MONDAY, 26 JULY, 2004
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Poem: "Number 8," by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from Pictures of the Gone World. © City Lights. Reprinted with permission.
Number 8
It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light
'We think differently at night.'
she told me once
lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'
Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise
and stretch
her sweet anatomy
let fall a stocking
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Aldous Huxley, born in Surrey, England (1894). He's best known to us today as the author of the novel Brave New World (1932), about a future in which genetically engineered people take drugs to keep them happy, have sex all the time, and never fall in love. Huxley said, "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
It's the birthday of humorist Jean Shepherd, born in Chicago, Illinois (1925). He's remembered for the autobiographical stories he told on the radio about a boy named Ralph Parker growing up in Hohman, Indiana. One of his stories was made into the movie A Christmas Story (1983), which he narrated. It's about a boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas, even though every adult in his life says that he'll shoot his eye out. The stories Shepherd told on-air were always improvised, but he later wrote them down and published them in collections like In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash (1967) and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters (1972).
Shepherd said, "Some men are Baptists, others Catholics. My father was an Oldsmobile man."
It's the birthday of Carl Jung, born in Kesswil, Switzerland (1875). He was the founder of analytic psychology. He noticed that myths and fairytales from all kinds of different cultures have certain similarities. He called these similarities archetypes, and he believed that archetypes come from a collective unconscious that all humans share. He said that if people get in touch with these archetypes in their own lives, they will be happier and healthier.
His father was a pastor, and as a boy Jung was shocked to find out that his father was losing his faith. He decided to become a scientist instead of a minister so that he could scientifically prove that religion was important. He became a psychologist at a time when Sigmund Freud was the most important psychologist in the world. When the two men met for the first time, they talked for thirteen hours straight. They collaborated for a few years, but finally decided that they disagreed with each other. Jung thought Freud was obsessed with sex, and Freud thought Jung was obsessed with God.
Jung said, "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
It's the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, Ireland (1856). His most famous play is Pygmalion (1913), about a cockney girl who learns to pass as a lady. It was the basis for the musical My Fair Lady (1956). As a young man, he moved to London from Dublin with his mother, who was a music teacher. She made enough money for the two of them to live on, so Shaw could devote himself to writing. He spent his days reading at the library and writing novels that no one would publish. He got into politics in his twenties, fighting for the rights of the working poor, but he was always terrified that public demonstrations would turn violent.
Shaw wrote his first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), about the evils of slumlords. The play was viciously attacked by people who opposed his politics, and Shaw figured that he must be a good playwright if he could make people so angry. He revolutionized English theater by writing plays about ideas when most other playwrights were writing sentimental melodramas. He wrote dozens of plays, including Man and Superman (1905) and Saint Joan (1923).
He was an obsessive letter writer and wrote about a quarter of a million letters in his lifetime, averaging nine letters a day, every day, for seventy-five years. He had an opinion about everything, and eventually became more famous for his personality than for his writing.
Shaw said, "Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."
And he said, "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."
TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2004
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Poem: from "Thoughts in a Garden," by Andrew Marvell.
from Thoughts in a Garden
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Michael Longley, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland (1939). He's part of the influential group of Northern Irish poets that includes Seamus Heaney. He has written many books of poetry, including Gorse Fires (1991), The Ghost Orchid (1995), and, most recently, The Weather in Japan (2000).
It's the birthday of Indian-American novelist Bharati Mukherjee, born in Calcutta, India (1940). She's the author of novels like The Holder of the World (1993) and Desirable Daughters (2002). She grew up in a wealthy Brahmin family, surrounded by servants and bodyguards. She wanted to be a writer from the time she was eight years old, when she fell in love with Russian novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. One night, her father had a group of American scholars over for dinner, and he said to them, "I want [my] daughter to be a writer, where do I send her?" They told him to send her to the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, so that's where she went. She became a United States citizen, and in 1988 she became the first naturalized citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for her short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories (1988).
It's the birthday of poet Hilaire Belloc, born in Paris, France (1870). He moved to England as a young man and worked as a journalist and essayist, but he's best known today for his poetry about naughty children. He said, "When I am dead / I hope it may be said / 'His sins were scarlet, / But his books were read.'"
It's the birthday of Joseph Mitchell, born in Fairmont, North Carolina (1908). He's been called the best reporter to ever write for The New Yorker magazine. He wrote about eccentric people living on the fringe in New York City, including gypsies, alcoholics, the homeless, fishmongers, and a band of Mohawk Indians who had no fear of heights and worked as riveters on skyscrapers and bridges. Most of his journalism is collected in the book Up in the Old Hotel (1992).
It's the birthday of Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lexington, Kentucky (1916). She's the author of novels such as The Ghostly Lover (1945) and The Simple Truth (1955), but she is best known as an essayist.
It's the fiftieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. At the end of World War II, Korea had been divided along the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union controlled the north and the United States controlled the south. On June 25th, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. President Harry Truman ordered a military police action to stop the invasion. Douglas MacArthur led the United States' army, and he almost won the war in what he called his "Home By Christmas" offensive. But near the end of November 1950, Chinese forces entered the war and drove MacArthur and the Americans back to the 38th parallel.
The war dragged on for months. Truce negotiations began the next year and they were the longest truce negotiations in the history of warfare: they lasted two years and seventeen days, with 575 meetings between the opposing sides. Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 on the platform that he would end the war, and when he was elected that's what he did. The armistice was signed on this day in 1953. Truman said that if he had signed the same armistice, the Republicans would have drawn and quartered him.
Almost 35,000 Americans were killed in the conflict, and more than 5,000 were captured or went missing. The Korean War was the first war the United States had concluded without success. There were no celebrations when it came to an end.
WEDNESDAY, 28 JULY, 2004
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Poem: "This Room," by John Ashbery, from Your Name Here. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission.
This Room
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in Stratford, England (1844). He was the oldest of nine children born to High Church Anglicans. His father was a marine insurance adjuster and also a poet. For a while Hopkins wanted to be a painter-poet like Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Then he got involved in religion and became a Jesuit priest. He preached in the slums of industrial cities—Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. He went through a phase in which he felt that poetry was too self-indulgent, and he burned his early poems. But he eventually grew out of it and sent his written poems to his good friend Robert Bridges, who became Poet Laureate in 1913.
Hopkins wasn't well-known as a poet until after he died. He spent the last part of his life in Dublin, working as a Professor of Greek and Latin, mired in depression.
Hopkins wrote, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God."
It's the birthday of novelist Malcolm Lowry, born in Cheshire, England (1909). His father was a cotton broker who owned plantations in Egypt, Peru and Texas. Lowry rebelled from his wealthy upbringing. When he was fifteen, he wrote angry hymns about his mother, whom he hated. He went to sea to work as a deckhand on ships to China and Norway. When he was at boarding school in Cambridge, he goaded a friend to kill himself, and the friend did.
Lowry's masterpiece is Under the Volcano (1947), set on The Day of the Dead in Mexico, 1938. It's about a former British consul who has a drinking problem and a troubled marriage. Lowry was also a very troubled man: he was an alcoholic prone to relationship difficulties and mental disorders. Lowry died a mysterious death caused by alcohol and an overdose of sleeping pills in 1957. Nobody is sure if it was suicide or not, but it fell on the same date as the suicide of his childhood friend.
It's the birthday of first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, born in East Hampden, Long Island (1929). She graduated from George Washington University, where she majored in French Literature. Then she worked as the Washington Times-Herald's "inquiring photographer." For forty-three dollars a week, she'd go up to people and ask them the question of the day, and then take their picture. In 1952 Jacqueline met a young congressman from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, at a dinner party.
She was graceful and elegant and always fashionably dressed, with a headscarf and dark glasses. The media loved her. People embraced her when she went abroad, with her husband or on her own goodwill tours. In 1961 she and JFK went to France, where they liked her even more because she spoke their language fluently.
She said, "The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life."
It's the birthday of poet John Ashbery, born in Rochester, New York (1927). He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario. His father was a farmer, and his mother was a biology teacher. He was a member of the "New York school of poets," along with Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and others. His poetry is often abstract, and has been compared to the paintings of Jackson Pollock and other avant-garde artists. Ashbery said, "I think my poems mean what they say .... There is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing."
THURSDAY, 29 JULY, 2004
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Poem: "the lesson of the moth," by Don Marquis, from The Best of Don Marquis. © Doubleday. Reprinted with permission.
the lesson of the moth
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1588 that Spain's "Invincible Armada" was defeated by the English. Spain had hoped to raid England and turn the Protestant isle Catholic again. The Spanish fleet consisted of 130 ships carrying 2,500 guns, 8,000 seamen, and almost 20,000 soldiers. But storms delayed their arrival and by that time, England was ready. Just after midnight, England sent eight burning ships into the harbor at Calais, where the Spanish were anchored for the night.
It's the birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville, born in Paris (1805). He came over to the United States with a colleague when he was twenty-five to study the American prison system. Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America (1835, vol. I; 1840, vol. II), a compilation of observations of American democracy that is still widely quoted today.
Tocqueville said, "[Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man; they judge the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow."
It's the birthday of novelist Newton Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1869). He was a poor student and hated school. He went to Princeton University because he liked the idea of the Ivy League, but he never graduated. He said, "No doubt I imbibed some education there, though it seems to me that I tried to avoid that as much as possible." Tarkington tried for a while to make a living from drawing and writing, and sent in manuscripts to popular magazines. But the rejection slips piled up. Finally, in the fall of 1898, he finished The Gentleman from Indiana and sold it to McClure. Gentleman from Indiana became a bestseller in 1900. He went on to write a number of popular novels, including two that won the Pulitzer:The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921).
It's the birthday of newspaper columnist, playwright and short story writer Don Marquis, born in Walnut, Illinois (1878). He worked for the Washington Times and then the Sun and the Tribune in New York. He had a column called "The Sun Dial," in which he created the characters Archy the cockroach, and Mehitabel the alley cat. Archy was a former free verse poet who "sees life from the underside now." He wasn't able to reach the shift key so everything he wrote was in lower case. And Mehitabel was an alley cat with questionable morals who insisted that she was Cleopatra in one of her former lives.
After using Archy and Mehitabel in columns for 10 years, Marquis made books out of their writing, beginning with archy and mehitabel (1927). Don Marquis wrote of himself, "Height, 5 feet 101/2 inches; hair, dove-colored; scar on little finger of left hand ... dislikes Roquefort cheese, 'Tom Jones,' Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, steam heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized charity, magazine covers, and the gas company."
FRIDAY, 30 JULY, 2004
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Poem: "Snapshot of a Lump," by Kelli Russell Agodon, from Small Knots. © Cherry Grove Collections. Reprinted with permission.
Snapshot of a Lump
I imagine Nice and topless beaches,
women smoking and reading novels in the sun.
I pretend I am comfortable undressing
in front of men who go home to their wives,
in front of women who have seen
twenty pairs of breasts today,
in front of silent ghosts who walked
through these same doors before me,
who hoped doctors would find it soon enough,
that surgery, pills and chemo could save them.
Today, they target my lump
with a small round sticker, a metal capsule
embedded beneath clear plastic.
I am asked to wash off my deodorafnt,
wrap a lead apron around my waist,
pose for the nurse, for the white walls—
one arm resting on the mammogram machine,
that "come hither" look in my eyes.
This is my first time being photographed topless.
I tell the nurse, Will I be the centerfold
or just another playmate?
My breast is pressed flat—a torpedo,
a pyramid, a triangle, a rocket on this altar;
this can't be good for anyone.
Finally, the nurse, winded
from fumbling, smiles,
says, "Don't breathe or move."
A flash and my breast is free,
but only for a moment.
In the waiting room, I sit between magazines,
an article on Venice,
health charts, people in white.
I pretend I am comfortable watching
other women escorted off to a side room,
where results are given with condolences.
I imagine leaving here
with negative results and returned lives.
I imagine future trips to France,
to novels I will write and days spent
beneath a blue and white sun umbrella,
waves washing against the shore like promises.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Henry Ford, born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan (1863). In 1903, he started the Ford Motor Co., which became enormously successful. Ford is the father of the Model T. It sold for $850 at first, which would be about $16,500 today. The prices eventually dipped lower than $280, which is about $3,000 today. By 1925, he was producing almost 2 million a year and everybody had to have one. It's the birthday of economist Thorstein Veblen, (1857). He's best known for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption." It's the birthday of Emily Bronte, born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1818). She's the author of Wuthering Heights (1848), a story of love and tragedy set in the moors of Yorkshire. She was the fifth of six talented Bronte children born to parents who seemed to have had no literary interest themselves. Their mother died when Emily was two, and the children were pretty much left to their own devices. Their father was aloof and treated his children as intellectual equals. Other than that, he mostly ignored them. The Bronte children had only themselves for playmates. Their house was bounded on two sides by the village graveyard. They became best friends with each other. All the Bronte children were avid readers and storytellers. They made up a mythical land called Gondal, and Emily made it the subject of many of her poems. She was shy and reclusive and whenever she left home she got homesick. She joined her three older sisters at a school for clergymen's children when she was six. In 1845, Charlotte found out that Emily had been writing poetry. Charlotte had also been secretly writing verse, and so had Anne. They published their joint work the next year. Instead of using their real names, they called it Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. That book sold only two copies, but it paved the way for Charlotte's Jane Eyre (1846) and Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne's Agnes Grey (1847). Jane Eyre was an instant success, but Emily's book didn't get much attention until after she fell ill and died the next year, at age thirty. Charlotte wrote a preface for it explaining why it was better than her own Jane Eyre, and it became a classic.
SATURDAY, 31 JULY, 2004
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Poem: "The Monks of St. John's File in for Prayer," by Kilian McDonnell, from Swift, Lord, You Are Not. © St. John's University Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Monks of St. John's File in for Prayer
In we shuffle, hooded amplitudes,
scapulared brooms, a stray earring, skin-heads
and flowing locks, blind in one eye,
hooked-nosed, handsome as a prince
(and knows it), a five-thumbed organist,
an acolyte who sings in quarter tones,
one slightly swollen keeper of the bees,
the carpenter minus a finger here and there,
our pre-senile writing deathless verse,
a stranded sailor, a Cassian scholar,
the artist suffering the visually
illiterate and indignities unnamed,
two determined liturgists. In a word,
eager purity and weary virtue.
Last of all, the Lord Abbot, early old
(shepherding the saints is like herding cats).
These chariots and steeds of Israel
make a black progress into church.
A rumble of monks bows low and offers praise
to the High God of Gods who is faithful forever.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of J(oanne) K(athleen) Rowling, born in Chipping Sodbury, England (1966). Her readers know today as Harry Potter's birthday. On Harry Potter's eleventh birthday, he learns that he is a wizard, and is officially invited to leave his Muggle aunt and uncle and attend the special Hogwarts school for wizards.
As a child, Rowling was short and stocky and wore very thick glasses, just like Harry Potter. She says she was very bossy, very bookish and terrible at school. When Rowling started writing Harry Potter, she was unemployed and divorced and living on public assistance in a tiny Edinburgh apartment with her infant daughter. She wrote during her daughter's naps, at a table in a café. She couldn't afford even a used typewriter. Then the Scottish Arts Council gave her a grant to finish the book. She did, and in the U.S. it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998). It was a dramatic overnight success. She was instantly famous and Harry Potter became a household name. She experienced a level of fame usually reserved for politicians and rock stars. On book tours, she spoke at big sporting venues, with images of her face projected on big screens behind her. At age thirty-five she was the highest-earning woman in Britain, netting more than thirty million dollars in 2000.
Rowling has had the plots mapped out for a series of seven Harry Potter books since 1995. There's a book for each year that Harry spends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She said, "I want to finish these seven books and look back and think that whatever happened—however much this hurricane whirled around me—I stayed true to what I wanted to write. This is my Holy Grail: that when I finish writing book seven, I can say—hand on heart—I didn't change a thing. I wrote the story I meant to write."
Rowling released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on June 21 last year. Within an hour, Barnes and Noble, the largest bookseller in the country, had sold 286,000 copies. That's eighty books per second. By the end of the day the book had sold five million copies total.
SUNDAY, 1 AUGUST, 2004
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Poem: "John Green Takes His Warner, New Hampshire, Neighbor to a Red Sox Game," by Maxine Kumin, from The Long Marriage. © W.W. Norton. Reprinted with permission.
John Green Takes His Warner, New Hampshire, Neighbor to a Red Sox Game
Everett down the hill's
52 and trim. No beer gut.
Raises beef, corn, hay, cuts
cordwood between harvests.
Goes to bed at 8 and falls
into sleep like a parachutist.
He's never been to a ballgame.
He's never been to Boston though
he went over to Portland Maine
one time ten, fifteen years ago.
In Sullivan Square, they
luck out, find a space
for John's car, take
the T to Fenway Park.
The famous T!
A kind of underground trolley.
Runs in the dark.
No motorman that Ev can see.
Jammed with other sports fans.
John has to show him
how to put the token in.
How to press with his hips
to go through the turnstile.
How to stand back while
the doors whoosh shut.
How to grab a strap
as the car pitches forward.
How to push out
with the surging crowd.
Afterward Ev says the game's
a whole lot better on tv.
Too many fans.
Too many other folks for him.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who wrote the lyrics for our national anthem, Francis Scott Key, born in Frederick, Maryland (1779). He was thirty-five years old on September 13, 1814, when he composed the poem "The Star Spangled Banner." He wrote it on a truce ship in the harbor while the British bombed Fort McHenry, eight miles away. He had gone to the British to negotiate the release of a Maryland doctor they had captured. They made him wait under their surveillance until the bombing was over. He had to watch from afar and did not know if the Americans were able to defend themselves. But in the morning he looked through a telescope and saw their raised garrison flag. He checked into a Baltimore hotel when he reached land and finished his poem there. Congress didn't make it the official national anthem until 1931.
It's the birthday of explorer William Clark, born in Caroline County, Virginia (1770). He co-commanded, with Meriwether Lewis, an expedition from the Louisiana Purchase territory to the Pacific Coast. They left St. Louis on May 14, 1804 and were gone for two years, four months, and nine days. By the time they returned home, many people had assumed they had died.
It's the birthday of Herman Melville, born in New York City (1819). He was born into a successful merchant family and was the third child of eight. When he was twelve, his father went insane and died and his mother was left alone to raise all the children. A bout of scarlet fever left young Melville with permanently poor eyesight. But he taught himself to read and loved it. He read Shakespeare and books of history, anthropology, and science. Melville got a job as a cabin boy on the 359-ton whaling ship Acushnet when he was twenty-one. Then he joined the Navy and sailed to the Atlantic and the South Seas.
He was a clerk and a bookkeeper at a general store in Honolulu and he lived for a while among the Typee cannibals in the Marquesas Islands, until another ship came there and took him to Tahiti. He came home to live with his mother and write about his adventures in his book Typee (1846). For the revised edition of that book, he was forced to edit out certain racy bits about the Marquesan girls that he and his mates had encountered. Typee was Melville's most popular book during his lifetime.
He's best known for his novel Moby-Dick (1851), which begins with the famous line, "Call me Ishmael." It continues, "Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation." The novel is about the mysterious Captain Ahab and his quest to hunt down the white whale, Moby-Dick, who cost him his leg on a previous voyage. Melville filled the book with symbolism and philosophy and Shakespearean rhetoric. The public didn't get it, and it only sold about 3,000 copies while Melville was alive. He died in 1891, with a manuscript of the unfinished novel Billy Bud on his desk.
