellison did not recall encountering prejudice or segregation. He did encounter it in New York and he sat down one day and typed the words, "I am an invisible man," not knowing that these would lead him to writing his great novel of 1952, Invisible Man.

SUNDAY, 2 MARCH 2003
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Poem: "Silver," by Walter de la Mare.

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Peter Straub, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1943). He wrote many best-selling horror stories, Ghost Story (1979) and Talisman (1984) being two of them.

It's the birthday of writer and educator John Jay Chapman, born in New York City (1862). He once said, "You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it."

It's the birthday of novelist John Irving, born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1942). His first three books were modest sellers, until the publication of The World According to Garp (1978) thrust Irving into fame and onto the bestseller lists. In 1981 his novel The Hotel New Hampshire was published, which begins, "The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born -- we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny; the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg."

It's the birthday of writer Sholem Aleichem, born in the Ukraine (1859). He wrote in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, and his story Tevye's Daughters became the basis of the stage and film musical, Fiddler on the Roof.

It's the birthday of composer Kurt Weill, born in Dessau, Germany (1900). He is best known for his collaborations with playwright Bertolt Brecht with whom he wrote The Three Penny Opera (1928) with its best selling song, "Mack the Knife." During the 1930s and '40s, Weill collaborated with Ira Gershwin, Maxwell Anderson, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perleman on such plays as Lady in the Dark (1940), One Touch of Venus (1943), and Street Scene (1947).

It's the birthday of novelist and social commentator Tom Wolfe, born in Richmond, Virginia (1931). At the age of 21, Wolfe tried out as a pitcher for the old New York Giants. He did not make the team. Instead, he decided to become a writer. He worked as a reporter at the New York Herald Tribune, then at Esquire magazine. The editor of Esquire magazine sent him to California to do a freelance piece on the hot rod culture there. He ran up a $750 hotel bill in Beverly Hills, as he grappled with writer's block. He came back to New York with copious notes but no story. The editor finally told Wolfe to give him the notes, and he would make a story out of them. He printed the notes instead, and made Wolfe famous. This "story," became the title piece, along with twenty-one other magazine and newspaper pieces, of Wolfe's first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was written in serial form and came out every two weeks in Rolling Stone magazine during 1984 and 1985. It was published in book form in 1987. He coined several phrases that have become popular parts of American slang, including "Good ol'boys," "radical chic," "the ME generation," and "the right stuff" -- The Right Stuff being the title of his book about the space program (1979). He is also well known for his trademark three-piece white suit, white homburg, and white kid gloves. He explained, "I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January, and found it annoyed people tremendously. It's kind of a harmless form of aggression."

It's the birthday of Dr. Suess, Theodor Geisel, born in Springfield, Massachusetts (1904). His first children's book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was finally published in 1937, after being rejected by 27 publishers. The Cat in the Hat (1957) was one of his most popular books. One of his last books, Oh, The Places You'll Go (1990), was written for adults.