Monday, 20 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: : "The Cowboy's Lament" from Folk Songs and Spirituals.
The Cowboy's Lament
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped up in white linen,
Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.
"Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the dead march as you carry me along;
Take me to the green valley, there lay the sod o'er me,
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.
"I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy" —
These words he did say as I boldly stepped by.
"Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story;
I was shot in the breast and I know I must die.
"Let sixteen gamblers come handle my coffin
Let sixteen cowboys come sing me a song.
Take me to the graveyard and lay the sod o'er me,
For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong.
"My friends and relations they live in the Nation,
They know not where their boy has gone.
He first came to Texas and hired to a ranchman,
Oh, I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.
"Go write a letter to my gray-haired mother,
And carry the same to my sister so dear;
But not a word of this shall you mention
When a crowd gathers round you my story to hear.
"Then beat your drum lowly and play your fife slowly,
Beat the Dead March as you carry me along;
We all love our cowboys so young and so handsome,
We all love our cowboys although they've done wrong.
"There is another more dear than a sister,
She'll bitterly weep when she hears I am gone.
There is another who will win her affections,
For I'm a young cowboy and they say I've done wrong.
"Go gather around you a crowd of young cowboys,
And tell then the story of this my sad fate;
Tell one and the other before they go further
To stop their wild roving before 'tis too late.
"Oh muffle your drums, then play your fifes merrily;
Play the Dead March as you go along.
And fire your guns right over my coffin;
There goes an unfortunate boy to his home.
"It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing,
It was once in the saddle I used to go gay;
First to the dram-house and then to the card-house;
Got shot in the breast, I am dying to-day.
"Got six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin;
Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Put roses to deaden the clods as they fall.
"Then swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly,
And give a wild whoop as you carry me along,
And in the grave throw me and roll the sod o'er me,
For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.
"Go bring me a cup, a cup of cold water,
To cool my parched lips," the cowboy said;
Before I turned, the spirit had left him
And gone to its Giver -- the cowboy was dead.
We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly,
And bitterly wept as we bore him along;
For we all loved our comrade, so brave, young and
handsome,
We all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Hortense Calisher, born in Manhattan (1911). She grew up in New York City, surrounded by crowds and excitement and culture, but as a young woman she got married and moved to a small town where she felt increasingly isolated and paralyzed. Then, one day, she got the idea for a short story "A Box of Ginger" while walking her son to school, and it became the first story she ever published in the New Yorker magazine. Hortense Calisher said, "First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life."
She went on to write many novels and collections of short stories, including In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997) and Sunday Jews (2002). Her most recent book is Tattoo for a Slave, which came out last month.
It's the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Benedict, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1954). She thought she wanted to be an art historian until a college professor wrote on one of her papers that she obviously wanted to be a novelist. She said, "The night I got that paper back, December 19, 1973, I decided to be a writer. I went back to my dormitory room and took out a notebook and wrote, 'I must write in this book every day, it does not matter what, and one day it will turn into fiction.' I don't know how I knew that. But it turned out to be right."
Benedict got a job working for a Mexican-American legal advocacy group and wrote her first novel, Slow Dancing (1985), about an immigration lawyer. She has since published several more novels, including The Beginner's Book of Dreams (1988) and Almost (2001).
She said, "I suppose I'm interested in souls in flux—of all ages. So far, I've taken an optimistic outlook on the matter of change. I want my characters to change for the better—to become deeper, braver, more complete people."
It's the birthday of experimental novelist David Markson, born in Albany, New York (1927). He's best known for his novel Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), which was rejected 56 times before being published. It's about a painter named Kate who believes she is the last person on earth.
As a young man, Markson became obsessed with an obscure, stream-of-consciousness novel about Mexico called Under the Volcano (1947). He said the book knocked him out of his chair when he first read it. He reread it half a dozen times, and then began to write long, confessional letters to the author, Malcolm Lowry. He traveled to the remote shack in Canada where Lowry lived, and later wrote a twenty thousand-word thesis about the book for his literature degree at Columbia, even though most of his teachers thought he was crazy.
Markson started out as a writer working on pulp detective novels. Then an editor asked him to write a western, so he decided to try. He said, "After about three pages...I realized that I couldn't take it seriously. So I turned everything upside down, all the men cowards, all the women homely as sin, and played it for the humor."
The result was Markson's first novel and his biggest success, The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1966), which has one of the longest subtitles in modern publishing history. The full title reads, in part, "The Ballad of Dingus Magee: being the immortal true saga of the most notorious and desperate bad man of the olden days, his blood-shedding, [and] his ruination of poor helpless females... interspersed with trustworthy and shamelessly interesting sketches of 'Big Blouse' Belle Nops, Anna Hot Water, 'Horseface' Agnes, and others, hardly any remaining upright at the end."
Markson went on to write a series of increasingly more avant-garde novels, including Reader's Block (1996) about a writer named reader who's writing a book about a character named Protagonist. His most recent novel is called This Is Not a Novel (2001).
It's the birthday of newspaper columnist Max Lerner, born near Minsk in a part of Russia that is now Belarus (1902). His father went to the United States before Lerner was born, and eventually saved up enough money to bring the whole family over. Lerner's father worked in the garment district in New York City for several years, and then spent all of his savings on a farm he'd never seen in the Catskills. It turned out to be so full of stones that it was almost unfarmable. The family later moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Lerner's father ran a grocery store and delivered milk.
Lerner got into Yale University on a scholarship, but as an underprivileged townie, he never fit in with the prep school crowd. He said, "I was short and Jewish, and the beautiful girls didn't want anything to do with me." He enrolled in Law School, but dropped out because he said he didn't want to spend the rest of his life fighting for somebody else's house deed. Instead, he decided to study economics, hoping to understand the forces that had made it so hard for his father to support his family.
After years working as a professor of social sciences, Lerner became a political columnist for the New York Post. He worked at the Post from 1949 to 1991, commenting on everything from nuclear weapons to post-war materialism. He also wrote many books, including The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols (1959) and The Age of Overkill: A Preface to World Politics (1962). Near the end of his life, he published a memoir about his own fight against cancer, Wrestling with the Angel (1990).
Max Lerner said, "When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil."
It's the birthday of poet, novelist and essayist Andrei Codrescu, born in an old medieval fortress city in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania (1946). He's best known for his essays, broadcast on public radio and collected in books such as The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans (1993) and The Dog with the Chip in His Neck (1996).
His father disappeared when he was six months old, and he never saw the man again. He witnessed the communist take-over of Romania, and he has always remembered how the smell of apple strudel in his hometown was overpowered by the smell of boots.
Codrescu didn't like literature as a kid because he said, "Writers [were] supposed to glorify the Communist Party and workers—girl meets tractor, boy meets girl on tractor, and tractor meets everybody." But then he discovered the forbidden Romanian poets, and fell in love with poetry. He said, "I realized that language did not have to describe or glorify anything. It existed in its own right."
He and his mother fled to the United States just before he got drafted into the Romanian Army. They landed in New York with a plane full of Yugoslavs who were singing "America the Beautiful." He didn't know any English when he landed in the United States. He said, "It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls." After hanging out with hippies, runaways and poets on the streets of New York for a few years, he published his first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (1970).
Codrescu went on to write a wide variety of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and then, in 1989, he traveled back to Romania to witness the democratic revolution. While he watched, forty-five years of Communist rule were undone in eight days. He wrote about the experience in his book Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution (1991). He said, "By doing the story, I was paying a debt to my childhood."
Andrei Codrescu's most recent book is the novel Wakefield, which came out this year.
Andrei Codrescu said, "It's not too late to discover America, which seems to get discovered over and over and never definitively."
TUESDAY, 21 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Oft in the Stilly Night" by Thomas Moore.
Oft in the Stilly Night
Oft in the stilly night
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimmed and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus in the stilly night
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
When I remember all
The friends so linked together,
I've seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather:
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garland's dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus in the stilly night
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Joseph Stalin, born in the Russian colony of Georgia (1879). He ruled over communist Russia through World War II, and it was his decision to take control of most of the countries in Eastern Europe at the end of the war that turned Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the last twenty-five years of his life, he held absolute power over more people than anyone in history, before or since.
He may also have been responsible for more human deaths than anyone in history. Historians aren't sure how many people he ordered to be executed in his many political purges, but some estimate about 20 million.
When he had someone arrested and executed for treason, he also arrested and executed all of their family members. When he felt that the people in general were growing disloyal, he ordered his underlings in each major city to round up and execute a few thousand people at random. But he also killed people he knew very well. Of the hundred or so people who belonged to his ruling inner circle, he eventually had more than half of them murdered.
But even though he was such a brutal murderer, he was also deeply interested in the arts. He personally oversaw and approved all the works of art, fiction, music, theater, and cinema produced in the Soviet Union. He loved theater so much that he often contributed to the scripts and even wrote lyrics for songs in several musicals. He loved to sing, and he sang well enough that he could have been a professional performer.
Stalin also read books all the time, and he was a fan of great literature. His favorite writers were Balzac and Zola, Hemingway, and James Fenimore Cooper. He loved Last of the Mohicans so much that he sometimes dressed up as an Indian to entertain guests.
But even though he loved great literature himself, he didn't want his own people to read it. He said, "Nobody understands human psychology like Dostoyevsky, and that's why I've banned him." He told the writers under his power that they should write about how life should be and not how life was. He said, "The writer is the engineer of the human soul," and he wanted to make sure he had control of that engineering operation.
Joseph Stalin also said, "Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?"
In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It's officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.
Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfire to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.
In ancient Egypt and Syria, people celebrated the winter solstice as the sun's birthday. In Ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even war were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.
Henry David Thoreau said, "In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends."
It's the birthday of the essayist Edward Hoagland, born in New York City (1932). His many essay collections include The Courage of Turtles (1970), Red Wolves and Black Bears (1976), and Balancing Acts (1992).
For most of his life, he suffered from a terrible stutter, and so to avoid awkward social situations he became an obsessive walker. When he was in college in Boston, he estimates that he walked about fifty miles a week all around the city. He also grew to love animals, because they didn't require him to talk, and he worked a job as a lion keeper in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. But most of all, his stutter made him admire language, because it came with such difficulty. He said, "Being in these vocal handcuffs made me a devoted writer at twenty, I worked like a dog choosing each word."
After college, he moved to New York City tried to be a novelist, and his first two books got generally good reviews. But his third novel was such a failure that he decided he needed to get away from everything for a while and went up to live in the remote wilderness of British Columbia. He walked for hundreds of miles through the forests and along the rivers, and when he got home he published his first book of non-fiction Notes from the Century Before: A Journal From British Columbia (1969), and it was a big success.
Since then, Edward Hoagland has become one of the few writers working today who writes almost nothing but personal essays. He's written about his own thoughts on go-go dancers, jury duty, boxing gyms, mountain lions, suicide, and the loss of his eyesight.
A new collection of his nature writing, Hoagland on Nature, came out last year.
Edward Hoagland said, "I'd die if I didn't write...[I'd] die from hurrying, worrying, and scurrying, if I didn't have something so worth hurrying about. I love life and believe in its goodness and rightness, but I seem not to be terribly well fitted for it—that is, not without writing. Writing is my rod and staff. It saves me, exults me."
It's the birthday of the novelist Anthony Powell, born in London (1905). He wrote the longest novel in the English language, A Dance to the Music of Time, which he published in twelve volumes, starting in 1951. It follows a group of English men from their time together in public school just before World War II, through the next fifty years of their lives.
Though he was already a successful writer by the time he started working on it, he wrote the whole thing, more than a million words, on an ancient typewriter at a card table squeezed into his bedroom.
Anthony Powell said, "As far as I can see, writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work."
It was on this day in 1913 that the very first crossword puzzle appeared in a newspaper. It was the invention of a journalist named Arthur Wynne, who worked for the New York World. He called it a "Word-Cross," but the typesetter made a mistake and called it a "Cross-Word" and the name stuck. Early on, the editors found it difficult to avoid making errors in the puzzles, so they decided to drop it. Hundreds of addicted readers wrote into to protest, so it was reinstated after one week.
In 1924, two men named Richard Simon and Lincoln Schuster decided to set up a publishing house, and as they were casting about for ideas of what to publish, they decided to try a book of crossword puzzles. That book sold half a million copies in less than a year. The book's success launched a worldwide crossword puzzle craze and helped put Simon & Schuster on the publishing map. The enthusiasm for crosswords also helped to drive up the sales for dictionaries and encyclopedias. Libraries were forced to ration the use of reference books. By the end of the 1930's most daily newspapers featured crossword puzzles. One of the last newspapers to do so was the New York Times, which finally began printing a daily puzzle in 1950.
Perhaps the most famous crossword ever published was one in London's Daily Telegraph for the month of May, 1944. Just before the launching of D-Day, five highly classified code words for beaches that had been selected as landings appeared as crossword answers: Utah, Omaha, overlord, Mulberry and Neptune. England's department of military intelligence investigated the incident, thinking that secret messages were being passed to the Germans, but it was ruled a coincidence.
WEDNESDAY, 22 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: : "A Singing Voice" by Kenneth Rexroth, from Sacramental Acts © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
A Singing Voice
Once, camping on a high bluff
Above the Fox River, when
I was about fourteen years
Old, on a full moonlit night
Crowded with whippoorwills and
Frogs, I lay awake long past
Midnight watching the moon move
Through the half drowned stars. Suddenly
I heard, far away on the warm
Air a high clear soprano,
Purer than the purest boy's
Voice, singing, "Tuck me to sleep
In my old 'Tucky home."
She was in an open car
Speeding along the winding
Dipping highway beneath me.
A few seconds later
An old touring car full of
Boys and girls rushed by under
Me, the soprano rising
Full and clear and now close by
I could hear the others singing
Softly behind her voice. Then
Rising and falling with the
Twisting road the song closed, soft
In the night. Over thirty
Years have gone by but I have
Never forgotten. Again
And again, driving on a
Lonely moonlit road, or waking
In a warm murmurous night,
I hear that voice singing that
Common song like an
Angelic memory.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1894 that a Jewish officer in the French army named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason in a trial that became one of the most divisive events in European history. At the time, Jewish people were more integrated into European life than they had ever been, but anti-Semitism was also on the rise. The word "anti-Semitism" had actually been invented just fifteen years before Dreyfus was arrested. An anti-Semitic political party had recently won several seats in the German parliament, and an anti-Semitic newspaper in Paris had a circulation of 200,000.
The French War Minister had recently been under attack for supposedly letting "Jews and spies" into the army. When it came out that someone in the army had been passing secrets to the German government, Dreyfus was accused of the crime because he was the highest-ranking Jewish soldier. He was convicted after a four-day trial. In a ceremony before his sentencing, he was led out to the barracks square where the badges, stripes and medals were all ripped from his uniform. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on a tiny island off the coast of South America, where he was the only prisoner and the guards were forbidden to speak to him.
Back in Paris, a number of officers soon realized that the actual traitor was a man named Esterhazy, and Dreyfus that had been framed. But no one in the Army was willing to admit that they had done anything wrong. Word of the injustice leaked out and eventually reached Emile Zola, the most famous writer in France. He had just finished writing a 20 volume series of novels, and he was feeling exhausted by fiction. When he heard about the falsely convicted Dreyfus, he saw the scandal as a chance to write about something real, to take real action in the world.
So he published an open letter to the President on the front page of one of the major newspapers in France, detailing all the evidence that Dreyfus had been unjustly convicted. The headline for the article was "J'accuse," which means "I accuse." It's been called the most famous front page in the history of newspapers. 300,000 copies were sold in one day. The article was reprinted in newspapers throughout France and around the world.
At the time, journalists in Europe didn't casually accuse their governments of wrongdoing. By making such accusations in print, Zola was exposing himself to the threat of prosecution, and he eventually had to flee the country or go to prison. Henry James said, "[It was] one of the most courageous things ever done."
The Dreyfus Affair, as it became known, tore France apart. Everyone in the country felt as though they had to choose sides. People called themselves "Dreyfusards" or "anti-Dreyfusards." Dreyfusards saw the conviction of Dreyfus as a symbol of all the corruption and injustice in the French government. Anti-Dreyfusards saw Dreyfus as a symbol of the Jews trying to destroy civilization.
There were artists and writers on both sides of the debate. Manet, Pissarro, and Monet were for Dreyfus. Cézanne, Rodin, Renoir and Degas were all against. Marcel Proust, Anatole France and Mallarme were among the writers for Dreyfus. Valery and Jules Verne were against.
The affair caused rifts within families. People fought duals over it. There was talk of civil war. Anti-Semitic groups led riots and smashed Jewish shop-fronts, attacked synagogues, and desecrated Jewish graveyards. The writer François Mauriac said that his father named his chamber pot "Zola."
Eventually, Dreyfus was called back from exile for a second trial, and it was the most thoroughly reported event up to that point in history. 300 journalists attended the trial, six telegraph wires were installed in Paris for foreign correspondents, and on the first day of the trial 650,000 words were transmitted over the telegraph wire.
When Dreyfus finally appeared in public, the crowds of people were shocked how slight and unassuming he was. They couldn't believe that the man at the center of such a great drama could be so ordinary. One journalist said he looked like a pencil salesman. He later said that he never believed he had been singled out, but just that he was the victim of a mistake. He was convicted again in his second trial, but the President gave him a pardon. The French army didn't publicly acknowledge his innocence until 1995.
One of the journalists who covered the Dreyfus Affair was a Jewish man named Theodor Herzl, who was so disgusted by the anti-Semitism he witnessed that he came to believe Jews would never be accepted in Europe. He began advocating for the creation of a Jewish state, and his idea eventually led to the creation of Israel.
It's the birthday of the bohemian poet Kenneth Rexroth, born in South Bend, Indiana (1905). His father was a wholesale drug salesman, and Rexroth was offered a position in the business and that would have eventually made him one of the top executives. He spent a couple days thinking about that job offer and finally decided that he'd rather try to go off and become some kind of artist.
He wasn't sure what kind of artist he wanted to be, but in the 1920's he was drawn to the artistic community in Chicago's West Side, where speakeasies called the Dill Pickle Club and the Wind Blew Inn were full of politics, theater, jazz and poetry. It was there that Kenneth Rexroth became one of the first poets to try reading his poetry to the accompaniment of jazz music.
Then he got involved in left-wing politics and traveled around the country, speaking from soapboxes for the Industrial Workers of the World, supporting himself by horse-wrangling, sheep-herding, and selling pamphlets that promised a cure for constipation.
He eventually settled in San Francisco, and California changed the way he wrote poetry. His early poems had been full of references to Greek mythology and philosophy, but after his arrival in California, he began to write poems about camping trips and fly fishing and love affairs, in addition to politics.
In the 1950's, San Francisco became the destination for lots of young poets and Rexroth invited them all over to his house, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary Snyder. He became a mentor to them, and it was he who helped organize the famous 1955 Six Gallery reading where many of the original Beat Poets first read their work to the public. Rexroth became known as the godfather of the Beat Generation.
Kenneth Rexroth published more than fifty more books of poetry and criticism in his lifetime, including The Signature of All Things (1950) and Saucy Limericks and Christmas Cheer (1980). The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth came out in 2002.
Kenneth Rexroth said, "I've never understood why I'm [considered] a member of the avant-garde...I [just] try to say, as simply as I can, the simplest and most profound experiences of my life."
And, "Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust."
It's the birthday of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, born in Head Tide, Maine (1869). One of the most popular poets of his lifetime, he is remembered for a few short poems, which he said were "pickled in anthological brine," including "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Mr. Flood's Party."
His father was an extremely practical business man who managed to retire when he was fifty-one years old. He encouraged each of his sons to follow a different career path: medicine, business, and science, but Edwin Arlington Robinson, who was the youngest boy in the family, said, "[As a young man] I realized...that I was doomed, or elected, or sentenced for life, to the writing of poetry."
Unlike many poets, who have to work all manner odd jobs in order to support themselves, Robinson rarely did anything in his life other than write poetry. Before he made a name for himself as a poet, he was known in his hometown as an idler and a failure. The only job he ever kept for more than a few months was a job at a customs house given to him by Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his poetry, and he wasn't required to do any work. Even after he began to support himself with his poetry, he didn't get married, he didn't travel, he didn't teach or give public readings.
Robinson said, "The man who fixes on something definite in life that he must do, at the expense of everything else...has got something that should be recognized as the Inner Fire. For him, that is the Gleam, the Vision and the Word! He'd better follow it. The greatest adventure he'll ever have on this side is following where it leads."
THURSDAY, 23 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: : "A Christmas Poem" by Robert Bly, from Morning Poems © Harper Perennial. Reprinted with permission.
A Christmas Poem
Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where we all
agree
To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for
horses;
All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place
As children, but we never heard the good stories.
Those stories only get told in the big tents, late
At night, when a trapper who has been caught
In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a
man
With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of
the fire.
As children, we knew there was more to it -
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,
Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas
tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?
There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er
The plain. The angles were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of author Norman Maclean, born in Clarinda, Iowa (1902) and raised in Missoula, Montana. His famous autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through It (1976), begins, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing."
The final line reads, "I am haunted by waters."
It was on this day in 1823 that we were given "A Visit From St. Nicholas." The poem, often referred to by its first line, "'Twas the night before Christmas," has been a subject of controversy over the past few years, as questions have been raised about its true author. The poem was first published anonymously in upstate New York, in the Troy Sentinel, and remained without attribution for thirteen years. Finally it was credited to Clement Clarke Moore, a New York City professor. The poem appeared in an anthology of Moore's work, and later in his life, he was known to write out copies in long hand when asked to do so.
Moore as the author wasn't questioned until the year 2000, when a scholar from Vassar named Don Foster published a defense of a different author—a different New Yorker, of Dutch descent, named Henry Livingston, Jr. Foster's was a convincing argument. One of its main points was about two of Santa's reindeer, which, when the poem was first published, were named Dunder and Blixem—the Dutch words for "thunder" and "lightning."
It was in "A Visit From St. Nicholas" that we first met all of Santa's reindeer. It was also the first time we heard Santa described as fat and jolly. Before 1823, he was described as much thinner, and as a disciplinarian of children.
It's the birthday of two great poets and champions of poetry, Harriet Monroe, born in Chicago (1860), and Robert Bly, born in Madison, Minnesota (1926). Both were responsible for magazines that introduced American readers to great poets—Monroe's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (first published in 1912) and Bly's The Fifties (first published in 1958, later called The Sixties, and then The Seventies).
Harriet Monroe's Poetry, which she produced with foreign editor Ezra Pound, was responsible for the little-magazine movement in America. She paid and encouraged poets, including modern, new verse poets. She is the reason we know such writers as Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, Rupert Brooke, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams. It was Monroe who first published T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Monroe said: "The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have, else they will never have better."
Robert Bly is probably best known for his non-fiction best-seller Iron John: A Book About Men (1990). He was inspired to start The Fifties around 1956, while he was in Norway on a Fulbright Fellowship. His job was to translate old and new Norwegian poetry into English, and in an Oslo library he discovered "powerful" poetry by writers from Peru, Germany, Sweden, and Italy. He argued that the new critics in America were blind to material outside the English language. So back in Minnesota, to cause trouble, he started The Fifties with his friend Bill Duffy, a teacher.
The first issue was published in 1958 in Pine Island, Minnesota. They paid $1 for each magazine printed, and charged 50 cents. On the back cover, Bly and Duffy listed the foreign poets they intended to translate, and the inside of the front cover read, "The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned." They paid $25 to place an ad for submissions in Poetry magazine, and infuriated people who submitted old-fashioned poems with rejection letters that said things like: "This [card] entitles you to buy the new book of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as soon as it is published" and "Your poems are like ice cream that has melted when the refrigerator got turned off" and "These poems remind me of false teeth."
In The Fifties, Bly and Duffy published poems by Gary Snyder and David Ignatow, Paul Celan and Juan Ramón Jim&ecacute;nez. They started a small press, publishing their own poems and the poems of writers they admired. They translated Georg Trakl and were interested in translating Boris Pasternak, Russian author of the great novel Doctor Zhivago (first translated to English in 1958), but received a letter from Pasternak thanking them for their interest, but warning them that his work was too out-of-date.
When they were ready to publish a volume of Pablo Neruda's poems, they wrote him, offering $150 for permission. Neruda responded: "I know your Press very well. You were the first ones who printed my brother, Cesar Vallejo. Certainly you may publish my poems. I only have one request: that you send the $150 directly to a bookseller [he mentioned] in Barcelona. I owe him a lot of money. Yours, Pablo Neruda."
Bly is the author of more than 30 books of his own poetry, including Silence In The Snowy Fields (1962) and The Light Around The Body (1967), which won the National Book Award for poetry in 1968. He has translated poems by German, Scandinavian, Spanish and Latin-American writers, and by the 15th century Indian mystic, Kabir.
Robert Bly, who said, "I know a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty than they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
And he said, "By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life."
It's the birthday of novelist Donna Tartt, born in Greenwood, Mississippi (1963). Tartt's first novel, The Secret History (1992), was begun while she was a student at Bennington College and published when she was 28. The book earned her near-instant celebrity, so Tartt received a lot of press about the ten-year delay in the release of her second novel, The Little Friend (2002). He response: "I can't write quickly. Working on something over a long period gives a sense of richness that you can't fake."
FRIDAY, 24 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. Reprinted with permission.
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Christmas Eve. In America, children across the country prepare for an overnight visit from Santa Claus, who will deliver gifts to those who have been nice. In Sweden, most children will be visited by Santa Claus today, instead of Christmas Day.
Today also marks the end of Advent, which lasts from St. Andrew's Day until Christmas Eve. The Roman Catholic Church traditionally considers Advent a time of penitence and fasting, to prepare for the holy day of Christmas. But the Roman observance also considers the end of Advent a time of great anticipation for the coming holiday, a feeling which persists in Western culture to this day.
It was on this day in 1818 that Franz Gruber, an Austrian organist, composed the music for the poem "Silent Night." It was Gruber's only published composition.
It was on this day in 1914 that the last known Christmas truce occurred, during World War I. German troops fighting in Belgium began decorating their trenches and singing Christmas carols. Their enemy, the British, soon joined in the caroling. The war was put on hold, and these soldiers greeted each other in "No Man's Land," exchanging gifts of whiskey and cigars. Recently killed soldiers were returned behind their own lines and given proper burials, and soldiers from both sides attended ceremonies. In many areas, the truce held until Christmas night, while in other places the truce did not end until New Year's Day. One story has it that the opposing sides played a soccer match together. The game ended when the ball deflated on a strand of barbed wire.
British commanders Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien disapproved of the truce, and they ordered artillery bombardments on Christmas Eve in the remaining years of the war. Troops were also rotated with regularity to keep them from growing too familiar with the enemy troops in the close quarters of trench warfare. The Christmas truce was a war tradition of the 19th century, and its disappearance marked the end of wartime protocols of that time.
It's the birthday of the poet who gave us "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold, born in Middlesex, England (1822). Arnold was the son of the schoolmaster of Rugby School, and Arnold himself attended Rugby as a youth. Arnold later attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a young man, and five years after his graduation he published his first volume of poems, The Strayed Reveler (1849). Three years later, Arnold published Empedocles on Etna (1852). Then he decided that his first two collections were no good, and he removed them from circulation. He later published many other volumes, including New Poems (1867), which included his famous elegy "Thyrsis."
Arnold wrote most of his poetry before the age of forty. His verse emphasized directness and symmetry, but his later work as a literary critic attacked the manners and taste of 19th century England, particularly the middle class he dubbed "Philistines." Late in his life, Arnold toured the United States giving lectures, which were collected into the book Discourses in America (1885). Arnold told his biographer that he wanted to be remembered most for this book.
It was on this day in 1801 that the steam engine transported its first passengers, in London, England. Richard Trevithick invented the high-pressure steam engine in 1800, and built the carriage used in London on Christmas Eve the following year. By 1804, he had constructed a steam locomotive for use in Wales, the first of its kind.
It was on this day in 1814 that the Treaty of Ghent was signed at Ghent, Belgium, an agreement intended to end the War of 1812. News of the treaty was slow to reach North America, and fighting between American and British forces continued for several weeks after the treaty to end the war had been signed. During this time, the Battle of New Orleans took place, which turned out to be one of the most famous battles of the war. President James Madison finally ratified the treaty in February 1815. The treaty did not address the disagreement that had helped cause the war, the impressment of American sailors. In the treaty, the British agreed to give up demands to establish a British-controlled Native American state northwest of the Ohio River. It was considered a victory for the United States.
It's the birthday of the mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, born in New York City (1929). Her father died when she was ten years old, and Clark went to secretarial school after graduating from high school so she could help her mother pay the bills. She worked in an advertising agency for three years until she decided to become a stewardess in 1949. Clark said, "I was in a revolution in Syria and on the last flight into Czechoslovakia before the Iron Curtain went down. I flew for a year then got married."
Clark began writing short stories after she was married. She took writing classes at New York University. In 1956, she sold her first short story to Extension Magazine for one hundred dollars. She had endured six years of rejection, and forty rejection slips. She said, "I framed that first letter of acceptance."
After her husband died, Clark began writing radio scripts, and eventually decided to write books. Clark wrote in the mornings, between five and seven, until she would wake her children for school. Her first book was a biographical novel about George Washington, and it was not a success. She decided to write a suspense novel after that, and she wrote Where Are the Children? and this marked a turning point in her career. The book became a bestseller.
Clark decided to attend college in 1974, and she graduated from Fordham University in 1979. Nine years later she returned to her alma mater as the commencement speaker. She is the author of several books, and she holds thirteen honorary doctorates.
It's the birthday of the journalist I.F. Stone, born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1907). Stone moved to New York City when he began his career as a journalist, and eventually became the editor of The Nation. He also worked on many newspapers. He began his own journal in 1953 and it ran for several years. Stone became known as one of the most influential liberal journalists of the period following World War II, and was an opponent of the Cold War.
SATURDAY, 25 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" by Galway Kinnell, from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.
When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Christmas Day, when much of what is considered the western world celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. The actual birth of Christ probably took place in the springtime during the year 4 B.C., but the early Christians decided to adopt the time of the winter solstice to celebrate the birth of Christ.
In Finland people go to the sauna and listen to a national radio broadcast called "The Peace of Christmas." It is also the time of year when they visit the graves of departed loved ones.
In Yugoslavia, the second Sunday before Christmas is considered "Mother's Day" when children tie their mother to a chair and demand presents for ransom, taunting, "It's Mother's Day, its Mother's Day, what will you pay to get away?" The following week they do the same thing to their father. However, Yugoslavians celebrate Christmas itself January 7th according to the old Julian calendar, developed during the reign of Julius Caesar.
In Australia, Christmas falls during the middle of the summer, when the temperature can reach 100 degrees. People often celebrate at the beach and have barbecues.
In China most people are Buddhists but there are some Christians and they celebrate Christmas by lighting decorated paper lanterns and decorating their "Trees of Light" with paper decorations. Children wait for a visit from the "Christmas Old Man."
In Seville, Spain, the Christmas season begins with the feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th. 10 boys dressed in elaborate costumes perform a beautiful dance called "The Dance of Six" in front of Seville's gothic cathedral. The Magi, or the three wise men, are particularly worshiped in Spain and it is believed that they roam the countryside during this season. Children leave shoes on the windowsill filled with straw, carrots and barley for Balthazar's donkey, a Wise Man believed to leave them gifts.
In Greece, St. Nicholas is considered the patron saint of sailors, and as a rule ships won't leave port without an icon on board. The Greek version of St. Nick has clothes and a beard drenched with seawater from trying to rescue drowning sailors and sinking ships.
Greeks don't have Christmas trees; instead they keep a small bowl with water and hang a cross wrapped in basil from a wire from the rim of the bowl. Once a day the cross is dipped in the bowl of water and used to sprinkle the water in rooms of the house to protect the home from bad luck.
In capitol city of Caracas, Venezuela, children tie a long string to their big toe before going to bed and hang it out the window. The next morning people roller-skate to mass and tug on the stings tied to the children's feet.
In Mexico children use stick to break open a piñata filled with candy and money.
In Brazil, on Christmas Eve people attend Midnight mass, called the Mass of the Rooster, because mass ends the next day, which is announced by the rooster, and Father Christmas wears a silk suit because of the heat.
It's the birthday of scientist and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Newton is considered the grandfather of modern science and physics. He attended Cambridge University from 1661 to 1665. While he was home over break from school he discovered the law of universal gravitation, explaining how things fall and also why planets have orbits. He also began to develop calculus and he discovered white light is composed of all of the colors in the spectrum. After graduating, he built the first reflecting telescope and then returned to Cambridge four years after he graduated to become a mathematics professor. He went on to publish his theories about gravity, the laws of motion, and also gravity's effect on the tides.
Newton said, "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
It's the birthday of American Red Cross founder Clara Barton (Clarissa Harlowe), born in Oxford Massachusetts (1821). Clara Barton came from Unitarian family of wealthy European immigrants who owned a sawmill. As a child she was very shy and had panic attacks, even though she came from a supportive family. When she was 15, her mother advised her to start teaching local children to help build her confidence since there weren't any schools in the area. She was so popular with her students that within 2 years time she was running the state's first free public school with over 600 students.
Barton eventually quit teaching and went work at the capitol in Washington D.C as a clerk in the patents office, becoming the first woman civil servant. She was working there when the Civil War broke out and she began tending to wounded soldiers who were brought to the capitol.
Barton was afraid that the soldiers would lose too much blood if brought to the hospital, so she and a small group of followers had the revolutionary idea taking first aid supplies to the battle field by mule drawn wagons. There they set up camp and attended to the wounded.
Despite resistance from male army officers over women being so close to fire and on the battlefield she continued to take care of thousands of soldiers during the first and second battles of Bull Run, earning her the title "Angel of the Battlefield." In a letter home she wrote of having to wring out her skirts because they had become so heavy with blood that she couldn't walk.
In 1869 Clara Barton had a nervous breakdown and went to Switzerland to recover. There she witnessed the newly established International Red Cross and began serving for the Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian war. After she returned to the United States and began campaigning for the U.S. to join the International Red Cross, which it did in 1881, and Clara Barton declared herself lifetime president. Clara Barton continued running the Red Cross and personally attending to victims at the scene of disasters, in both times of war and peace until her late 70's, when she was basically forced into retirement.
Today the Red Cross is still active in disaster and war relief, and runs the world's largest blood donor service.
Clara Barton said, "Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business."
It's the birthday of Rod Serling born in Syracuse, New York (1925), best known as the creator, writer and producer of the eerie television series called "The Twilight Zone" which first aired in 1959. Serling believed it was the writer's job to "menace the public consciousness" and considered television and radio as a means for social criticism.
While in college, Serling had an internship at a radio station and wrote a radio script he wrote about a prizefighter who was slowly dying from leukemia. Serling's national award for that script launched him into the world of radio and eventually television.
In the mid 1950's, Serling won three Emmy™ awards for three television plays he wrote. He grew increasingly frustrated over not being allowed to write controversial scripts about humanity because corporate sponsors would not subsidize messages that might be offensive to the public, so he switched to science fiction. He found it was easier to slip social criticism by the censors if it took place in a fictional world. Creating "The Twilight Zone" allowed him total artistic freedom and the show was enormously popular during the five years it aired on television.
Serling said, "It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."
SUNDAY, 26 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "The Meeting" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The Meeting
After so long an absence
At last we meet again:
Does the meeting give us pleasure,
Or does it give us pain?
The tree of life has been shaken,
And but few of us linger now,
Like the Prophet's two or three berries
In the top of the uttermost bough.
We cordially greet each other
In the old, familiar tone;
And we think, though we do not say it,
How old and gray he is grown!
We speak of a Merry Christmas
And many a Happy New Year
But each in his heart is thinking
Of those that are not here.
We speak of friends and their fortunes,
And of what they did and said,
Till the dead alone seem living,
And the living alone seem dead.
And at last we hardly distinguish
Between the ghosts and the guests;
And a mist and shadow of sadness
Steals over our merriest jests.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Boxing Day and St. Stephen's Day in England, Canada, and several other countries. The origins of this national holiday are not certain, but the holiday might have started from an old custom of wealthy estate-owners giving small gifts or money, wrapped in boxes, to their servants and those who worked for them. Servants were needed on Christmas to help with their masters' holiday events, so they often were given a rest the next day. St. Stephen is honored today for being the first Christian martyr, having been stoned to death for blasphemy.
It's the birthday of Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first calculating machine, born in London, England (1792). He was obsessed with the notion of mathematical accuracy in his work and surroundings. He was fed up with what he called the "intolerable labor and fatiguing monotony" of the hand-calculating of scientific tables, so he invented and built the Difference Engine, which could perform large calculations with the turn of a crank. He then set out to build the steam-powered Analytical Engine, which would have been the size of a locomotive, but he never found a way to make it work. He is also known for inventing the speedometer and the locomotive cowcatcher.
It's the birthday of poet and scholar Thomas Gray, born in London (1716). He gave us the phrase, "Where ignorance is bliss—'Tis folly to be wise." All of Thomas's early poems were written in Latin, of which he had remarkable control, but we know him for his masterful poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which is considered one of the greatest poems of the English language. "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,/The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,/The plowman homeward plods his weary way,/And leaves the world to darkness and to me."
It's the birthday of author Henry Miller, born in New York City (1891). He was rebellious by nature. He said, "From five to ten were the most important years of my life; I lived in the street and acquired the typical American gangster spirit."
With money his father gave him intended to finance him through Cornell, he went on a trip through the southwest and Alaska. When he returned he went to work in his father's tailor shop, but left after trying to unionize the workforce. After that, he ran a speakeasy in Greenwich Village, but eventually moved to France for nine years. While there, Henry wrote about his bohemian experiences in Tropic of Cancer (1934), of which he said, "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing." The book was immediately banned in the U.S. for its obscenities and graphically sexual content. In 1964, the Supreme Court finally ruled that Tropic of Cancer could not be suppressed. He had already sold two million copies of it by this time.
