MONDAY, 26 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "Middle Age," by Pat Schneider, from The Patience of Ordinary Things. © Amherst Writers and Artists Press. Reprinted with permission.
Middle Age
The child you think you don't want
is the one who will make you laugh.
She will break your heart
when she loses the sight in one eye
and tells the doctor she wants to be
an apple tree when she grows up.
It will be this child who forgives you
again and again
for believing you don't want her to be born,
for resisting the rising tide of your body,
for wishing for the red flow of her dismissal.
She will even forgive you for all the breakfasts
you failed to make exceptional.
Someday this child will sit beside you.
When you are old and too tired of war
to want to watch the evening news,
she will tell you stories
like the one about her teenaged brother,
your son, and his friends
taking her out in a canoe when she was
five years old. How they left her alone
on an island in the river
while they jumped off the railroad bridge.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, born in Rome (AD 121). He rose through the ranks of the Roman Senate, and became emperor when Antoninus died in AD 161. Before Aurelius came to power, the Roman Empire was experiencing incredible prosperity. It was the period known as the Pax Romana, a time of peace that lasted nearly two hundred years. The Roman Empire was the largest it would ever be, stretching from Scotland to the Arabian desert. Many people led very comfortable lives; they had access to products from all across the empire, and most cities had water and sewage systems, roads and public baths. The richest people lived in great villas with central heating systems. For entertainment, there were plays and gladiator contests. The historian Tacitus wrote that it was a time of "rare happiness . . . when we may think what we please, and express what we think."
But almost as soon as Marcus Aurelius became emperor, Rome encountered a series of disasters. During the twenty years he ruled there were plagues, famines and wars. He was almost constantly trying to defend the Roman Empire against invaders; in the north his armies battled the Germans, and in the east they battled the Parthians.
In the midst of all this chaos, Marcus Aurelius consoled himself by keeping a kind of diary filled with philosophic meditations. He studied the Stoic philosophers, who believed in detaching yourself from everything in the universe that's outside of your power to control. He jotted down bits of advice to himself—for example, "Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last," " Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith," and "Very little is needed to make a happy life."
Marcus Aurelius said, "Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good."
It's the birthday of humorist Artemus Ward, born Charles Farrar Browne near Waterford, Maine (1834). He got his first printing job when he was fourteen years old, and by the time he was twenty-three he was working as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It was at that paper that he began writing humor columns filled with misspelled words, puns and other jokes, under the name Artemus Ward. They soon became enormously popular, and Ward got a job writing for the new magazine Vanity Fair.
In 1861, Ward started giving lectures across the country. He was a skinny, scholarly-looking man, and he had a deadpan delivery that had a big influence on another famous nineteenth-century humorist—Mark Twain.
When the Civil War began in 1861, Ward supported the North; he said, "Let's have the Union restored as it was, if we can; but if we can't, I'm in favor of the Union as it wasn't." On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln read aloud an article by Ward to his cabinet just before reading the Emancipation Proclamation. When one of the cabinet members looked angry that he was reading a humor article, Lincoln said, "Gentlemen . . . with the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do."
It's the birthday of novelist Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He's the author of The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), The Fixer (1966), and many other novels. He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. His mother's family was full of Yiddish actors, and as a child Malamud would go to see their plays on Second Avenue. He also went to Charlie Chaplin movies, and he knew he wanted to be a writer after he discovered how much he loved retelling the plots of these movies to all of his friends at school.
He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression, and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits." In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines, and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.
It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success, and he went on to publish many more novels.
It's the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos, born in Mount Shasta, California (1893). Her father managed a theater, and Loos began acting there as a small child. Eventually, she became so popular that she was the family's main source of income. Her first screenplay was produced by D.W. Griffith when she was just nineteen years old—The New York Hat (1912). Between 1913 and 1928, she wrote about 150 screenplays for silent films, and almost two thirds of them were made into movies.
In 1925, Loos published the fictionalized diary of a naive, flighty young woman named Lorelei Lee in the magazine Harper's Bazaar. The next year, the diary was published in book form with the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), and Loos became an instant celebrity. In one diary entry, Lorelei Lee writes, "I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good, but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever." Gentlemen Prefer Blondes went on to become a hit Broadway musical starring Carol Channing, and a Hollywood movie starring Marilyn Monroe.
TUESDAY, 27 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "Calling him back from layoff," by Bob Hicok, from Insomnia Diary. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
Calling him back from layoff
I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been
confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was
and it turns out I'm OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars
painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that's a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle
for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said
he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean
and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through
with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions
as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried
with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward
than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other
and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other
forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones
hear?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, born in Brooklyn, New York (1929). His first novel was The Sky Changes, the story of a couple's attempt to save their crumbling marriage by taking a road trip across America. He's gone on to write many more novels, including Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), Mulligan Stew (1979) and his latest, Little Casino (2002). His poetry collections include The Orangery (1978) and White Sail (1977).
It's the birthday of playwright
August Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). His plays include Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990). He grew up in a poor section of Pittsburgh, in an apartment with no hot water. He was the only African-American in a private Catholic High School, and he used to start every day by throwing away racist notes that were left on his desk. He eventually transferred to a public high school, but things weren't much better there. For one assignment, he spent months doing research on Napoleon, wrote a twenty-page paper, saved up enough money to rent a typewriter and paid his sister twenty-five cents to type up the paper he had written. His history teacher thought it was so good that it couldn't possibly have been written by a fifteen-year-old black student.
Wilson left school and never came back. He worked at a series of menial jobs, and he started going to the library every day to read about whatever he was interested in. He fell in love with the works of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. In the spring of 1965, he wrote a college term paper about Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg for his sister. She paid him twenty dollars for his work, and on April 1, 1965, Wilson bought his first typewriter with that money. He typed his name, just to see how it would look, and from that point on he knew that he wanted to be a writer.
Wilson became involved in the Black Power movement of the '60s, and started writing politically inspired poetry and directing plays. In 1978, he went to visit a friend in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he liked the relaxed atmosphere so much that he decided to stay there. He found that living away from Pittsburgh allowed him to write about it, and in 1982 he wrote his first play, Jitney, set in a Pittsburgh taxi stand.
Two years later, Wilson was listening to old blues records by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey when he came up with the idea for a play about 1920s blues musicians and their struggle against the interests of white recording companies. That idea turned into Wilson's big breakthrough, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1985. At one point in the play, Ma Rainey says, "White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life."
Wilson said, "Confront the dark parts of yourself. . . . Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing."
It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, born in Meran, Tyrol, Austria (1898). He went to many different schools, but he failed out of all them, so his family sent him to work with his uncle, who owned a chain of hotels. When he shot and almost killed a waiter for one of the hotels, his parents gave him the choice of reform school or emigration to America. He chose America, and arrived in New York when he was sixteen years old.
He worked at a series of hotels, and then started his own restaurant, which became very successful. He didn't think about becoming a writer until a friend in the publishing industry happened to see his childlike drawings on the walls of his apartment. His friend suggested that he write and illustrate a children's book, and a few years later the first "Madeline" book was published.
Madeline (1939) begins: "In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. In two straight lines they broke their bread, and brushed their teeth, and went to bed. They smiled at the good, and frowned at the bad, and sometimes they were very sad. They left the house at half past nine, in two straight lines, in rain or shine . . . the smallest one was Madeline!"
WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL, 2004
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Poems: "The First Fruit Salad," by Joanne Limburg, from femenismo. © Bloodaxe Books. Reprinted with permission.
The First Fruit Salad
One June night
she left her husband sleeping
in the record-breaking heat
and went down to ask the fridge
what it was she wanted.
What she wanted was:
the life of a fruiteater,
an endless afternoon
in a cool and juicy place
where white teeth sank into Spanish oranges
and apples fell open into perfect halves
on wooden chopping-boards,
all by themselves, all day,
and cubes of watermelon
clinked in long glasses.
Splay-legged on the kitchen floor,
she hugged the bowl of fruit salad
to her chest, and remembered how,
at the very beginning,
Eve sat, blindfold and giggling,
as he brought the spoonfuls up to her mouth,
one by one,
to be named.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Diane Johnson, born Diane Lain in Moline, Illinois (1934). She's a novelist, a short story writer, an essayist, a travel writer, a literary critic, and a journalist. She's written a biography of Dashiell Hammett, and she wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining (1980). She may be best known as the author of a trilogy of novels about American expatriates in France—Le Divorce (1997), Le Mariage (2000) and her latest, L'Affaire, published last year.
It's the birthday of novelist Alistair MacLean, born in Glasgow, Scotland (1922). He joined the Royal Navy in 1941, and he was captured and tortured by Japanese soldiers in World War II. When he got back home to Glasgow, he began writing his first novel, H.M.S. Ulysses (1955), based on his experience on a Navy ship in the Arctic Ocean. It became a bestseller, and he went on to write many more popular adventure novels, including Ice Station Zebra (1963), The Guns of Navarone (1957) and Where Eagles Dare (1967).
It's the birthday of the woman who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper in Monroeville, Alabama (1926). She grew up in Monroeville, which had a population of about 7,000, and it was the model for the town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee wrote, "It was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."
Her father was a lawyer, and she spent much of her free time hanging around the courthouse and playing golf with the children of other lawyers. She thought it seemed like a pretty good way to live, and for a long time she wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up. She went to law school at the University of Alabama, and after she graduated she worked as a reservation clerk for an airline in New York City. She spent all day at work, and then came home to write for four hours every evening. In the mid '50s, Lee started working on a novel about the trial of a black man in a small town in Alabama.
In December of 1956, she wasn't able to get back to Alabama to celebrate Christmas with her family, so instead she celebrated with a family she knew in Manhattan. On Christmas morning, Lee and the family gathered around the tree to open gifts. Most of them were for the children of the family, but when everything under the tree had been unwrapped, the parents asked Lee to open an envelope that was resting on the branches. Inside was a note that said, "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." The couple gave her a loan to devote an entire year to nothing but writing, and it was during that year that Lee wrote most of the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird.
She sent the manuscript to a publisher in New York, and they told her that it had potential but that it was too much like a collection of short stories and not enough like a novel. She spent the next two and a half years rewriting it, and To Kill A Mockingbird was published in July of 1960. It was priced at $3.95, and it sold more than two and a half million copies in less than a year. It was selected by the Reader's Digest book club, the Literary Guild book club, and the Book-of-the-Month Club; and it was immediately published in more than a dozen languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.
To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of Atticus Finch, a lawyer who defends a black man named Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white girl. The title of the novel comes from something Finch says to his daughter: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
To Kill a Mockingbird sells about a million copies every year, and it's sold over thirty million copies since its publication. In 1963, just three years after its publication, it was taught in eight percent of U.S. public middle schools and high schools, and today that figure is closer to eighty percent. Only Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Huckleberry Finn are assigned more often.
THURSDAY, 29 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "Sonnet XV," by William Shakespeare, from The Sonnets.
XV
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked ev'n by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet C.P. Cavafy, born in Alexandria, Egypt (1863). His parents were Greek, and he wrote his poetry in Greek, but he lived in Alexandria almost his entire life. In 1889, he got a job as an unpaid clerk at the city's Irrigation Office, and he stayed there until he retired thirty years later. He lived with his mother until he was thirty-six, in an apartment just above a brothel, and across the street from a church and a hospital. Cavafy once said, "Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters to the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die."
He published only a few poems in his lifetime; most of his poetry was printed in pamphlets that he gave to friends and family. He wrote poetry on all kinds of subjects, but he's especially known for his erotic poems, which were unusually direct and detailed for their day.
Cavafy wrote, in the poem "An Old Man":
In the inner room of the noisy café
an old man sits bent over a table;
a newspaper before him, no companion beside him.
and in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.
He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
and yet the time when he was young seems like
yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.
And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
and how he always trusted her--what folly!--
the liar who would say, "Tomorrow. You have ample time."
He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.
. . . But with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the café.
It's the birthday of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, born in Brooklyn, New York (1954). He's known for his stand-up routine in which he points out little absurdities in everyday life. He once said, "I take the most normal things in life and spend way too much time thinking about them."
Growing up on Long Island, he became interested in comedy from watching his father, who was always making people laugh in conversation. By the time he was eight years old, Seinfeld had begun studying the techniques of comedians on The Ed Sullivan Show. Once, he made a friend laugh so hard that he sprayed a mouthful of cookies and milk all over him, and from that point on he knew that he wanted to be a comedian.
He got a degree from Queens College, and a few weeks after he graduated he went to an open mic night at a local comedy club. When he got on stage, he couldn't remember anything he was going to say, so he just mumbled through all of the topics he had prepared. For the next few years, he bounced around the New York comedy circuit, and took the worst day jobs he could find so that he would feel more pressure to succeed as a comedian. He said, "To have your back to a cliff, that's the best way to accomplish something. Never have anything to fall back on."
He worked as a light bulb salesman, a janitor, and an illegal jewelry salesman. When he still hadn't made it big in New York after four years, he decided to try his luck in Los Angeles. He got a job writing scripts for a sitcom, but he was fired after a few shows.
Seinfeld got his big break in the spring of 1981, when a talent scout for the Tonight Show saw him perform and offered him a spot on the show. He went on to perform on Leno and Letterman dozens of times in the next few years, and he did his stand-up routine at hundreds of shows every year, all across the country. In 1990, his sitcom Seinfeld premiered, and it soon became one of the most popular TV shows of all time. In 1998, Seinfeld quit the show and went back to doing stand-up comedy fulltime.
It's the birthday of editor and publisher Robert Gottlieb, born in New York City (1931). He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a family that loved to read. He once said that his father's "idea of a real treat, something truly devilish, was to go on a spree . . . and buy half a dozen books." Gottlieb would read three or four books every day, and he was able to read for sixteen hours at a time. As a teenager he read War and Peace in one day, and while he was at college he read Marcel Proust's six-volume Remembrance of Things Past in less than a week.
In 1955, he applied for a job as an editorial assistant for Jack Goodman at Simon & Schuster. When Goodman asked him why he wanted to be an editor, Gottlieb said, "It's never occurred to me to be anything else." In his second year as an editor, Gottlieb received a manuscript by Joseph Heller with the working title Catch-18. Gottlieb suggested the title Catch-22, the book became a modern classic, and Gottlieb became one of the best-known editors in the country at the age of twenty-six.
He went on to edit the books of S.J. Perelman, Jessica Mitford, Doris Lessing, Ray Bradbury, Chaim Potok, Anthony Burgess, John Cheever, Michael Crichton, John Le Carre, and many other writers.
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL, 2004
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Poem: "The Two-Headed Calf," by Laura Gilpin, from The Hocus Pocus of the Universe. © Doubleday and Co. Reprinted with permission.
The Two-Headed Calf
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of singer and songwriter Willie Nelson, born in the small farming community of Abbott, Texas (1933). He was raised by his grandparents and aunts during the Great Depression, and earned his keep by picking cotton. His grandfather gave him his first guitar lessons. After high school, he supported himself going door-to-door selling Bibles, encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, and sewing machines.
At night, Nelson wrote songs and performed at honky-tonks with names like the County Dump and the Bloody Bucket, where the performers had to be shielded by chicken wire from flying cans and bottles. In 1959 he wrote "Night Life," a song that was eventually recorded by more than seventy artists and sold over thirty million copies. He only made a hundred and fifty dollars from the song, because he sold the copyright, but he used that money to buy a second-hand Buick, and he drove in that Buick to Nashville, hoping to become a country music star.
He spent the next decade writing songs for other country singers, including the song "Crazy" (1961), recorded by Patsy Cline. He grew increasingly frustrated by the music industry, and by 1971 he had divorced his second wife and lost his investment in a failed pig farm, and his house had burned to the ground. He went back to Texas and started recording his own albums. In 1975, he recorded Red Headed Stranger, a concept album about a preacher on the run after murdering his wife and her new lover. At the time, many country singers were backed by orchestras and backup singers, but Nelson recorded the album with just his acoustic guitar and a few other instruments. No one thought it would be a hit, but it sold millions of copies, and inspired a traditional country music revival.
It's the birthday of poet, critic, and nature writer Annie Dillard, born Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). When she was a kid, she started reading Modern Library editions of classic literature, hoping to find something she enjoyed as much as Mad Magazine. She thought Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was okay, but she hated James Joyce's Ulysses.
She went to college in Virginia, where she studied creative writing. She got married and then settled down in suburban Roanoke, where she started writing and publishing poems. In the backyard of her house, there was a tiny stream called Tinker Creek. After she survived a near fatal case of pneumonia, she started sitting by the creek every day, watching the ordinary bugs and birds and frogs and minnows, and writing about them in her journal. Along with her observations of the creek, she also began jotting down odd bits of information, interesting quotations, scientific data, and theological speculations. She eventually combined all of the bits and pieces in the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). She's gone on to write many other books of essays, including The Writing Life (1989), and For the Time Being (1999).
It's the birthday of John Crowe Ransom, born in Pulaski, Tennessee (1888). He's best known as a poet and literary critic, and as the founder of the Kenyon Review, but he started out as a passionate literature professor. He studied Latin and Greek in college and taught high school Latin for a while, but then got a job teaching English at Vanderbilt University.
As a professor at Vanderbilt, Ransom taught several young men who would become important American poets, including Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. At first, his students thought he was a terrible teacher because he forced them to read literature so slowly, sometimes spending an entire hour looking at a single line of poetry. The young men eventually grew to think of Ransom as a mentor, almost a father, and they invited him to join a small group of students who discussed literature and philosophy in their spare time. They called themselves The Fugitive Group, and in 1922 they began to publish an influential literary magazine called The Fugitive.
The poems Ransom contributed to the magazine were collected in the books Chills and Fevers (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). He went on to found The Kenyon Review, and he became one of the most important literary critics of the twentieth century. He was one of the first people to argue that American schools should be teaching American literature, not just European, and that students should be reading modern poetry, not just the classics. He also tried to teach people how to read literature, in books such as The New Criticism (1941).
Ransom believed that art provides the best kind of knowledge, superior to any scientific description of reality, and he argued that a work of literature should only be understood in terms of itself. He thought images in poems were more important than ideas; he wrote, "An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours."
It was on this day in 1939 that the New York World's Fair opened to the public. The idea for the fair came from a group of businessmen who wanted to revitalize the economy. It was the height of the Great Depression, and Mayor La Guardia decided that the theme of the fair would be The World of Tomorrow. He said, "While other countries are in the twilight of an unhappy age, we are approaching the dawn of a new day."
Planners built the fairground on Flushing Meadows, which had been a garbage dump. The exposition's focal point was the giant tower and sphere, Trylon and Perisphere, which were painted so white that on sunny days people had to squint to look at them. People entered the Trylon by riding up one of the first escalators in the world.
Many recent inventions were marketed at the fair, including television. The first ever public television broadcast in New York City showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt giving a speech at the opening of the fair. AT&T had an exhibit where people could make some of their first long-distance telephone calls. Westinghouse had an exhibit with a robot named Electro and his dog Sparko. The fair's Medicine and Public Health Buildings showed a machine that kept an isolated chicken heart beating.
There were exhibits for air conditioners, refrigerators, FM radio, fluorescent lighting, and washing machines. At the dishwasher exhibit, audience members watched a dishwashing contest between Mrs. Modern, who used a dishwasher, and Mrs. Drudge, who washed dishes by hand. Mrs. Modern always won the contest, and she always looked as neat and refreshed as when she started.
There were prototypes of the early helicopter, called an autogiro, which was basically a plane with a propeller on top. There were dioramas showing model utopian cities of the future, where everyone would soon have fax machines and videophones. Unfortunately, most Americans couldn't afford to go to the fair, and those who did couldn't afford to buy the new inventions advertised there. By the time it closed, in the autumn of 1940, the war in Europe was big news. The 4,000 pounds of steel in the Trylon and Perisphere were eventually melted down to make military equipment. But in the 1950s and 1960s, most of the inventions and designs introduced by the New York World's Fair became mainstays of postwar America.
SATURDAY, 1 MAY, 2004
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Poem: "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose.
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.--Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is May Day, a celebration of the return of spring that goes back thousands of years in European traditions. Various May Day traditions included the gathering of wildflowers and green branches, the weaving of floral garlands, and the setting up of a decorated May tree, or Maypole, around which people danced. Local villages would crown a May king and queen, and lovers would spend the night out under the stars. It was believed that washing your face with dew on May Day morning would keep you looking young and beautiful.
It's the birthday of English essayist, poet and dramatist Joseph Addison, born in Milston, England (1672). He was working as a politician when he and Richard Steele began publishing a daily periodical called the The Spectator, to which they both contributed essays. Their essays were later collected in a book called The Spectator (1711), and critics consider Addison's essays in that book to be his greatest work. He is known for introducing ordinary, easily understood language into the English essay.
It's the birthday of Joseph Heller, born in Brooklyn, New York (1923). He's the son of a bakery deliveryman and grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. He once said he learned a lot about life from being surrounded by Ferris wheels, cotton candy, and con artists. He enlisted in the military in 1942 and flew bomber missions over Italy. He later said, "For someone like myself, who didn't realize he was in danger until the last twenty-five missions, it was extremely excitable and pleasurable, full of fun."
He always felt a little guilty in between missions, sitting around while his friends were out risking their lives, but one of his tent mates had a typewriter, so he started writing stories to pass the time. He said later that if it weren't for the Second World War, he'd be in the dry-cleaning business.
About ten years after the war, Heller began to write Catch-22 (1961), about a World War II bomber pilot named Yossarian who tries to get himself declared insane so he can stop flying bombing missions. Unfortunately, there is a regulation called Catch-22, which says that if you want out of combat duty you can't be crazy.
Heller wrote, "[A pilot] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to." He also wrote, "But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents."
Catch-22 got mixed reviews, but it became a cult favorite and by 1963 it had become the best-selling book in America. Vietnam War protesters began wearing pins that said, "Yossarian Lives!" The phrase "Catch-22" became a part of the American lexicon, defined by one edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as "a condition or consequence that precludes success, a dilemma where the victim cannot win."
It's the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, born in Alvarado, Texas (1924). He co-wrote the screenplays for the films Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Easy Rider (1969), but he started out as a novelist. He grew up in Dallas, reading and playing with his pet—tarantulas, chickens, steers, and an armadillo. He said that he learned to write by rewriting in his own style the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Bobbie Ann Mason, born in Mayfield, Kentucky (1940). She grew up in rural Kentucky, the daughter of dairy farmers. When she got to high school she realized just how different she was from the city kids. She became the first member of her family to go to college, and she eventually got a PhD from the University of Connecticut. She wrote her dissertation about the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. By the time she was done, she said, "I was so sick of reading about the alienated hero of superior sensibility that I thought I would write about just the opposite."
She began to write short stories about people in her home state of Kentucky, people who grow up in Southern suburban housing developments, drive trucks for a living, listen to Bruce Springsteen, and spend all their time watching TV and going to Wal-Mart. She got an encouraging rejection letter from The New Yorker magazine when she sent them the second short story she'd ever written. Over the next two years, they rejected nineteen more stories, but they finally published the twentieth. Her first collection, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) got great reviews, and made her one of the most prominent writers of the so-called New South.
The title story from her collection Shiloh and Other Stories begins, "Leroy Moffittss wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell. Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman."
Mason has gone on to write many more books of fiction about her native western Kentucky, including Love Life: Stories (1989) and the novel Feather Crowns (1993). Her most recent collection of short stories is Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2002).
Bobbie Ann Mason said, "I have always found it difficult to start [writing] with a definite idea about a character, or even a definite emotion. . . . But if I start with a pond that is being drained because of a diesel fuel leak, and a cow named Hortense, and some blackbirds flying over, and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere."
SUNDAY, 2 MAY, 2004
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Poem: "When I Was Conceived," by Michael Ryan, from New and Selected Poems. © Houghton-Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.
When I Was Conceived
It was 1945, and it was May.
White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.
The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,
and my father came home from work that evening
tired and washed his hands
not picturing the black-goggled men
with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.
Maybe he loved his wife that evening.
Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline
with her palm as he stretched out
on the couch with his head in her lap
while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio
and they both laughed. My father sold used cars
at the time, and didn't like it,
so if he complained maybe she held him
an extra moment in her arms,
the heat in the air pressing between them,
so they turned upstairs early that evening,
arm in arm, without saying anything.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Dr. Benjamin Spock, born in New Haven, Connecticut (1903). His Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) was a bestseller during the period after World War II, when parents across America were raising the Baby Boom generation. Spock opened his first pediatric practice in 1933. He said, "One of my faults as a pediatrician has always been that I whoop it up too much with children." He made it a habit to wear ordinary business suits, rather than white doctor's coats, to make his visitors feel more relaxed. His practice was enormously successful. One of his assistants said that all the mothers had crushes on him.
After ten years of observing children and their health, Spock decided to write a book about taking care of them. Instead of writing it out himself, he dictated the book to his wife, to give it a conversational tone. Previous parenting guidebooks had encouraged parents to be stern with their children, and they were written as a list of commands. Dr. John B. Watson had written in his guidebook, "Never, never kiss your child. Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage." Dr. Spock encouraged parents to be affectionate, and he also encouraged them to follow their own instincts. The first sentence of his book was, "You know more than you think you do."
Spock was later partially blamed for the cultural revolution of the 1960s, because he had supposedly encouraged the pampering of babies who grew up to be hippies. But he said, "[I think] my book helped a generation not to be intimidated by adulthood. When I was young, I was always made to assume that I was wrong. Now young people think they might be right and stand up to authority."
It's the birthday of playwright and humorist Jerome K. Jerome, born in Walsall, England (1859). He's best known for his humorous play Three Men in a Boat (1889). He said, "Nothing is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of things longer." And, "It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."
It's the birthday of lyricist Lorenz Hart, born in New York City (1895). He's famous for writing the lyrics to songs like "Blue Moon" (1934), "My Funny Valentine" (1937), and "The Lady Is a Tramp" (1937). As a young man in his twenties, he was drifting around, writing verse in his spare time, when someone introduced him to Richard Rodgers, a teenage composer who wanted to be a lyricist. They worked on a series of amateur musical comedies together, but their future didn't seem promising. Rodgers was just about to give up on music and go into the underwear business when their show The Garrick Gaieties (1925) became a huge success. They went on to write several successful musicals together, including Connecticut Yankee (1927), The Boys From Syracuse (1938), and Pal Joey (1940).
It's the birthday of the Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, born in Budapest, Hungary (1860). He was the son of a wealthy businessman, and though his parents were Jewish, they were not especially religious. He went to law school, but after he graduated he began writing plays and journalism. In 1892, a Vienna newspaper hired him as their Paris correspondent. When he arrived in Paris, he was shocked to find anti-Semitism there; he had experienced anti-Semitism in Austria, but he assumed that Paris was more enlightened. Then, two years after his arrival in the city, a Jewish officer in the French army named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason, and later used as a symbol of disloyal French citizens in anti-Semitic propaganda. Herzl covered the trial and its aftermath for his newspaper, and he was so horrified by the open display of anti-Semitism that he decided Jews had to leave Europe and start their own country.
In 1896, he published The Jewish State, an Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, in which he wrote, "I consider the Jewish question to be neither social nor religious. . . . It is a national question, and in order to solve it we must, before everything else, transform it into a political world question, to be answered in the council of the civilized peoples. We are a people, a people."
There had been other Zionists before him, but Herzl became Zionism's most prominent spokesman. Many Jewish intellectuals across Europe denounced him as a fanatic. They resented his suggestion that they could not assimilate into European society. Some called him "The Jewish Jules Verne," because they considered him a political fantasy writer.
But Herzl didn't give up. He rallied support for his ideas and helped organize the World Zionist Organization. The first Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland, with about two hundred delegates from countries around the world. In a speech to the congress, Herzl said, "We want to lay the foundation stone, for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation." He later wrote in his diary, "At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone will see it."
He spent the rest of his life trying to acquire land for Jewish settlement, gaining support from politicians, kings, and even the Pope. He tried to persuade the Ottoman Empire to give up land in Palestine, but they refused. Great Britain offered an area of land from their colony in Uganda, but the Zionist Congress decided to hold out for Palestine. Herzl died in 1904, before the project was completed.
It was the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis that revitalized the Zionist cause among European Jews, and many moved to Palestine before there was an official Jewish state. Israel was officially established as a Jewish nation in 1948, and in accordance with his wishes, Theodor Herzl's body was taken there and buried on a hill near Jerusalem that is now known as Mount Herzl.
