MONDAY, 6 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: "The Invitations Overhead," by Stephen Dobyns, from Common Carnage (Penguin Poets).

The Invitations Overhead

At the edge of a golf course, a man watches
geese land on a pond, the bottom of which
is spotted with white golf balls. It is October
and the geese pause in their long flight.

Honking and flapping at one another, they seem
to discuss their travels and the man thinks
how the world must look when viewed from above:
villages and cornfields, the autumn trees.

The man wonders how his own house must look
seen from the sky: the grass he has cut
a thousand times, the border of white flowers,
the house where he walks from room to room,

his children gone, his wife with her own life.
Although he knows the geese's honkings are only
crude warnings and greetings, the man also
imagines they tell the histories of the people

they travel over, their loneliness, the lives
of those who can't change their places, who
each year grow more isolated and desperate.
Is this what quickens his breathing when at night

the distant honking seems mixed with the light
of distant stars? Follow us, follow us, they call,
as if life could be made better by departure,
or if he were still young enough to think it so.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is Ivy Day in the Republic of Ireland, commemorating Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish statesman who died on this day in 1891. Parnell led the Irish struggle for Home Rule from Britain, and they called him "the uncrowned king of Ireland." Today is called Ivy Day because Parnell's emblem was a sprig of green ivy, worn on the lapel. James Joyce was obsessed with Parnell, and his short story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," was set on this day.

On this day in 1683, thirteen families from Krefeld, Germany arrived in the colony of Pennsylvania and founded Germantown, one of America's oldest European settlements. They were Mennonites, the first to arrive in America. They came on the sailing ship the Concord, looking for religious freedom after having been persecuted in Europe. They were also drawn to William Penn's offer of 5,000 acres of land. By the American Revolution there were 100,000 Germans in Pennsylvania, more than a third of the state's total population at the time.

It's the birthday of architect Le Corbusier, born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (1887). He was also a painter, a sculptor, and a writer. Le Corbusier was the pen name he chose when he started writing articles for The New Spirit, a magazine he co-founded in Paris in 1920. Le Corbusier collected his articles in his first book, Toward a New Architecture (1923), and it became a big influence on other architects. His other books include The City of Tomorrow (1929), When the Cathedrals Were White (1947), and The Modular (1954). He said, "Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep."

It's the birthday of novelist and critic Caroline Gordon, born in Merry Mont, Kentucky (1895). In 1924, she married the poet Allen Tate and together they moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, where Tate's brother, Ben, had given Tate a house. They called the house Benfolly, because Tate considered Ben's gift a "folly." At Benfolly, Gordon and Tate hosted some of the best writers of their day—Ford Madox Ford, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. While Gordon was writing her first novel, Penhally (1931), Ford Madox Ford helped her to finish it by not letting her do anything each day until she had dictated at least 5000 words to him. Her books include the novel Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), Old Red and Other Stories (1963) and How to Read a Novel (1957). In How to Read a Novel, Caroline Gordon wrote, "A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

It's the birthday of soprano Jenny Lind, born in Stockholm, Sweden (1820). When she performed in London in her most famous role in the 1847 opera Robert le Diable, (Robert the Devil) , newspapers reported that London "went mad about the Swedish nightingale," and that became her nickname for the rest of her career.

On this day in 1847, Charlotte Brontë came out with her novel Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell. It's a story about an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, and it was an immediate success. In Jane Eyre, Bronte writes, "It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."

On this day in 1930, William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying was published. Faulkner wrote the book while he was working the night shift at a power plant. He said he wrote it in six weeks, without changing a word. He said, "Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall." It's a story about the Bundren family and their journey to take the body of their mother, Addie, to be buried. In the book, Addie says, "I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." Faulkner said that of all his books, he liked As I Lay Dying the best.

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TUESDAY, 7 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: "One reason I like opera," by Marge Piercy, from Colors Passing Through Us (Knopf).

One reason I like opera

In movies, you can tell the heroine
because she is blonder and thinner
than her sidekick. The villainess
is darkest. If a woman is fat,
she is a joke and will probably die.

In movies, the blondest are the best
and in bleaching lies not only purity
but victory. If two people are both
extra pretty, they will end up
in the final clinch.

Only the flawless in face and body
win. That is why I treat
movies as less interesting
than comic books. The camera
is stupid. It sucks surfaces.

Let's go to the opera instead.
The heroine is fifty and weighs
as much as a '65 Chevy with fins.
She could crack your jaw in her fist.
She can hit high C lying down.

The tenor the women scream for
wolfs down an eight course meal daily.
He resembles a bull on hind legs.
His thighs are the size of beer kegs.
His chest is a redwood with hair.

Their voices twine, golden serpents.
Their voices rise like the best
fireworks and hang and hang
then drift slowly down descending
in brilliant and still fiery sparks.

The hippopotamus baritone (the villain)
has a voice that could give you
an orgasm right in your seat.
His voice smokes with passion.
He is hot as lava. He erupts nightly.

The contralto is, however, svelte.
She is supposed to be the soprano's
mother, but is ten years younger,
beautiful and Black. Nobody cares.
She sings you into her womb where you rock.

What you see is work like digging a ditch,
hard physical labor. What you hear
is magic as tricky as knife throwing.
What you see is strength like any
great athlete's. What you hear

is still rendered precisely as the best
Swiss watchmaker. The body is
resonance. The body is the cello case.
The body just is. The voice loud
as hunger remagnetizes your bones.

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1955, poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" for the first time at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.'' Ginsberg's friend and fellow writer Jack Kerouac sat on the side of the low stage, drinking from a jug of wine and shouting, "Go!'' at the end of the long lines. When Ginsberg was done, the audience exploded in applause, and Ginsberg left the stage in tears. Many consider the event the birth of the Beat movement. "Howl" was initially printed in England, but customs officials seized its second edition as it entered the country. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the book out of his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, he was arrested and tried for obscenity, but he was found not guilty, and City Lights became the center of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s.

It's the birthday of the Australian novelist Thomas M. Keneally, born in Sydney (1935). He's the author of Schindler's Ark (1982), also published as Schindler's List. It tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,300 Jews from the Nazis.

It's the birthday of the poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman, born in Waukegan, Illinois (1948). She's the author of A Natural History of the Senses (1990). The paperback edition of her latest book, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire (2002), is released today. She said, "I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."

It's the birthday of cellist Yo-Yo Ma, born in Paris (1955). He gave his first public cello recital when he was five and made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York at age nine. In 1998 he founded the Silk Road Ensemble, a group of musicians who combined classical music with folk styles from places along the ancient Silk Road trading routes. Their first recording, Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet, came out in 2001. In 2000, he played on the soundtrack for the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In October 1999, Yo-Yo Ma left his rare and precious cello—a 1733 model he nicknamed Petunia—in the trunk of a New York City taxicab. Luckily, he kept his cab receipt, and he got the cello back.

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WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: "Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties," by Adrienne Rich, from Your Native Land, Your Life (W.W. Norton).

Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties

Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window.
Outside, it's summer. Heat
swamping stretched awnings, battering dark-green shades.
The Depression, Monument Street,
ice-wagons trailing melt, the Hospital
with its segregated morgues . . .
I'm five years old and trying to be perfect
walking hand-in-hand with my father. A Black man halts beside us
croaks in a terrible voice, I'm hungry . . .
I'm a lucky child but I've read about beggars—
how the good give, the evil turn away.
But I want to turn away. My father gives.
We walk in silence. Why did he sound like that?
Is it evil to be frightened? I want to ask.
He has no roof in his mouth,
                           my father says at last.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of R(obert) L(awrence) Stine, born in Columbus, Ohio (1943). He wrote a series called Fear Street and then launched the more popular Goosebumps book series in 1992-scary tales aimed at eight- to eleven-year-olds. The books in the series have names like Say Cheese and Die! (1992), The Cuckoo Clock of Doom (1995), and The Horror at Camp Jellyjam (1995). As a child he spent hours alone, was always picked last for the team and often got lost in an imaginary world. He wrote stories though, typing them with one finger, as he still does. He typed out jokes and stories and handed them out at school, even though his teacher kept confiscating them. He was inspired by horror comic strips like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. He read them every Saturday at the barbershop, when he got his weekly hair cut. His most recent book is The Sitter (2003), about a haunted babysitting experience.

On this day in 1956, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States opened in Edina, Minnesota. It was called Southdale, and cost $20 million to build. There were two levels, filled with 72 stores and anchored on both ends by department stores—Dayton's and Donaldson's. In the center was the Garden Court, decorated with brightly colored song birds, art displays, decorative lighting, tropical plants, fountains, trees and flowers. The goal was to create an atmosphere of leisure and inspire people to mingle, like in a European marketplace. The mall offered a helicopter service to customers—a ten-minute ride between Southdale and the airport, downtown St. Paul, or the Dayton's in downtown Minneapolis.

On this day in 1871, the 335,000 residents of Chicago experienced yet another warm, sunny day of their three month long drought. The conditions were getting dangerous because the whole city was built of wood. A few fires had broken out, including one the night before, which the whole fire department was called out for. But it was nothing like the Great Chicago Fire, which began the evening of October 8, at 8:45 PM. The fire broke out at the barn of two Irish immigrants, Catherine and Patrick O'Leary, on the West Side. The story is that Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a kerosene lamp while she was being milked. A massive conflagration spread. The fire traveled quickly on the West Side, but the people on the other side of the Chicago River felt safe in their beds. By midnight, though, it had jumped the river and was traveling northeast and upriver. It traveled up to 30 mph at times, and generated "fire devils," whirling masses of fire and superheated air that traveled even faster than the fire itself. The fire devils caused high winds that sent burning planks and other fiery items soaring for hundreds of yards through the air. The intense heat caused spontaneous combustion in places not yet reached by the fire. People were running out of their houses and running north. Some people took as many belongings as they could. They ran holding cats, dogs and goats. One eyewitness saw a lady running with a pot of soup that was spilling all over her dress. Another woman was carrying her framed wedding veil and wreath. By the next morning, the heart of the business district was in flames. By October 10, more than three square miles in the heart of the city were completely destroyed. The property damages were $200 million. Almost 100,000 people were homeless, and nearly 300 were dead. It was more than 24 hours later, and four and a half miles from where it started, that the fire finally ran out of fuel and rain came.

But Chicago was determined to rebuild itself. One editorialist wrote, "All our energies are aroused, all our faculties at work, all our brains alive, and when a community is thus awoke to a determined and united purpose—only the angels can transcend their power." After eighteen months had passed, more than 1,000 major buildings, valued at more than $50 million, had been erected. Two years after the fire, the value of the bare ground of the new Chicago was worth more than it had been in 1871 with all its buildings. Between 1870 and 1880, the population rose from 300,000 to 500,000. Then it more than doubled by the turn of the century.

On the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, the worst natural fire in U.S. history occurred. A fire with a lot less press coverage ravaged the city of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. It was a lumber town, surrounded by pines, and it provided much of the wood used to build and rebuild Chicago. The fire ruined more than one million acres of forest there, and killed about 1,500 people. A mass grave of 350 unidentified bodies still remains.

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THURSDAY, 9 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: ''Proverbial Ballade,'' by Wendy Cope, from Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber & Faber).

Proverbial Ballade

Fine words won't turn the icing pink;
A wild rose has no employees;
Who boils his socks will make them shrink;
Who catches cold is sure to sneeze.
Who has two legs must wash two knees;
Who breaks the egg will find the yolk;
Who locks his door will need his keys-
So say I and so say the folk.

You can't shave with a tiddlywink,
Nor make red wine from garden peas,
Nor show a blindworm how to blink,
Nor teach an old racoon Chinese.
The juiciest orange feels the squeeze;
Who spends his portion will be broke;
Who has no milk can make no cheese-
So say I and so say the folk.

He makes no blot who has no ink,
Nor gathers honey who keeps no bees.
The ship that does not float will sink;
Who'd travel far must cross the seas.
Lone wolves are seldom seen in threes;
A conker ne'er becomes an oak;
Rome wasn't built by chimpanzees-
So say I and so say the folk.

Envoi

Dear friends! If adages like these
Should seem banal, or just a joke,
Remember fish don't grow on trees-
So say I and so say the folk.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1888 that the public was first admitted to the Washington Monument. The cornerstone of the monument had been laid 40 years earlier, on July 4th. But there wasn't enough money to complete the project, and the construction went on and off for four decades until February 21, 1885. It was 555 feet tall, with 893 steps to the top. There was a steam-powered elevator installed that took ten to twelve minutes to ride. It was the tallest building in the world, and people flocked to it when it opened on this day. In the first nine months, more than 600,000 people visited, and by the turn of the century, more than 1.5 million had come. One woman wanted to be married in the elevator while suspended in the middle of the monument. One man wanted to scatter his wife's ashes from the window. Gabby Street, a pitcher for the Washington Senators, stood at the base and caught a ball dropped from the top, traveling at 125 miles per hour. In 1915, the first suicide occurred down the elevator shaft. The monument continues to be the site of important events—the woman's suffrage rallies of the '20s, the civil rights marches in the '60s, anti-war demonstrations in the '70s, and the Million Man March in 1995.

It's the birthday of memoirist Jill Ker Conway, born in New South Wales, Australia (1934). She began her three-part memoir with The Road from Coorain (1990), about growing up in the Australian outback and going to school in wartime Sydney. Then she wrote True North (1995), about her Harvard education, and continued telling her story, as the first woman president of Smith College, in A Woman's Education (2001).

It's the birthday of composer Camille Saint-Saens, born in Paris (1835). He was a child prodigy, with perfect pitch and a fantastic memory. He learned the piano and organ, and played the music of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart in recitals. He composed nice waltzes and gallops by the age of five, and wrote his first symphony at sixteen. His first famous opera was Samson and Dalila (1877). He wrote lots of other operas too, but they were less well-known outside of France. He was always surprised that the greater public gave him such high praise, yet constantly wanted to hear Samson and Dalila and ignored his other work. Over the course of his lifetime he composed more than 300 pieces, including thirteen operas, and he was the first major composer to write specifically for the cinema. He's best-known for Samson et Dalila , his Third (organ) Symphony , (1886), his Second and Fourth Piano Concertos, and Carnival of the Animals (1886) for piano and orchestra. He toured frequently, conducting his oratorios and premiering his piano concertos all over Europe and the United States, sometimes accompanied only by his servant, Gabriel, and his pet dogs. Saint-Saens was very polite but highly opinionated. He wasn't outwardly emotional, but he poured out long, flowery letters to his friends. He did everything with speed—he talked, walked, wrote, conducted rehearsals and composed very quickly. He said, ''I like good company, but I like hard work still better.'' He didn't like the dreary weather of Paris, and skipped off to Algiers in the winters. It was there he died at age 86. He was given a huge state funeral on Christmas Eve and was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. At his grave, the composer Alfred Bruneau said, ''[His pieces] have won a place that they will hold so long as beauty lasts, so long as orchestras and choirs shall gather together to move and charm us.''

It's the birthday of Charles R(udolph) Walgreen, owner of the Walgreens drug store chain, born near Galesburg, Illinois (1873). He lost part of his left hand's middle finger when he was working in a shoe factory. The doctor who attended to him convinced him to become a druggist's apprentice, at $4 an hour. He did, and after fighting in the Spanish-American War, became a pharmacist and eventually bought out the store he was working for, in 1901. It was just 50 feet by 20 feet, on Chicago's South Side, and Walgreen had to take out a huge loan to afford it. There was considerable drug store competition in Chicago at the time, so Walgreen fixed up his store as soon as he got his hands on it. He put in brand new light fixtures, widened the aisles, had an employee at the front door to greet each customer. It was the only drug store where you could buy pots and pans. He acquired another store and continued to specialize in customer service. Almost all drug stores had soda fountains, but they only did well in the hot weather. Walgreen kept his counters open year-round, and had hot food served during the winter months. His wife Myrtle cooked all the food in their home kitchen. She rose before dawn and brought everything to his two stores by 11:00 AM—chicken, tongue, egg salad, bean and cream of tomato soup. In 1922, a man working at a Walgreen soda fountain created the first malted milkshake, and it was a roaring success.

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FRIDAY, 10 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: ''Theolonious Monk,'' by Stephen Dobyns, from Common Carnage (Penguin).

Thelonious Monk

A record store on Wabash was where
I bought my first album. I was a freshman
in college and played the record in my room

over and over. I was caught by how he took
the musical phrase and seemed to find a new
way out, the next note was never the note

you thought would turn up and yet seemed
correct. Surprise in 'Round Midnight
or Sweet and Lovely. I bought the album

for Mulligan but stayed for Monk. I was
eighteen and between my present and future
was a wall so big that not even sunlight

crossed over. I felt surrounded by all
I couldn't do, as if my hopes to write,
to love, to have children, even to exist

with slight contentment were like ghosts
with the faces found on Japanese masks:
sheer mockery! I would sit on the carpet

and listen to Monk twist the scale into kinks
and curlicues. The gooseneck lamp on my desk
had a blue bulb which I thought artistic and

tinted the stacks of unread books: if Thomas
Mann depressed me, Freud depressed me more.
It seemed that Monk played with sticks attached

to his fingertips as he careened through the tune,
counting unlike any metronome. He was exotic,
his playing was hypnotic. I wish I could say

that hearing him, I grabbed my pack and soldiered
forward. Not quite. It was the surprise I liked,
the discordance and fretful change of beat,

as in Straight No Chaser , where he hammers together
a papier-mâché skyscraper, then pops seagulls
with golf balls. Racket, racket, but all of it

music. What Monk banged out was the conviction
of innumerable directions. Years later
I felt he'd been blueprint, map and education:

no streets, we bushwhacked through the underbrush;
not timid, why open your mouth if not to shout?
not scared, the only road lay straight in front;

not polite, the notes themselves were sneak attacks;
not quiet-look, can't you see the sky will soon
collapse and we must keep dancing till it cracks?

for Michael Thomas

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi , born in a village in Parma, Italy (1813). His parents owned a tavern and were not very well off. But his father recognized musical talent in Giuseppe and bought him a spinet (an upright harpsichord), which he kept for the rest of his life. By the age of twelve, Verdi was the organist for his church. He started playing for other churches farther away from home, and then he went off to music school. He lived in the town of Busseto, and boarded with a wealthy grocer who liked Verdi and wanted to support him, and whose daughter Verdi ended up marrying. When Verdi went for the position of maestro di musica in Busetto, a scandal erupted. One faction supported Verdi and the other, headed by the clergy and the local bishop, were rooting for his rival--a more traditional, conservative and older musician. The town was in such discord over the matter that they completely banned music in church until the question was solved. Eventually, they compromised and made Verdi the maestro for secular music and his rival the leader for church music. Verdi wrote marches, overtures and other pieces for the Busseto Philharmonic Society and the town marching band. But then he set his sights elsewhere and got an opera, Oberto , performed at La Scalia, the most important theater in Italy, in 1839. It was a modest success. Then tragedy struck, when his wife died of encephalitis. Verdi had already lost their two children in infancy. He vowed he would never write music again. But he couldn't resist when he read the powerful libretto for Nabucco . He turned it into a stunning opera, premiering on March 9, 1942. The audience applauded for ten minutes after the first scene, and after the chorus the audience demanded an encore, even though they were prohibited by the Austrian government at the time. Even the stagehands, who rarely paid attention to the performance, would stop what they were doing to watch and applaud the show. Verdi used the same librettist for his next opera, Lombardi . The librettist had a procrastination problem, and Verdi had to lock him in a room in order to get him to write enough on time. Once Verdi made the mistake of sticking him in the room with his wine collection, and hours later the librettist emerged drunk. Verdi wrote a total of 26 operas, most notably Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), Aida (1871), and Falstaff (1893).

It's the birthday of playwright, screenwriter and director Harold Pinter , born in East London (1930). He was the son of a Jewish tailor, and he was raised in a small, working-class neighborhood that he had to escape during World War II. He acted in plays at school and he liked to read Kafka and Hemingway. Pinter tried out London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but he didn't like it and left after two years. He debuted his first full-length play, The Birthday Party , in the West End in 1958. It didn't do well, but he continued to write plays and eventually created a body of work that people call the ''comedies of menace.'' In these plays, situations that should be ordinary turn absurd or ominous because of characters acting out of character for inexplicable reasons. The plays usually take place in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by indefinable outside forces. Pinter wrote The Homecoming (1965), about a man who brings his wife home to meet his all-male family. She stays with his family to be their caretaker and whore and he goes back to his job teaching philosophy, realizing that nobody needs him. Pinter said that the opening of that play in New York City in 1967 was one of the greatest theatrical nights of his life. He said the audience was full of money—the women in mink, the men in tuxedoes. And as soon as the curtain opened, they hated the play. Pinter said, ''The hostility towards the play was palpable. You could see it.'' But, he said, ''The great thing was, the actors went on and felt it and hated the audience back even more. And they gave it everything [they had]. By the end of the evening, the audience was defeated. All these men in their tuxedos were just horrified. . . . There's no question that the play won on that occasion.''

It's the birthday of Thelonious (Sphere) Monk , who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (1917) but grew up in New York City. He started piano lessons at a young age. By age thirteen, he had won the weekly amateur night contest at the Apollo Theater so many times that he was no longer allowed to compete. Six years later, he joined the house band at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where he and Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and a few others invented a new kind of jazz known as bebop. It involved unusual repetition of phrases and an offbeat, angular pattern of sound. In the '40s he started making recordings, and in the '50s he came out with two of his most popular albums, Brilliant Corners and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane . With these albums, he gained international attention as a pianist and a composer. The Thelonious Monk Quartet, which included John Coltrane, began a hugely successful regular gig at the Five Spot. Monk played at jazz festivals with other famous jazz legends around the country until the 1970s, when he stopped touring. His most famous compositions include ''Round About Midnight,'' ''Straight No Chaser,'' ''Blue Monk,'' and ''Misterioso.''

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SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: "Onion, Fruit of Grace," by Julia Kasdorf, from Eve's Striptease (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Onion, Fruit of Grace

Onion, fruit of grace,
you swell in the garden
hidden as the heart of God,
but you are not about religion.
Onion, frying into all those Os,
you are a perfect poet,
and you are not about that.
Onion, I love you,
you sleek, auburn beauty,
you break my heart though
I know you don't mean
to make me cry.

Peeling your paper skin,
I cry. Chopping you,
I cry. Slicing off
your wiry roots,
I cry like a penitent
at communion, onion.
Tasting grace, layer by layer,
I eat your sweet heart
that burns like the Savior's.
The sun crust you pull on
while you're still underground,

I've peeled it.
Onion, I'm eating
God's tears.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Elmore Leonard , born in New Orleans (1925). His father worked for General Motors, and the family traveled around a lot until they finally settled in Detroit, where he still lives with his wife, and with his children and grandchildren nearby. He said, ''I live in Detroit because I like it [and] because I know the names of all the streets.'' After college, Leonard decided he would write westerns or detective novels, depending on which made more money. He sold his first western for $1,000 and quickly churned out eight more, including the popular Hombre (1961). Then in the '60s, westerns became less popular, so he switched to detective fiction. It took a while for him to be successful. To support his wife and five children, he worked in advertising and for the Encyclopedia Britannica, working on his novels every morning between 5:00 and 7:00 AM. By 1983, he had written 23 novels, including Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Stick (1983) and La Brava (1984). In 1995, his book Get Shorty was turned into a movie starring John Travolta. And the movie Jackie Brown , directed by Quentin Tarantino, was based on his book Rum Punch (1992). His most recent book is Tishomingo Blues (2002), about a high-diver and a con artist from Detroit, stuck together in Mississippi for a Civil War reenactment. He said about his writing, ''I leave out the parts that people skip.''

It's the birthday of the French writer François (Charles) Mauriac , born in Bordeaux (1885). He made it his mission to write about Bordeaux—a vine-growing, pastoral region of France—and he used it as the setting for most of his novels. He became famous for his book A Kiss for the Leper (1922), about a wealthy but hideous man whose life is destroyed by an arranged marriage to a beautiful peasant woman. He also wrote The Desert of Love (1925), Thérèse (1927), and The Knot of Vipers (1932). He was part of a long tradition of French Roman Catholic writers who explored the problems of good and evil in the world and in human nature. People thought his writing was dark and his characters were somber, but he didn't always agree. He said, ''The serpents in my books have been noticed, but not the doves that have made their nests in more than one chapter.'' On the eve of World War II, he spoke out against the Germans in a French newspaper he started, and he had to hide out during part of the war for his anti-German views. In the 1950s, he sided with Charles de Gaulle in his opposition to colonial policies in Morocco, and he condemned torture in Algeria by the French army. In 1952, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He said, ''I believe that only poetry counts. A great novelist is first of all a great poet.''

It's the birthday of (Anna) Eleanor Roosevelt , born into a prominent, wealthy family in New York City (1884). Her father was in ill health and an alcoholic. Her mother was famous in New York for her striking beauty, and she made Eleanor feel bad about her appearances, calling her ''granny'' and ''very plain.'' Eleanor said, ''I was a solemn child without beauty. I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth.'' She was close for a time with her father, but by the age of ten she was an orphan. She went off to live with her grandmother, and then to a school in London. While there, she was inspired by her headmistress, who was passionately devoted to liberal causes and social justice.

One day on a train to Tivoli, where Eleanor's grandmother lived, she bumped into Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her distant cousin, and the two began a secret courtship that ended in marriage in 1905. She had six children with FDR, one of whom died in infancy. She was an active wife and mother, but also a volunteer for social causes. Her husband was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, and Eleanor accompanied him, expecting to do nothing more than support her husband. But she found herself taking an active role, working for the Red Cross and visiting wounded and shell-shocked troops in the Naval Hospital. She was appalled at the state of the hospitals and demanded that the government inspect the poor conditions affecting the sailors.

In 1921, FDR contracted polio and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Eleanor got even more involved in politics, joining various women's rights organizations of the 1920s. She tried to make up for her husband's disability by traveling around and meeting with important people whom her husband had trouble reaching. He was elected president in 1933, and Eleanor continued to be actively involved as the First Lady. Franklin and Eleanor were both champions of the disadvantaged. But at times Eleanor was even more adamant than her husband. She supported anti-lynching laws that her husband did not, and she wrote a confidential letter to the NAACP expressing frustration that her husband and Congress weren't complying. In 1933, she was the first president's wife to give her own press conference. In 1936, she began writing a daily syndicated newspaper column as a means to advance communication between the president and the public. People loved her, and called her ''the first lady of the world.'' Franklin died in 1945, and Eleanor became a delegate to the United Nations and chaired the Human Rights Commission as they drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt said, ''No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.''

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SUNDAY, 12 OCTOBER, 2003
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Poem: "[My brother's in Wyoming ...]," by Gary Young, from No Other Life (Heyday Books).

[My brother's in Wyoming . . .]

My brother's in Wyoming, and I've had that dream again. We're fishing. The trout rise, take our bait, and keep rising. In love once with a woman, and with my own capacity for pain, I fell in with some cowboys, and broke my neck riding bulls in a little rodeo. That night, drunk in the bunkhouse, not knowing how badly I'd been hurt, I thought it can't get worse than this, but I was wrong. That was twenty years ago. Thunder rolls down South Fork Canyon. The Milky Way is a great river overhead. My brother is in Wyoming. I miss him more than ever when he's there.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Oktoberfest has its origins in a wedding that happened on this day in 1810. The Bavarian Crown Prince Louis, later King Louis I of Bavaria, married Princess Therese of Saxonia. The royal couple celebrated on the fields in front of the city gates with a horse race, and they invited the citizens of Munich to attend. All across Bavaria there were similar festivities, and everyone enjoyed the party so much that the following year they decided to do it again. Eventually it became a tradition. The Oktoberfest in Munich is now the largest festival in the world. Every year, nearly six million people attend, and they drink more than ten million pints of beer.

It's the day that the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus reached the New World. On this day in 1492, one of the sailors on the Pinta sighted land, an island in the Bahamas, after ten weeks of sailing from Palos, Spain, with the Santa María , the Pinta , and the Niña . Columbus thought he had reached East Asia. When he sighted Cuba he thought it was China, and when the expedition landed on Hispaniola, he thought it might be Japan. Legend has it that only Columbus believed the earth was round, but that's not true; most educated Europeans at the time knew the earth wasn't flat. However, the Ottoman Empire had cut off land and sea routes to the islands of Asia. Columbus became obsessed with finding a western sea route, but he miscalculated the world's size, and he didn't know the Pacific Ocean existed. He called his plan the "Enterprise of the Indies." He pitched it first to King John II of Portugal, who rejected it, and then to the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They also turned him down, twice, before they conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada in January 1492 and had some treasure to spare. Columbus led a total of four expeditions to the New World during his lifetime, and over the next century his discovery made Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Still, he died in 1506 without accomplishing his original goal of finding a western trading route to Asia. Two of the things that the people of the New World introduced to the Europeans were hammocks and chocolate, both of which might come in handy tomorrow when Americans relax to celebrate Columbus Day.

It's the birthday of author and psychologist Robert Coles , born in Boston, Massachusetts (1929). He's the author of over 60 books. As an undergraduate at Harvard he wrote poems and stories. He wrote an essay on William Carlos Williams and he sent Williams a copy. Williams, who was a doctor as well as a poet, told him it wasn't bad—for a Harvard student. He suggested Coles go into medicine, which Coles did, abandoning his literary ambitions and becoming an M.D. in 1954. Coles was in the South at the dawn of the civil rights movement, planning to lead a low-key life as a child psychologist. But one day, during a visit to New Orleans in 1960, he saw a white mob surrounding a six-year-old black girl named Ruby Bridges, who kneeled in her starched white dress in the middle of it all to pray for her attackers. Coles decided to begin what would become his work for the next few decades, an effort to understand how children and their parents come to terms with profound change. He conducted hundreds of interviews on the effects of school desegregation, and he shaped them into the first volume of Children of Crisis (1967), a series of books for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

In 1995, when Coles was 66, he co-founded a new magazine about ''ordinary people and their lives.'' It was called DoubleTake , and it featured photography and writing in the documentary tradition. The magazine was printed on fine paper with big, beautiful photo reproductions, and it won lots of awards. Robert Coles became close friends with Bruce Springsteen when they discovered a shared interest in the novelist Walker Percy. They call each other ''the Boss'' and ''the Doc.'' Last year, when DoubleTake faced financial trouble, Springsteen stepped in at the last minute. In February, he gave two benefit concerts in a small theater next to the DoubleTake office and raised almost $1 million for the magazine, enough for it to survive. At the concert, Springsteen sang and talked and took questions, and he said that Coles's book The Secular Mind (1999) was about the ''moment during everybody's day when things stop," and "you're connected to other things, larger things.'' This month, Coles will publish a book called Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing , about fans whose lives have been affected by Springsteen's music. Robert Coles said, ''We should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes, lest we do it in 20 or 30 years and it's too late.''

It's the birthday of actress, playwright, and novelist Alice Childress , born in Charleston, South Carolina (1916). She was taken to Harlem, New York to be was raised by her grandmother, Eliza Campbell, the daughter of a slave. Her grandmother encouraged her to write. She would sit at the window and point to people passing by and ask Alice what she thought they were thinking. Alice would make something up, and her grandmother would say, ''Now, write that down. That sounds like something we should keep.'' Childress's plays include Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band (1966), and Wine in the Wilderness (1969); and she's the author of the children's books A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973) and Rainbow Jordan (1981).

It's the birthday of poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald , born in Geneva, New York (1910). His books of poetry include A Wreath for the Sea (1943), In the Rose of Time: Poems 1931-1956 (1956), and Spring Shade: Poems, 1931-1970 (1971). But he's best known for his translations of ancient Greek literature, which became standards. He translated Homer's The Odyssey (1961) and The Iliad (1963), Virgil's Aeneid (1983), and plays by Sophocles and Euripides. He was close friends with the writers James Agee and Flannery O'Connor, and he edited collections by both of them.

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