MONDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," by James Wright, from Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press).

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace, born in Apulia, Italy (65 B.C.). He's best known today for his Odes, poems about ordinary events like drinking wine or saying goodbye to a friend. He wrote, "Think to yourself that every day is your last; the hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise." And he wrote, "Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans: it's lovely to be silly at the right moment."

It's the birthday of American poet, essayist, and fiction writer Delmore Schwartz, born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (1913). He went to college at New York University. The summer after his junior year, he moved from his mother's apartment to a shabby apartment in Greenwich Village. He was determined to become a writer, and locked himself in his room for twelve hours a day, writing stories and poems. By the time the summer was over, he had finished his first great work, a short story called "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." It was published in 1937 in the left-wing journal The Partisan Review, and a year later Schwartz came out with a book of short stories with the same name. It was a big success, and people like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov loved it. Schwartz was 25 years old and already a big-name writer.

He wrote poetry, essays and stories, and was known as one of the best writers of his generation. He published the poetry collections Shenandoah (1941) and Genesis: Book I (1943), and the short story collection The World is a Wedding (1948). But when he quit his job teaching at Harvard in 1948, he was almost penniless. He married a writer named Elizabeth Pollet, and they went off to live in an old farmhouse in rural New Jersey. He wrote furiously, held several jobs, and got hooked on alcohol and amphetamines. His wife left him and he moved back to New York City, where he continued to drink heavily and write poetry and criticism. He wrote in a letter, "The years pass and the years pass and the years pass, & still I see only as in a glass darkly and vaguely." He died in 1966 at the age of 52.

Schwartz said, "I find life superior to anything I could invent."

It's the birthday of American novelist Mary Gordon, born in Far Rockaway, Long Island, New York (1949). She's the author of the novels The Company of Women (1981), The Other Side (1989), and Men and Angels (1985), among others. She grew up in a family that was devoutly Catholic. Her father had converted from Judaism and founded several right-wing Catholic magazines. Mary later said Catholic mass was "an excellent training ground for an aspiring novelist," because it was full of beautiful rituals and evocative language. As a child, she wanted to become a nun. But she fell in love with literature and went to college at Barnard at a time when civil rights activism and Vietnam War protests were at their height. She left the Catholic Church, joined the women's movement, and wrote poetry and fiction.

After college, Gordon moved to London, where she researched Virginia Woolf and worked on her first novel. One day, she was feeling lonely and saw the novelist Margaret Drabble on TV. Gordon wrote her a letter describing her day, and Drabble called Gordon up and invited her to dinner. Drabble read the manuscript of Gordon's first novel and introduced her to an agent who helped find a publisher for Final Payments in 1978. It's about a Catholic woman who lives at home until she's 30 years old, taking care of her ailing father. After his death, she goes out into the world on her own for the first time, but she's weighed down by feelings of guilt and self-torment. Final Payments sold over a million copies, and critics compared Gordon to Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor. Almost overnight, Gordon went from making $11,000 a year teaching community college to being featured in People magazine.

She lives in Manhattan with her husband, and says she never wants to leave. She said, "If I'm ever sad, I go to Broadway. What I think is so wonderful about living in this city is remembering how many other ways there are to live besides your own. I find that endlessly hopeful and endlessly interesting."

It's the birthday of American writer James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio (1894). He's known as the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain. In 1927, Thurber met the writer E.B. White, who introduced him to Harold Ross, the editor of a new magazine called The New Yorker. Ross hired Thurber as an editor, and Thurber went on to write articles and draw cartoons for The New Yorker for years. He wrote almost constantly-at parties, at the dinner table, in bed. E.B. White said, "His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action." Between 1930 and 1961, Thurber published almost thirty books. He's one of the few major American authors who wrote almost exclusively short pieces. His best-known stories are "The Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," about a man who fantasizes compulsively.

Thurber often claimed he didn't care much about politics. He said that when Harding and Cox, who were both from Ohio, ran for president in 1920, he couldn't decide who to vote for. So he flipped a coin, didn't bother to see how it landed, and left without voting. He made fun of leftist intellectuals in the 1930s, saying, "I don't think the revolution is here or anywhere near here." But in the '40s and '50s, he became an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, after it began threatening writers' freedom. He said, "The end of American comedy is in sight and the theater's gone to hell. . . . Who can write where everybody's scared? . . . I'm not letting any Congressman scare me to death." He wrote diatribes against the House Un-American Activities Committee and spoke out against it in newspapers and magazines. In 1952 he wrote, "I have to write what I have to write, and I don't give a damn what anybody says about it. I wanted to be on the New Yorker, and I wanted to make money, and I wanted to sell books. . . . The raising of my voice now, at 57, is in defense of my livelihood rather than my profession."

Thurber said, "Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness."

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TUESDAY, 9 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "Seven Deadly Sins," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies (Random House).

Seven Deadly Sins

Behold the systematic GLUTTON
who eats the fat first off his mutton,
and while the blessing says, "We're grateful,"
he's asking for a second plateful.

This man is also AVARICIOUS,
finding the smell of dough delicious,
and takes a fierce, uxorious PRIDE
in one possession: his young bride.

His neighbor just across the fence,
a man of strong CONCUPISCENCE,
ENVYING the husband his fair flower,
would buy her favors by the hour.

ANGER inflames the husband's face,
but AVARICE takes the higher place.
He says, "Don't let my ANGER trouble you;
Take her-I'll take your BMW."

The deal is struck; with one car more,
a final sin completes his score.
The sinner says, "I'd shoot them both,
were I not such a slave to SLOTH."

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the man who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, Joel Chandler Harris, born in Eatonton, Georgia (1848). When he was 13 years old, Harris saw an advertisement for a printer's assistant at a newspaper published at a local plantation. He applied, and got the job. While he was working for the newspaper, he met some of the slaves on the plantation. He loved listening to the stories they told about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and other animals in the Briar Patch. When the Civil War began, Chandler left the plantation to work for newspapers in cities all across the South. He wrote in a letter, "It was just lonely enough to bring me face to face with myself and yet not lonely enough to breed melancholy. I used to sit in the dusk and see the shadows of all the great problems of life flitting about, restless and uneasy, and I had time to think about them." He was working for the Atlanta Constitution when he began to publish the tales he had heard years earlier, under the title Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1880), the first of many Uncle Remus collections. He wrote the tales in a southern, African-American dialect that he claimed was an exact reproduction of the speech he heard as a young man. He said he wanted to teach his readers that "it is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice, but mischievousness."

It's the birthday of screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo, born in Montrose, Colorado (1905). He's best known as a screenwriter, but his 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun won the National Book Award. It's about the thoughts of a soldier who has lost his arms, legs, face, sight, and hearing. The soldier decides to become an educational exhibit about the horrors of war. He thinks people who come to see him "would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing, to concentrate war in one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that's in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere, a war between a man and a high explosive shell."

Trumbo joined the Communist party in 1943. He said the meetings were "dull beyond description, about as revolutionary in purpose as Wednesday-evening testimonial services in the Christian Science Church." But he was blacklisted by the film industry and tried by the House Un-American Activities Committee as one of the "Hollywood Ten," a group of writers and actors who refused to speak about their alleged Communist friends and activities. He spent a year in jail and then moved to Mexico, where he continued to write scripts under different pseudonyms. In 1956, he won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for The Brave One, which he wrote under the name Robert Rich. Three years later, his name was removed from the blacklist, and he wrote the screenplay for Exodus (1960).

It's the birthday of the great English poet John Milton, born in London (1608). He's best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). But he spent twenty years of his life writing almost nothing but essays on political and religious topics.

He married a woman named Mary Powell in 1642, but she quickly grew tired of him and left him almost immediately after their honeymoon. Milton was furious, but it was against the law to get a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. The next year, he wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in which he argued that couples should be able to divorce if the marriage turns out to be unhappy. He tried to prove that marriage was created to remedy the loneliness of men, and that if a wife failed to perform this function, her husband should have the right to divorce her. He also said that those who had lived freely in their youth were more likely to find happiness in marriage than those who were chaste and inexperienced. Milton addressed his tract to the British Parliament, but it didn't go over well. He remained married to Powell until her death in 1652.

Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644 to make the case against the government's censorship of books and pamphlets. It's one of the first great arguments in favor of freedom of the press. He argued that no one group should control the number of available opinions from which an individual can choose. He wrote, "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

After the Civil War ended and Charles II was restored to the throne, Milton devoted himself to the writing of Paradise Lost. The epic poem tells the story of Satan's rebellion against God, his expulsion from Heaven, and his temptation of Adam and Eve. Milton said the poem was an attempt to "justifie the wayes of God to men. Many readers of Paradise Lost come away from it feeling that Satan is the most interesting and sympathetic character in the poem. He's clever and cunning, smart enough to hold sway over the rest of the fallen angels and to trick Adam and Eve into betraying God. At one point Satan thinks, "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n." Milton's God, on the other hand, comes across as a mean, stodgy old man. William Blake called Milton "a true poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

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WEDNESDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: 342, by Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown and Company).

342

It will be Summer—eventually.
Ladies—with parasols—
Sauntering Gentlemen—with Canes— And little Girls—with Dolls—

Will tint the pallid landscape—
As 'twere a bright Boquet—
Tho drifted deep, in Parian—
The Village lies—today—

The Lilacs—bending many a year—
Will sway with purple load—
The Bees—will not despise the tune—
Their Forefathers—have hummed—

The Wild Rose—redden in the Bog—
The Aster—on the Hill
Her everlasting fashion—set—
And Covenant Gentians—frill—

Till Summer folds her miracle—
As Women—do—their Gown—
Or Priests—adjust the Symbols—
When Sacrament—is done—

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Carolyn Kizer, born in Spokane, Washington (1925). She's the author of eight collections of poetry, including Yin: New Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. She's also written essays and criticism, and translated Chinese and Japanese poetry into English. She said, "What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions."

It's the birthday of poet Nelly Sachs, born in Berlin (1891). She accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature on her birthday in 1966. In her banquet speech, she said, "Today . . . I think of what my father used to say on every tenth of December, back in . . . Berlin: 'Now they celebrate the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.' . . . To me a fairly tale seems to have become reality."

Sachs grew up in a Jewish family in Berlin during the time that Hitler was rising to power. In 1940, she learned that she was going to be put in a forced labor camp. She had been exchanging letters with the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof for years. She got Lagerlof to intercede with the Swedish royal family in her behalf, and Sachs was able to escape to Sweden with her mother. Other members of her family were killed in concentration camps. Sachs became fluent in Swedish and supported herself and her mother by translating Swedish poetry into German. The first collection of her own poetry wasn't published until 1947, when she was almost fifty years old. Her collected poems were published in 1961 under the title Journey to the Beyond.

It's the birthday of poet Emily Dickinson, born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). She grew up in a wealthy, religious family, and rarely left Amherst. She went to college at Mount Holyoke and then went back to her parents' house, where she spent the rest of her life. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, "You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool and noon excels my piano. . . . I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and my father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do." Dickinson dressed completely in white, refused most visitors, and rarely left the house. During the last years of her life, she mourned the deaths of her father, her mother, her nephew, and some of her closest acquaintances. She became known as the "Belle of Amherst," the "New England Mystic," and the "Woman in White."

But even though she didn't go out much, she wrote hundreds of letters. She once wrote, "A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend." She wrote to a man at the Atlantic Monthly named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, about publishing her poetry anonymously. Higginson advised her not to publish, but the two kept in contact for years. When he asked her what she looked like, she wrote back, "I . . . am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." Dickinson and Higginson finally met one night at her father's home. Higginson later said, "I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

Dickinson also wrote dozens of passionate letters to a woman named Susan Gilbert. Dickinson and Gilbert became close friends around 1850. A few years later, Gilbert married Dickinson's brother, and the couple moved into a house next door to Emily. Her letters to Gilbert are full of declarations of love, and lamentations that they're not together. Dickinson wrote, "If you were here—and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language." And she wrote, "If this life holds not another meeting for us, remember also, Susie, that it had no parting more, wherever that hour finds us, for which we have hoped so long, we shall not be separated, neither death, nor the grave can part us, so that we can only love."

Most early biographers ignored these letters or said they weren't unusual for the Victorian period. But more recent biographers have suggested that Dickinson and Gilbert were more than just close friends.

Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems, but only seven of them were published in her lifetime. In 1862, Dickinson wrote 366 poems, or about one per day. She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, but she compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. Her sister found the poems after Emily's death, but they were heavily edited and weren't published until 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. In 1955, a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered one of the greatest American poets ever.

Dickinson wrote:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
The there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

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THURSDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "Russia," by David Kirby, from I Think I am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay (Orchises).

Russia

A woman lifts a wine bottle
and brings it down
on the head of her lover,
who falls dead at her feet.

At the trial a student
leaps up, pale with love,
and shouts I did it,
so they take him away.

When he gets out of prison,
he goes down to the river,
where he sees the woman
reading under a tree.

She has become
a young girl again.
He offers her a bouquet
and says marry me, marry me

but she throws the flowers
in the water and says nothing.
It is most the beautiful
day of his life.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of American short story writer Grace Paley, born in New York City (1922). She was raised in the Bronx by Russian immigrants who spoke Yiddish, Russian and English around the house. She started writing poetry at an early age, and took a course from the British poet W.H. Auden when she was 17 years old. As she grew older she felt an urge to write fiction, but she was raising two children and felt that she didn't have the time. One day, she fell ill and arranged for her children to go to an after-school program while she stayed home and rested. Without the children there to take care of, she sat down at a typewriter and started writing what would become her first short story, "Goodbye and Good Luck." She wrote two more stories and began to send them to the editors of magazines, but no one would publish them. Eventually, she showed the stories to the ex-husband of a friend, who worked in publishing. He said the stories were so good that if she could write seven more like the ones he just read he was sure he could get them published. Paley wrote seven more stories, and The Little Disturbances of Man was published in 1959.

Her short stories are often about the lives of ordinary people in New York, especially women. Many of her stories don't have much action or plot. She wrote in the short story "A Conversation with My Father": "[Plot] takes all hope away. Everyone real or invented deserves the open destiny of life."

Paley often goes long stretches without writing. She starts stories by writing down a few sentences and letting them sit for as long as it takes for her to think of what should come next. Sometimes, she said, it takes months or even years. Her second book of short stories wasn't published until 1974, 15 years after her first collection. She spent the years in between protesting the Vietnam War and participating in the civil rights and feminist movements. She has called herself a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."

It's the birthday of American poet Jerome Rothenberg, born in New York City (1931). His first collection of poetry came out in 1959, and since then he's published over 20 more. He's also a well-known translator who has translated poems from French, German, Spanish, Aztec, Navajo, Hebrew, and Seneca. He said, "There are no half-formed languages, no underdeveloped or inferior languages. . . . The language of snow among the Eskimo is awesome. The aspect system of Hopi verbs can, by a flick of the tongue, make the most subtle kinds of distinction between different types of motion."

It's the birthday of writers and longtime friends Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane. Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan (1937). One day, he was out hunting in the woods when he fell off a cliff and hurt his back. Thomas McGuane suggested that Harrison write a novel. He began work on Wolf, and it was published in 1971.

Harrison wrote a few books of poetry and another novel, but he was struggling to make just $10,000 per year. Then, in 1979, he came out with a series of novellas entitled Legends of the Fall. It was so successful that Harrison was able to buy a farm near his old home in Michigan, as well as a cabin in the woods of the Upper Peninsula.

Jim Harrison said, "I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. . . . A lot of good fiction is sentimental. . . . I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass."

Thomas McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). He's the author of many novels, including Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), Nothing but Blue Skies (1992), and The Cadence of Grass (2002). He grew up in an Irish family that loved to tell stories, but his parents discouraged him from becoming a writer. When he left for Michigan State University, he devoted himself to reading and writing fiction, hoping to make it big as a writer and show up his parents. He developed a circle of friends that included Jim Harrison, and they exchanged stories and books. Harrison used his connections in the publishing world to help get McGuane's first novel, The Sporting Club (1969), published.

McGuane lives on a ranch in Montana, where he raises cattle and takes care of dogs and horses. He's an avid fisherman, and published a book about fishing in 1999 called The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing. For a while, he was a serious rodeo competitor. He said, "I don't . . . believe in American writing. . . . The problems of writing . . . are really universal. They are the same in Mexico, the same in Yugoslavia, and the same in Montana."

It's the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918). He went to great lengths to write and eventually publish his novels under the Communist regime of the Soviet Union. After fighting in World War II, he was arrested for writing letters that criticized Joseph Stalin. He was sentenced to eight years in Russian labor camps, where he worked as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. Upon his release, he was exiled to a village in Kazakhstan, where he taught math and physics. He began writing prose in secret, being careful not to show his work to even his closest friends, in case word got out to Soviet authorities. He said he was "convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime." Then, in 1961, the Soviet government adopted slightly looser censorship standards. Solzhenitsyn decided to risk trying to publish his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). He succeeded, but two years later the government took his books out of print and forced him to stop publishing.

Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts were smuggled into Europe and America, and they drew the attention of several major writers. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though he still couldn't publish in his home country. It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union that his works became widely available in Russia. Today, he's considered a national hero.

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FRIDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "Old Celery," by Mark Yakich, from Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (forthcoming from Penguin).

Old Celery

At the corner greengrocer
I'd passed you many times before,
always under the bright lights,
water beading up on your tough skin.

I picked up a tomato,
a pair of kohlrabi,
a handful of coriander;
I had money this time.

As I counted my change,
a penny dropped down under your stand.
On the way up, you,
old celery, caught my eye.

You'd been moved to a darker corner
of the produce. I now felt
guilt; I had missed
you in your prime.

I set down the other vegetables,
took you, limp and barely
green, and left a hollow yellow
in the bed of shaved ice.

When I held you up
to get a fair look, there was
not a silence in the world
like the silence between us.

Like so many things I've not wanted
to see until they persisted
in seeing me, I took you
as if now I had a choice.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of French novelist Gustave Flaubert, born in Rouen, France (1821). He's best known for the novel Madame Bovary (1857). As a young man, he rebelled against his middle class family, dropped out of school, and studied literature on his own. Eventually, his father convinced him to go to law school, but he was distracted by writing projects that he could never seem to finish. In 1844 he had a nervous attack. He dropped out of law school, his father bought him a house on the River Seine, and Flaubert devoted the rest of his life to writing. After his father died, he moved back in with his mother, where he lived until he was 50 years old. He lived by his own maxim, "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."

He was a perfectionist, and spent hours at his writing desk every day. It took him about five years to write Madame Bovary, which was published in 1857. One time, when he was writing a scene in the novel, he said his "nerves were so on edge that my mother, who came into my room at ten o'clock to say goodnight, made me give an appalling cry of terror. . . . For a good while my heart was racing because of it all and I needed about a quarter of an hour to recover. That is how absorbed I am when I'm working." Madame Bovary is about the adulterous affair of a provincial housewife. Critics complained about its amoral depiction of sin, and Flaubert had to go to court to allow the book to remain in print.

Most of Flaubert's novels were neither critical nor popular successes. A Sentimental Education (1869) sold fewer than 3,000 copies in the first four years after it was published. But he became hugely popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially among European writers like James Joyce, who admired Flaubert's style of realism in which the writer leaves no trace of himself in his work.

Flaubert said, "To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

It was on this day in 1850 that the book that's considered by many historians to be the first bestseller was published, The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner. It's a domestic epic about a ten-year-old girl who is sent out into the world by her dying mother and neglectful father. She endures many hardships, but stays faithful to her mother's lessons of Christian humility. The novel went through 14 editions in two years. No other novel had sold so well, both in England and America. It's rarely read today.

It's the birthday of Ol' Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, born in Hoboken, New Jersey (1915). He recorded dozens of hits, including "I Get a Kick out of You," "I've Got You Under My Skin," and "Night and Day." Sinatra grew up in Hoboken, the son of Italian immigrants. He knew early on that he wanted to be a singer, and his mother supported his decision to drop out of high school to sing in nightclubs. In 1935, he formed a group called the Three Flashes with three other young men from Hoboken. After a while, he decided his best chance to make it big was to sing alone, so he quit the group and went back to solo nightclub gigs. In 1939, a trumpet player named Harry James heard Sinatra singing on a local radio station, and James signed him for $75 a week. Sinatra made his first recording the next month. James said, "He's never had a hit record, and he looks like a wet rag, but he says he's the greatest."

It's the birthday of British playwright John Osborne, born in London (1929). He grew up in a working class family, and his father died when he was young. When he was 16, he quit school and began acting with traveling companies. He started writing plays when he was 19, and his first play was produced when he was 25. Two years later, he came out with his most famous play, Look Back in Anger (1956). It's a bleak play about a 25-year-old man named Jimmy Porter who lives in a tiny apartment with his wife and business partner. Jimmy owns a sweets shop, but he has no real hope for the future, and he becomes involved in a love triangle with his wife's friend. The play was revolutionary in British theater. Before Look Back in Anger, most plays in England were classics, melodramas, or genteel, drawing-room comedies. They usually had a likeable main character for audiences to identify with. Osborne changed all that. The term "angry young man" was coined to label the discontented British youth of the 1950s, and Osborne inspired a generation of writers, artists, and musicians. He wrote, "I do not like the kind of society in which I find myself. I like it less and less. I love the theatre more and more because I know that it is what I always dreamed it might be: a weapon."

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SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "A Blessing," by James Wright, from Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press).

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
      happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
      darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of mystery novelist Ross Macdonald, born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California (1915). He's famous for his series of detective novels about the private investigator Lew Archer, novels such as Moving Target (1949), The Drowning Pool (1950), and The Way People Die (1951). Most of his novels are about corruption in Southern California. Ross Macdonald said, "Nothing is wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure."

It's the birthday of football player and novelist Tim Green, born near Syracuse, New York (1963). He is possibly the first professional athlete ever to publish a novel while he was still an active player. While in college on a football scholarship, he studied writing with the authors Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. They encouraged him to write about what he knew, and what he knew was football. While playing as a defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons, he published his first novel, Ruffians (1993), a thriller about professional football. He has gone on to write several other novels about the seamy side of the football business, including The Red Zone (1998) and Double Reverse (1999). His most recent novel is The Fourth Perimeter (2003).

It's the birthday of German poet Heinrich Heine, born in Dusseldorf, Germany (1797). He's one of the most popular German poets of the nineteenth century. He wrote a series of love poems, each one of which ended with an ironic, witty twist. These poems were collected in The Book of Songs (1827), but they didn't sell well. He spent the next decade struggling to find work, writing for various newspapers, and hoping that he wouldn't get in trouble for his unpopular political views. He wrote many more poems and dramas, but late in his life his early poems were rediscovered, and they made him rich and famous. Many of them were set to music by composers like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.

Heine wrote, "There are more fools in the world than there are people." And he wrote, "The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin."

It's the birthday of rock critic Lester Bangs, born in Escondido, California (1948). His father was an alcoholic and an ex-convict who disappeared when Bangs was nine years old. His mother was a Jehovah's Witness, and he grew up going door to door with her, evangelizing, holding signs that said, "What Is Your Destiny?"

After he heard The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, he fell in love with rock 'n roll, ran away from home and got involved with the Hell's Angels. He tried to go to college to study journalism but dropped out just before his twentieth birthday. He wanted to join a rock band, but the only instrument he could play was the harmonica. Then, in 1969, he wrote his first music review and sent it to Rolling Stone magazine with a note that said, "Look . . . I'm as good as any writer you've got in there. You'd better print this or give me the reason why!" He was shocked when they actually accepted it.

Bangs went on to write for a variety of different magazines, but instead of just writing about the music, he used music as the starting point for long, rambling essays about American life and culture. He wanted to write serious literature, and hated the fact that people considered him a hack journalist. He tried to write a book throughout the 1970s, but he struggled with alcoholism and drug addition, and in 1982 he died of a drug overdose. After his death, much of his work was collected in the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987), and he is now considered one of the greatest rock critics of all time.

It's the birthday of American poet James Wright, born in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1927). Wright's hometown was located in a heavily industrialized area of the state that Wright called "my back-broken beloved Ohio." There was a coal mine and a steel mill near his house, and he grew up surrounded by blast furnaces and smoke stacks. During the winter, all the snowdrifts in his town turned black from soot. In the summer, he swam with other boys in the Ohio River, which was full of runoff from the factories that lined the banks. He called the Ohio, "[that] beautiful river, that black ditch of horror."

He started writing poetry when he was eleven years old. His father worked at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company, and Wright took a job at the same factory when he got out of high school. After working there for a few months, he decided that he had to get out of his hometown. He later said, "I knew musicians and possible poets and even ordinary lovable human beings, and saw them with brutal regularity going into [factories], and turning into stupid and resigned slobs with beer bellies and glassy eyes."

He served in World War II and used the G.I. Bill to study at Kenyon College. He got a job teaching English at the University of Minnesota, and published two books of poetry, but he suffered from depression and alcoholism, and he lost his teaching job for missing classes. His poetry hadn't attracted any attention, his marriage had broken up, and he wasn't sure what to do next when, one day, he read an issue of Robert Bly's literary magazine The Fifties. It impressed him so much that he wrote Bly a sixteen page single-spaced letter. Bly wrote back and invited him to a farm in western Minnesota, and the two became great friends.

Wright had been writing all of his poetry with formal meter and rhyme, but Bly encouraged him to write free verse, and the result was his first important book of poetry, The Branch Will Not Break (1962). It got great reviews and contained many of his most famous poems, including "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," "A Blessing," and "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." He went on to write many more books of poetry, including Two Citizens (1973) and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977). Throughout his work, he kept coming back to the subject of his hometown. He wrote, "The one tongue I can write in / Is my Ohioan."

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SUNDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "don't forget," by Charles Bukowski, from Bone Palace Ballet (Black Sparrow Press).

don't forget

there is always somebody or something
waiting for you,
something stronger, more intelligent,
more evil, more kind, more durable,
something bigger, something better,
something worse, something with
eyes like the tiger, jaws like the shark,
something crazier than crazy,
saner than sane,
there is always something or somebody
waiting for you
as you put on your shoes
or as you sleep
or as you empty a garbage can
or pet your cat
or brush your teeth
or celebrate a holiday
there is always somebody or something
waiting for you.

keep this fully in mind
so that when it happens
you will be as ready as possible.

meanwhile, a good day to
you
if you are still there.
I think that I am—
I just burnt my fingers on
this
cigarette.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson, born in San Francisco (1919). She was the daughter of upper class, high society parents, and she never lived up to their expectations. Her mother wanted her to be a socialite, but Shirley was awkward, unattractive, and intellectual. Her mother once told her that she wished Shirley had never been born. She was shunned by her classmates in high school and spent all her time alone, reading and writing. She made a vow to herself that she would write a thousand words every day for the rest of her life, in order to prove herself to everyone who had rejected her.

In college, a man named Stanley Edgar Hyman fell in love with her when he read one of her short stories. He was Jewish, and her parents were horrified when she married him. They moved to a small town in Vermont, where her husband taught literature at Bennington College. She was an eccentric woman, and the local townspeople talked about her behind her back. They called her a Communist, a witch, an atheist and a Jew. She felt as though everyone in town were watching her and judging her, and she began to dread leaving the house.

One day, she sat down and wrote a story about a small New England town where one resident is ritually chosen by lottery each year to be stoned to death. She finished the story in two hours and sent it off to The New Yorker, where it was published as "The Lottery" in 1948. The story generated more reader response than any story ever published by The New Yorker up to that point. Hundreds of readers wrote to the magazine, demanding to know what the story meant, or asking to cancel their subscriptions because they were so disturbed.

"The Lottery" made Shirley Jackson famous, but she still struggled to find time to write while raising four children. She eventually wrote two memoirs about the experience of parenting, Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). Her memoirs were lighthearted and funny, but she also wrote several dark novels, including The Haunting of Hill House (1959), about a group of people who try to spend a night in a house with ghosts, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), about a woman who has poisoned her entire family.

Jackson said, "[Writing is] a way of making daily life into a wonderfully unusual thing instead of a grind."

It's the birthday of Stanley Crouch, born in Los Angeles, California (1945). He's an African-American writer who has written several books of essays, including Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990) and The American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race (1995). As a young man, he became disillusioned with the civil rights movement and got involved with the Black Nationalists, who believed in living separately from whites rather than trying to assimilate. He eventually came to feel that Black Nationalism was a form of reverse racism. He has gone on to argue that Black Nationalism killed the Civil Rights movement because it encouraged African Americans to define themselves by their race alone. He wrote, "I'm not going to submit to racism, I don't care whose version of it I happen to come in contact with. . . . I'm not going to submit to any ideas that reduce the rich possibility of human life."

It's the birthday of Amy Hempel, born in Chicago, Illinois (1951). She's the author of several books of short stories, including Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), and Tumble Home (1997). As a young woman, she had a series of traumatic experiences: her mother committed suicide, she had a motorcycle accident, and then she a car accident. She said, "I went from accident to accident, hospital to hospital; I'd walk out of the house in the morning and half look up to see when the . . . safe was going to fall out of the sky and smash me into the sidewalk." She became so afraid of death that she decided the only way to conquer her fear was to enroll in an anatomy class and dissect cadavers, and it worked. She got a job counseling terminally ill patients, but she wanted to write fiction on the side and wasn't getting anywhere with it. She finally decided to move to New York City, and discovered that it was only after she had left California that she could write about the life she had been living there. She wrote a series of extremely short stories about the strange people she'd known and experiences she'd had, and published them in her first collection, Reasons to Live (1985). It begins, "My heart-I thought it had stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God."

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