Monday, 15 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: Poem: "Atavistic" by Irene McKinney, from Vivid Companion © Vandalia Press. Reprinted with permission.
Atavistic
I wanted to walk without clothing
in the woods beside the creek,
and to come to the barn at night
and sleep beside the horses, curled
in the smell and scratch of hay
with the bitch and pups.
The life of the house was flat,
filled with monotonous talking,
passing to and fro among the rooms,
and for what. My mother hated
animals, the way they ate the
food and dirtied the floor.
They were her enemies; she fought
their right to be there and
would have wiped them off the earth
if she could have. If a cat or a dog
came too close to the back door she
threw scalding water on it, and
was righteous in her anger, shouting
that they were not human and
didn't feel real pain.
If we must choose sides, I said
As a child, I take
The side of the animals.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the first woman ever taken seriously by the American art world Georgia O'Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). She studied art in college and then supported herself teaching art at various colleges, but she found that teaching left her no time for her own work, and turpentine smell of the art classrooms made her sick. She went for months and years on end without painting anything, only to start over again and try something new.
Without her knowledge, a series of her charcoal drawings wound up in the hands of the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. Looking at the drawings, he shouted, "Finally, a woman on paper!" He put the drawings in his art gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City without even asking permission. Suddenly, Georgia O'Keeffe, an unknown twenty-nine-year-old art teacher, became the talk of the American art world.
At first, she was angry that her work had been without her permission, but after she met Stieglitz, they hit it off, and eventually got married. She moved to New York, and started to produce the giant paintings of flowers for which she is known. She said, "I only paint [flowers] because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."
On a trip to Taos, New Mexico, O'Keeffe fell in love with the desert. She felt that the thin, dry air helped her to see better, and she spent the rest of her career to painting desert mountains, flowers, stones, and skulls.
It's the birthday of Marianne Moore, born in Kirkwood, Missouri (1887). Her father was an engineer and inventor who had spent his life trying to build a smokeless furnace. When his business failed, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an institution for the mentally ill. Marianne Moore was born just after her parents had separated, and she never met her father.
She went with her mother to live with her grandfather, the pastor of a Presbyterian Church. She had started writing poetry by the time she was eight years old. One of her first known poems was addressed to Santa Claus, requesting a horn for her brother and a doll for herself, in rhyme. When she was nine years old, her mother wrote in a letter, "She dotes on poetry to a horrible degree. I know we shall yet have a poetess in the family, and finish our days languishing in an attic."
She went to Bryn Mawr College, where she hoped to study English literature, but after a professor wrote a disparaging comment on one of her papers, she switched to biology. Working in a laboratory had a profound effect on her writing. She said, "Precision, economy of statement, logic...drawing and identifying, liberated [my] imagination."
After college, Moore got a series of jobs teaching typing and bookkeeping, and she contributed poems to Bryn Mawr's alumni magazine. Then, in 1915, she published two poems in The Egoist, an influential literary magazine which was also publishing the early work of James Joyce at the time. Her work caught the attention of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and she moved to Greenwich Village to join the literary scene there. She became friends with poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. She went to parties every night, and attended art shows and exhibitions, even though she went on living with her mother and read the Bible every day.
Her first collection Poems (1921) was published without her knowledge by the poet Hilda Doolittle, who admired her work. Her poetry was often compared to modern painting, and she was known for her eccentric titles, including "Holes Bored by Scissors in a Work Bag," "In 'Designing a Cloak to Cloak His Designs,' You Wrested from Oblivion, a Coat of Immortality for Your Own Use," and "To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity."
She often just wrote about random objects, such as a picture of an Egyptian desert rat, a can of shoe-polish, a magazine advertisement for Missouri hogs, or a mechanical crow. She's perhaps best known for her poem that begins, "The Mind...is an enchanted thing / like the glaze on a / katydid-wing."
Moore became a celebrity poet in her old age. The Ford Motor Company hired her to come up with a name for a new automobile. She suggested "Utopian Turtletop" but Ford decided to call the car the Edsel.
She was an avid baseball fan for all of her adult life and, when she was eighty-one years old, she was asked to throw out the first ball for the opening day at Yankee Stadium. She threw a sinking slider. She said that one of the most beautiful things in the world was, "That eight-shaped stitch with which the outer leather is drawn tight on a baseball."
Marianne Moore's Complete Poems came out in 1981.
She wrote, "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."
It's the birthday of the poet Ted Berrigan, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1934). He was the author of many collections of poetry including Poems, In Brief (1971), Red Wagon (1976), and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988).
It's the birthday of the novelist J. G. [James Graham] Ballard, born in Shanghai, China (1930). He's the author of many surrealist science fiction novels, including The Crystal World (1966), Crash (1973), and The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), but he's best known for the novel he wrote about his own childhood Empire of the Sun (1984).
He grew up in China, where his father was an executive with a British textile manufacturer. He lived in a houseful of Chinese servants and a chauffeur drove him everywhere he wanted to go. He said, "Shanghai [was like] a cross between Las Vegas and ancient Rome, full of American cars and American exuberance...There were dozens of casinos and radio stations, unlimited advertising and publicity stunts, bizarre parades."
Then, when he was twelve years old, World War II broke out and Japan invaded China. Ballard and his parents were placed in an internment camp. They lived in a tiny room and ate barely enough food to survive. Shanghai went from being a city of extravagance to a city of empty apartment blocks, of abandoned factories, of empty airfields.
After the war, Ballard's family moved back to England, a country he had only read about. He had imagined England was a country full of beautiful rolling meadows and village greens, and when his ship docked at Southhampton, he thought they had come to the wrong country. On the train to London, he watched the bombed out landscapes rolling past his window. He said, "Everything was much greyer and grimmer and darker and colder than I had been led to believe... Even the sun seemed to be grey, and it rained perpetually. Everyone looked small and tired and white-faced and badly nourished."
Ballard started writing fiction in the 1950s, at a time England was rebuilding itself and English culture was beginning to absorb things like television, mess merchandising, and supermarkets. Ballard said, "The so-called mainstream novel wasn't really looking at [modern life]. The only form of fiction which was trying to make head or tail of what was going on in our world was science-fiction."
Ballard became the leading figure of the new British school of science fiction, which tried to write science fiction about the real world, not just alien planets. Ballard said, "The moral imperative facing any writer interested in science or technology should be an imaginative response to the world five minutes away from us, not some invented planet with alien life forms."
Many critics consider his masterpiece to be the novel Crash (1973), about a cult of people obsessed with car accidents. When he submitted Crash for publication, the first person who read it said, "This author is beyond psychiatric help."
J.G. Ballard's most recent novel is Super-Cannes, which came out in 2002.
He said, "Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."
TUESDAY, 16 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: Poem: "An Introduction To Some Poems" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems © Graywolf Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission.
An Introduction to Some Poems
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Andrea Barrett, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1954). She is known for writing about botanists, oceanographers and geologists in novels such as The Forms of Water (1993) and The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998).
She grew up on Cape Cod, and spent most of her time near the ocean, fascinated by sea life. She decided to study biology in college and went on to study zoology in graduate school.
At some point, she decided she was more interested in history than biology, and started studying medieval religion. It was while she was writing papers about the Spanish Inquisition that she realized she should be a writer. She said, "I'd go to the library and pull out everything, fill my room and become obsessed with the shape and the texture of the paper, and the way the words look, trying to make it all dramatic. At some point I realized: 'Hey, this isn't history, and I'm not a scholar.'"
She worked as a secretary in medical labs, trying to write. After years of struggling to finish her first novel, she showed it to a writer at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and he told her to throw it away. She was so upset that she cried for a day, but then she took his advice and wrote her novel Lucid Stars which was published in 1988. Her collection of short stories Ship Fever (1996) became a best-seller after winning the National Book Award.
Because so many of Barrett's books deal with scientists, she constantly has to do research before she writes. She said, "I love research...I describe a [sailor] character who has to go belowdecks, and I think, 'So what is belowdecks?...Then I have to get books about ship building, ship history, immigration history, so I can write a little more...I love learning that way—lurching from subject area to subject area. When you're lit by your own purposes, it's astonishing how easily you can leap into a new field and get to that center of passion."
In order to finish her book The Voyage of the Narwhal, about a group of British scientists exploring the Arctic, Barrett traveled to Antarctica herself.
Her most recent book is Servants of the Map (2002).
Andrea Barrett said, "I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they're any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There's that same sense of helplessness, of lacking control over how much of your life you want to devote to it."
She also said, "It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It's the greatest secret of the world."
It's the birthday of the novelist Chinua Achebe, born in Ogidi, Nigeria (1930). His great uncle was the man who first received European missionaries into his village. His father became one of the village's early converts to Christianity. Achebe was baptized as a Christian and spent his childhood reading the Bible every day, going to church every Sunday. But he was drawn to the customs of the non-Christians in his community, their traditional festivals and the elaborate masks they wore during religious ceremonies.
He went to a school run by Europeans and read Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Conrad. While reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness, about the colonization of Africa, Achebe found himself identifying with the white colonizers against the African savages. He said, "Eventually I realized...I was not on Marlowe's boat steaming up the Congo...I was one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the river bank, making horrid faces." He decided to become a writer to give voice to those strange beings in Conrad's novel.
The result was his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), one of the first novels ever written about European colonization from the point of view of the colonized native people. It became an international best-seller, and sparked a worldwide interest in African literature. His success helped inspire a whole generation of Africans to believe that they could be writers. He has been called the forefather of African literature in English.
His most recent novel is Home and Exile (2000).
It's the birthday of the novelist Jose Saramago, born in the small village northeast of Lisbon, Portugal (1922). The child of peasants, he grew up on his family's pig farm. In the winter, he often slept with the piglets to keep warm. While working on the daily chores, his grandfather told him endless stories about local legends, ghosts, fights and deaths. Saramago said, "Maybe [my grandfather] repeated the stories for himself, so as not to forget them, or else to enrich them with new detail...Needless to say, I imagined he was master of all the knowledge in the world."
His family moved to Lisbon when he was a teenager, and since his parents couldn't afford an academic school, he went to a technical school and became an auto mechanic. The technical school did offer one literature course, though, and Saramago fell in love with books. Every night after work at the repair shop, he would go to the local public library and read.
He published his first novel Land of Sin (1947) when he was twenty-four, but after writing two more novels which he considered failures, he stopped writing fiction for the next thirty years. He said, "That was maybe one of the wisest decisions of my life...I had nothing worthwhile to say." He supported himself as a metal worker, and slowly began to write book reviews and articles for local newspapers. When Portugal came under the rule of an oppressive dictator, he jointed the revolutionary movement to overthrow the government. He became the editor of an opposition newspaper, but the government shut the paper down and he lost his job.
Saramago was in his mid-fifties, unemployed, and blacklisted by the government. He decided he had no choice but to go back to writing fiction. He later said, "Until the age of fifty we have to learn, and after fifty we have to work until the end occurs."
He went to live in one of the poorest villages in his country and wrote a novel Raised from the Ground (1980) about three generations of a peasant family. He tried to write the novel the way a group of people would tell a story, so he didn't capitalize any letters, didn't indent any paragraphs, and he used no punctuation other than commas. When friends told him the book was almost impossible to read, he told them to read it aloud, and they suddenly found it easy to follow.
He went on writing political and fantastic novels through the eighties and nineties. His real international success came when he published Blindness (1997), a novel about a mysterious disease that causes everyone in a city to lose their sight. A year later, in 1998, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His most recent book is The Double, which came out last month.
Jose Saramago said, "If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
It's the birthday of the essayist Phillip Lopate, born in New York City (1943). He's the author of novels, poetry and several collections of essays, including Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis (1981) and Against Joie de Vivre (1989), in which he wrote, "The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun.'"
His most recent book is Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (2004).
It's the birthday of the playwright Paula Vogel, born in Washington, D.C. (1951). She's the author of many plays, including The Baltimore Waltz (1992) and How I Learned to Drive (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Her play The Oldest Profession (1981) was revived in New York City this year.
It's the birthday of the playwright George Kaufman, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1889). He was a humorist and a collaborator on many satirical plays, including Animal Crackers (1928), Strike Up the Band (1930) and You Can't Take It With You (1938).
He was also known as one of the fiercest drama critics of his day. Once, while viewing a play he didn't like, he poked the woman sitting in front of him and said, "Madam, would you mind putting on your hat?" He was once asked by a press agent how to get a new actress coverage by the major newspapers, and he responded, "Shoot her."
WEDNESDAY, 17 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Then It Was Simple" by Cortney Davis from Leopold's Maneuvers © University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted with permission.
Then It Was Simple
You walked up Sylvandell Drive
on the coldest night. Soon, Father would be home,
easing the grey Plymouth into the one-car garage,
and Mother, who was always home,
would be cooking meatloaf with its two
sizzling strips of bacon. Snow stung your face,
snow crunched beneath your boots and the glow
from Pittsburgh's steel mills hung in the sky.
In such a place, in 1955, Mary could appear to you
casually, leaning out the neighbor's window,
a blue domestic angel with a movie star face,
round arms crossed on the sill, her brown hair
in a friendly page boy. She smiled, you smiled back,
your sled tugging behind you,
grounding you, and the frozen snow and the whirl of gravity
holding you, and Mary,
as if she were not from another world,
so happy to see you.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1558 that Queen Elizabeth I acceded to the English throne upon the death of her sister, Queen Mary. She reigned for 45 years, one of the great eras in English history. Near the end of her reign, she said to her subjects: "Though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves."
Despite the dark events of war and religious murders, Elizabeth's reign is best remembered for extraordinary achievements. She believed it was her divine mission to lead England, and under her direction, the country became strong and unified. Commerce and industry prospered. The queen herself was an expert musician and her court was the cultural center of its day. Some of the great writers in English literature—Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare—appeared during her reign. Spenser's masterpiece, The Faerie Queen (1596) is even dedicated to her.
It's the birthday of American novelist and historian Shelby Foote, born in Greenville, Mississippi (1916). He was a successful novelist when, in 1952, he accepted the suggestion of his publisher to write a short history of the Civil War to complement his novel Shiloh (1952). Foote is best known for his trilogy, The Civil War: A Narrative.
Foote grew up on the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, once a great swamp filled with alligators and water moccasin snakes. Foote's father was a manager at Armour & Co. and died of septicemia from an operation on his nose when Foote was five. Foote's mother never remarried. She spent her time getting him out of trouble. He was editor of the high school paper and liked to give the principal a hard time. When Foote applied to attend college at Chapel Hill, the principal wrote a letter saying not to let Foote into their school under any circumstances. Foote got in his car and drove to North Carolina to register anyway and told them he didn't think they meant it so they let him in. He was a literary prodigy there along with his classmate Walker Percy, who was his best friend for sixty years.
Foote's interest in writing began with his interest in reading. When he was eleven he won as a prize a copy of David Copperfield. Up until then, he'd read The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift and Tarzan. He said, "This was a whole other world, and it was a world of art. I couldn't have defined it as that, but, one thing, I knew David Copperfield better than anybody I knew in the real world, including myself. I said, 'My God,' to myself, 'this is a whole world.'"
As a teenager, Foote sold poems to magazines for 50 cents apiece. He read and loved the work of Marcel Proust, William Faulkner and Walker Percy's uncle, Will Percy.
When Foote was 19 years old and he and Walker Percy were planning to drive from Foote's hometown, Greenville, Mississippi, through William Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Foote suggested they stop in Oxford and try to meet him. Percy said he wasn't going to just knock on his door and Foote said he would. Percy waited in the car while Foote went up the cedar-tree lined walkway to Faulkner's house. He was greeted in the yard by three hounds, two fox terriers and a Dalmatian. Soon, a small man, barefoot, naked save for a pair of shorts, and seemingly drunk, appeared and asked Foote what he wanted. "Could you tell me where to find a copy of Marble Faun, Mr. Faulkner?" Foote asked. Faulkner was gruff and told him to contact his agent. Faulkner later befriended Foote, who walked Faulkner around the Civil War battlefields of Shiloh.
Foote once told Faulkner on one of their outings, "You know, I have every right to be a better writer than you. Your literary idols were Joseph Conrad and Sherwood Anderson. Mine are Marcel Proust and you. My writers are better than yours."
Foote started a novel in his late 20s, but World War II interrupted and he served in the European theater under General George Patton as a captain of field artillery. He carried with him, in his baggage, G.F.R. Henderson's Stonewall Jackson, and had Douglas South Freeman's R.E. Lee with him as often as he could lug it around. He spent his spare time drawing maps and figuring out what happened during the Civil War.
He said, "I think history has a plot. You don't make it up; you discover it."
After the service, Foote returned to fiction and sold his first short story to the Saturday Evening Post in 1946. He published several highly regarded novels—including Tournament (1949), Follow Me Down (1950) and Love in a Dry Season (1951)—before he turned to the first Civil War volume in 1952.
What Foote thought might be a four-year project turned into a three-volume effort that took two decades, topping 1.6 million words and a total of 2,093 pages when published. He compared the project to swallowing a cannonball. He wrote all three volumes in Memphis. Scores of television viewers were introduced to Foote during Ken Burns' 1991 PBS series "The Civil War."
He said, "The kind of country we are emerged from the Civil War, not from the Revolution. The Revolution provided us with a constitution; it broke us loose from England; it made us free. But the Civil War really defined us."
Foote writes six to eight hours a day seven days a week in his bedroom. He writes five or six hundred words a day (about 100,00 words a year) with a dip pen, which you have to dip in ink after every three or four words. After he finishes writing, he sets it aside to dry, then copies it off on a typewriter and puts it on the stack without editing, because Foote doesn't see a need to edit his work. He likes to be left alone when he writes. He often quotes words John Keats wrote in a letter: "A fact is not a truth until you love it."
Foote said, "I'm privately convinced that most of the really bad writing the world's ever seen has been done under the influence of what's called inspiration. Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time."
And he said, "I have noticed that when a man dies, no matter at what age or by what cause, his life then has a beginning and a middle and an end, and sometimes his death explains his youth."
And, "A writer's like anybody else except when he's writing."
It was on this day in 1869 that the Suez Canal was formally opened for navigation. The Canal was officially inaugurated in a lavish ceremony. French, British, Russian, and other royalty were invited for the event which coincided with the re-planning of Cairo. A highway was constructed linking Cairo to the new city of Ismailia, an Opera House was built, and Verdi was commissioned to compose his famous opera, "Aida" for the opening ceremony.
The digging of the canal began on April 25, 1859 and continued for ten years. The sea-level waterway is 100 miles long, connecting, by way of three natural lakes, the Mediterranean Sea with the Gulf of Suez and the Indian Ocean. It is the longest Canal that has no locks, and it can be widened and deepened at any time when necessary.
More than 2.4 million Egyptian workers took part, of which more than 125,000 lost their lives.
It's the birthday of film director Martin Scorsese, born 1942 in Flushing, in the New York borough of Queens. He is known for his direction of movies like "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1975), "Taxi Driver" (1976), "Raging Bull" (1980), "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988), "Goodfellas" (1990), "The Ages of Innocence" (1993) and "Gangs of New York" (2002).
Scorsese grew up in Little Italy in Manhattan where he lived until he was 24. Scorsese had asthma and wasn't able to work odd jobs during the summers or play with the neighborhood boys. Instead, he went to movies with his father and afterward sketched motion picture scenes on drawing pads.
Scorsese was raised a devout Roman Catholic and enrolled in a seminary with the intention of becoming a priest. He was expelled for roughhousing during prayers and transferred to a high school in the Bronx where he found in filmmaking his true vocation. He went to New York University and won awards for his student films "What's a Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?" (1963) and "It's Not Just You, Murray" (1964).
Scorsese directed his first feature film, "Who's That Knocking At My Door" (1968) while teaching at NYU. Scorsese won widespread acclaim with "Mean Streets" (1973), based on a relationship between a couple of small-time hoods (played by Harvey Keitel and the then-unknown Robert De Niro) in the criminal world of Little Italy. In a long New Yorker review, Pauline Kael called the movie "a triumph of personal filmmaking."
Along with movies, Scorsese made documentaries about antiwar demonstrations and Woodstock. He made a 45-minute documentary of an after-dinner conversation with his parents. The film, "Italianamerican" (!973), includes his parents telling stories and a demonstration of his mother making spaghetti sauce. It received a standing ovation at the 1974 New York Film Festival, during which his mother blew kisses to the audience.
Martin Scorsese said, "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out."
THURSDAY, 18 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Fame" by Irene McKinney, from Vivid Companion © Vandalia Press. Reprinted with permission.
Fame
That I would become known;
that someone would know me.
I would recognized, and not
pitiable; and I would remain
as strong as I was, if not stronger,
and overcome my circumstances
through sheer will, and that
others younger or less talented
would not become known,
or at least not until I was.
Then, that recognition would
reward me for all I'd undergone,
my bravery of thought, my refusal
of dishonest love, and my goodwill
would be returned to me manyfold,
after the years and years.
And I would not be bitter, nor petty,
nor would I act on selfish interests,
nor suppress my generosity.
And none of this was me.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1928 that Mickey Mouse was born when the first sound-synchronized cartoon to attract widespread public notice, Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie," premiered in New York at the Colony Theater. The black and white cartoon featured Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Pegleg Pete and lasted seven minutes. With Walt Disney as the voice of Mickey, the cartoon met with great success.
In 1998, "Steamboat Willie" was one of 25 films added by the Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board to the National Film Registry.
As Walt Disney recalled of the cartoon's first showing, "The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!"
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). During her childhood, her family spent every April through November in the Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entymologist, did research for the government. She was eleven years old before she completed a full year of school. When she was about six she began to write morality plays, comic books, poems, and a novel about an ant which she never finished. While in high school she wrote poetry and thought about a career in home economics. But, influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, at sixteen she committed herself to a writing career. She said, "It was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do."
Atwood studied English at the University of Toronto. She reviewed books and wrote articles for the college literary magazine. Her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone, was published in 1961, the year she graduated. She went to Radcliffe and then Harvard, where she studied Victorian literature and worked as a waitress and market researcher and wrote in her free time.
While at Harvard, Atwood realized realized that no one had ever published a critical study of Canadian literature. She later read all she could and wrote Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). She claimed that Canadian literature reflects a tendency of Canadians to be both victims and survivalists. The book sparked a debate and the book sold 85,000 copies within ten years, an impressive sales record for a critical study.
With the book's success, Atwood craved privacy and moved to a one-hundred-acre farm in Ontario to write. She published several collections of poems, in cluding You Are Happy (1974), along with the novels The Edible Woman (1969), Lady Oracle (1976), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Cat's Eye (1990). In 2002, she published Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.
Margaret Atwood said, "The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose."
It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup (1901), born in Jefferson, Iowa. He was a pioneer in scientific polling techniques, and his name became a household word synonymous with the opinion poll.
Gallup grew up in an octagonal house built by his father, whose name was also George. Gallup used ride his bike to deliver milk produced by the family's dairy herd. He was athletic in school, but was more drawn to facts and figures.
Gallup enrolled in the University of Iowa in 1918, played football and became the editor of the Daily Iowan. While editor in the early 1920s, Gallup conducted what is widely considered the first poll in human history. He took a survey to find the prettiest girl on the campus. The winner was Ophelia Smith, whom Gallup later married.
From 1929 to 1931, he headed the Drake University School of Journalism, left to teach at Northwestern University and conduct newspaper research in the Chicago area, and in 1935 set up the American Institute of Public Opinion at Princeton University. While teaching and doing research, Gallup found that small samples of the populace could predict general attitudes. He gained recognition for accurately predicting Franklin Roosevelt's victory over Alf Landon in 1936.
Gallup's biggest blunder, the prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman in 1948, was a minor stumbling block. At one time, nearly 200 newspapers published his reports. At the height of his career, Gallup spoke out against the practice of exit polling in elections and advocated election reforms still being discussed today. Gallup died of a heart attack in 1984 at his summer home in Switzerland. His worldwide Gallup Organization is now run by his son, George Gallup, Jr.
George Gallup said, "I could prove God statistically."
And he said, "Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense."
It was on this day in 1978 that Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple, ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink cyanide-poisoned punch. He told guards to shoot anyone who refused or tried to escape.
Over a year before, Jones abruptly moved his flock to Jonestown, a settlement in the jungles of Guyana, a country the size of Idaho on South America's northern coast. The plan was to create an egalitarian agricultural community. But Peoples Temple members who worked the fields and lived on rice soon learned it was more like a prison. Loudspeakers broadcast Jones' voice at all hours. Anyone who broke the rules was punished by being put in a 6-by-4-foot underground enclosure. Misbehaving children were dangled head-first into a well late at night.
In May 1978, Deborah Layton, Jones' trusted financial lieutenant, managed to escape. She went to the U.S. consulate and later to newspapers warning everyone that Jones was conducting drills for a mass murder-suicide.
Six months later, U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, who had been contacted by a number of people worried about their relatives in the Peoples Temple, led a delegation of reporters and relatives to Jonestown. Ryan's group arrived on November 17. Their visit began happily enough, but things went bad after some Jonestown residents indicated they wanted to defect. Ryan's group was ambushed the next day as they tried to leave at a nearby airstrip. Ryan and four others were killed. Later that night, Jones told his followers "the time has come for us to meet in another place," as the mass suicide began. He was found shot through the head.
It's the birthday of playwright and humorist Sir W[illiam] S[chwenk] Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, born in London (1836). He met composer Arthur Sullivan in 1870. They started working together the following year and produced a series of hits including H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), The Gondoliers (1889), and others. Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on 14 operas in the 25-year period from 1871 to 1896.
It's the birthday of German-American novelist and playwright Klaus Mann, born in Munich (1906). He was the son of Thomas Mann and began writing when he was seventeen. He published a collection of short stories called Vor dem Leben (Before Life) (1925) and worked as a theater critic while he wrote his first novel, Der Fromme Tanz (The Pious Dance), (1925) and his first play, Anja and Esther (1925). He left Germany for Amsterdam in 1933 when Hitler came to power, knowing he could not bear life under Hitler's dictatorship.
Mann spent his short life struggling for an identity apart from that of his famous father. He published nearly thirty books and attempted, in his work, to battle fascism in Europe. His greatest work, Mephisto (1936) examines the artist as traitor and is the story of a gifted actor who attains a position of influence within the Third Reich. The book is based on the life of Gustaf Grundgens, an actor who remained in Germany and became manager of the Nazi's State Theater. When the book came out, Grundgens managed to have it suppressed for many years. In 1977, nearly three decades after Mann died, the book was translated and made into an Oscar-winning film in 1981.
Mann became a citizen of the United States in 1943. He had been accepted into the U.S. Army and was sent to Europe in 1944. He participated in the Allied invasion of Italy and wrote for the army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. He said, "I stubbornly hope to live long enough to witness a state of international affairs which may be a little less confused and horrifying than the world we have to face at this moment." In a state of clinical depression, Klaus Mann took his own life in Cannes, France, in 1949.
It's the birthday of astronaut Alan Shepard, born in 1923 in East Derry, New Hampshire. Rear Admiral Shepard was one of the Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959, and he holds the distinction of being the first American to journey into space. On May 5, 1961, in the Freedom 7 spacecraft, he was launched by a Redstone vehicle on a flight which carried him to an altitude of 116 miles. Shepard made his second space flight as spacecraft commander on Apollo 14, January 31–February 9, 1971. Shepard and his team spent 33 hours on the moon's surface where they performed experiments and collected almost 100 pounds of lunar samples for return to earth.
FRIDAY, 19 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil," by Sharon Olds, from The Wellspring © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil
In the strange quiet,
I realize
there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—
Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman’s body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful call of a young animal.
Literary and Historical Notes:
On this day in 1861, Julia Ward Howe awoke from a deep sleep and wrote 5 verses of a song straight out on a scrap of paper. Sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body,” it soon became the anthem of the North during the Civil War: The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
It was on this day in 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln got up in front of about 15,000 people seated at a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and delivered the Gettysburg Address. Gettysburg was the pivotal battle of the Civil War, with 45,000 casualties over three days in early July that year. After the battle, a Gettysburg man named David Wills had the terrible task of identifying and burying the dead. Wills wrote Lincoln and asked him to attend the cemetery's dedication ceremony, because, he said, Lincoln's presence would:
"...kindle anew in the breasts of the Comrades of those brave dead a confidence that they who sleep in death on the Battle Field are not forgotten by those highest in Authority."
It was a foggy, cold morning, and Lincoln arrived about 10 a.m. Around noon the sun broke out as the crowds gathered on a hill overlooking the battlefield. A military band played, a local preacher offered a long prayer, and orator Edward Everett spoke for over two hours. Around 3 p.m. Lincoln got up to speak. He spoke for only two minutes, and when he sat down most of the people in the back of the crowd didn't know he'd even spoken: Lincoln thought his speech, the Gettysburg Address, was a failure. He ended with:
"From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
It's the birthday of critic and poet Allen Tate, born in Winchester, Kentucky (1899).
It's the birthday of poet Sharon Olds, born in San Francisco (1942).
SATURDAY, 20 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Forty-Five," by Hayden Carruth, from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
Forty-Five
When I was forty-five I lay for hours
beside a pool, the green hazy
springtime water, and watched
the salamanders coupling, how they drifted lazily,
their little hands floating before them,
aimlessly in and out of the shadows, fifteen
or twenty of them, and suddenly two
would dart together and clasp
one another belly to belly
the way we do, tender and vigorous, and then
would let go and drift away
at peace, lazily,
in the green pool that was their world
and for a while was mine.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Deborah Eisenberg, born in Chicago (1945), best known for her short story collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986) and Under the 82nd Airborne (1992).
"I wish I were faster, and more fluent, but it just takes many months of scrabbling around in swampy territory to figure out what it is that I want. There's always a point at which I think I have a final draft, then I read it and ask myself, 'Why have I written this?' Then I go back and write it again and that's the final draft."
It's the birthday of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, an East Rand mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa (1923). Her father was a Jewish jeweler originally from Latvia, and her mother was British. She went to a convent school where she started writing at the age of nine. Her first short story, Come Again Tomorrow (1938), appeared in a Johannesburg magazine when she was 15. By her 20's she had her first piece accepted by the New Yorker, which has been publishing her work ever since. Her sixteen collections of short stories and thirteen novels often explore the issue of race in South Africa, and deal with relationships among white radicals, liberals, and blacks. Her best known novel is probably The Conservationist (1974), which won the Booker Prize in Great Britain.
It's the birthday of journalist and commentator (Alfred) Alistair Cooke, born in Manchester, England (1908). He first came to the United States in 1932, on a scholarship to study theater at Yale University. He came back as a commentator on American culture and society with a weekly, 15-minute radio program, Letter from America, which began in 1946. It was broadcast to fifty-two countries on the BBC World Service, and was the longest running radio program in history. Cooke passed away earlier this year.
It's the birthday of cartoonist Chester Gould, born in Pawnee, Oklahoma (1900), creator of Dick Tracy, who first appeared in the Detroit Daily Mirror in 1931. Originally called Plainclothes Tracy, Dick was a clean-cut, square-jawed, plainclothes detective who faced an ugly assortment of villains with names like Mole and Pruneface. The comic strip also featured a "Crimestopper Notebook," which offered tips on crime prevention.
It's the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri (1889), for whom the Hubble Telescope is named. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a law degree. He passed the Kentucky bar exam in 1913, but gave up practicing law after one year to return to Chicago for a doctorate in astronomy. "I chucked the law for astronomy," he said, "and I knew that even if I were second or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered." Hubble went to work at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, where he discovered that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way, opening up a whole new field of astronomy.
He later discovered that these distant galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way; in other words, the concept of the expanding universe, which has been called "the most spectacular astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."
SUNDAY, 21 NOVEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Pre-Holiday PMS," by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer © Story Line Press. Reprinted with permission.
Pre-Holiday PMS
I don't want to be thankful this year.
I don't want to eat turkey and I could care
if I never again tasted
your mother's cornbread stuffing.
I hate sweet potato pie. I hate mini marshmallows.
I hate doing dishes while you watch football.
I hate Christmas. I hate name-drawing.
I hate tree-trimming, gift-wrapping,
and Rudolph the zipper-necked red-nosed reindeer.
I just want to skip the whole merry mess—
unless, of course, you'd like to try
to change my mind. You could start
by telling me I'm pretty and leaving me
your charge cards
and all your cash.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of English novelist Beryl Bainbridge, born in Liverpool, England (1933). Her books include The Birthday Boys (1993), which was fashioned around Captain Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole; and The Dressmaker (1973), about a young woman who lives with her two unmarried aunts in Liverpool during World War Two.
It's the birthday of novelist Marilyn French, born in New York City (1929). She wrote her thesis on James Joyce (1976), and a year later came out with her novel The Women's Room (1977), which became a huge success and enabled French to write and publish without doubt and anxiety about money. Her other titles include Her Mother's Daughter (1987), Our Father (1993), and Women's History of the World (2000).
It's the birthday of children's novelist Elizabeth George Speare, born in Melrose, Massachusetts (1908). She's best known for her book The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958), about a sixteen-year old girl who becomes caught up in a witch hunt in colonial New England.
It's the birthday of tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins, born in St. Joseph, Missouri (1901). He picked up the tenor saxophone—which, up to that time, was considered a kind of vaudeville novelty instrument—when he was nine. It was Coleman Hawkins, more than anyone else, who developed the tenor saxophone into one of the most popular jazz instruments.
It was during his decade with Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra (1923-1934) that Hawkins developed as a soloist. In 1934, Hawkins traveled to Europe, where he stayed for five years, playing with most of the great European jazzmen, like Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. When war broke out in Europe, Hawkins returned to the United States (1939), where he laid down his most celebrated recording, "Body and Soul."
It's the birthday of French philosopher and writer Voltaire, born François Marie Arouet, in Paris (1694). He studied law, but dropped it to become a writer. He produced a series of satirical poems which landed him in the Bastille for a year. Twice in his life, he had to leave France because of what he'd written on political subjects. The publication of his anti-establishment Philosophical Letters forced him to flee to the country in 1734, and he didn't return for 28 years. His best known work is the philosophical tale Candide (1766), in which the optimistic Dr. Pangloss declares, "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
On this day in 1620, 41 men aboard the Mayflower, at anchor off Cape Cod, signed what was called the Mayflower Compact, a document which created a body politic and bound the signers to its laws. The Mayflower Compact became the foundation of the government established by the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
