MONDAY, 12 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Night," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Night
Into the darkness and the hush of night
Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,
And with it fade the phantoms of the day,
The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the light,
The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,
The unprofitable splendor and display,
The agitations, and the cares that prey
Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.
The better life begins; the world no more
Molests us; all its records we erase
From the dull common-place book of our lives,
That like a palimpsest is written o'er
With trivial incidents of time and place,
And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Haruki Murakami, born in Kyoto, Japan (1949). Widely considered one of Japan's most important 20th-century writers, he is heavily influenced by American culture, and has been criticized by some Japanese for being too westernized. He said in an interview, "I write weird stories. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. ... I wake up at 6:00 in the morning and go to bed at 10:00, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. ... But when I write, I write weird." His works include Hear the Wind Sing (1979), A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995).
It's the birthday of artist John Singer Sargent, born in Florence, Italy (1856). He was one of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He made his fortune and reputation as a portrait painter of beautiful women and influential men.
It's the birthday of writer and member of the British Parliament Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland (1729). Burke studied law, but gave it up to become a writer. He entered Parliament in 1765 and began to write pamphlets about the corruption he found there. He sympathized with the American colonies and wrote essays such as "On American Taxation" (1774) and "On Conciliation with the Colonies" (1775).
It's the birthday of writer Charles Perrault, born in Paris, France (1628). The son of an upper-class bourgeois family, he wrote Parallels Between the Ancients and the Moderns in 1688, which compared the authors of antiquity to modern writers. In 1697, he published Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose, and opened up a new literary genre, the fairytale.
It's the birthday of writer Walter Mosley, born in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California (1952). His first book was Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), which was set in 1948 and introduced the character of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, who reluctantly gets drawn into investigations that lead him through the tough streets of black Los Angeles. Mosley is also the author of Black Betty (1994).
It's the birthday of writer Jack London, born John Griffith Chaney, in San Francisco, California (1876). He's best known for his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). He attended school only through the eighth grade, but he was an avid reader and educated himself at public libraries. He eventually returned to high school, and gained admittance to the University of California at Berkeley, but he only stayed for six months, calling it "not alive enough" and a "passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence."
At the age of 15, he borrowed the money to buy a fishing sloop, complete with a mistress who came with the boat. He began raiding oyster beds and selling the oysters to fish markets; he became so good at it he was known as the "Prince of the Oyster Pirates." He made more money in one week of pirating than he was able to earn in his first full year as a professional writer. However, after a brush with the law, he decided to change sides and became a California Fish patrol deputy.
In 1897, London went to Alaska to pan for gold. He never found any gold, but he gained a tremendous amount of insight and perspective. He returned to Oakland two years later, and struggled in extreme poverty, writing day and night. Three years later, he published The Call of the Wild (1903). It recounts the reversion of a civilized dog, Buck, to his primitive heritage. At his peak, London became America's most famous and best-selling author, and the first writer to become a millionaire through his work. Though his income was great by the standards of the day, his expenses were greater. He was also an alcoholic and often claimed that he only wrote for the money. To pay for his agricultural adventures, he wrote what he thought would be commercial successes. As he grew older, he even resorted to buying story plots from struggling young writers like Sinclair Lewis, and tried to imitate his own style to repeat his earlier successes.
TUESDAY, 13 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: ""A Little Health," by anonymous poet, from The Diary of Francis Kilvert (1840-1879).
A Little Health
A little health,
A little wealth,
A little house and freedom,
And at the end
A little friend
And little cause to need him.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Jay McInerney, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1955). His first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984) was a huge success.
It's the birthday of Edmund White, born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1940). He worked as an editor at Horizon and The Saturday Review, and wrote A Boy's Own Story (1982).
It's the birthday of Carolyn Heilbrun, born in East Orange, New Jersey (1926). She's written a number of books of literary criticism, and, under the pseudonym Amanda Cross, 14 murder mysteries starring the detective Kate Fansler, including Honest Doubt (2000), and The Edge of Doom (2002). She started teaching English at Columbia University in 1960, but she worried that the university wouldn't give her tenure, and she wanted to have something to fall back on. She made the hero of her mystery books a rich, thin English professor who spent as much time talking about university politics as she did running down criminals.
It's the birthday of A(lfred) B(ertram) Guthrie, born in Bedford, Indiana (1901). He wrote The Big Sky (1946), and won a Pulitzer Prize for The Way West (1949). He said, "Fiction is love and hate and agreement and conflict and common adventure, not lonely musing of have-beens and might-have-beens."
It's the birthday of Horatio Alger, Jr., born in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1832). His career as a minister ended when he was accused of molesting two boys in his parish. He left New England, vowed to redeem himself by helping the poor, and set about writing novels about the homeless children who lived in the streets of New York City. His first novel, Ragged Dick; or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, was serialized in a magazine, where it picked up more readers with every issue. When it was published in book form in 1867, it became an instant bestseller. Groucho Marx once said, "Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends—that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn't regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life."
On this day in 1864, the songwriter Stephen Foster, died in New York City. He was 37 years old. His wife had left him, and he was slowly drinking himself to death. Sick in bed with a high fever, he got up to call the chambermaid, fell against the washstand and cut his neck. He lay there for hours before someone could take him to the hospital, and he died a couple of days later. When his wife went through his belongings after his death, she found 38 cents and a note in his handwriting that read, "Dear friends and gentle hearts . . ."
It is also the anniversary of the death of James Joyce, in Zurich in 1941. He died of a stomach ulcer. He wrote Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses (1922). His last book was Finnegans Wake, which remained a work in progress for 16 years until it was finally published in 1939. The novel is about the family of a publican named Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who lives in Chapelizod, just outside of Dublin. The first sentence of the book is the end of the unfinished last sentence. The book ends, "A way a lone a last a loved along the," and begins, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
WEDNESDAY, 14 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Courtesy," by Hilaire Belloc.
Courtesy
Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.
On Monks I did in Storrington fall,
They took me straight into their Hall;
I saw Three Pictures on a wall,
And Courtesy was in them all.
The first the Annunciation;
The second the Visitation;
The third the Consolation,
Of God that was Our Lady's Son.
The first was of St. Gabriel;
On Wings a-flame from Heaven he fell;
And as he went upon one knee
He shone with Heavenly Courtesy.
Our Lady out of Nazareth rode -
It was Her month of heavy load;
Yet was her face both great and kind,
For Courtesy was in Her Mind.
The third it was our Little Lord,
Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
He was so small you could not see
His large intent of Courtesy.
Our Lord, that was Our Lady's Son,
Go bless you, People, one by one;
My Rhyme is written, my work is done.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Anchee Min, born in Shanghai (1957). She's the author of a memoir about her childhood in China called Red Azalea (1994).
It's the birthday of film writer, director, and producer Hal Roach, born Harold Eugene Roach in Elmira, New York (1892). He originated the "Our Gang" comedies in 1922 and introduced Laurel and Hardy to film audiences.
It's the birthday of Mary Robison, born in Washington, D.C. (1949). Three years ago, she published Why Did I Ever? (2001), a novel in 527 very short sections.
It's the birthday of author Emily Hahn, born in St. Louis (1905). She said that as a child she wanted to be "the greatest expert on ghosts, the world's best ice skater, a champion lion tamer." She lived in Africa, China, and Hong Kong, married a Chinese intellectual, had an affair with a spy, and wrote for The New Yorker for 70 years. She wrote a famous article about having become inadvertently addicted to opium and being cured by hypnosis.
It's the birthday of novelist John dos Passos, born in Chicago (1896). He wrote the Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the U.S.A. Trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). He was the illegitimate son of a prominent lawyer, and since the acknowledgement of John's existence would have ruined his father's reputation, John and his mother were bundled off to Europe, where they moved from one hotel room to another for 12 years. He went to Harvard, then spent time during World War I working as an ambulance driver in France and Italy, which gave him the material for two fiercely anti-war novels, One Man's Initiation (1920), and Three Soldiers (1921). He wrote aggressive, muscular prose, but he had a soft voice and a strange accent, and he peered at things through thick glasses.
Dos Passos was a famous writer for the American left. "My sympathies," he wrote in 1939, "lie with the private in the front line against the brass hat; with the hodcarrier against the strawboss, or the walking delegate for that matter; with the laboratory worker against the stuffed shirt in a mortarboard; with the criminal against the cop." He eventually backed away from his radically liberal philosophy when he slowly became disillusioned with Communism. The event that sealed this change for him occurred in 1937, when his friend was executed by communists during the Spanish Civil War. His writings became more reactionary, and many of his readers and writer friends felt alienated.
It's the birthday of British author and illustrator Hugh Lofting, born in Maidenhead, Berkshire (1886). He trained as a civil engineer, worked in Africa, Cuba, the West Indies, and Canada, and then settled in New York to become a writer. He was best known for his classic series of children's books about Doctor Dolittle, a gentle country veterinarian who could converse with animals. These stories were based on illustrated letters he wrote to his two children from the front lines in World War I. On the boat coming to America with his family, Lofting befriended the writer Cecil Roberts, to whom he showed the letters. Roberts liked them and showed them to his publisher, who agreed to print The Story of Doctor Dolittle. In the story, Dolittle lives in the little town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh and is fond of animals, especially his pets Dab-Dab the duck, Jip the dog, Gub-Gub the piglet, Polynesia the parrot, and Too-Too the owl.
THURSDAY, 15 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "White Dream," "The Last Year" and "My Cup," by Robert Friend, from Dancing With A Tiger: Poems 1941-1998 (Spuyten Duyvil).
White Dream
After receiving the relentless news
and experiencing the terrible invasion,
I was strangely unafraid, and even glad
as I sank into each day as into a soft pillow
and wafted like a child into healing sleep.
Perhaps it was simply resignation.
I knew it as unconditional peace.
Pain, I knew, would come later.
Let it.
I turned over on my pillow
and sank into another
white dream.
This is the last year.
There will be no other,
but heartless nature
seemingly relents.
Never has a winter sun
spilled so much light,
never have so many flowers
dared such early bloom.
The air is brilliant, sharp.
Never have I taken
such long, long breaths. My Cup
They tell me I am going to die.
Why don't I seem to care?
My cup is full. Let it spill.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Frank Conroy, born in New York City (1936). He's the author of the memoir Stop-time (1967) and the novel Body and Soul (1993). He's the director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he once scolded a student for using a lot of detail that didn't matter to her short story. "The author makes a tacit deal with the reader," he said. "You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it—to remember, to keep in mind—as they make their way up the hill. . . . If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain—to the end of the story—and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands."
It's the birthday of novelist Ernest J. Gaines, born in Oscar, Louisiana (1933). He wrote The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), ostensibly the recollections of a hundred-and-ten-year-old freed slave as revealed during a series of interviews. It was praised for its uncannily authentic voice, and Gaines said that after the novel was published, writers besieged him for advice about how to interview elderly people, and how to get them to talk openly about their memories. He had to tell them that he had made the whole thing up, and had no idea how to do interviews.
It's the birthday of civil rights leader, minister, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia (1929). He didn't set out to become a civil rights activist, but he was chosen to lead a boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama when he was only 26. He said later that if he'd known what the job would entail, he might have turned it down. He wasn't even sure he wanted to become a preacher; as a teenager, the way people shouted and stomped in his Baptist church sometimes embarrassed him. But during the boycott, after he was assaulted and arrested and his house was bombed, he experienced what amounted to a religious conversion. He said later that he realized that the movement had far greater force than his own doubts, and that he had to act like a charismatic leader even if he didn't feel like one. He said, "As people began to derive inspiration from their involvement, I realized that the choice leaves your own hands. The people expect you to give them leadership."
It's the birthday of folklorist Alan Lomax, born in Austin, Texas (1915). He started working with his father when he was a teenager, recording traditional American folk songs sung by the people who had learned them at their grandparents' knees, long before radio or television. Together, he and his father archived 25,000 songs for the Library of Congress, and they brought Lead Belly, Son House, and Woody Guthrie to public attention.
It's the birthday of poet Osip Mandelstam, born in Warsaw (1891). He was raised in St Petersburg, and supported the Revolution until the Kremlin began to persecute artists and writers who refused to produce socialist realist propaganda. He wrote a brazenly hostile poem about Stalin that he read to a gathering of his friends. When a copy reached the dictator, he issued an order for Mandelstam to be "preserved and isolated." Mandelstam and his wife were exiled to the provinces. He was released for a short while, then re-arrested and sent to Siberia, where he died in prison. His wife saved his poems by memorizing them.
FRIDAY, 16 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: From "The Choice," by John Pomfret.
from The Choice
That life may be more comfortable yet,
And all my joys refined, sincere and great,
I'd choose two friends, whose company would be
A great advance to my felicity:
Well-born, of humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and men, as well as books, have known.
Brave, generous, witty, and exactly free
From loose behavior or formality.
Airy and prudent, merry, but not light;
Quick in discerning, and in judging right.
Secret they should be, faithful to their trust;
In reasoning cool, strong, temperate and just;
Obliging, open, without huffing, brave,
Brisk in gay talking, and in sober, grave;
Close in dispute, but not tenacious, tried
By solid reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to lust, revenge, or envious hate,
Nor busy meddlers with intrigues of state;
Strangers to slander, and sworn foes to spite:
Not quarrelsome, but stout enough to fight
Loyal and pious, friends to Caesar, true
As dying martyrs to their Maker too.
In their society, I could not miss
A permanent, sincere, substantial bliss.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Robert Service, born in Preston, Lancashire, England (1874). He's best known for the poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," and "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and other works about life among the sourdoughs in the Yukon. He didn't spend very much of his life in Canada, though, and although he wrote about miners, he wasn't a miner himself when he lived in Whitehorse, he was a bank teller. The Gold Rush was already over, and most of the prospectors had left. He liked to recite poems at church socials, and sold a couple of poems to the local newspaper. "Give us something about our own bit of earth," the newspaper editor told him. "There's a rich paystreak waiting for someone to work." That very Saturday night, Service got the idea for his poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." It eventually sold three million copies, and the royalty checks from publishers never stopped coming. Service became a war correspondent, fell in love with a woman he bumped into while watching a parade in Paris, and spent the rest of his life in a villa in France.
"The Shooting of Dan McGrew" begins:
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was hi light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave, and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was dangerous Dan McGrew.
It's the birthday of William Kennedy, born in Albany, New York (1928). His first novel, The Ink Truck, came out in 1969, and didn't sell very well. 13 publishers rejected Ironweed (1984), about a derelict on the run from his own past. But it won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and a Pen/Faulkner award, all in the same year. William Kennedy said, "The more serious you are as a writer, the more you feel yourself an outsider."
It's the birthday of critic and novelist Susan Sontag, born in New York City (1933). She wrote the widely anthologized essay "Notes on Camp," and a study called Illness as Metaphor (1978).
It's the birthday of Dian Fossey, born in San Francisco (1932). She lived alone for 18 years, studying mountain gorillas in the cold and rainy mountains of Rwanda. She wrote Gorillas in the Mist (1983) about her work there.
SATURDAY, 17 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "Byzantine Faces," by Robert Lax, from A Thing That Is (The Overlook Press).
Byzantine Faces
i won't believe
i'm really
alive
until i'm gladder
to be alive
here now
than to have
been alive
there then
living in greece
i may be
thinking
i am, was,
alive there
then
some byzantine
time
some classical
time
why think
that good?
i should
know better
i think good
any time except
the eighteenth
century
(not too bad)
the nineteenth
century
(bad enough)
or the twentieth
really, i'm
glad to be
alive in the
twentieth
not only glad
to be just
alive
but even to
be alive
just now
right now
yes, but i keep
remembering
a light in the
eyes of certain
figures in
frescoes
certain figures
in mosaics
that made
me wish
i was living
then
as though
living then
were to
live
forever
some life
some liveliness
in the eye
that seemed
eternal
eternally
alive
eternally
infinitely
joyous
& penetrating
(warm with
the warmth
of life
exploding,
even, with,
the joy
of life)
yet there
forever
is it
that see
ing them
in some
mu
se
um
seeing
them still
preserved
still
living
made me
envy
their
state
?
not
sure
am
not
sure,
either,
that it
was envy
they gave
me, but
rather a
life
a spark
of living
to keep
alive
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston (1706). Books were hard to come by when he was a young apprentice in his brother's printing shop, but he got hold of a volume of Addison and Steele's The Spectator and used it to teach himself how to write. He took notes on each of the pieces, then hid the book and tried to reconstruct the essays from the notes alone. He toyed with the idea of becoming a poet, but his father assured him that "verse-makers were generally beggars," and he turned his attention to the cultivation of virtue and the service of humanity. He became better known than any of the leaders of the Revolution except George Washington. He signed every document associated with the founding of the Republic, and he took Paris by storm when he appeared at court to secure an alliance with France. He invented bifocals and the glass harmonica, charted the Gulf Stream on his way across the Atlantic, and chased tornadoes on horseback. He was flirtatious on up into his seventies. In 1731, Franklin founded America's first circulating library so that people could borrow books to read even though they might not have been able to afford to buy them. He was the author, printer, and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanac, an annually published book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information. It contains aphorisms like "Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," and "In this world nothing can said to be certain except death and taxes."
It's the birthday of Charles Brockden Brown, born in Philadelphia (1771). He was the first man in the United States to try to make a living writing novels. His masterpiece was Wieland (1798), a gothic horror novel whose plot turned on "spontaneous combustion, demonic ventriloquism, murder and madness."
It's the birthday of Anne Brontë, born in Yorkshire, England (1820). She was the youngest of the Brontë sisters. Her first novel was Agnes Grey (1847). She died at the age of 29.
It's the birthday of the novelist Ronald Firbank, born in London (1886).
It's the birthday of Nevil Shute, born in Middlesex, England (1899). He wrote A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957), a famous book about the end of the world.
SUNDAY, 18 JANUARY, 2004
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Poem: "A Time to Talk," by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt).
A Time to Talk
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, "What is it?"
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, born in London (1779). His name is attached to Roget's Thesaurus, but he had a long career as a physician and a scientist before he began work on the project. As a young man, he experimented with laughing gas, figured out how to improve the public water supply, invented the log-log slide rule, and wrote a paper which was the first to describe the persistence of images on the retina, thought to have been the first step toward the development of the movie camera. Roget's Thesaurus is probably the world's most famous compendium of synonyms. For "talk," Roget suggested: "chatter, chat, prate, prattle, patter, babble, gab, gabble, gibble-gabble, jabber, blab, blabber, blather, blether, clatter, run on, rattle on, ramble on, run on like a mill race, talk till one is blue in the face."
It's the birthday of Joseph Farwell Glidden, born in Clarendon, New York (1813). For centuries, hedgerows and stone walls were the only way to keep livestock contained. In the American West, cowboys followed herds of cattle to make sure no harm came to them. Glidden saw an exhibition in which a wooden rail with nails protruding from it kept livestock at a distance. He rigged up an old coffee grinder to twist strands of wire around each other, then clipped off the protruding ends to make barbs. A number of men filed patents for similar barbed fences at the same time. There was a tremendous fight, but Glidden won, and his barbed wire factory made him one of the country's richest men. It wasn't long before the Wild West became a thing of the past. Long cattle drives came to an end, and longhorn cattle began to disappear; it wasn't necessary to breed cattle tough enough to survive out on the range anymore.
It's the birthday of A[lan] A[lexander] Milne, born in St. John's Wood, London (1882). He wrote for the humor magazine Punch, and he was the author of a successful play called Mr. Pim Passes By (1920). But once he published Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), nobody ever remembered anything else he had written. In a little verse, he wrote: "When I wrote them, little thinking / All my years of pen - and - inking / Would be almost lost among / Those four trifles for the young."
It's the birthday of Oliver Hardy, born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia (1892). He studied law and sang professionally before he met Stan Laurel. Laurel and Hardy were one of the few to move smoothly from the vaudeville hall to full-length film comedies. They were most famous during the thirties, and they won an Oscar for a short film called The Music Box, in which they attempted to get a piano up a steep staircase.
It's the birthday of Cary Grant, born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England (1904). He came to the United States as an acrobat. He failed his first screen test; the studio said he was bow-legged and that his neck was too thick. After he was signed by Paramount, he had a three-year run in which he made his best-known films--Bringing up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). He said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me."
