Monday, 27 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "This is How Memory Works" by Patricia Hampl, from Resort © Carnegie Mellon University Press. Reprinted with permission.

This is How Memory Works

You are stepping off a train.
A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.
A gust of steam from the engine swirls
around the hem of your topcoat, around
the hand holding the brown leather valise,
the hand that, a moment ago, slicked back
the hair and then put on the fedora
in front of the mirror with the beveled
edges in the cherrywood compartment.

The girl standing on the platform
in the Forties dress
has curled her hair, she has
nylon stockings - no, silk stockings still.
Her shoulders are touchingly military,
squared by those shoulder pads
and a sweet faith in the Allies.
She is waiting for you.
She can be wearing a hat, if you like.

You see her first.
that's part of the beauty:
you get the pure, eager face,
the lyrical dress, the surprise.
You can have the steam,
the crowded depot, the camel's-hair coat,
real leather and brass clasps on the suitcase;
you can make the lights glow with
strange significance, and the black cars
that pass you are historical yet ordinary.

The girl is yours,
the flowery dress, the walk
to the streetcar, a fried egg sandwich
and a joke about Mussolini.
You can have it all:
you're in that world, the only way
you'll ever be there now, hired
for your silent hammer, to nail pictures
to the walls of this mansion
made of thinnest air.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1831 that Charles Darwin set sail from England on the HMS Beagle, beginning the journey that would take him to the Galapagos Islands and inspire his theory of evolution. His father wanted him to be a clergyman, but Darwin always cared more about collecting beetles than he did about theology. He took a biology class in college, and his teacher recommended him for the spot on an upcoming voyage to South America. His father was furious, but Darwin went anyway.

Darwin had terrible seasickness, so as soon as they reached South America, he spent as much time on land as he could, traveling through unexplored regions. He was amazed at the variety of shapes and colors in the plants and animals he found. He wrote in his diary, "It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose."

He returned to England in the fall of 1836, and never traveled beyond Great Britain again. He spent years thinking about what he'd seen during his voyage on the Beagle, and eventually developed the theory of evolution in the mid-1840s. But he was terrified to publish it, for fear of offending people's religious beliefs. He said, "It is like confessing to a murder." Finally, in 1859, he published On the Origin of Species (1859), which forever changed the way people thought about living things and their beginnings.

Charles Darwin wrote, "Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed, born in London, England (1930). His parents ran a publishing house that mainly published Catholic literature. He moved with his family to Pennsylvania when he was a boy, and grew up in a tiny village where there were almost no other children, and he spent most of his free time playing baseball by himself. He said, "I became perhaps the outstanding solitary baseball player of my generation."

He traveled back and forth between England and the United States as he was growing up, and it made him feel like a foreigner wherever he was. He went to Oxford for college and wrote his first novel about it, called A Middle Class Education (1961).

Sheed has supported himself for much of his life as a journalist and a book reviewer, and he said, "Book reviewing gives me a certain thin-lipped benignity towards my own critics, when they turn the cannon round and aim it in my direction. Unsympathetic criticism stings like hell for twenty-four hours, but you are less likely to feel a personal animus about it if you have stung a few victims yourself."

He has written several satirical novels about the business of journalism, including The Hack (1963) about a miserable man who writes uplifting poems and stories for a Catholic magazine, and Max Jamison (1970) about a theater critic who can't help criticizing everything in his own life. Most recently, he has written several memoirs, including My Life as a Fan (1993), about his love of baseball, and In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (1995).

Wilfrid Sheed said, "One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers."

It's the birthday of avant-garde poet Charles Olson, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1910). As a young man, he became obsessed with Herman Melville and tracked down Melville's entire personal library in preparation for writing a book about him. But he put off writing the book and took a job in Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration instead. He worked his way up to a high-powered job in the Office of War Information, but he grew more and more frustrated by bureaucratic inefficiency.

Then, one day, he quit his job and vowed to devote the rest of his life to poetry.

Olson started paying visits to the poet Ezra Pound, who was being held on treason charges in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, and he started writing poetry influenced by Pound, full of allusions to ancient mythology and classical literature. He wrote a manifesto about the kind of poetry he believed poets should be writing, called Projective Verse (1959). He advocated for a kind of poetry that was completely free of meter or rhyme and concerned more with the sounds of words than the sense they made. He lectured on this style of poetry at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and influenced many younger poets, including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley.

His first book of poems was In Cold Hell, In Thicket (1953) and it contained his most famous poem "The Kingfishers" which begins, "What does not change is the will to change." He spent most of the rest of his life writing an epic series of poems called The Maximus Poems about the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, the coastal town where he spent his summers as a child. The first volume of The Maximus Poems was published in 1960.

It's the birthday of poet Juan Felipe Herrera, born in Fowler, California (1948). The son of migratory farm workers, he spent his childhood on the move, living in a series of farm camps in California. He said, "I grew up as a gypsy child. You're under the sky. You're always moving. You don't really worry about having too many things. You just hang out, stay light ... in nature. It was beautiful."

Herrera has written many collections of poetry, including Exiles of Desire (1983) and Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999) and he has recently published several bilingual books for children, including Calling the Doves (1995) and The Upside Down Boy (2000).

He said, "Writing for children is the other side of paradise...I can say the same things with fewer words, with words made out of corn and river water. Basic, real stuff, from the ground."

Today is the 100th anniversary of the first performance James Barrie's play, Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, which had its opening night on this day in 1904. Barrie was a successful playwright at the time, but he became obsessed with the production of Peter Pan. He rewrote the script more than twenty times. It was one of the most expensive productions ever attempted at that time, since it required the construction of harnesses and wires so that the actors could appear to fly around the stage.

It was also one of the first plays to acknowledge the existence of the audience. In the famous scene, Peter Pan asks members of the audience to clap if they believe in fairies, in order to save the life of Tinker Bell. Barrie was terrified that the audience might not clap, so he asked the orchestra to do so if necessary. But the audience did clap, and the play was a huge success.

---

TUESDAY, 28 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Goodbye to the Old Life" by Wesley McNair, from Fire. © David R. Godine. Reprinted with permission.

Goodbye to the Old Life

Goodbye to the old life,
to the sadness of rooms
where my family slept as I sat

late at night on my island
of light among papers.
Goodbye to the papers

and to the school for the rich
where I drove them, dressed up
in a tie to declare who I was.

Goodbye to all the ties
and to the life I lost
by declaring, and a fond goodbye

to the two junk cars that lurched
and banged through the campus
making sure I would never fit in.

Goodbye to the finest campus
money could buy, and one
final goodbye to the paycheck

that was always gone
before it got home.
Farewell to the home,

and a heartfelt goodbye
to all the tenants who rented
the upstairs apartment,

particularly Mrs. Doucette,
whose washer overflowed
down the walls of our bathroom

every other week, and Mr. Green,
determined in spite of the evidence
to learn the electric guitar.

And to you there, the young man
on the roof turning the antenna
and trying not to look down

on how far love has taken you,
and to the faithful wife
in the downstairs window

shouting, "That's as good
as we're going to get it,"
and to the four hopeful children

staying with the whole program
despite the rolling picture
and the snow - goodbye,

wealth and joy to us all
in the new life, goodbye!

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of humorist Sam Levenson, born in New York City (1911). He started out as a Spanish teacher in the New York public schools. In 1940, a group of teachers who had formed an orchestra asked him to be the master of ceremonies for their performance at a Catskills hotel. He found the experience addictive, and began going to comedy clubs after school and on weekends.

Instead of telling jokes, he told humorous stories about his childhood in New York City. He said that there was a lot of folk humor about growing up in the country, and he wanted to be the folk humorist of the city. Within a few years he was appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, and by 1951, he had a show of his own. But he eventually gave up on television and wrote several books of humorous essays, including In One Era and Out the Other (1973) and You Don't Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What (1979).

Sam Levenson said, "Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we'll find it."

It's the birthday of the novelist Simon Raven, born in London (1927). He was a free thinker and a libertine who had planned to become a literature professor, but he said, "I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books." He enlisted in the army, since he refused to go into business, but he had to resign because of his terrible debts.

Finally, Raven turned to writing fiction. He said, "For in a literary career there was one unfailing advantage: no degree whatever of moral or social disgrace could disqualify one from practice—and indeed a bad character, if suitably tricked out for presentation, might win one helpful publicity."

Simon Raven quickly became one of the most notorious members of the London literary scene, and would probably have died young and unaccomplished, but then his publisher offered him a steady salary if he would move at least 50 miles away from London in order to write. So that's what he did, and he became a different man, spending his days writing and his evenings reading, and publishing dozens of books. He's best known for his 10 volume series of novels about the British upper class called Alms for Oblivion, the first volume of which was published in 1964.

He said, "I've always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself, who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and nobody is special."

It's the birthday of the novelist Manuel Puig, born in the small town of General Villegas, Argentina (1932). He's best known for his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979), about a homosexual who befriends a guerilla fighter in prison by telling him the plotlines of all the movies he ever saw when he was growing up.

Puig grew up in the area of Argentina known as the pampas: a desert region that is considered romantic and enchanted by most Argentines, but which Puig himself hated. He said, "There's nothing less romantic than...the total absence of landscape—no trees, no rain, only this grass that grows by itself, which is excellent for cattle, but not for people."

The only thing he loved about his hometown was the tiny movie theater, which showed a different movie every day. The first movie he saw there was The Bride of Frankenstein, and after that he went there every night at 6:00, sitting in the same seat. He watched every movie that played the theater for years, including movies made by Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Frank Capra. The movies saved him from the bleakness and tedium of the world around him. He said, "The movies helped [me] not to go crazy. You see another way of life. It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped [me] hope."

In 1946, he managed to flee his hometown and travel to Buenos Aires, where he tried to become a filmmaker. He eventually made his way to New York City, supporting himself as a ticket clerk for an airline. But his only memorable experience was selling a plane ticket to Greta Garbo.

Puig tried to write a series of screenplays, but they were all just imitations of movies he'd loved as a child. Then he started a screenplay which began with a narrator speaking in voice over. He thought the voice-over would only last for a few lines, but he kept writing and writing, never getting to the action of the movie, until finally he realized he was writing a novel.

And that was the first novel Puig published, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) about a boy growing up in a boring small town who constantly fantasizes that his life is a Hollywood movie.

He went on to write many more novels, many of them written almost entirely in dialogue. He said that he preferred to write dialogue, because he was always uncertain of his grammar, and he'd rather let his characters be responsible for any grammatical mistakes.

It's the birthday of comic book writer Stan Lee, born Stanley Martin Lieber in New York City (1922). He spent most of his childhood watching Errol Flynn movies and reading boys' adventure stories. He decided to be a writer at an early age, and won a writing contest sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune three weeks in a row.

He got a job just out of high school as a gopher for a publishing company called Timley Publications, which published comic books. At first he got people coffee, swept floors, and ran errands, but eventually he began to proofread, and then write the occasional script, because he said, "I knew the difference between a declarative sentence and a baseball bat."

When he began to write scripts regularly, he chose to write under a pseudonym. He said, "I felt that those simple little comic books weren't important enough to deserve my real name. I was saving that for the Great American novel that I hoped to write one day. So I just cut my first name [Stanley] in half and called myself 'Stan Lee'."

Lee was just eighteen years old when the editor of the publishing house quit, and he got the job as head editor and writer. It was supposed to be temporary, but he wound up staying for more than thirty years.

At first, Lee wrote comic books without taking them very seriously. He said, "I was the ultimate hack. I was probably the hackiest hack that ever lived. I wrote whatever they told me to write the way they told me to write it. It didn't matter: War stories, crime, Westerns, horror, humor; I wrote everything."

But in the 1960's, Stan Lee began to regret all the time he'd spent writing mindless entertainment, stories with hackneyed plots and bad dialogue. At parties, he was embarrassed to admit that he wrote for comic books. He told his wife that he was fed up and he was going to quit. She suggested that if he had nothing to lose, he should try creating a comic book he could be proud of, since it wouldn't matter if he got fired anyway.

He agreed, and decided that the most important thing lacking from comic books was complex characters. All the good guys were entirely good, and the bad guys entirely evil. Stan Lee said, "[I decided to create] the kind of characters I could personally relate to. They'd be flesh and blood...they'd be fallible and feisty, and—most important of all—inside their colorful, costumed booties they'd still have feet of clay."

Instead of creating just one new comic book series, Lee created more than half a dozen, including The Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, Daredevil, and Dr. Strange. But his most successful character of all was The Amazing Spiderman, about an awkward teenager named Peter Parker who develops superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. He was the first superhero to be filled with self-doubt, the first superhero to struggle with whether he wanted to be a superhero. Stan Lee's boss hated the idea, but the first issue featuring Spiderman sold every copy that was printed, and Spiderman went on to become one of the most popular superheroes ever invented.

Stan Lee said, "You ask the audience to suspend disbelief and accept that some idiot can climb on walls, but [then] you ask: What would life be like in the real world if there were such a character? Would he still have to worry about dandruff, about acne, about getting girlfriends, about keeping a job?"

---

WEDNESDAY, 29 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Snowflake" by William Baer, from Borges and Other Sonnets. © Truman State University Press. Reprinted with permission.

Snowflake

Timing's everything. The vapor rises
high in the sky, tossing to and fro,
then freezes, suddenly, and crystallizes
into a perfect flake of miraculous snow.
For countless miles, drifting east above
the world, whirling about in a swirling free-
for-all, appearing aimless, just like love,
but sensing, seeking out, its destiny.
Falling to where the two young skaters stand,
hand in hand, then flips and dips and whips
itself about to ever-so-gently land,
a miracle, across her unkissed lips:
as he blocks the wind raging from the south,
leaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of journalist and novelist Robert Ruark, born in Wilmington, North Carolina (1915). He started out as a newspaper columnist who wrote about his travels around the world. He claimed to be able to write a column in eleven minutes. He once finished sixteen columns in a single day.

He said, "There was a time, when I would go anywhere, eat airline food...chase elephants on horseback, slug athletes, enjoy being jailed, and wrestle with leopards, all for love of the newspaper business."

He went on to write several novels, including Something of Value (1955) and The Old Man and the Boy (1957).

It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Jim Shepard, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut (1956). He's the author of several novels, including Lights out in the Reptile House (1990) and Kiss of the Wolf (1994). He published his first short story in the Atlantic magazine when he was just nineteen years old.

His novel Project X came out this year.

It's the birthday of novelist William Gaddis, born in Manhattan (1922). He went to Harvard University, where he was the editor of the Lampoon magazine until he got expelled after a run-in with the campus police. So he got a job as a fact checker for the New Yorker magazine. He said, "It was terribly good training, a kind of post-graduate school for a writer."

He became friends with some of the beat writers of the era, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and decided to go on the road like they had. He traveled to Panama, where he worked as a crane operator on the Panama Canal. Then he went to Costa Rica, which was in the midst of a civil war. A young captain recruited him for the fight, but his rifle was stolen by the end of day.

He finally made his way back to New York City on a Honduran banana boat, and when he arrived in the city he wore a white Panama suit and his arm was in a sling, even though there was nothing wrong with it. He later said, "I was preparing my arm to write explosively when it was released from its bandage like a bird from a cage."

The book he eventually wrote was The Recognitions (1955), about an aspiring painter who sells out his talent to become a forger of Dutch masterpieces. The book was almost a thousand pages long, and it made references to art history, theology, mythology, and literature. Gaddis said, "I saw myself as a prophet...I spent seven years writing that novel. When I finished it, I thought well, I guess this will change the world. It didn't... I thought I would win the Nobel Prize... Nothing happened."

Gaddis was devastated at the reception of his book. He had to take jobs writing speeches for corporate executives to support himself. He took twenty years to write his next novel J.R. (1975) about an eleven-year-old boy who builds a financial empire that he manages from his grade school's public phone booth. It won the National Book Award. Critics went back and reread his first novel and began to call it a masterpiece.

Gaddis went on to write several more novels, including A Frolic of His Own (1994), which also won the National Book Award. But even though he's been called one of the most important writers of the 20th century, his books have never sold very well. He once received a royalty check for four dollars and thirty-five cents.

He died in 1998. His last novel Agape Agape was published after his death in 2002.

William Gaddis said, "There have never in history been so many opportunities to do so many things that aren't worth doing."

It was on this day in 1916 that James Joyce published his first novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's the coming of age story of a boy named Stephen Dedalus, growing up in Ireland near the end of the 19th century, who over the course of the book turns his back on his family, his church, and eventually his country, resolving by the end of the book to leave Ireland and become a writer.

Joyce had tried to leave Ireland himself after he finished school, but he was forced to return for his mother's funeral. He started writing for various Irish journals, and in 1904 he wrote an essay called "Portrait of an Artist", about his own development as a writer. He sent it out for publication, and when it came back rejected, he sat down at the table and sketched out a framework for a long autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero. He estimated that the book would have fifty chapters and be about 1,000 pages long.

He began writing after he had left Ireland for the second time and moved to Trieste. He had written about 900 pages of Stephen Hero before he decided that it was too conventional, too Victorian. In a fit of disgust he destroyed most of the manuscript. Only a short fragment was ever found. He started over again, and in the new version of the novel, he concentrated less on the events of the main character's life and more on his developing consciousness.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins when Stephen Dedalus is a baby, listening to his father tell a story: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." As Stephen Dedalus grows older, the language of the novel grows more and more sophisticated. It ends with Stephen Dedalus as a young man, vowing to leave Ireland and to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Joyce spent ten years writing the novel, while also struggling to support his family teaching English. Two years before he finished the novel, he took a trip back to Ireland, where he was so disgusted by the prudery and censorship of the publishing industry that he resolved never to return to his home country again. And he never did.

In 1914, he learned than an American named Ezra Pound had developed an interest in his work, and wanted to publish something by him in a new magazine called The Egoist. Joyce sent Pound the just finished manuscript for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it was serialized there. When he published the complete novel on this day in 1916, he was celebrated as one of the most promising new writers in the English language.

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THURSDAY, 30 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "My Brother" by Denver Butson, from Triptych. © The Commoner Press, NY, 1999. Reprinted with permission.

My Brother

To escape headaches and fears of an unfaithful wife
my brother perpetually reforming drug user
machinist scrapper arrested at 14 for arson
and incarcerated for a few weeks
father of one son and one aborted fetus
occasional bowler heavy metal fan
connoisseur of ketchup potato chips stromboli
and cheesesteak wearer of faded jeans
faded flannel shirts pocket-tee shirts
unlaced hightops or workboots
concert tee shirts painters' hats and
army coat sufferer of aloneness
of paranoia and fear insomniac and talker
of another language in his sleep
expert belcher and marksman constant but lousy liar
moderate drinker of cheap beer violent rampager
demolisher of lamps electric fans telephones
blue-eyed ladies' man father brother and son
shy blushing ladies' man skinny-legged blue-eyed
ladies' man stuck the open end of a .357 Magnum
in his right nostril with the other end
in his calloused and stained hands
and blew his headaches and his head
from this world into the next
one night just like that.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of entrepreneur Asa Griggs Candler, born in Villa Rica, Georgia (1851). He grew up poor during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, and he had only an elementary school education. He had always wanted to be a doctor, but when that proved to be financially impossible for his family, he became a pharmacist's apprentice. By 1888 he had the largest drug company in Atlanta, and in 1886 he bought sole rights to John Pemberton's original formula for Coca-Cola. He formed the Coca-Cola Company in 1890.

Candler was a leader in advertising. He used calendars, billboards, point-of-sale posters, and other novelties to keep the Coca-Cola trademark seen in public. In 1909 the Associated Advertising Clubs of America claimed Coca-Cola to be "the best advertised article in America." Candler made the soft drink until 1919. He sold the company after a long federal lawsuit about Coca-Cola, caffeine, and health concerns. He went on to serve as Atlanta's mayor and also funded a teaching hospital for Emory University's Medical School.

It's the birthday of novelist Douglas Coupland, born on a Canadian military base in Baden-Solingen, Germany (1961). He is best known for his controversial novel Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture (1991). He popularized the term "Generation X," which was later attached to a whole generation of people and he continues to write about pop-culture.

Coupland started off as a sculptor, working with wood and fiberglass, earning his degree in studio sculpture in 1984. He did all kinds of jobs to make money, working as a gas station attendant, making copies of blue prints, and even designing baby cribs. Coupland's writing career began mostly from luck, when an editor at Vancouver Magazine read a postcard he had written to a friend. He liked Coupland's style and hired him to write for the magazine.

Douglas Coupland said, "Adventure without risk is Disneyland." He also said, "You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself."

It's the birthday of novelist, composer, and poet Paul Bowles, born in New York City, New York (1910). He did not devote himself to writing until after World War II. His first and most famous novel was The Sheltering Sky (1949), and it was set in Morocco. It helped cause a U.S. literary migration to Tangier, and he became a resident there in 1952.

Bowles was an only child, and his father was a dentist who played golf constantly. He was much closer to his mother, who started reading him Edgar Allen Poe's stories at bedtime when he was only two years old. In sixth grade, he wrote mystery stories and read daily chapters to his classmates. He began studying music when he was eight and tried to write his first opera when he was nine. The family home had a phonograph, and Bowles bought a new record each week, but he was not allowed to listen to it if his father was home.

Bowles studied briefly at the University of Virginia, choosing the school because Poe had gone there, but he left to study music in Paris. He became a composer, music critic and poet, writing musical scores for more than thirty plays, many of them on Broadway, and for movies as well.

In 1931 Bowles met Gertrude Stein. She told him he was definitely not a poet and suggested he go to Tangier, Morocco. He did, and he also decided never to write again. He didn't stick to this decision and later sent her a short story. Stein wrote to him and said, "I take back all the harsh things I said about your writing. It makes a picture and that is always good. But it is alright to learn to play Bach in writing too."

Bowles said, "We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

It's the birthday of short-story writer, poet, and novelist (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, India (1865). The son of British parents, he is best known for his book Kim (1901), and The Jungle Book (1894), and he was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1907.

Kipling was raised by Indian nannies and he spoke "kitchen Hindi" as well as he spoke English. When he was six, he and his younger sister, Beatrice, were sent to England to begin their educations while their parents stayed in India. The children were not warned about this plan, and as a child Kipling had thought he had been abandoned.

Kipling returned to India at the age of seventeen and worked as a journalist. He published his first collection of poems, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, in 1886 and his first collection of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, in 1888. He said, "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten."

In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Starr Balestier, the sister of an American publisher and writer, and they moved to Vermont. They didn't stay there long because Kipling fought with his neighbor and brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier. They left Vermont after Kipling failed to appear in court in a case he had brought up against his brother-in-law for threatening him. Kipling said, "Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors."

The family moved back to England, and later in life Kipling became politically active, speaking for the Conservative party. He wrote about the danger of war with Germany, and opposed both women's suffrage and home rule for Ireland. Kipling developed a morbid fear of cancer, from which he never suffered.

Kipling was mainly considered a poet in his own lifetime, and he was offered both a knighthood and the post of British Poet Laureate. He turned both offers down. He said, "Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves."

He died on January 18, 1936 in London, and was buried in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. Before he died, Kipling did his best to get a hold of and destroy all the letters he had ever sent to protect his private life. His widow continued to do this after he died, but several letters survived and have been published. He said, "I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble."

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FRIDAY, 31 DECEMBER, 2004
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Poem: "Ice" by Gail Mazur, from The Common. © The University of Chicago, 1995. Reprinted with permission.

Ice

In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it's hard to imagine why anyone would leave

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December's always the same at Ware's Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys'
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8's, an hour
of distances moved backwards without falling,

then twilight, the warming house steamy
with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
playing, slamming the round black puck

until it's dark, until supper. At night,
a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn't music, they glide
arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she'll never
be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her
in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is New Year's Eve. Tonight there will be parties all across the country in celebration of the coming new year, and at the stroke of midnight millions of people will sing "Auld Lang Syne." The lyrics to the song were first written down by the poet Robert Burns, but the song actually comes from Scottish oral tradition. The Scottish title can be translated to mean "old long ago" or "time long past" or simply "the good old days."

The writer Thomas Mann said of New Year's Eve, "Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote, "The year is going, let him go; ring out the false, ring in the true."

It's the birthday of the painter Henri Matisse, born in Le Cateau, France (1869). Matisse is best known for his use of vivid colors in his paintings, but Matisse also enjoyed sculpture. He is one of the few painters to earn widespread fame during his lifetime.

Matisse originally intended to become a lawyer, and in 1887 he moved to Paris to study law. He completed his course work and became a court administrator before a bout of appendicitis changed his life. Matisse began to paint while recovering from his illness. He never returned to law, and in 1891 he attended a prestigious art school, where he studied under Gustave Moreau.

Matisse was not very successful when he first began exhibiting his work. It wasn't until 1905, while Matisse lived at a Mediterranean village called Collioure, that he perfected his now-famous practice of using bold, primary colors in his paintings. He began exhibiting with a group of painters called fauvists, who also favored bold colors, and Matisse eventually became a leader of that group. The fauvist movement was brief, but Matisse's success continued throughout his lifetime.

Matisse was afflicted with cancer in 1941 and needed surgery, and then found himself restricted to a wheelchair, unable to use an easel. He began to cut paper collages, some of them large. When bedridden, Matisse attached charcoal to long poles, and he drew on the walls and ceilings of his room. Late in life he was able to decorate the Dominican nuns' chapel in St. Paul de Vens in Southern France, and when he completed the work in 1951, he declared it his masterpiece.

It's the birthday of the novelist Nicholas Sparks, born in Omaha, Nebraska (1965), eighty minutes before the new year. He is the author of A Walk to Remember (1999), Message in a Bottle (1998) and The Notebook (1996), which have all been made into movies.

Sparks's passion as a young man was running, and he earned a scholarship to run track at the University of Notre Dame. He was injured in his freshman year, and spent the summer months moping around his parents' house until his mother told him to write a book to pass the time. He wrote a novel that was never published. Sparks said of it, "In all honesty, it's a wonderful story-except for the writing." He wrote another novel that went unpublished before deciding to do something else. He appraised real estate, bought and restored houses, waited tables, sold dental products by phone, and started his own business. Eventually Sparks sold that business and became a pharmaceutical representative. Then he wrote The Notebook.

Nicholas Sparks said, "Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period."

It's the birthday of the poet Alexander Smith, born in Kilmarnock, Scotland (1830). He is best known for collaborating with Sydney Dobell on War Sonnets (1855), inspired by the Crimean War, and for being one of the Spasmodic poets.

Smith's father was a lace-designer, and his family was too poor to send Smith to college. Smith was supposed to follow in his father's footsteps and he began working at a linen factory, but he also wrote poetry. His earliest published work appeared in the Glasgow Citizen, and Smith eventually became friends with the editor, James Hedderwick. Smith published A Life Drama and Other Poems in 1853, and the success of it led to Smith's appointment of secretary to Edinburgh University the following year.

In 1854, Smith and others were dubbed "Spasmodic" poets by a critic who did not care for their writing, which reflected discontent and unrest through a jerky and strained writing style. This criticism did not stop Smith and Dobell from meeting each other that same year in Edinburgh, and the next year publishing War Sonnets.

Alexander Smith said, "I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory."

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SATURDAY, 1 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Passing Through a Small Town" by David Shumate, from High Water Mark. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.

Passing Through a Small Town

Here the highways cross. One heads north. One heads east
and west. On the corner of the square adjacent to the
courthouse a bronze plaque marks the place where two Civil
War generals faced one another and the weaker surrendered.
A few pedestrians pass. A beauty parlor sign blinks. As I turn
to head west, I become the schoolteacher living above the
barber shop. Polishing my shoes each evening. Gazing at the
square below. In time I befriend the waitress at the café and
she winks as she pours my coffee. Soon people begin to
talk. And for good reason. I become so distracted I teach my
students that Cleopatra lost her head during the French
Revolution and that Leonardo perfected the railroad at the
height of the Renaissance. One day her former lover returns
from the army and creates a scene at the school. That evening
she confesses she cannot decide between us. But still we spend
one last night together. By the time I pass the grain elevators
on the edge of town I am myself again. The deep scars of love
already beginning to heal.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is New Year's Day. On this day in Georgia, people eat black-eyed peas and collard greens for good luck. Another popular southern dish is called Hoppin' John and is made of black-eyed peas and ham hocks. An old saying goes, "Eat peas on New Year's Day to have plenty of everything the rest of the year."

On New Year's Day in British Columbia, Canada, people of all ages do a traditional polar bear swim. They put on their bathing suits and plunge into the icy water around Vancouver. The Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year's brings good luck because the shape of a ring symbolizes coming full circle. In Japan, people send each other New Year's postcards and make rice cakes, to eat in January. Starting the New Year with a smile is considered good luck.

The ancient Babylonians were the first to make New Year's resolutions. Early Christians believed they should reflect on mistakes and resolve to improve themselves in the New Year. The idea of making a lot of noise exactly at midnight dates back to early pagan rituals. People believed that deafening noise would drive away evil spirits who flocked to the living at the start of the new year.

In Times Square, New York City, thousands will gather to watch the New Year's ball make its one-minute descent at midnight. The tradition began in 1907 and the original ball was made of iron and wood. Today's ball weights about 1,000 pounds and is made of Waterford Crystal.

It was on this New Year's Day in 1863 that Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring freedom for all slaves in the southern states. The ruling changed the Civil War from a war against secession to a war against slavery. It also allowed the Union to enlist 200,000 African-American soldiers who volunteered after January 1st. Slavery was abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

Also on this day in 1803 the slave colony of Saint-Dominique declared its independence from France. The new nation called itself Haiti after the original Arawak Indian name. To this day it is the site of the only successful slave rebellion in history.

It's the birthday of English novelist E. M. Forster, born in London (1879). He's the author of A Room with a View (1908), Howard's End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote Maurice (1971), a book with homosexual themes published after his death. Forster wrote about the social issues of the English middle-class and believed that people needed to stay in touch with the earth and nurture their imaginations. He once said, "All men are equal-that is to say, who possess umbrellas."

It's the birthday of American writer J.D. Salinger (1919). He's a recluse best known for his novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and its famous teenage hero Holden Caulfield. The book follows Caulfield on a crazy three-day ramble through the streets of Manhattan.

Salinger was born in New York City, the son of a Jewish kosher cheese importer and his Scotch-Irish wife. He was a restless student and studied at three universities but never got a degree. He published his first story in 1940 when he was twenty-one. He was a Staff Sergeant during D-Day and soldiers later praised him for bravery. Salinger returned to New York City after the war and took up writing.

Salinger said, "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." He published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, but refused to help with publicity and didn't want his picture on the back cover. The novel was an overnight success and still sells over 250,000 copies each year.

Salinger wrote three more books before he stopped publishing. In the 1960s he retreated to a remote mansion in Cornish, New Hampshire and immersed himself in Zen Buddhism. Today, he's rarely seen and refuses to give interviews. In 1992, a fire broke out in his house. The New York Times reported that he and his third wife, Colleen, fled "like fleet chipmunks" from reporters.

Salinger once said, "I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."

It's the birthday of American photographer Alfred Steiglitz (1864), the most influential champion of photography in the 20th century. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the son of a wealthy wool merchant. His father sent him to Berlin to study engineering. One day he was out for a walk and saw a camera in a shop window. He later said, "I bought it and carried it to my room and began to fool around with it. It fascinated me, first as a passion, then as an obsession."

Steiglitz wanted the world to consider photography a real art form. In 1905 he opened a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City. There he displayed new photography as well as the work of a group of artists just emerging in France-Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Rodin, and others. In 1916, he showed some charcoal prints by a young painter named Georgia O'Keefe. The two began began a friendship that developed into romance. Eight years later they married. It was Steiglitz's second marriage; he was 60 and she was 37.

Steiglitz is famous for his series of 400 photographs of O'Keefe, often in the nude. He also loved to photograph cloud patterns and the every day world around him in New York City or his summer home in Lake George, New York.

One of Steiglitz's most famous prints shows immigrants on a ship's crowded steerage deck. Pablo Picasso said about the photo, "This is exactly what I have been trying to say in paint." Steiglitz said, "I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that, the feeling I had about life..."

Alfred Steiglitz was the first photographer to have his work shown by major art museums. He died on July 13, 1946, in New York City.

It's the birthday of Betsy Ross (1752), the woman who made the first American flag.

As the story goes, General George Washington brought a sketch of a flag to her Philadelphia upholstery shop. It was 1776. She suggested the five-point star on his drawing be changed to a six-point star. Then she sewed the flag in her parlor.

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SUNDAY, 2 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "New World Order" by Meredith Holmes, from Shubad's Crown. © Pond Road Press. Reprinted with permission.

New World Order

At dusk on January 2nd
we close the curtains,
eat bread and potatoes by candlelight
and burrow to sleep like marmots.
Pulse and respiration slow
not quickening until April.

Driveways go unshoveled
streets unplowed. Snow fills
doorways, sifts into mail slots.
No traffic, no church, no bowling.
Phones are still, offices unlit
and cities as dark as Nebraska cornfields.
All the interstates are deserted
the truckstops silent.
No steak and egg breakfasts
no Johnny Cash

By February, stars are visible
in the night sky over Manhattan and Detroit.
TV stations on the Gulf Coast
and in Southern California
report only local weather.
The Industrial North, the Midwest
the Great Plains, the Great Lakes
are all but forgotten.
The continent is a closed door
with a narrow band
of light around the edge.
Everybody is dreaming:
fire, skin, cave, snow.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1897 that Stephen Crane (1871) survived the sinking of a boat to Cuba and went on to write his short story "The Open Boat" about his experience. Stephen Crane was born into a strict Methodist family of 14, he went to college for two years but never finished, instead he went to New York where he lived in poverty and worked as a free lance writer.

Crane had his big break in publishing with the internationally famous novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) about a young soldier's first experience in battle during the Civil War, but Crane himself had never seen a war. He wanted to witness a war firsthand, so in 1887 he went to Cuba to report on the revolt against Spain when the ship he was on board (The Commodore) sank and he was marooned at sea in a dingy with the captain, the cook and an oil man for four days. When he returned home he wrote "The Open Boat" which is considered one of the greatest short stories ever written, which begins: None of them knew the color to the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea.

"The Open Boat" was one of the first semi-autobiographical stories based on actual events, and led to a new genre. It explored themes like human nature and destiny, and contradicting moods of hope and despair. Ernest Hemingway was greatly influenced by Crane's themes and style, and "The Open Boat" probably in part inspired Hemingway to write "The Old Man and the Sea."

It's the birthday of science fiction writer and scientist Isaac Asimov, born in Petrovichi, Russia (1920). Three years later his family later immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, where they ran a candy store that carried science fiction magazines. Isaac's father didn't allow him to read the magazines but he did it anyhow. His family wanted him to go to medical school and become a doctor, which he had no interest in doing, but he applied anyway, and was happy when he was turned down and could go to college to study chemistry instead.

Asimov published his first short story in Amazing Stories when he was 18. He was able to put himself through college and graduate school at Columbia University by writing and publishing stories. He published his 32nd story called "Nightfall" (1941) in Astounding Science Fiction magazine when he was 21 years old. The story was about a planet with six suns that only has a sunset once every two thousand and forty nine years. It won numerous awards and is still often considered the best science-fiction short story ever written. Asimov went on to write over 500 books but he was always bothered that people considered his best work was written so early in his career. Asimov said, "Writing is just thinking through my fingers."

After graduate school Asimov taught biochemistry at Boston University school of Medicine, but he had no interest in research or academic publishing. Instead he liked write science fiction stories and books about outer space.

Isaac Asimov called himself "a born explainer" and in the late 1950s he began to write books about outer space science after the Russians launched the Sputnik space ship. He felt that Americans had a gap in knowledge about outer space so he began to write books about space and science that were interesting and easy for the common person to understand. He continued to write these books about space for 25 years until his publishers told him to stop and go back to writing science fiction novels.

Kurt Vonnegut once asked him how it felt to know everything, to which he replied, "I only know how it feels to have the reputation of knowing everything. Uneasy." He said when he had to write about something he knew little about he closed his eyes and typed "very very fast."

Isaac Asimov died in 1992 after contracting AIDS from an HIV infected blood transfusion he received during a 1982 open heart surgery operation.

It's the birthday of poet David Shapiro, born in Newark, New Jersey (1947). He was a child prodigy. By the time he was sixteen years old he had played the violin for the New Jersey symphony orchestra. When he was thirteen years old he began writing and publishing poetry. Music, math, painting and architecture were among his inspirations, and he believed poems should have movements in them the way Mozart had movements in his music.

He enrolled in Columbia University, and during his freshman year there he published his first book of poetry and won the Breadloaf Writer's Conference Robert Frost Fellowship. His book was well received by many notable writers including Jack Kerouac and Kenneth Rexroth and also the New York Times Book Review. His third book of poems, A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel (1971) was nominated for a National Book Award.

While at Columbia Shapiro protested the war in Vietnam and his photograph was published on the cover of Newsweek magazine "occupying" the president of the University's chair and smoking one of his "liberated" cigars. He continued to win many fellowships including one to Cambridge University in England and a Book of the Month creative arts fellowship as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities, and a National Endowment for the Arts.

During his early years David Shapiro became acquainted with many well-known poets and artists of the era. He knew Marianne Moore and Allen Ginsberg, and Kenneth Koch was a lifelong friend. He also had friendships with musician John Cage and the painter Jasper Johns.

Shapiro is considered a member of The New York School of poets, which was an avant-garde arts movement started in the 1950's following the earlier beat generation of poets and artists. The New York School included the painter Jackson Pollock, and the poets Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. In 1970 David Shapiro co-published An Anthology of New York Poets with Ron Padgett.

David Shapiro says that before he goes to sleep he will ask for lines of poetry to come to him, and in the middle of the night they come to him in dreams and gets out of bed and begins to write. A lot of his poems take place in front of paintings, and once in a dream it was revealed to him that poetry is a form of painting.

David Shapiro said, "Next to Dante we are all just writers."

It's the birthday of British crime novelist Mo Hayder, born in Essex, England (1962). Mo Hayder left home when she was 15 years old and joined the punk rock movement in London's Soho district. After seeing the movie Blade Runner she moved to Japan where she made good money as a nightclub hostess entertaining rich businessmen and lived in a traditional Japanese-style home that was slated for demolition. She eventually decided to go to film school in California, where she made Claymation figures that ate each other's heads. Her animated films won awards, but were not considered suitable for television in the United States. She eventually returned to London, where she continued to work a variety jobs.

Hayder was making minimum wage when her first crime novel Birdman (2000) was published. It reached the London Times bestseller list and quickly became an international best seller. Previous to this book she had never written anything, other than a couple of short stories for a writer's course. Her second novel, The Treatment (2002), was successful as well.

Mo Hayder says she was inspired in part to write these novels due to a murder that took place in her neighborhood when she was growing up. A policeman who lived in the house directly behind her family's home murdered his wife and buried her in the back yard. He put a tent up to hide where he had dug the hole. For about a week she could see the tent from her house before he was arrested. She said this experience made her think about the common ground that we inhabit, whatever side of the law we think we're on.

To research her third novel, Tokyo, (2004) she returned to Japan and again worked as a nightclub hostess.

When asked in a recent interview what was in her refrigerator, Hayder responded, "A head."

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