MONDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2003
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Poem: "Shooting," by Raymond Carver from All of Us: The Selected Poems (Knopf).

Shooting

I wade through wheat up to my belly,
cradling a shotgun in my arms.
Tess is asleep back at the ranch house.
The moon pales. Then loses face completely
as the sun spears up over the mountains.

Why do I pick this moment
to remember my aunt taking me aside that time
and saying, What I am going to tell you now
you will remember every day of your life?
But that's all I can remember.

I've never been able to trust memory. My own
or anyone else's. I'd like to know what on earth
I'm doing here in this strange regalia
It's my friend's wheat--this much is true.
And right now, his dog is on point.

*

Tess is opposed to killing for sport,
or any other reason. Yet not long ago she
threatened to kill me. The dog inches forward.
I stop moving. I can't see or hear
my breath any longer.

Step by tiny step, the day advances. Suddenly,
the air explodes with birds.
Tess sleeps through it. When she wakes,
October will be over. Guns and talk
of shooting behind us.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of author and political analyst Kathleen Hall Jamieson, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1946). She's the author of ten books, including Everything You Think You Know About Politics . . . and Why You're Wrong (2000), Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy (1992), and Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (1995).


It's the birthday of playwright, screenwriter, and director Garson Kanin, born in Rochester, New York (1912). He is perhaps best known as the author of Born Yesterday (1946). He also collaborated with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, on screenplays for several Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn films, including Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952).


It's the birthday of novelist and playwright Frances (sometimes Francis) Eliza Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England (1849). Although her name is not well known, she wrote three classic books known by millions of children around the world: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), The Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1909).


It's the birthday of author and journalist Carlo Lorenzini, better known as C. Collodi, born in Florence, Italy (1826). In 1880, he created an unforgettable story of a wooden boy named Pinocchio, whose nose grew with every lie and whose most ardent wish was to become "a real boy."


It's the birthday of author Laurence Sterne, born in Clonmel, Ireland (1713). He is best known for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760). He said, "I take a simple view of life. It is keep your eyes open and get on with it."


It's the birthday of editor and author William F(rank) Buckley, Junior, born in New York City, New York (1925). In 1955, he founded the National Review, a magazine of conservative opinion. "We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."


It's the birthday of composer and pianist Scott Joplin, born in Bowie County, Texas (1868). He wrote the Maple Leaf Rag, and instead of selling it to the publisher for a flat fee of 25 dollars, he had his lawyer draw up a royalty contract that paid him one cent per copy. It went only to sell one million copies in sheet music.

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TUESDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2003
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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.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Lewis Thomas, born in Flushing, New York (1913). He's the author of 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 1920s, 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 88.


It's the birthday of editor and critic Leonard Woolf, born in London (1880). He was a bureaucrat who served the British crown in Sri Lanka, but he 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 Sigmund Freud, as well as the Woolfs' own novels and essays. They turned down the chance to publish James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). "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 Ulysses a "pale" and "disheveled" "disaster."


It's the birthday of Lope Felix de Vega, born in Madrid (1562). He was the first playwright in Spain to make enough money at writing dramas to support himself. On his deathbed, told 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."

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WEDNESDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2003
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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.

Literary and Historical Notes:

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, and over fifty years, only two things about the cartoon strip changed: Snoopy began to walk upright, and his thoughts appeared above his head in little balloons. Schulz once said 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 (1950). 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). He 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.

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THURSDAY, 27 NOVEMBER 2003
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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.

Literary and Historical Notes:

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). She 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."

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FRIDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2003
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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.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Dennis Brutus, born in Zimbabwe (1924). He's the author of 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 short stories, a dozen biographies, 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 (1885), 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). 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."

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SATURDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2003
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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 cracke
d 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.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of C[live] S[taples] Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, (1898). He's 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."

C.S. Lewis 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 (1869), which she found tedious to write. 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 day but who ruined the souls of little children by night. She published these stories under several different 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. She wrote to a friend, "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). His treatment of hysterical patients with hypnosis greatly influenced Sigmund Freud.

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SUNDAY, 30 NOVEMBER 2003
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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 . . .

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of playwright David Alan Mamet, born in Chicago, Illinois (1947). He's the author of 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 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 of Patmos.


It's the birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery, born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island (1874). She's the author of the Anne of Green Gables books.


It's the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri (1835). He 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." Twain swore constantly and without shame. His streams of profanity alarmed his wife. 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 Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he had a great deal of cash on his hands, which he invested in a typesetting machine that was very complicated and demanded more and more investment. In the end, it didn't 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.

Mark Twain said, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." And he 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 (1704), and Gulliver's Travels (1726). He once said, about a book he admired, "That is as well said as if I had said it myself."

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