Monday, 4 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "This Shining Moment in the Now" by David Budbill. Reprinted with permission of the author.
THIS SHINING MOMENT IN THE NOW
When I work outdoors all day, every day, as I do now, in the fall,
getting ready for winter, tearing up the garden, digging potatoes,
gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing
bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods, doing the last of
the fall mowing, pruning apple trees, taking down the screens,
putting up the storm windows, banking the house - all these things,
as preparation for the coming cold...
when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am
physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,
the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees...
when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is,
when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw,
to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am
all body and no mind...
when I am only here and now and nowhere else - then, and only
then, do I see the crippling power of mind, the curse of thought,
and I pause and wonder why I so seldom find
this shining moment in the now.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Edward L. Stratemeyer, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1862). He's known as the man who created the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and Nancy Drew. He was the son of a tobacconist, and wrote his first story on a piece of packing paper. It was published, and he began a career writing adventure stories for children, and became one of the most successful children's book authors of his day.
After writing about 150 books of his own, he created a company called the Stratemeyer Syndicate with a team of ghostwriters to write books based on his outlines. He swore everyone to secrecy and even invented fictional biographies for the pseudonymous authors. The Stratemeyer Syndicate went on to publish about 700 titles under more than sixty-five pseudonyms.
In 1926, the American Library Association sponsored a survey of juvenile reading preferences, asking 36,000 children in thirty-four different cities about their favorite books; ninety-eight percent of those children responded with a Stratemeyer title. The Stratemeyer Syndicate still sells about 6 million books each year.
It's the birthday of humorist Roy Blount Jr., born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1941). He's the author of many books of humor, including What Men Don't Tell Women (1984) and It Grows on You: A Hair-Raising Survey of Human Plumage (1986). As a young boy, he moved with is parents to Georgia, and that's where he grew up. He fell in love with the spoken voice at an early age, and he especially grew to love Southern accents. His mother taught him to read by reading him Uncle Remus and Mark Twain. Blount's English teacher in high school thought his essays reminded her of New Yorker writers like James Thurber and S.J Perelman, so she introduced him to those writers and they became his idols. But instead of getting a job at the New Yorker after college, he got a job writing about sports for Sports Illustrated. His first book was a humorous account of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team: About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974). The book was successful enough that Blount quit his job at Sports Illustrated and has made his living ever since as a freelance writer.
He has contributed profiles, essays, sketches, verse, short stories, and reviews to more than a hundred different publications. He said, "I have written about politics, sports, music, food, drink, gender issues, books, comedians, language, travel, science, animals, economics, anatomy, and family life. Preferably, about all of those things together." His most recent book is the biography of Robert E. Lee that came out last year.
Roy Blount Jr. said, "If there is one thing that [I pride myself] on...it is this: that [I have] done more different things, for money, than any other humorist-novelist-journalist-dramatist-lyricist-lecturer-reviewer-performer-versifier-cruciverbalist-sportswriter-screenwriter-anthologist-columnist-philologist-biographer of sorts...that [I] can think of offhand."
It's the birthday of the novelist Anne Rice, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, (1941). Her parents named her Howard Allen O'Brien—Howard after her father—and she so disliked her name that she changed it to Anne when she was in the first grade. Her father was a postal worker who wrote fiction in his spare time, and her mother was a failed Hollywood actress who was interested in the occult. Rice's mother would take her for long walks in old New Orleans neighborhoods and she would tell Anne Rice stories about which of the various old mansions was haunted and which had been used by covens of witches.
Rice began spending her spare time wandering around cemeteries, reading ghost stories, and watching horror movies. She didn't fit in at the Catholic school she attended, since the nuns were suspicious of her interest in the supernatural.
After getting married and having a daughter, she struggled to become a writer. She began writing a short story every day as an exercise, but she couldn't get much published. Then, her five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with acute leukemia and died.
Rice fell into a deep depression, and only got herself out of it by writing. She wrote constantly, and in five weeks, she had finished her first novel. It was about a vampire who becomes so lonely that he decides to turn a five-year-old girl into a vampire to keep him company. He's horrified when he realizes that she will never age, that she will remain a five-year-old forever. That novel was Interview with a Vampire (1974), one of the first novels ever to portray vampires as something more than just villainous monsters, to give them complex desires and emotions. People didn't know what to make of Interview with a Vampire. It got mixed reviews and didn't sell very well. So Anne Rice decided to stay away from horror and start writing historical novels. She also published a series of erotic novels under pseudonyms. But Interview with the Vampire developed a cult following, and throughout the early 1980's it kept selling copies, slowly becoming one of the most popular vampire novels of all time. Finally Rice returned to writing horror with her novel The Vampire Lestat (1985), and it was an immediate best seller.
Rice sets most of her books in New Orleans. It is now possible for tourists to take a special nighttime vampire tour of New Orleans, visiting all the spots mentioned in her novels. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city.
Rice has gone on to write several more novels in her series, known as the Vampire Chronicles, including The Queen of the Damned (1988) and The Vampire Armand (1998). Her most recent novel is Blood Canticle, which came out last year.
Anne Rice believes that supernatural and horror fiction should be taken seriously as literature. She said, "Realism, which is so respected today, is really just a fad...There's no telling that anybody's going to be reading these little realistic novels 50 years from now, but people are still reading Faust."
She also said, "To write something great, you have to risk making a fool of yourself."
It was on this day in 1957 that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit. It came at a time when Americans were feeling very secure. The economy was expanding. The Korean War was over. The Red Scare had ended. The Vietnam War hadn't started yet. And then on this day in 1957, TV stations interrupted their programs to announce the launch of what was called "a man made moon."
The novelist Stephen King will always remember that day, because he was in a movie theater when he found out about it, watching a movie called Earth Versus the Flying Saucers. In the middle of the movie, the manager of the theater turned off the projector, and turned on the lights, walked out onto the stage, and announced that the Russians had put a space satellite into orbit around the earth.
Stephen King said, "We all sat there...[thinking] the Russians had beaten us. Somewhere over our heads, beeping triumphantly, was an electronic ball which had been launched and constructed behind the Iron Curtain. [No one] had been able to stop it...The manager stood there for a moment longer, looking out at us as if he wished he had something else to say but could not think what it might be. Then he walked off and pretty soon the movie started up again."
The word "sputnik" means "fellow traveler" in Russian, but Americans took no comfort in that name. Most commentators saw the launch as a sign that Russians were ahead in the race to create intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the fear was that soon they would be setting up a military base on the moon.
Sputnik inspired education reforms, based on the idea that American teachers were focused too much on their students' feelings, while Russian teachers were turning their students into little scientists. A book called Why Johnny Can't Read became a best seller. The former Harvard president James Bryant Conant urged parents to tell children, for their own sake and for the sake of the nation, to do their homework. President Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which funded laboratories and textbooks in public schools.
But Eisenhower refused to increase the budget for space exploration, because he didn't see it as significant on a practical level. He said, "I'd like to know what's on the other side of the moon, but I won't pay to find out this year."
So the Russians kept beating us. They put the first man in space and the first woman and they took the first spacewalk. They sent the first probe to the moon, and they took the first photographs of the far side of the moon. It wasn't until we put a man on the moon that we became the leaders in space exploration.
Eventually, Americans and Russians became somewhat less competitive in the space race. The Russians launched a space station in 1986 that became a joint laboratory for scientists from the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as other parts of the world. The space station was called "Mir," which is the Russian word for "peace."
TUESDAY, 5 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Guilty" by Ginger Andrews from Hurricane Sisters. Reprinted with permission of the author.
Guilty
It happens
to be a beautiful morning,
the orange sun huge,
slanting through the valley fog
all the way to the county courthouse
where my brother pleads guilty
to driving under the influence,
is handcuffed,
sentenced to ten days in jail,
thirty months probation,
a fifteen hundred dollar fine,
to be paid in fifty dollar per month
installments all as we expected.
No slack for repeat offenders,
even a kind fifty-seven year-old
clean-cut handsome man
whose last arrest was six long years ago,
after our father, and then our sister died.
A man with children in another county
who are used to their dad serving them
hot oatmeal and buttered toast
every morning before school. My brother
nods his head toward me in thanks, I guess,
for the ride here, as he follows
fellow jail mates, single file
down the long hall.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the few writers ever to become the leader of a country, Czech dramatist and president Vaclav Havel, born in Prague (1936). He was born into an affluent family, and as a teenager he watched as his family's property was seized by the government when Communists took control of the country.
He was prevented from attending college, so he took a job in a chemical company and joined a literary underground society, passing around books that had been banned by the government. In the 1960's, he wrote a series of absurdist plays, including The Garden Party (1964) and The Memorandum (1965) that attacked the Communist Party, describing the way in which the Communists were ruining the language by introducing all kinds of euphemisms and clichés.
After a brief period of greater freedom in Czechoslovakia during the late 1960's, Soviet troops invaded and imposed hard-line Communist Party control over the government. Havel's plays were banned. He was arrested twice, thrown in jail, and then forced to earn a living stacking barrels in a brewery.
He continued writing plays, though, including The Mountain Hotel (1976), about a windowless resort in which vacationers spend all their time remembering and forgetting the same things. He also continued to receive money from the production of his plays abroad. He used the money to buy a Mercedes-Benz which he drove to his job at the brewery every day.
Havel kept protesting the government, refusing to go into exile the way so many other writers and artists in the country did. He said, "The solution to the situation does not lie in leaving it. Fourteen million people can't just go and leave Czechoslovakia." He spent the 1980's in and out of prison, writing plays that he couldn't see performed in his own country.
In 1989, after another arrest and imprisonment, he was released early because thousands of artists protested to the prime minister. He'd become a national hero. After the collapse of the Communist regime, he helped negotiate the transition to democracy, and in December of 1989, he was elected President, the first non-communist leader of his country since 1948.
Vaclav Havel said, "If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President."
He also said, "The revolution that ended up by me becoming a President is very strange theater. And perhaps I am an actor in a play that isn't mine."
He finished his second term and stepped down from power last year.
The playwright Arthur Miller said, "[Vaclav Havel is] the world's first avant-garde president."
It's the birthday of the avant-garde novelist who wrote under the name Flann O'Brien, born Brian O'Nolan in Strabane, Ireland (1911). He supported himself as a civil servant. He was always impeccably dressed and was a very productive worker, and no one guessed that he was working on one of the strangest strange novels of the 20th Century.
That novel was At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). It has three beginnings and three endings and the three different strands run alongside each other for the length of the book. It's about a man writing a novel about a novelist, and it borrows many elements from other works of fiction, including cowboys, Greeks, and characters from the novels of Charles Dickens. The first printing of At Swim-Two-Birds sold a little more than two hundred copies. The Germans bombed the warehouse where the remaining copies were stored and so they were destroyed. O'Brien was terribly depressed, and didn't publish any more fiction for twenty years. But some of the most prestigious writers in Europe got their hands on those first two hundred copies, and it's believed that At Swim-Two-Birds was the last novel that James Joyce ever read. The book has since come to be regarded as a masterpiece of experimental fiction.
It begins, "Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression."
It's the birthday of short story writer and novelist Edward P. Jones born in Arlington, Virginia (1950). He's best known for his novel The Known World, which came out last year, about a black slave owner in the pre-Civil War South.
Jones grew up in Washington, D.C., raised by his mother, who couldn't read or write. He had to sign her name on his own report cards. She washed dishes and worked as a maid to support the family, and they moved about eighteen times throughout Jones's childhood. He had trouble making friends, because they moved so frequently, so he started reading books instead.
Jones got a scholarship to college, and started writing fiction. His work was promising, but just as he was graduating, his mother got sick, and he moved back to be with her as she died. He supported himself writing for a tax law publication called Tax Notes. He lived extremely frugally, sleeping on an inflatable mattress, with few possessions other than his books and a TV. He published a few short stories here and there, and in 1992 he came out with a collection called Lost in the City, about ordinary African Americans living in Washington, D.C.
That book won awards and it got Jones a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, but he kept his day job at Tax Notes because he was terrified of losing his regular paycheck. Then, ten years after his first book had been published, his job at Tax Notes was eliminated. It took getting laid off to finally sit down and write full time.
He'd been working on a novel for years, but he'd only written twelve pages. Six months after he lost his job, he'd finished the first draft. He said, "It was all sitting up in my head. All the characters, every scene. Even phrases my characters wanted to say were sitting there waiting...It felt good to finally write it down. I wrote five pages a day."
That novel, Jones's first, became The Known World, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Jones was fifty-three years old. He didn't own a car, a cell phone or a fax machine, and he still doesn't.
It's the birthday of the architect Maya Lin, born in Athens, Ohio (1959). As a young woman, she became interested in the art and architecture of cemeteries, and she spent a lot of time wandering around the local cemetery in her town. While studying architecture at Yale, she took a class on funerary architecture. One of the assignments was to enter the national competition for the design of a Vietnam Memorial, which would be constructed on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
Lin submitted a design with two long, low black granite walls, built into the earth, with the names of all those killed in the war engraved on the stone. She specified that the granite should be highly polished, so that the mourners reading the names would see themselves reflected on the surface of the rock. She made a model of the design in mashed potatoes and sent in her proposal just before the deadline. Hers was one of 1,420 entries, including an entry by her own professor, who gave her a B- in the class. She learned during graduation week that her design had won the competition.
Many veterans of the war protested her design for the monument, calling it too dark and depressing. Some even claimed that Maya Lin wasn't American enough to design the monument, even though she'd been born in Ohio. But construction went ahead, and the memorial was unveiled on November 13, 1982. It is now one of the most celebrated war memorials in the world. Today, more than a million people travel from across the country to see it each year.
It's the birthday of horror novelist Clive Barker, born in Liverpool, England (1952). He started out as an aspiring playwright with his plays The History of the Devil (1981) and Frankenstein in Love (1982). But they weren't very successful, so he began writing a multi-volume collection of horror stories called The Books of Blood (Volume 1 published in 1984), which were among the most graphically violent horror stories ever published at that time, but which also drew upon mythology and classic literature. He went on to write many novels that mix elements of both horror and fantasy, including Weaveworld (1987) and The Great and Secret Show (1989).
WEDNESDAY, 6 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "The Garden" by Lee Robinson from Hearsay © Fordham University Press, New York, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
The Garden
Now that the teenagers
have taken the house -
long legs, loud shoes, sarcastic
tongues, their paraphernalia
winding from chair
to floor to stair
like some perverse
unstoppable vine - I retire
to the garden.
Nothing here
talks back. I learn
a language the children
don't speak: lantana,
hosta, portulaca. I have gloves
but seldom use them.
I like the dirt
under my fingernails,
the roughness that comes
from pulling weeds,
churning the soil for new beds.
It's time
to pitch the rusty swing set,
to rid the shed of punctured
volleyballs, old bicycles,
a decade of water guns,
time to fill it with peat moss
and new tools:
spade, trowel, rake,
all shiny, all mine.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in 1847, Charlotte Brontë published her novel Jane Eyre under the pseudonym "Currer Bell." It's a story about an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, and it was an immediate success. In Jane Eyre, Brontë writes, "Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones."
On this day in 1930, William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying was published. Faulkner said that of all his books, he liked As I Lay Dying the best. He also said, "A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."
It was on this day in 1927 The Jazz Singer was first released. It was the first talking motion picture widely and commercially released. It starred Al Jolson in black face, and was the first of a series of Jolson's "talking pictures." There are only a few minutes of actual singing in the movie when Jolson sings the song "Mammy" twice during the film and there are a few lines of dialogue. The rest is mainly instrumental musical accompaniment. The movie was a box-office hit, ending the era of the silent film.
The Jazz Singer has been remade twice: in 1953 starring Danny Thomas and Peggy Lee, and in 1980, starring Neil Diamond, Lucie Arnaz, and Laurence Olivier.
On this day in 1889, the Moulin Rouge (French for "red mill") opened its doors to the public. The cabaret was built by Joseph Oller in the red-light district of Pigalle near Montmartre, Paris, France. It is famous for the large red imitation windmill on its roof. Perhaps the best-known legacy of the Moulin Rogue is the dance called the "Can-Can." The origin of the Can-Can is traceable to Celeste Mogador, a popular polka dancer who created the dance for the music of Jacques Offenbach in about 1850. By 1861, it was being copied on the London stage and had been given the name French Cancan, meaning "French tittle-tattle." The dance is very demanding of its performers, each of whom must have superior qualities of balance, rhythm and stamina.
In those early days, a frequent occupant of a front-row barstool at the Moulin Rouge was gentleman named Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. An eccentric man in both manner and appearance, he was regularly accompanied by a glass of wine and a sketchpad. With his pencil he captured the movements and expressions of the dancers, and the faces of the drunken, approving crowd. Soon, his sketches became posters and the reputations of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge became entwined.
It's the birthday of architect Le Corbusier, born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in Le-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (1887). He was also an artist and a writer. He chose "Le Corbusier" as his pen name when he began writing articles for The New Spirit, a magazine he co-founded in Paris in 1920. He wore dark suits, bow ties and round horn-rimmed glasses, and his friends called him "Corbu."
Le Corbusier collected his articles in his first book, Toward a New Architecture (1923), and it became a big influence on other architects. He wrote, "Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light." His other books include The City of Tomorrow (1929), When the Cathedrals Were White (1947), and The Modular (1954).
In 1927 Le Corbusier participated in the competition set by the League of Nations for the design of its new centre in Geneva. His project proposed for the first time anywhere, an office building for a political organization that was not a Neoclassical temple but a functional structure. This plan was to become the model for all future United Nations buildings. It probably would have shared a first prize but was eliminated on the grounds of not having been written in India ink as the rules of the competition specified.
Le Corbusier said, "If you were to look down from the sky on the confused and intricate surface of the earth, it would be seen that human effort is identical throughout the ages and at every point. Temples, towns and houses are cells of identical aspect, and are made to the human scale. One might say that the human animal is like the bee, a constructor of geometrical cells."
Le Corbusier was the first architect to make a studied use of roughcast concrete. He is known for his functional designs for large concrete buildings and high-rise residential complexes, and for his misguided mega projects, urban-renewal schemes and regimented public housing. Le Corbusier loved Manhattan. He loved its newness, and he loved its tall buildings. He shared his one reservation when he landed in New York City in 1935. A headline in the Herald Tribune revealed that the celebrated architect found American skyscrapers much too small.
Le Corbusier said, "Architecture...must appeal to our bodily senses as well as to our spirits and our minds." Le Corbusier wanted to revive the basic tenets of good architecture. He believed the Classical ideas of proportion, harmony and balance were essential to good architecture.
Le Corbusier continued to create new projects until the end of his life: the Olivetti computer centre in Milan (1963), an art centre in Frankfurt (1963), the French embassy in Brasília (1964), and the Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg (1964). He died suddenly in 1965 while swimming and was given a national funeral, and in 1968 the Le Corbusier Foundation was created.
Le Corbusier writes, "Equilibrium means calm."
He said, "A house is a machine for living in."
It's the birthday of George Horace Lorimer, born in Louisville, Kentucky (1867). He edited The Saturday Evening Post for almost 40 years, from 1899 to 1937. Under his leadership the magazine became an enormous success—by 1922 it had a circulation of more than 2 million. He published some of the best writers of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Joseph Conrad. In 1903, he bought the rights to publish Jack London's Call of the Wild for $700. In 1916, he hired a twenty-two-year-old artist whom few people had heard of to illustrate the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. The artist, Norman Rockwell, went on to design 317 covers for the magazine over the next 47 years.
Lorimer said, "Education is about the only thing lying around loose in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away."
It's the birthday of soprano Jenny Lind, born in Stockholm, Sweden (1820). She is considered to be one of the most gifted sopranos ever. In 1840 she was appointed member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and official singer of the Swedish Court. She was known also as a great philanthropist.
Hans Christian Andersen fell in love with her, but she did not return his love. Among other stories, he wrote "The Nightingale" (1843) as a tribute to Jenny Lind. He said, "...she can never be mine...though her voice stays with me, forever, in my story..." Lind would later be known as "The Swedish Nightingale."
In 1848 she spend a lot of time in London with Chopin, who wrote about Lind in letters to his family and friends. He wrote, "Yesterday I was at a dinner with J. Lind, who afterwards sang me Swedish things till midnight." She came to Paris the next year to marry Chopin, but fled Paris a month later to get away from a cholera epidemic and political unrest. She wrote in a letter to a friend, "Things and experiences approached me which deeply affected my peace of mind...I was very near to marrying. But again it came to nothing."
After parting with Chopin, Jenny Lind no longer performed in operas, only in concerts. She toured the U. S. for a few years where she raised money for charity and married Otto Goldschmidt, her pianist. They settled in England where she died in 1887. Her memorial is at Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, near that of Handel, and William Shakespeare.
THURSDAY, 7 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain" by Delmore Schwartz, from Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz © The Vanguard Press. Reprinted with permission.
The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain
The common rain had come again
Slanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,
Fainting falling in the first evening
Of the first perception of the actual fall,
The long and late light had slowly gathered up
A sooty wood of clouded sky, dim and distant more and
more
Until, as dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned,
A weakening nothing halted, diminished or denied or set
aside
Neither tea, nor, after an hour, whiskey,
Ice and then a pleasant glow, a burning,
And the first leaping wood fire
Since a cold night in May, too long ago to be more than
Merely a cold and vivid memory.
Staring, empty, and without thought
Beyond the rising mists of the emotion of causeless
sadness,
How suddenly all consciousness leaped in spontaneous
gladness;
Knowing without thinking how the falling rain (outside, all
over)
In slow sustained consistent vibration all over outside
Tapping window, streaking roof,
running down runnel and drain
Waking a sense, once more, of all that lived outside of us,
Beyond emotion, for beyond the swollen
distorted shadows and lights
Of the toy town and the vanity fair
of waking consciousness!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, born Diane Fink in Waukegan, Illinois (1948). A writer who has always been interested in the outside world more than her own life, she wrote her first book of poetry, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (1976) entirely about astronomy. She has since written many other poems about science, as well as cattle farming, flying an airplane, and soccer. She became a journalist as well, specializing in essays about animals, and she once put a bat on top of her head to see if it would really get tangled in her hair. It didn't, but she described how it coughed gently.
She is best known for her book A Natural History of the Senses (1990), a collection of wide-ranging essays about her own thoughts and experiences of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.
Ackerman has put so much effort into experiencing the world to the fullest that she has broken ribs while mountain climbing in albatross country, and has ingested intestinal parasites while swimming in the Amazon River. But she still believes that you can find wonder in your own back yard. She said, "When the deer leap the fence behind my house and come up to eat the apples that are slightly fermented on the ground underneath a fresh layer of snow, that's magic."
Her most recent book is An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, which came out this year.
It's the birthday of the poet James Whitcomb Riley, born in Greenfield, Indiana (1849). As a boy, he loved to read, but he constantly ran away from school to go for walks in the countryside. His father, a lawyer, told him that if he didn't want to go to school he had to get a job. So, he joined a traveling medicine show, where he worked as a sign painter, advertising jingle writer, and minstrel. In his jingles, he specialized in using the language of the rural Midwest, and he eventually began to send his lyrics to newspapers, where they were published.
He went on to become one of the most popular poets of his day. He's best remembered for his poem "Little Orphant [sic] Annie" (1899) about a woman who tells scary stories to children to get them to behave.
James Whitcomb Riley wrote,
"Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn't say his prayers,--
An' when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an' his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An' when they turn't the kivvers down, he wuzn't there at all...
All they ever found wuz thist his pants an' roundabout:--
An' the Gobble-uns 'll git you
Ef you
Don't
Watch
Out!"
It's the birthday of the poet, and novelist Sherman Alexie, born on an Indian reservation near Spokane, Washington (1966). As an infant, he was diagnosed hydrocephalic, underwent brain surgery, and his doctors were amazed that he survived. He suffered from seizures for the rest of his childhood. For that reason, and because he was constantly reading books, he didn't fit in at the school on his reservation.
He transferred to a mostly white school, where he was an honor student and the class president and the captain of the basketball team. People treated him as though he were white. His own high school girlfriend once told him that she hated Indians, apparently unaware that she was dating one.
In college, Alexie studied poetry, and he said, "[At first] I didn't see myself in [Western literature], so I felt like I was doing anthropology, like I was studying white people. [But] something was drawing me in that I couldn't intellectualize or verbalize, and then I realized that the poems weren't just about white people. They were about everybody."
He started writing poetry, but he also started drinking, and soon dropped out of college. Both his parents had suffered from alcoholism, and he said, "[I almost became] one of those Indians upholding our stereotype." But he quit drinking the day he found out his first collection of poetry The Business of Fancydancing (1992) was accepted for publication.
His first big success was his collection of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). It was one of the first works of fiction to portray Indians as modern Americans who watch all the same TV programs and eat the same breakfast cereal as everybody else. He has since written about Indians who are gay intellectuals, basketball players, middle-class journalists, elderly movie extras, rock musicians, construction workers, or reservation girls whose cars only go in reverse because all the other gears are broken. His most recent is the story collection Ten Little Indians, which came out last year.
Sherman Alexie said, "All too often, Indian writers write about the kind of Indian they wish they were. So I try to write about the kind of Indian I am. I'm just as much a product of 'The Brady Bunch' as I am of my grandmother."
It's the birthday of the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey (1934). One of the most controversial poets of recent memory, he got his start as a poet writing about the Black Power movement in the 1960's. He was named the Poet Laureate of New Jersey in 2002, but a poem he wrote about September 11th was so controversial that he was asked to step down from the position. He refused, and so the state of New Jersey abolished its poet laureate program. His most recent collection of poems is Funk Lore (1996).
It was on this day in 1982 that the musical Cats first opened on Broadway. It was based on a book of children's poems by T.S. Eliot called Old Possum's Practical Book of Cats (1939), which describes an annual feline gathering and celebration, at the end of which one cat is chosen to ascend into heaven. It went on to become the longest running musical in history, with 7,485 performances in New York City and 8,949 performances in London.
Cats had one of the most expensive production designs ever assembled; it had no plot; all the characters were cats; and the lyrics were written by one of the more difficult poets of the 20th century. Most people in the theater industry thought it would be a huge flop. Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the music, had to mortgage his own house to get the project off the ground.
But it turned out that the cats Eliot had invented for his godchildren: Macavity, Mungojerrie, Rumpelteazer, Jennyanydots, Rum Tum Tugger, and the tawdry Grizabella, were extraordinarily popular. At the time, the musical industry was on the wane, and most musicals on Broadway were revivals. Cats proved that musical theater could be big business again, and it sparked a renaissance of new musicals such as Miss Saigon, Les Misérables, and Phantom of the Opera.
Over the course of Cats' eighteen-year life, more than 1.8 million pounds of dry ice were used during the show to create fog onstage, and 3,247 pounds yak hair were used for wigs. One of the musical's most popular songs, "Memory," has been recorded 180 times by different artists around the world.
Cats finally closed on Broadway in 2000, but it is still going strong in other parts of the world, including Budapest, Hungary; Stuttgart, Germany; and Pretoria, South Africa. It is estimated that Cats has been seen by more than 50 million people in 30 countries.
T.S. Eliot said, "When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it until the wind changes."
FRIDAY, 8 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Mother, In Love at Sixty" by Susanna Styve, from Miscellaneous, Tender © Laurel Poetry Collective. Reprinted with permission.
Mother, In Love at Sixty
Reason number one it can't work: his name is Bill. For god's
sake, he hunts. He has no pets, other than two doting
daughters, and his ex-wife is still alive. He's simply not my
type. Who wants to get married again, anyway? I'm too old.
I go South at the first frost. Plus, he's messy. Men are messy.
He could die. Then where would I be?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of young adult novelist R.L. [Robert Lawrence] Stine, born in Bexley, Ohio. The creator of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series of horror novels for young people, he's one of the best-selling children's book authors of all time. He has written more that a two hundred books and he's sold more than a hundred million copies.
He started out as a social studies teacher, but he quit after one year and became a freelance writer. His first writing was producing fake interviews for a fan magazine. His editor would come by in the morning and tell him to do an interview with the Beatles, so he'd sit down and make it up.
He worked on a series of humorous books for children, including How to Be Funny: An Extremely Silly Guidebook (1978) and The Complete Book of Nerds (1979), but they weren't especially successful. It wasn't until he tried writing a scary book for kids, a novel called Blind Date (1986), that he found any success.
By the early 1990's, his books were selling about a million copies per month. To keep up with demand, he had to write twenty pages a day, finishing a book every two weeks. His Fear Street series was the first modern book series for children that sold equally well to both boys and girls. He is also the author of a horror novel for adults Superstitious (1995), and his autobiography, It Came from Ohio: My Life as a Writer (1997).
In response to critics who have said that his books aren't good for children, R.L. Stein said, "I believe that kids as well as adults are entitled to books of no socially redeeming value."
It's the birthday of the science fiction author Frank Herbert, born in Tacoma, Washington (1920). He was an obsessively curious kid growing up, and he actually dropped out of college because they wouldn't let him take as many courses as he wanted to. As a young man, he supported himself variously as a professional photographer and television cameraman, radio news commentator, oyster diver, and jungle survival instructor, and as a newspaper reporter and editor.
He was an early member of the environmentalist movement and he was especially interested in ecology and resource management. After having worked as a journalist and written about those topics, he decided that the best way to get his ideas across would be to write science fiction novels.
His first novel was The Dragon in the Sea (1956), which was moderately successful. He got the idea for a new novel while he was writing a magazine story on government experiments to control the shifting sands in the coastal town of Florence, Oregon. It took him six years to research and write it. And that was his masterpiece, Dune (1965) about a desert planet where people only survive because they have learned to conserve and recycle every possible trace of moisture.
Dune was one of the first science fiction novels to completely imagine an entirely different world, with different plants and animals, different social classes, and a whole set of elaborate religious beliefs. It became a cult novel on college campuses and went on to sell about 12 million copies in 14 languages.
Herbert went on to write five Dune sequels. He spent a lot of the money he made inventing solar and wind cooling systems for his home. He also served as a consultant in ecological studies to various foundations as well as South Vietnam and Pakistan.
Frank Herbert said, "I refuse to be put in the position of telling my grandchildren: 'Sorry, there's no more world for you. We used it all up.'"
It's the birthday of editor, essayist, novelist and memoirist Michael Korda, born in London, England (1933). He's the editor in chief of the Simon & Schuster publishing house, as well as a best-selling author himself. He started out as a slush pile reader, and he worked his way up to the top by finding a series of best sellers in that very pile. He went on to edit writers such as Graham Greene, Joan Didion, Larry McMurtry, Jackie Collins, and Anthony Burgess.
But he wasn't satisfied just being an editor, so he decided to write books himself. His first big success was a self-help book called Power! How To Get It, How To Use It (1975). He intended the book as satire - describing, for instance, how to arrange your office furniture in order to take advantage of your co-workers. But people took the book seriously and it became a bestseller. He's gone on to write many more books, including Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller (2001).
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Bret Lott, born in Los Angeles (1958). He's the author of many novels, including The Hunt Club (1998) and his most recent novel A Song I Knew by Heart (2004). He didn't realize he wanted to be a writer until after he had studied forestry and marine biology, worked as a cook, sold RC Cola, and taught high school. He happened to take a creative writing course in graduate school, and he liked it so much he kept at it.
Lott supported his family teaching remedial English, and every morning, he got up at 4:30 a.m. while his wife and new baby were still asleep, and wrote for a couple hours, and that was how he finished his first novel The Man Who Owned Vermont (1987).
Bret Lott said, "All my writings, whether short stories or novels, are about working people—people who have to sort through their personal lives and problems while working to pay bills and put food in the refrigerator."
It's the birthday of the comic book writer and essayist Harvey Pekar, born in Cleveland, Ohio (1939). He is the creator of the American Splendor, the first ever autobiographical comic book series, which was made into a movie last year.
His parents were Jewish immigrants. His father was a Talmudic scholar who supported the family by working as a grocer. Pekar was a smart kid, but he dropped out of community college and got a job as a file clerk at a Veterans Administration hospital. He spent his free time reading literature and collecting jazz records. He owned about 15,000 records at the height of his collecting obsession.
It was through record collecting that Pekar became friends with the legendary comic book artist Robert Crumb. One day, while discussing the future of comics as an art form, Pekar complained to Crumb that comic books were all about superheroes or monsters. Even the new alternative comics, geared toward adults, tended to be about sex maniacs and drug addicts. Nobody wrote comic books about real people and their ordinary struggles. After that conversation, Pekar decided to write a comic book about his own life.
Pekar spent the next few weeks writing about his daily difficulties at the supermarket, his interactions with his co-workers, his ordeals with lost keys, and his dating life. Since he couldn't draw anything other than stick figures, he let Robert Crumb illustrate.
The first issue of American Splendor came out in 1976, and Pekar continued publishing a new issue every summer, each one illustrated by a variety of different artists. He printed 10,000 copies of each new issue himself and distributed it to independent bookstores and comic book shops across the country. After fifteen years, he was picked up by a publishing house.
Pekar has written about nearly every important aspect of his life: his job, his friends, meeting his wife, marrying her, their struggles as a couple, buying their first house, and going through his cancer treatment. His work inspired a whole generation of artists to write autobiographical and realist comic books. An anthology of his work was published last year as American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar.
When asked why he wanted to turn his life into a comic book, Harvey Pekar said, "I wanted to write literature that pushed people into their lives rather than helping people escape from them."
Robert Crumb said of him, "He's passionate and articulate. He's grim, he's Jewish. It's a good thing he has stayed in Cleveland all his life. That place would be forgotten in the soup of history without him."
SATURDAY, 9 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Proverbial Ballade," by Wendy Cope, from Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber & Faber).
Proverbial Ballade
Fine words won't turn the icing pink;
A wild rose has no employees;
Who boils his socks will make them shrink;
Who catches cold is sure to sneeze.
Who has two legs must wash two knees;
Who breaks the egg will find the yolk;
Who locks his door will need his keys-
So say I and so say the folk.
You can't shave with a tiddlywink,
Nor make red wine from garden peas,
Nor show a blindworm how to blink,
Nor teach an old racoon Chinese.
The juiciest orange feels the squeeze;
Who spends his portion will be broke;
Who has no milk can make no cheese-
So say I and so say the folk.
He makes no blot who has no ink,
Nor gathers honey who keeps no bees.
The ship that does not float will sink;
Who'd travel far must cross the seas.
Lone wolves are seldom seen in threes;
A conker ne'er becomes an oak;
Rome wasn't built by chimpanzees-
So say I and so say the folk.
Envoi
Dear friends! If adages like these
Should seem banal, or just a joke,
Remember fish don't grow on trees-
So say I and so say the folk.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1888 that the public was first admitted to the Washington Monument. The cornerstone of the monument had been laid 40 years earlier, on July 4th. But there wasn't enough money to complete the project, and the construction went on and off for four decades until February 21, 1885. It was 555 feet tall, with 893 steps to the top. There was a steam-powered elevator installed that took ten to twelve minutes to ride. It was the tallest building in the world, and people flocked to it when it opened on this day. In the first nine months, more than 600,000 people visited, and by the turn of the century, more than 1.5 million had come. One woman wanted to be married in the elevator while suspended in the middle of the monument. One man wanted to scatter his wife's ashes from the window. Gabby Street, a pitcher for the Washington Senators, stood at the base and caught a ball dropped from the top, traveling at 125 miles per hour. In 1915, the first suicide occurred down the elevator shaft. The monument continues to be the site of important events—the woman's suffrage rallies of the '20s, the civil rights marches in the '60s, anti-war demonstrations in the '70s, and the Million Man March in 1995.
It's the birthday of memoirist Jill Ker Conway, born in New South Wales, Australia (1934). She began her three-part memoir with The Road from Coorain (1990), about growing up in the Australian outback and going to school in wartime Sydney. Then she wrote True North (1995), about her Harvard education, and continued telling her story, as the first woman president of Smith College, in A Woman's Education (2001).
It's the birthday of composer Camille Saint-Saens, born in Paris (1835). He was a child prodigy, with perfect pitch and a fantastic memory. He learned the piano and organ, and played the music of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart in recitals. He composed nice waltzes and gallops by the age of five, and wrote his first symphony at sixteen. His first famous opera was Samson and Dalila (1877). He wrote lots of other operas too, but they were less well-known outside of France. He was always surprised that the greater public gave him such high praise, yet constantly wanted to hear Samson and Dalila and ignored his other work. Over the course of his lifetime he composed more than 300 pieces, including thirteen operas, and he was the first major composer to write specifically for the cinema. He's best-known for Samson et Dalila , his Third (organ) Symphony , (1886), his Second and Fourth Piano Concertos, and Carnival of the Animals (1886) for piano and orchestra. He toured frequently, conducting his oratorios and premiering his piano concertos all over Europe and the United States, sometimes accompanied only by his servant, Gabriel, and his pet dogs. Saint-Saens was very polite but highly opinionated. He wasn't outwardly emotional, but he poured out long, flowery letters to his friends. He did everything with speed—he talked, walked, wrote, conducted rehearsals and composed very quickly. He said, ''I like good company, but I like hard work still better.'' He didn't like the dreary weather of Paris, and skipped off to Algiers in the winters. It was there he died at age 86. He was given a huge state funeral on Christmas Eve and was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. At his grave, the composer Alfred Bruneau said, ''[His pieces] have won a place that they will hold so long as beauty lasts, so long as orchestras and choirs shall gather together to move and charm us.''
It's the birthday of Charles R(udolph) Walgreen, owner of the Walgreens drug store chain, born near Galesburg, Illinois (1873). He lost part of his left hand's middle finger when he was working in a shoe factory. The doctor who attended to him convinced him to become a druggist's apprentice, at $4 an hour. He did, and after fighting in the Spanish-American War, became a pharmacist and eventually bought out the store he was working for, in 1901. It was just 50 feet by 20 feet, on Chicago's South Side, and Walgreen had to take out a huge loan to afford it. There was considerable drug store competition in Chicago at the time, so Walgreen fixed up his store as soon as he got his hands on it. He put in brand new light fixtures, widened the aisles, had an employee at the front door to greet each customer. It was the only drug store where you could buy pots and pans. He acquired another store and continued to specialize in customer service. Almost all drug stores had soda fountains, but they only did well in the hot weather. Walgreen kept his counters open year-round, and had hot food served during the winter months. His wife Myrtle cooked all the food in their home kitchen. She rose before dawn and brought everything to his two stores by 11:00 AM—chicken, tongue, egg salad, bean and cream of tomato soup. In 1922, a man working at a Walgreen soda fountain created the first malted milkshake, and it was a roaring success.
SUNDAY, 10 OCTOBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Theolonious Monk," by Stephen Dobyns, from Common Carnage (Penguin).
Thelonious Monk
A record store on Wabash was where
I bought my first album. I was a freshman
in college and played the record in my room
over and over. I was caught by how he took
the musical phrase and seemed to find a new
way out, the next note was never the note
you thought would turn up and yet seemed
correct. Surprise in 'Round Midnight
or Sweet and Lovely. I bought the album
for Mulligan but stayed for Monk. I was
eighteen and between my present and future
was a wall so big that not even sunlight
crossed over. I felt surrounded by all
I couldn't do, as if my hopes to write,
to love, to have children, even to exist
with slight contentment were like ghosts
with the faces found on Japanese masks:
sheer mockery! I would sit on the carpet
and listen to Monk twist the scale into kinks
and curlicues. The gooseneck lamp on my desk
had a blue bulb which I thought artistic and
tinted the stacks of unread books: if Thomas
Mann depressed me, Freud depressed me more.
It seemed that Monk played with sticks attached
to his fingertips as he careened through the tune,
counting unlike any metronome. He was exotic,
his playing was hypnotic. I wish I could say
that hearing him, I grabbed my pack and soldiered
forward. Not quite. It was the surprise I liked,
the discordance and fretful change of beat,
as in Straight No Chaser , where he hammers together
a papier-mâché skyscraper, then pops seagulls
with golf balls. Racket, racket, but all of it
music. What Monk banged out was the conviction
of innumerable directions. Years later
I felt he'd been blueprint, map and education:
no streets, we bushwhacked through the underbrush;
not timid, why open your mouth if not to shout?
not scared, the only road lay straight in front;
not polite, the notes themselves were sneak attacks;
not quiet-look, can't you see the sky will soon
collapse and we must keep dancing till it cracks?
for Michael Thomas
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi , born in a village in Parma, Italy (1813). His parents owned a tavern and were not very well off. But his father recognized musical talent in Giuseppe and bought him a spinet (an upright harpsichord), which he kept for the rest of his life. By the age of twelve, Verdi was the organist for his church. He started playing for other churches farther away from home, and then he went off to music school. He lived in the town of Busseto, and boarded with a wealthy grocer who liked Verdi and wanted to support him, and whose daughter Verdi ended up marrying. When Verdi went for the position of maestro di musica in Busetto, a scandal erupted. One faction supported Verdi and the other, headed by the clergy and the local bishop, were rooting for his rival--a more traditional, conservative and older musician. The town was in such discord over the matter that they completely banned music in church until the question was solved. Eventually, they compromised and made Verdi the maestro for secular music and his rival the leader for church music. Verdi wrote marches, overtures and other pieces for the Busseto Philharmonic Society and the town marching band. But then he set his sights elsewhere and got an opera, Oberto , performed at La Scalia, the most important theater in Italy, in 1839. It was a modest success. Then tragedy struck, when his wife died of encephalitis. Verdi had already lost their two children in infancy. He vowed he would never write music again. But he couldn't resist when he read the powerful libretto for Nabucco. He turned it into a stunning opera, premiering on March 9, 1942. The audience applauded for ten minutes after the first scene, and after the chorus the audience demanded an encore, even though they were prohibited by the Austrian government at the time. Even the stagehands, who rarely paid attention to the performance, would stop what they were doing to watch and applaud the show. Verdi used the same librettist for his next opera, Lombardi. The librettist had a procrastination problem, and Verdi had to lock him in a room in order to get him to write enough on time. Once Verdi made the mistake of sticking him in the room with his wine collection, and hours later the librettist emerged drunk. Verdi wrote a total of 26 operas, most notably Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), Aida (1871), and Falstaff (1893).
It's the birthday of playwright, screenwriter and director Harold Pinter , born in East London (1930). He was the son of a Jewish tailor, and he was raised in a small, working-class neighborhood that he had to escape during World War II. He acted in plays at school and he liked to read Kafka and Hemingway. Pinter tried out London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but he didn't like it and left after two years. He debuted his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, in the West End in 1958. It didn't do well, but he continued to write plays and eventually created a body of work that people call the ''comedies of menace.'' In these plays, situations that should be ordinary turn absurd or ominous because of characters acting out of character for inexplicable reasons. The plays usually take place in a single room, whose occupants are threatened by indefinable outside forces. Pinter wrote The Homecoming (1965), about a man who brings his wife home to meet his all-male family. She stays with his family to be their caretaker and whore and he goes back to his job teaching philosophy, realizing that nobody needs him. Pinter said that the opening of that play in New York City in 1967 was one of the greatest theatrical nights of his life. He said the audience was full of money—the women in mink, the men in tuxedoes. And as soon as the curtain opened, they hated the play. Pinter said, ''The hostility towards the play was palpable. You could see it.'' But, he said, ''The great thing was, the actors went on and felt it and hated the audience back even more. And they gave it everything [they had]. By the end of the evening, the audience was defeated. All these men in their tuxedos were just horrified. . . . There's no question that the play won on that occasion.''
It's the birthday of Thelonious (Sphere) Monk , who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (1917) but grew up in New York City. He started piano lessons at a young age. By age thirteen, he had won the weekly amateur night contest at the Apollo Theater so many times that he was no longer allowed to compete. Six years later, he joined the house band at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where he and Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and a few others invented a new kind of jazz known as bebop. It involved unusual repetition of phrases and an offbeat, angular pattern of sound. In the '40s he started making recordings, and in the '50s he came out with two of his most popular albums, Brilliant Corners and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane. With these albums, he gained international attention as a pianist and a composer. The Thelonious Monk Quartet, which included John Coltrane, began a hugely successful regular gig at the Five Spot. Monk played at jazz festivals with other famous jazz legends around the country until the 1970s, when he stopped touring. His most famous compositions include ''Round About Midnight,'' ''Straight No Chaser,'' ''Blue Monk,'' and ''Misterioso.''
