Monday, 11 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "as the credits rolled" by Denver Butson, from illegible address © Luquer Street Press. Reprinted with permission.
as the credits rolled
at the end of this movie I dreamt
in which I was a bicyclist in the Wild West
and you were the pretty girl with a fast gun
the sunset was the color of smoked salmon
and the mountains looked like paintings
of mountains
I said if I'm really the hero
I should ride this here bicycle into that sunset
and you said what bicycle?
and shot it out from under me
with your lightning-fast six-shooter
and I said I reckon I could walk
and I started walkin'
and you caught up to me holstering your smoking gun
while Ennio Morricone himself
sauntered out from the green room
behind the mountains
humming a song so longing
so beautiful
we couldn't help wishing
that this was our forever
this sun this music
and those ushers down there
dragging their trashbags
silently through the aisles.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Columbus Day, the day on which we remember the explorer Christopher Columbus and his voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. He's often been called the man who discovered America, but of course we know that there were people living in the North and South America for thousands of years before Columbus arrived. He wasn't even the first European to explore the New World. There are legends of Celtic and Phoenician sailors finding land across the Atlantic centuries before the birth of Christ. The Vikings sailed to Newfoundland in the tenth century, and around the year 1000 Leif Eriksson was probably the first European to visit the area that became the United States.
In fact, most of the ideas we have about Columbus are myths, including the idea that he was the first person to believe the world was round. The mythical Columbus was largely an invention of the American writer Washington Irving, who wrote one of the first modern biographies of Columbus, and made most of that biography up.
But while Columbus may not have discovered America, his voyage was the first to publicize the existence of the Americas to the rest of Europe, sparking waves of exploration and colonization.
He was trying to find a new trade route to Asia, and he'd gotten the idea to sail around the world in the opposite direction. He just miscalculated the size of the earth. He thought the distance from Spain to Japan was twenty-seven hundred miles, when in fact it's about thirteen thousand.
Columbus called his plan the "Enterprise of the Indies." He pitched it first to King John II of Portugal, who rejected it, and then to the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. They also turned him down, twice, until they conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada in January 1492 and had some treasure to spare.
And so Columbus sailed, with the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, three relatively small ships, none of them bigger than a tennis court. He kept a false captain's log, underestimating the distance traveled, to keep his men from panicking about how far they'd sailed from home. They panicked anyway, and seriously considered throwing him overboard after they'd found no land for weeks.
Then, at about 10:00 PM on this day in 1492, Columbus saw a light on the western horizon. He said it was, "Like a little wax candle that was lifting and rising." He tried not to get too excited and told his men to keep a lookout for land. It was 2:00 in the morning on October 12 when the lookout man on the foremost ship called out, "Tierra!" They waited until daybreak to go ashore. Historians aren't sure precisely which island Columbus first set foot on, but it was probably one of the islands of the Bahamas.
Columbus went on to lead a total of four expeditions to the New World during his lifetime, exploring the islands that became Cuba, Haiti, as well as parts of Central America. It was a long time before anyone realized the size and importance of the world Columbus had stumbled upon.
Columbus himself went to his grave believing that his greatest achievement was the discovery of a new route to China and Japan. He never made much money from his exploration, but Spain reaped the rewards and became the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.
The reason the North and South America are not named for Columbus is that he wasn't a very good writer, and his accounts of his explorations never became best sellers. A minor mapmaker named Amerigo Vespucci wrote the first really popular descriptions of the New World, full of adventure and romance, and his works gave our continents their names.
It's the birthday of the crime novelist Elmore Leonard, born in New Orleans (1925). His family moved around a lot, and finally settled in Detroit, where Leonard grew up. He wanted to be a writer from the time he was a kid, but by the time he graduated from college, he was already married with children. He didn't think he could make a living as a writer, so he took a job at an advertising agency.
Every morning, he would write fiction from 5 to 7 a.m., and then go to work. He decided to write westerns, because there were a lot of Westerns being made into movies at the time, and he figured he might be able to sell one of his novels to Hollywood. He published his first novel The Bounty Hunters in 1953. He published four more novels in the next eight years but he still hadn't had any major success. He quit his job to write fulltime, but he found that he had even less time to write, because he was so worried about supporting his family of five children. He finally sold his novel Hombre (1967) to Hollywood, but by that time Westerns were already becoming less fashionable so it didn't make much money.
Eventually, Leonard gave up on Westerns, and started writing crime novels. He slowly developed a cult following, but it took a long time for him to get a general audience. The problem was that his books weren't really mysteries or thrillers. He didn't write about noble private detectives like Philip Marlowe. Most of his books didn't even have heroes. He just focused on interesting characters who broke the law, and he became known for capturing they way those characters talked.
Leonard said, "When I start a book...the characters audition in their opening scene—I listen to them, see how they sound...if I'm curious enough to turn the pages, I figure it'll have the same effect on readers."
Leonard had published more than twenty novels over the course of thirty years, including Fifty-Two Pickup (1974), Stick (1983) and La Brava (1984), before he finally made it big with his novel Glitz (1985). He's published 15 novels since then and they have all been best sellers. His most recent novel is Mr. Paradise, which came out this year.
Though he's specialized in crime fiction for most of his career, Elmore Leonard doesn't read crime fiction himself. His favorite writers are Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Bobbie Ann Mason.
To get inside the heads of the despicable people he writes about, Leonard said, "I [try] to put myself in [a criminal's] place. He doesn't think he's doing an evil thing. I try to see [him] at another time—when he sneezes, say. I see convicts sitting around talking about a baseball game. I see them as kids. All villains have mothers."
When asked why he writes about criminals, instead of ordinary people, Leonard said, "I just feel more secure in a situation where I know a gun can go off at any time if things get boring."
It's the birthday of experimental short story writer and novelist Ben Marcus, born in Chicago (1967). His first book was The Age of Wire and String (1995), which is a sort of fictional encyclopedia, organized into the categories "Sleep," "God," "Food," "The House," "Animal," "Weather," "Persons," and "The Society," each of which includes five brief essays and a glossary.
His novel Notable American Women (2002) that takes place in a futuristic Ohio, about a boy raised by his mother in a radical feminist society called "The Silentists." The main character of the book is named Ben Marcus, but when asked if the book was autobiographical, Ben Marcus said, "My family was very loving and I've never been to Ohio." He recently edited the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, which came out this year.
It's the birthday of the French writer François (Charles) Mauriac, born in Bordeaux, France (1885). He's best known for his dark, religious novels, including A Kiss for the Leper (1922), The Desert of Love (1925), and The Knot of Vipers (1932).
He was a passionate Catholic and believed that the purpose of literature was to bring people to salvation, but he always struggled with how to write about evil without tempting his readers. In 1952, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
François Mauriac said, "Sin is the writer's element."
It's the birthday of Mason Locke Weems, born in Anne Arundel County, Maryland (1759). He was an Episcopalian clergyman and a traveling bookseller. He wrote extremely popular fictional tales about history and presented them as if they were fact.
It was Weems who invented the famous story about George Washington cutting down his father's cherry tree with a hatchet, and then admitting that he had done so. Weems included that story in his mostly fictional biography The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (1800).
TUESDAY, 12 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "Aunt Bobby" by June Beisch, from Fatherless Woman © Cape Cod Literary Press. Reprinted with permission.
Aunt Bobby
My favorite aunt was unmarried, half deaf
and lived alone in a smoke-filled room
at the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis.
Once beautiful, she still had her vanity.
Her hip, mangled in surgery,
gave her a spasmodic gait, she flapped
down Oakland Avenue to visit us
like a tall crane who'd had a few.
I loved the sight of her, ran to
the frazzled, overpermed head, the
too-bright ruby lips, the strong perfume.
For all the appearances of inutile femininity,
she was to me, a half divinity.
The auntness of aunts, their
bemused, hat-askance objectivity.
They belong to no one and to everyone
and can offer a child another reality.
How many times she took me home
to her apartment hoping to give
my busy mother a small reprieve
handed me a pencil and drawing pad
then made me feel like Michaelangelo.
Now thinking back, I wish I had
given back just half of what she gave to me.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of actress, playwright, and novelist Alice Childress, born in Charleston, South Carolina (1916). She moved with her family to Harlem as a child, and she said she decided to be a writer at her Wednesday night testimonials at her grandmother's church. She said, "I remember how people, mostly women, used to get up and tell their troubles to everybody.... I couldn't wait for person after person to tell their story." She decided she wanted to grow up and tell those women's stories to the world.
It was also her grandmother who kept encouraging her to write. Childress said, "My grandmother had no formal education, but [if I told her a story] she'd say, 'That's interesting, write it down.' I'd say, 'No, I don't want to,' but she'd say, 'Just a little bit.' And I got used to it."
Childress was primarily a playwright, and her plays included Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band (1966), and Wine in the Wilderness (1969). But she's best known for her novels A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973) and A Short Walk (1979).
It's the birthday of the author and occultist Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington, England (1875). As a young man he spent his time traveling around, writing poetry, and dabbling in the occult. At the turn of the century, alternative religions were all the rage, and Crowley studied yoga, Buddhism, reincarnation, Tarot card reading, and Jewish Qabalah, among other things. He was a member, along with W.B. Yeats, of a mystical society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
He spent his honeymoon with his first wife in Egypt, where they slept in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid. Crowley performed a magical ritual that was supposed to illuminate the chamber with astral light. His wife wasn't impressed, but soon after, she fell into a trance, saying that she had been possessed by an ancient spirit. He wrote down everything she said under her trance, and published it as The Book of the Law (1938) which became a kind of Bible for occultists and libertines. It contains Crowley's most famous statement, "There is no law beyond do what thou wilt."
He went on to found a commune in Sicily during the 1920's that became notorious for alleged black magic rituals, drug use, and free love. A tabloid journalist called Crowley, "The wickedest man in the world." But he was actually on the decline at the time, and by 1947, he died in obscurity.
Crowley didn't become famous again until twenty years after his death, when John Lennon chose to include his image on the cover of the Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Suddenly, he became a prophet to rock stars and hippies. Most of his books, including his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1969) have been in print ever since.
It's the birthday of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, born in Geneva, New York (1910). He's regarded as having produced the most beautiful English translations of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey in the last century. He began translating for a living because he failed at trying to be a journalist. He said, "I worked hard and learned much from the big-city savvy of [the] city editor, but I never learned to write at high speed."
One of his former teachers from prep school asked him if he wanted to try translating a Greek tragedy. He did, and it was broadcast on the BBC to great acclaim. He went on to translate several more Greek plays for the radio, including Oedipus at Colonus (1941) and Oedipus Rex (1949).
Ever since he had first read Homer as a college student, he'd wanted to try translating his work, but it wasn't until he won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1953 that he began work on The Odyssey (1961). It took him ten years to finish it, and he spent part of that time traveling to the various places mentioned by Homer, so that he could capture them correctly in English. His translation of The Odyssey was such a success that he took another twelve years to translate The Iliad (1974).
Fitzgerald was also an influential classics professor at Harvard, and he always emphasized that Homer's work should be read aloud. One of his students said, "Every Tuesday afternoon he'd start [class] by saying to us, 'Listen to this, now...it was meant to be listened to.' [Then he would read and] the 12 of us would listen, very quiet around the blond wood table, our jittery freshman muscles gradually unclenching."
Robert Fitzgerald described Homer as, "A living voice in firelight or in the open air, a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons, a master performer at his ease, touching the strings, disposing of many voices, many tones and tempos, tragedy, comedy, and glory, holding his [listeners] in the palm of his hand."
It's the birthday of the novelist Richard Price, born in New York City (1949). He grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, a tough neighborhood full of street gangs. Price witnessed a lot of street fights growing up, but he didn't participate in them because he suffered from a mild form of cerebral palsy. He also said, "I was a member of the Goldberg gang—we walked down the street doing algebra."
He became the first member of his family to go to college, and he planned to go to law school. But throughout college, he found himself telling romanticized stories about his childhood to all his friends, guys who came from the suburbs or the Midwest. And when he wrote down one of those stories and read it aloud for an audience, he got a standing ovation.
Price applied to law school anyway, but he didn't get in, so he decided to try writing a novel about the Bronx. He said, "Every night for the better part of a year, I would sit down with a record player, an old stack of 45's, some vodka, and work myself into a sensory memory trance that eventually became [my first novel]."
That first novel was The Wanderers (1974), about a group of teenagers struggling to make it out of the Bronx, and it was a big success. Price went on to write a series of autobiographical novels, but eventually he was out of ideas.
He moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, where people would tell him what to write about. He said, "It was like going from being a clothes designer to a tailor... It's the craft of pandering. And no matter what you write, it always gets changed around to look like everything else that everybody else has ever seen."
While Price was doing research for one of his screenplays, he began to spend time with cops in Jersey City. And what he saw was neighborhoods very much like the neighborhood he'd grown up in, but instead of joining street gangs, most of the kids there had become drug dealers. He decided that someone needed to write a novel about what those neighborhoods had become. He spent three years following cops around those neighborhoods, and he got to know some of the drug dealers as well. He carried around a notebook and wrote down everything he saw, everything he heard. He paid his sources money, or gave them books, or helped them find jobs so that they would give him information.
Price discussed plot lines for his novel in progress with everyone he met on the street, and they told him whether or not it was realistic. He said, "I had half of Jersey City looking over my shoulder...Everybody was in on the act: cops, drug dealers, families. It was an equal-opportunity book."
The result was Price's novel Clockers (1992) about a young drug dealer named Strike who's trying to make enough money to get out of the business without getting killed or arrested. It was one of the first works of fiction that attempted to describe the crack cocaine trade from the point of view of the dealers as well as the police. It was Price's first novel in almost ten years, and it became a huge success.
Price has continued writing about race, crime and the police in novels such as Freedomland (1998) and Samaritan (2003).
When asked what his goal is as a writer, Richard Price said, "I want to create an awareness that certain people exist...Let me just put them on paper so the reader can see who they are."
WEDNESDAY, 13 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "The Woman at the Dig" by Leo Dangel, from The Crow on the Golden Arches © Spoon River Poetry Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Woman at the Dig
Tired from running a combine
all day through acres of wheat,
alone in front of the TV, I pay
attention because the show's about
scientists digging up an ancient site.
I have no special interest in bones,
pottery, spearheads, or prehistoric
garbage dumps, and I always look past
the man describing animal migrations,
burial rites, or building design and try
to catch a glimpse of the women
working at the site - one of them
might be wearing cut-off jeans
and a halter top, clearing a patch
of ground with a trowel or brush.
These women are all experts.
You can tell by the way they look
at a bone chip or a pottery shard
they understand worlds about
the person who left it. Sifting soil,
they show more grace than contestants
in a Miss Universe pageant.
Years from now, when these farms
are ancient history, an expedition
with such a woman might come along.
I could drop something for her to find,
a pocketknife, a brass overalls button.
If only she could discover my bones.
My eyes would be long gone,
But I can see her form coming into focus
above me as she gently sweeps aside
the last particles of dust - her knee, thigh,
hip, shoulders, and finally, set off by sky
and spikes of sunlight, her face - a woman
who recognizes what she's found.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Conrad Richter, born in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania (1890). His father, both his grandfathers and all his uncles were preachers. As a young boy, he loved to hear them tell stories about his ancestors who had been tradesmen, soldiers, country squires, blacksmiths, and farmers. He was especially fascinated that one of his ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War under George Washington and another had been a Hessian mercenary in the opposing British Army.
In the late 1920s, his wife got sick and doctors suggested a change of climate, so they moved to New Mexico. Richter became obsessed with the history of the Southwest, and he began traveling around interviewing older men and women and gathering old record books, newspapers, letters, and diaries of the early pioneers.
After five years of research, he wrote a book about the Southwestern settlers called Early Americana, and Other Stories (1936), and it was considered one of the best works of historical fiction ever written about Western pioneers.
He went on to write many more books, including a trilogy about frontier life in Ohio: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
It's the birthday of Harlem Renaissance writer Arna[ud] Wendell Bontemps, born in Alexandria, Louisiana (1902). For three generations, all the men in his family had been brick masons, but after his mother's death when he was twelve, his father sent him to a private school where he was the only black student. He went on to be the first member of his family to get a college degree, but his father was furious that he chose to study literature instead of medicine or law.
After he graduated from college, he moved to New York City because, he said, "I wanted to see what all the excitement was about." The excitement was the Harlem Renaissance, and he quickly became friends with writers like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and James Weldon Johnson. They encouraged him to publish his poetry and fiction, and his first novel, God Sends Sunday, came out in 1931.
During the Great Depression he moved with his family to the South, living in a series of ramshackle houses with tin roofs and poor ventilation. It often got so hot that he had to write his books on the front lawn under the shade of a tree.
Finally, money got so tight that he and his wife had to move in with his father, who told him to give up writing and go back to brick masonry. The room his father gave him was too small for a writing desk, so he wrote his next novel on top of a sewing machine. Based on an actual slave uprising, the novel was published in 1936 as Black Thunder, and many people consider it his masterpiece.
After Bontemps's third novel failed to sell, he gave up writing fiction and got a job as the chief librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he collected and published a series of anthologies of African American literature, including The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). He is responsible for preserving much of the early African American literature that we have today.
Arna Bontemps wrote,
"I have sown beside all waters in my day. I planted deep, within my heart the fear That wind or fowl would take the grain away. I planted safe against this stark, lean year..."
It's the birthday of comedian Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Schneider in the town of Mineola [Minny-OLE-a] on New York's Long Island (1925). He got his start in comedy working as an emcee for a strip club, where he told jokes as he introduced the performers, and eventually he got his own show.
Bruce was controversial because he used profanity in his act, but also because he spoke openly about sex, race, and religion. He once said, "Because I'm Jewish, a lot of people say to me, 'Why did [the Jews] kill Christ?' We killed him because he didn't want to become a doctor, that's why we killed him." People called him a "sick comic" but he said, "I'm not sick. The world is sick, and I'm the doctor."
In 1961, a policeman came to Bruce's show and charged him with obscenity. He got out on bail, but the judge told him that if he said one dirty word at his next performance, he'd go to jail. So at his next performance, with the local district attorney in the audience, he pulled out a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) and read all the dirty parts to the audience. He figured they couldn't arrest him if he was just reading literature.
He tried to fight the charges of obscenity, in court and on stage. He said, "If God made the body, and the body is dirty, the fault lies with the manufacturer." But he sank into depression and became obsessed and paranoid. He spent entire performances reading court transcripts out loud, insulting the judge and the prosecuting attorney. After spending four months in jail, he stopped performing and died of a drug overdose on August 3, 1966.
In December of 2003, Governor George Pataki granted a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce for his 1964 obscenity conviction. A new box set of recordings of his performances came out this year called Let the Buyer Beware.
Lenny Bruce said, "Every day, people are straying away from the Church and going back to God."
He also said, "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce."
It was on this day in 1792 that the cornerstone was laid for the American presidential residence, now known as the White House. The first design for the White House came from a Frenchman named Pierre L'Enfant who had grown up in France near the palace of Versailles and who laid the plans for the entire city of Washington, D.C. He called his design "The Presidential Palace."
George Washington thought it was too fancy, so he got an Irish born architect named James Hoban to reduce the design to a fifth of its original size, and he changed the name to "The Presidential House." Even in George Washington's scaled down version, it was still the largest house ever built in the United States at that time.
John Adams was the first President to call it home. On his second night in the house, Adams wrote to his wife Abigail, "I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." Nearly 150 years later, Franklin Roosevelt had those words carved into the mantel in the State Dining Room.
People nicknamed it the White House at the very beginning, when a coat of whitewash was brushed on to protect the vulnerable sandstone against winter freezes. But it was officially known as the "Presidential House" or "The Executive Mansion" until Teddy Roosevelt finally demanded that it be known by the nickname ordinary people had given it. Roosevelt had the words "White House" printed on the headings of all official papers and documents requiring his signature.
Many presidents have added their own touches. Jefferson was the first to install flushing toilets; Andrew Jackson got running water and the first shower; Martin Van Buren brought in central heating; and Polk replaced candles and oil with chandeliers with gas. An early form of air conditioning was improvised for the dying James A.Garfield in the summer of 1881. Rutherford B. Hayes introduced the telephone, and Benjamin Harrison had the White House rigged for electricity, though he would not touch the switches. President Truman who brought in the first television set. Dwight Eisenhower put in a putting green, Gerald Ford installed a swimming pool and Bill Clinton built a jogging track.
It currently has 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, and 6 levels. There are also 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, and 3 elevators. It is the only private residence of a head of state that is open to the public for tours, free of charge.
Perhaps the most famous literary description of the White House came from the poet Walt Whitman, who once wrote about walking past the White House at night. He wrote, "To-night took a long look at the President's house. The white portico-the palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow...everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet soft-the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon...the White House of the land, and of beauty and night-sentries at the gates, and by the portico, silent, pacing there in blue overcoats-stopping you not at all, but eyeing you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move."
THURSDAY, 14 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "87" from 100 Selected Poems, by e.e. cummings.
87
o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-I
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue
with a swoop and a dart
out flew his wish
(it dived like a fish
but it climbed like a dream)
throbbing like a heart
singing like a flame
blue took it my
far beyond far
and high beyond high
bluer took it your
but bluest took it our
away beyond where
what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-I
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and essayist Katha Pollitt, born in New York City (1949). She grew up in an activist household, and from the time she was a young girl her parents were encouraging her to write angry letters to newspapers. During college, she helped take over Harvard University's ROTC building to protest the Vietnam War. When her parents found out what she'd done, they sent her flowers. She published her first book of poetry, The Antarctic Traveler, in 1982, and started supporting herself writing book reviews. Eventually, she found she was more interested in expressing her own ideas than talking about the books she was reviewing, so she dropped the books and became an essayist. She started writing a column called "Subject to Debate" for The Nation magazine in 1994, and many of her columns have been collected in Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (1994), and Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001).
It's the birthday of the 34th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, born in Denison, Texas (1890). He was the last person to become president after having served as the commanding general of the United States Army. He grew up in a poor, deeply religious family, working on a creamery to help pay the bills. His mother was a pacifist, and when he chose to go to West Point for college, she broke down in tears. He served in World War I and worked his way up through the military ranks until World War II, when he was put in charge of strategic planning for the European stage of the war. After leading the successful invasion of French North Africa, he was named Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, and a few months later he planned the invasion of Normandy - the largest amphibious attack in history.
He became known as one of the friendliest generals in the army. He loved to stand around with soldiers, smoking cigarettes, talking about where everyone was from. He slept in the trenches with the privates, and when he traveled by jeep near enemy lines, he preferred to drive the jeep himself. He was also one of the only generals who loved talking to the press. He said, "[Journalists are] quasi members of my staff."
Even though he'd been such a successful military leader, he ran for president against Adlai Stevenson promising to get the United States out of the Korean War, and that's what he did. There wasn't another major military conflict in his two terms in office. He said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
It's the birthday of poet e. e. cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) , born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He was a man who wrote joyful, almost childlike poems about the beauty of nature and love, even though he was actually a conservative, irritable man who hated noisy modern inventions like vacuum cleaners and radios. He spent most of his life unhappy, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized for his unpopular political views.
He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), when he traveled to Russia in 1931, hoping to write about the superior society under the rule of communism. He was horrified at what he found. He saw no lovers, no one laughing, no one enjoying themselves. The theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to talk to each other in the street. Everyone was miserable. When he got home, he wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno. Most of the publishers at the time were communists themselves, and they turned their backs on cummings for criticizing communist Russia. Many magazines refused to publish his poetry or review his books. But the attacks only made him more stubborn. He said, "To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
He tried to write a script for a ballet, but it was never performed. He tried writing for the movies in Hollywood, but found that he spent all his time painting humming birds and sunsets instead of working on screenplays. He had to borrow money from his parents and his friends. He said, "I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." A few years later, he decided to make some extra money by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him. The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. Even though he suffered from terrible back pains, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden," he began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country. By the end of the 1950s he had become the most popular poet in America. He loved performing, and loved the applause, and the last few years of his life were the happiest. He died on September 2, 1962.
In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike . . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs."
It's the birthday of short story writer Katherine Mansfield, born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand (1888). She's the author of short story collections such as Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party, and Other Stories (1922); and she is known as one of the originators of the modern short story in English. Her father was an incredibly successful businessman in the growing economy of New Zealand, and he sent her away to school in England. After her eighteenth birthday, when her parents came to pick her up from her English school and bring her back to New Zealand, she found that she no longer had anything in common with them or their values. She wrote in her journal on the boat ride home, "They are worse than I had even expected. They are prying and curious, they are watchful and they discuss only the food . . . . For more than a quarter of an hour they are quite unbearable, and so absolutely my mental inferiors."
As soon as she got back to New Zealand, she became one of the wildest members of the small artistic community there. She had affairs with men and women; she traveled deep into the countryside and lived with the indigenous people; and she published a series of occasionally scandalous stories under a variety of pseudonyms. In a letter to an editor, asking for money, she wrote, "[I have] a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse." Eventually, her parents gave her an allowance so she could move to London, and she never returned to New Zealand.
Mansfield lived so freely in the London bohemian scene that she eventually had to destroy her own diaries for fear of incriminating evidence. At one point, she married a man she barely knew, but left him before the wedding night was over, because she couldn't stand the pink bedspread and the lampshade with pink tassels in the hotel room. She had to settle down a bit when her mother came to London and threatened to put her in a convent. She said, "How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"
She wrote sketches and essays for various newspapers and journals, but she didn't begin to write the stories that made her famous until her younger brother came to visit her in 1915. They had long talks over the course of the summer, reminiscing about growing up in New Zealand. She hadn't seen him in years and found that she had more in common with him than any other member of the family. He left that fall to start military duty as a soldier in World War I. She learned two months later that he had been killed while demonstrating how to throw a grenade. She was devastated, and she dealt with her grief by writing a series of short stories about her childhood, including "The Garden Party" which many consider her masterpiece. She died of tuberculosis a few years later in January 1923, at the age of 34. She wrote, "How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - little rags and shreds of your very life."
FRIDAY, 15 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "My Father Gets Up in the Middle of the Night to Watch an Old Movie," by Dennis Trudell.
My Father Gets Up in the Middle of the Night to Watch an Old Movie
On cable television. Because he can't sleep.
My father gets up in the middle of the night
to watch an old movie on cable television—
because he can't sleep. He has done this before.
He will do it again, and sometimes he eats
cookies. My father eating cookies and watching
an old movie again because he can't sleep.
He is eighty-seven years old. He lives alone.
Because my mother died . . . and sometimes he looks
at her absence on the black sofa. My father
turning back to the movie on cable television,
eating another cookie. The movie has a name,
but he doesn't know it. My mother died—
because this is not a movie with a happy
ending. Or any ending. My father returns
to bed and goes to sleep. Or does not,
and then later sleeps. The television reflects
the lamp he leaves on . . . . the black sofa.
Reflects an old mirror behind the sofa—
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, born in the Prussian village of Röcken (1844). He was a philosopher who loved literature, and he experimented with different literary styles to express his philosophy. Some of his books are long lists of aphorisms, while others are written almost like novels or poetry. His most famous book, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), describes a prophet who comes down from the mountains to teach people about the coming of a new kind of super-man, but the people he speaks to only ridicule and laugh at him. Nietzsche spent most of his life suffering from debilitating headaches and deteriorating eyesight, and he eventually went crazy and spent his last years in an asylum. He's perhaps best known for claiming that "God is dead," but most people forget that he actually said, "God is dead . . . and we have killed him!" He thought that the absence of God from the world was a tragedy, but he felt that people had to accept that tragedy and move on. He wrote that God was like a star whose light we can see, even though the star died long ago. Much of his philosophy is about how people might live in a world without God and without absolute morality. At the time of his death on August 25, 1900, almost no one had heard of him, but after his work was republished, it had a huge impact on the philosophers of the twentieth century. He said, "I know my fate. One day my name will be tied to the memory of something monstrous—a crisis without equal on earth . . . I am no man, I am dynamite!"
It's the birthday of Mario Puzo, born in New York City (1920). He's best known as the author of the novel The Godfather (1969), which was made into a movie in 1972. People had written novels and made movies about the mafia before, but the mafia characters had always been the villains. Puzo was the first person to write about members of the mafia as the sympathetic main characters of a story. The son of Italian immigrants, he started out trying to write serious literary fiction. He published two novels that barely sold any copies. He fell into debt, trying to support his family as a freelance writer. One Christmas Eve, he had a severe gall bladder attack and took a cab to the hospital. When he got out of the cab, he was in so much pain that he fell into the gutter. Lying there, he said to himself, "Here I am, a published writer, and I am dying like a dog." He vowed that he would devote the rest of his writing life to becoming rich and famous. The Godfather became the best-selling novel of the 1970s, and many critics credit Puzo with inventing the mafia as a serious literary and cinematic subject. He went on to publish many other books, including The Sicilian (1984) and The Last Don (1996), but he always felt that his best book was the last book he wrote before he became a success - The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), about an ordinary Italian immigrant family.
It's the birthday of English novelist Sir P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse, born in Guildford, England (1881). He was one of the most popular writers of the first half of the twentieth century. His father worked as a magistrate in Hong Kong, and because his mother traveled back and forth between England and Hong Kong, he was raised mostly by a series of aunts. His books are filled with evil and terrifying aunts, and he once wrote, "It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later out pops the cloven hoof." While he was in high school, he found out that his father had gone bankrupt and wouldn't be able to pay for college. He got a job as a bank clerk and started publishing humorous stories and poetry on the side. He said, "[My] total inability to grasp what was going on [at the bank] made me something of a legend." He eventually switched to journalism, and it was as a journalist that he first traveled to the United States to cover a boxing match. He fell in love with America. He said, "Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying." He moved to Greenwich Village in 1909, and began to publish the stories that made him famous in the Saturday Evening Post. From America, he wrote about an imaginary, cartoonish England, full of extremely polite but brain-dead aristocrats, and his work was wildly popular in the years leading up to the decline of the British Empire. He is best known for books such as My Man Jeeves (1919); Carry On, Jeeves (1927); Thank You, Jeeves (1934) and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) - books about a servant named Jeeves who is constantly saving his employer, Bertie Wooster, from all kinds of absurd situations.
Wodehouse was an extremely shy man. When his wife rented them an apartment in New York, he made her promise to get one on the first floor, because he never knew what to say to the man who ran the elevator. People who knew him said that he was incredibly dull, that he was never funny in person, and that he didn't seem to have any emotions. He said, "I haven't got any violent feelings about anything. I just love writing." Over the course of his life he wrote almost a hundred books of fiction, wrote for sixteen plays, and composed lyrics for twenty-eight musicals. When asked about his technique for writing, he said, "I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit." He is known for his metaphors and similes. He described one character as "A tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'" He wrote of another, "He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg." In his lifetime, he was generally considered a writer of light entertainment, but he's since been recognized as a master prose stylist.
SATURDAY, 16 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "Break of Day," by Galway Kinnell.
Break of Day
He turns the light on, lights
the cigarette, goes out on the porch,
chainsaws a block of green wood down the grain,
chucks the pieces into the box stove,
pours in kerosene, tosses in the match
he has set fire to the next cigarette with,
stands back while the creosote-lined, sheet-
metal rust-lengths shudder but just barely
manage to direct the cawhoosh in the stove—
which sucks in ash motes through gaps
at the bottom and glares out fire blaze
through overburn-cracks at the top—
all the way to the roof and up out through into
the still starry sky starting to lighten,
sits down to a bowl of crackers and bluish milk
in which reflections of a 40-watt ceiling bulb
appear and disappear, eats, contemplates
an atmosphere containing kerosene stink,
chainsaw smoke, chainsmoke, wood smoke, wood heat,
gleams of the 40-watt ceiling bulb bobbing in blue milk.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Irish writer Oscar Wilde, born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, in Dublin (1854). He's the author of the plays Lady Windermere's Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895); and he's one of the most quotable authors in the English language.
His mother was a famous poet, journalist and Irish nationalist; and his father was a noted ear and eye doctor. He went to college at Oxford, where he began affecting an aristocratic English accent and dressing in eccentric suits and velvet knee breeches. He stayed in England after college, and made a name for himself as a brilliant conversationalist in the high society of London. A movement in art and literature called Aestheticism was becoming popular at the time, and Wilde became known as one of its leading spokesmen. The movement's motto was "Art for art's sake." Wilde began lecturing on the importance of art and beauty in people's everyday lives. He said, "We spend our days looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is art." And he said, "Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong."
He worked for a women's magazine, and he wrote essays, stories, and plays. But he didn't become well known as a serious writer until he came out with his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891, about a beautiful young man who remains young while a portrait of him grows old. Wilde then burst upon the British theater scene with four consecutive comedy hits: Lady Windermere's Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Wilde attended the opening of Lady Windermere's Fan wearing a green carnation in his suit. After the final curtain went down and the crowd erupted in applause, Wilde came out on stage and said: "Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on a great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself."
Wilde was married and had two children, but he was never completely comfortable with family life. He experimented with homosexuality, and fell in love with a young poet from Oxford named Lord Alfred Douglas. Eventually, Wilde was charged with sodomy and went to trial. He was found guilty, and sentenced to two years in prison. On the last day of the trial, Wilde wrote to Lord Douglas, "This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. . . . Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours." Wilde was released from prison in 1897, and died three years later, in a cheap hotel in Paris.
Oscar Wilde wrote:
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
" The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
" It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
It's the birthday of Noah Webster, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1758). When he was 43 years old, he began writing the first American dictionary, which was published in 1806. Spelling and pronunciation were different in different parts of the country, and Webster wanted to standardize American English. He also wanted the American language to have its own rules rather than relying on British dictionaries like Samuel Johnson's 1755 edition. It's thanks to Webster that the American and English spellings are different for words like "catalog," "honor," "theater," and "center."
It's the birthday of German novelist Gunter Grass, born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland) (1927). He's best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He joined the Hitler Youth in the 1930s, and he was drafted into the army when he was sixteen years old. He fought in World War II, then held jobs as a farmer, a miner, a stonemason, and a jazz musician. In 1956, he started writing The Tin Drum, and it was published three years later. The main character has decided to stop growing, in protest of the cruelties of German history. He gains the ability to scream loudly enough to break glass, and he communicates only through his toy drum. The Tin Drum is the first novel of a trilogy that also includes Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963). Grass's most recent work is Crabwalk (2002), a bestseller about how German guilt has become taboo. Grass said, "Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated."
It's the birthday of American playwright Eugene O'Neill, born in a Broadway hotel room in New York City (1888). His father was a famous actor, and O'Neill spent much of his childhood in trains and hotels, following his father on tours. He went to Princeton, but he was expelled after a year. He got a series of odd jobs, then went off on a gold prospecting expedition in Honduras, where he contracted malaria. After he recovered, he tried out sailing, vaudeville acting, and writing for a small town newspaper. In 1912, he fell sick again with tuberculosis and spent six months in a sanatorium. While he was there, he began to read classic playwrights and modern innovators like Ibsen and Strindberg.
When he was released, he began writing furiously, coming out with eleven one-act plays in just a few years. In 1916, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he fell in with a group that would become known as the Provincetown Players, which included writers like Susan Glaspell and Robert Edmond Jones. The group began producing O'Neill's plays on a regular basis, and they helped to revolutionize American theater.
In 1920 his play Beyond the Horizon became a popular and critical success on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. He would go on to win two more Pulitzers in the next eight years, for Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928). He continued to write until 1944, when he was diagnosed with a crippling neurological disease called cortical cerebellar atrophy. In 1956, his work began to be revived, and his posthumous play Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
SUNDAY, 17 OCTOBER, 2004
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Poem: "Men Come, Men Go, but Laundry is Forever," by Sara King.
Men Come, Men Go, but Laundry is Forever
Two towels mean he's been here,
and one towel means he's gone.
Beer bottles gathering dust mean
he's been gone awhile.
Then a new name on the phone machine,
wine glasses on the floor,
my children exchange glances,
eyebrows up and down.
So who is this guy? they ask me.
Just some friend, I say.
Does this friend have a name?
It's John, Okay?
And you're not going to meet him,
unless he's going to stay.
But he doesn't.
I declare him irresponsible,
unstable, self-centered.
He says I don't play volleyball,
I'm not skinny, and I'm not Jewish.
Then his photographs come down,
and his towel.
His toothbrush hits the trash.
I resume my old ways of keeping house—
I don't.
Do you think you'll ever remarry, Mom?
It's too late, I tell them.
I'm running out of towels.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Arthur Miller, born in New York City (1915), widely considered to be the greatest living playwright in America. His father was the wealthy owner of a coat factory, and the family had a large Manhattan apartment, a chauffeur, and a summer home at the beach. Then, in 1928, his father's business collapsed. He watched his parents sell their most valuable possessions, one by one, to pay the bills, until finally the family had to move in with relatives in Brooklyn. Miller had to share a bedroom with his grandfather. He was thirteen years old. It was terrifying for him to watch his father go from being so powerful to being so helpless. He said, "It made you want to search for ultimate values, for things that would not fall apart under pressure." He paid his way through college with a job in a research laboratory, feeding hundreds of mice every night. He had never been interested in theater before, but he thought he would enter a play writing contest to make some extra money, and he won with the first play he'd ever written. He won the same contest the following year, and decided that he was born to write plays. Unfortunately, the first play he wrote out of college, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after four performances.
He considered giving up but decided to try writing one more play. His next play, All My Sons (1947), was about a man who has been selling faulty machinery to the army, and finds out that he has caused the death of twenty-one soldiers. The play ran on Broadway for 328 performances, and was made into a movie the following year. Miller used the money he made from All My Sons to buy four hundred acres of farmland in Connecticut. In 1948, he moved to Connecticut by himself, and spent several months building a ten by twelve foot cabin by hand. As he sawed the wood and pounded the nails, he thought about the main characters of his next play: a salesman, his wife, and his two sons. He knew how the play would begin, but he wouldn't let himself start writing until he had finished the cabin. When it was finally completed, he woke up one morning and started writing. He wrote all day, had dinner, and then wrote until he had finished the first act in the middle of the night. When he finally got in bed to go to sleep, he found that his cheeks were wet with tears, and his throat was sore from speaking and shouting the lines of dialogue as he wrote. The play was Death of a Salesman (1949), about a man named Willy Loman who loses his job and realizes that he doesn't have much to show for his life's work. Miller wrote, "For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." It has gone on to be the most widely produced play in the world, playing in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Argentina. It has been particularly popular in China and Japan. Miller has gone on to have an extremely long and productive career, publishing short fiction, essays, an autobiography, and many more plays. His most recent play, Resurrection Blues, premiered in 2002 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
It's the birthday of novelist Nathanael West, born Nathan Weinstein in New York City (1904). He was inspired to write his first major novel when he met a woman who wrote an advice column for a local newspaper. She showed him a few of the letters she had received from readers, expecting that he would find them funny. Instead, he was heartbroken at how desperate these people were, and he wrote his novel Miss Lonely Hearts (1933), about an advice columnist who is overwhelmed by the sadness of the people who write to him. It got great reviews, but within weeks of its publication, the publishing house went bankrupt. West tried working for a few literary journals, but they all folded. He wrote a parody of the Horatio Alger novels his father had given him called A Cool Million (1934), but it got bad reviews and it didn't sell. He finally decided to move to California and try to write for the movies. He drifted around Hollywood for a few years, unable to find a job, living off money from friends. He got to know the people who lived on the margin of Hollywood, people who had hoped they would make it as movie stars, but who failed and became stuntmen, extras, criminals, and prostitutes. He loved the way they talked, and considered compiling a dictionary of Hollywood slang. Instead, he wrote a novel about them called The Day of the Locust (1939). It's now considered one of the best novels ever written about Hollywood.
