MONDAY, 24 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "How to Kill" by Keith Douglas, from Keith Douglas: The Complete Poems © Faber & Faber, Ltd. Reprinted with permission.
How to Kill
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, now infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City (1862). She came from a distinguished New York family, and she grew up stifled under all the rigid social customs of high society. She said, "I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone facades." She decided she wanted to be a writer at an early age, but her parents did not encourage her. She said, "Authorship was considered something between a black art and a form of manual labor."
Wharton was grateful that her parents took her traveling in Europe for much of her childhood, because she got away from many of the New York debutante parties, and she was able to spend most of her time reading. It was in Europe, when she was about twenty years old, that she first met the writer Henry James, though she barely had the courage to speak to him at the time.
Her parents married her off to a man she didn't love when she was 23, and she had to spend the next decade in New York, living the life of a society matron, hosting parties, and leaving herself almost no time to write. Having lived in Europe, she now found New York City to be an awful place to live. She said, "New York is cursed with its universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried, cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness."
She eventually had a nervous breakdown, and it was while she rested at a sanitarium that she began to write seriously. One of her doctors suggested that writing might impair her recovery, but after her first book of short stories The Greater Inclination (1899) got great reviews, she disregarded the doctor's advice.
A few years later, she met Henry James again, and the two became great friends. She had just published a few historical novels, which weren't very successful. His advice was that she write about contemporary New York City, the time and place she new best. He said, "Don't pass it by—the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."
Wharton took James's advice, and the result was her first great novel, The House of Mirth (1905), about the frustrated love affair between Lawrence Selden and a young woman named Lily Bart. Wharton wrote: "He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her... She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty."
Wharton went on to write many more novels about frustrated love, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920), which was the first novel written by a woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.
In her lifetime, most of her novels were bestsellers, even though they had unhappy endings. But after the rise of modernist fiction by writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Wharton's novels began to seem dated. She never understood why stream-of-consciousness writing came into fashion. She said of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), "Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening."
After her death, many critics considered Wharton a stuffy old woman who wrote novels about manners, and most of her books went out of print. Then in 1975, the biographer R.W.B. Lewis discovered that she had conducted a passionate affair during her marriage, and that she had been much more radical in her letters and her journals than her fiction. Suddenly, feminists and others began to reevaluate her work. Several of her novels were made into movies, most of her books came back into print, and she is now considered one of the great American novelists.
Edith Wharton said, "Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."
It's the birthday of war poet Keith Douglas, born in Tunbridge Wells, England (1920). His father was a military man who got laid off by the British army after World War I. His parents struggled to pay the bills, and they separated when he was eight years old. He never saw his father again. He was a student at Oxford when World War II started. He enlisted in the army in 1939, and was stationed in North Africa.
Soon after he arrived, a battle broke out, but he was told to stay out of the combat because he didn't have enough experience. He stole a truck and drove into battle anyway. It turned out that his truck was badly needed in the battle, and his commanding officer was so impressed by his bravery that he put Douglas in charge of a tank battalion. He kept a diary for the next two years, describing the desert campaign from El Alamein, Egypt to Zem Zem, Tunisia. The diary was later published as Alamein to Zem Zem (1946), and it's considered one of the best memoirs of World War II.
Douglas spent several months in a hospital in 1943, and from his hospital bed he wrote a series of unflinching poems about the battles he had witnessed. He said to a friend, "My object is to write true things... I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present... To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and others." After he got out of the hospital, he participated in the invasion of Normandy, and died in battle on June 6, 1944. His poems were published in The Collected Poems of Keith Douglas (1951).
TUESDAY, 25 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Bonie Doon" by Robert Burns.
Bonie Doon
Ye flowery banks o' bonie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu o' care?
Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird,
That sings upon the bough;
Thou minds me o' the happy days
When my fause luve was true.
Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird,
That sings beside thy mate;
For sae I sat, and sae I sang,
And wist na o' my fate.
Aft hae I roved by bonie Doon
To see the wood-bine twine,
And ilka bird sand o' its luve,
And sae did I o' mine.
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose
Frae aff its thorny tree;
And my fause luver staw my rose
But left the thorn wi' me.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). He's the man who wrote the lines: "Oh, my luve's like a red, red rose, / That's newly sprung in June; / Oh, my luve's like the melodie / That's sweetly played in tune."
He only published one book in his lifetime, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), but many of the poems were set to music and are still sung today in Scotland and around the world. A few years after his death, friends began to gather on his birthday to celebrate his life, and the event slowly grew in size and became a Scottish tradition. This day is now a Scottish national holiday.
It's the birthday of W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, born to English parents in Paris, France (1874). His early childhood was comfortable and happy, but his mother died when he was eight and he never got over the loss. He kept three pictures of her next to his bedside for the rest of his life. His father died a few years later, and he had to go live with an unaffectionate uncle. He developed a terrible stutter and became incredibly shy. He later said, "Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge... become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature." Instead, he read voraciously and eventually began to write fiction.
Maugham decided to study medicine, because he knew his uncle would disown him if he admitted that he wanted to be a writer. After medical school, he became an obstetrician, and got a job making house calls to deliver babies in the worst slums of London. He stayed up for hours every night to work on his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), which was about the extreme poverty he had witnessed as a doctor. The book was successful enough to allow him to quit his job and devote his life to writing.
He went on to become one of the most popular authors of his lifetime, writing many plays, essays, short stories, and memoirs. He's best known for his novel Of Human Bondage (1915), based on his own childhood. He once read the book on the radio, and when he came to the passage describing the death of the main character's mother, he broke down weeping and was barely able to continue.
Maugham said, "Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother."
And, "Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all."
It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She came from a family of distinguished scholars and literary critics. She said, "[The] Stephens are difficult, especially as the race tapers out towards its finish—such cold fingers, so fastidious, so critical, such taste... How I wish they had hunted and fished instead of dictating dispatches and writing books."
She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. Her brothers all went to the best universities, and she wrote letters to them about her reading. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father's death, when she was twenty-two. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she'd been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.
Of Charles Dickens, she wrote, "Dickens makes his books blaze up not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire." Of George Moore, she wrote, "Literature has wound itself about him like a veil, forbidding the free use of his limbs."
In 1917 Woolf and her husband founded Hogarth Press, a printing press that they ran out of their home. It allowed her to publish whatever she wanted, without having to submit her work to editors, and as a result she began to produce a series of experimental novels that might not have been published otherwise, in which she attempted to capture the inner lives of her characters.
Woolf believed that the problem with 19th century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.
She wrote: "We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying... what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light."
She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had died that year. She wrote to a friend, "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!" Later that summer, she wrote in her diary "There's no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."
Her next book was her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf wrote: "In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what [Mrs. Dalloway] loved; life; London; this moment of June."
Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. Many of her essays were collected in The Common Reader (1925).
In one of her most famous essays, "The Death of a Moth," Woolf described the experience of watching a moth trapped between two windowpanes. She wrote, "Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body... as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it."
And in her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One's Own (1929), she wrote: "So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison."
WEDNESDAY, 26 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "The Lanyard" by Billy Collins. Reprinted with permission from author.
The Lanyard
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly-
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift-not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Australia Day, the day on which Australians celebrate the establishment of the first British settlement in that country in 1788. Captain James Cook had been the first European to discover the island continent in 1770, and he informed the British government that it might make a good place for a settlement. By 1780, Great Britain's prisons were growing overcrowded because they had lost their colonies in America, which was where they had been sending prisoners. So they decided to start sending convicts to Australia, which was then called New South Wales.
The first shipment consisted of about 730 convicts, among them highway robbers, jewel thieves, and a woman who had tried to steal 24 yards of black silk lace. The military guards carried no ammunition, so that their guns could not be used against them in a mutiny. Two attempted mutinies were put down during the voyage. Forty-eight people died before they reached their destination, which was considered a remarkably successful survival rate. They arrived on this day in 1788 and settled an area they called Sydney Cove, around which would grow the city of Sydney.
It's the birthday of cartoonist, novelist and playwright Jules Feiffer, born in the Bronx (1929). He said of his childhood, "The only thing I wanted to be was grown up. Because I was a terrible flop as a child. You cannot be a successful boy in America if you cannot throw or catch a ball." He decided early on that he wanted to be a comic strip artist, and when he was a teenager, he showed his work to the cartoonist Will Eisner, and Eisner gave him a job. Feiffer said, "[It was] ten dollars a week part-time—erasing pages, filling in blanks, and dreaming great dreams."
But he was drafted in 1951, and he did not take well to the army. He said, "I was treated with open contempt by one form of authority or the other in the army on a 24-hour basis." The experience inspired him to write a bitterly cynical cartoon strip about a four-year-old boy who is drafted by mistake. He tried to sell the strip to a variety of major newspapers, but nobody would buy it. So he finally turned to a new weekly newspaper in his neighborhood called The Village Voice. Over the next decade, the Village Voice became nationally prominent, and Feiffer's cartoons became nationally syndicated.
His strip in the Village Voice was one of the first cartoon strips to deal with adult themes such as sex, politics, and psychiatry. For most of his career, he has drawn and written all of his work in Central Park, which he considers his office. His cartoons collected in books such as Feiffer's Marriage Manual (1967) and Feiffer on Nixon: The Cartoon Presidency (1974). His most recent book is a book for children The Daddy Mountain (2004).
It's the birthday of children's book author and editor Mary Mapes Dodge, born Mary Mapes in New York City (1831). She was born into a prestigious New York family. Her grandfather was a personal friend of the Marquis de Lafayette. Her father was an inventor and an entrepreneur who planned to revolutionize the farming industry with new chemical fertilizers. One of the investors in his fertilizer idea was a man named William Dodge, who later married young Mary Mapes.
Mary Mapes Dodge lived with her husband in New York City for five years, and had two sons. Then one night in 1858, her husband left the house and never came back. It turned out that he had drowned, possibly of a suicide. She was devastated and took her sons to live on her father's farm. She moved into a room in the attic, which she decorated with moss, leaves, flowers, and a painting of the Rhine river on the ceiling. She spent many hours in the attic playing with her sons and telling them stories, and eventually she began to write the stories down and submit them to magazines.
She had long been interested in writing something about Holland, although she'd never been there. She had some Dutch friends who had emigrated from Amsterdam, and she asked them to tell her everything they knew about their home country, what things looked like and smelled like, and the things people did and the food they ate and the stories they told their children at night. She used all of these details to write a children's book called Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865), which became a best-seller. In the fifteen years after it was published, it received more reviews than any other children's book in America.
Among the historical background of Holland that Mary Mapes Dodge wrote about in Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates , she included a story about a boy who saved Holland by sticking his finger in a dike. That story was her own invention, but it became so famous that many people believed it was an old Dutch folktale.
In 1872, Charles Scribner and two of his partners were thinking of developing a magazine for children, and they wrote to Dodge to ask for her advice. She replied, "The child's magazine, needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the [adult's]... Let there be no sermonizing either, no wearisome spinning out of facts, no rattling of the dry bones of history. A child's magazine is its pleasure ground."
They were impressed enough by her response that they asked her to edit the children's magazine, which became known as St. Nicholas. Dodge chose the name, because she said, "Is he not the boys' and girls' own Saint, the special friend of young Americans? That he is... And, what is more, isn't he the kindest, best, and jolliest old dear that ever was known? Certainly again."
St. Nicholas became one of the most successful children's publications of all time. It included work by writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain. The magazine also encouraged young people to submit stories and poems for publication. Among the writers who first published their work in St. Nicholas were Ring Lardner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eudora Welty, Edmund Wilson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
THURSDAY, 27 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Winter Song" by Aaron Kramer, from Wicked Times. © University of Illinois Press. Reprinted with permission.
Winter Song
Under a willow
close by a brook
her lap for a pillow
her eyes for a book
she like a drummer
practiced her art
all spring and all summer-
the drum was my heart.
Hear how the willow sighs to the sun:
It is over and done with, over and done!
Hear the cold brook, that can hardly run:
It is over and done with, over and done!
Under what maple
close by what lake
will she lie next April?
Whose heart will she break?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson near Daresbury, Chesire, England (1832). He is best known as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (1872), and for the characters the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the White Rabbit and many others. Carroll was also a gifted mathematician and photographer. His photographs of children are still considered remarkable to this day.
Carroll read Pilgrim's Progress as a young boy, in part to prepare for a life in the ministry. But he suffered an attack of whooping cough at age 17, a late age to get that illness, and as a result he developed a stammer to go along with his natural shyness. After recovering from his illness, Carroll decided that life as a minister would be too demanding.
Instead, Carroll lectured in mathematics at Christ's College, Oxford, where he had also attended university. Carroll found the work dull and considered most of his students stupid, but he wrote seriously during this time. In 1855, he said, "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication, but I do not despair of doing so some day." The next year he published under the famous pseudonym "Lewis Carroll" for the first time, when his poem "Solitude" appeared in a magazine called Train.
Carroll always felt at ease around children. It has been rumored that his stammer would disappear while he talked with children. Nobody can say for certain if this is true, but Carroll was well-known as a storyteller, and he liked telling his stories to children. Carroll first came up with the idea for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by telling stories to the children of the dean of Christ's College, who had a daughter named Alice.
Carroll enjoyed massive success from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and his pseudonym grew into an alter ego that became famous in its own right. Even today, more people know the legends surrounding Lewis Carroll better than they know the biography of the real man, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The stories of Alice and her adventures in the strange wonderland have remained popular to this day. Many readers speculate on the underlying meaning of the tales, but Carroll himself said he only intended the tales as carefree fantasy and nothing more.
Lewis Carroll said, "If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, without hard labour, and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!"
And, "If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."
It's the birthday of the famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, in what is today Austria (1756). He is considered one of the most important composers the West has ever seen, along with Ludwig van Beethoven.
Mozart's father Leopold was one of Europe's leading music educators, and he gave his son intensive training in the piano and violin. The young Mozart developed so quickly that he began composing original work at five years old. Then Leopold took Mozart and his sister on several tours throughout Europe, where Mozart would write piano pieces for his sister to perform. Mozart was often ill during this time, and the cold weather and constant travel may have contributed to his early death. But Leopold was more concerned with money than the well being of his son.
Still, Mozart enjoyed many parts of his journeys. He met many famous musicians and composers. During a trip to Italy, Mozart amazed his hosts when he listened only once to the performance of a Gregario Allegri composition, and then wrote it out from memory, returning one more time to correct minor errors. Another time, Mozart encountered the glass harmonica, and he so enjoyed its sound that he composed several pieces of music for it.
Mozart visited Vienna in 1781, when he was working for a harsh archbishop. The two had a disagreement, and according to Mozart he was fired with a literal kick in the seat of his pants.
Mozart remained in Vienna thereafter, and in 1782 he married Constanze Weber, the sister of a woman he had loved years before. The couple had six children, but only two of them survived into adulthood. It was in Vienna that Mozart wrote his famous operas The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and The Marriage of Figaro (1786).
The circumstances of Mozart's early death are still speculated about today. Many people speculate that he died of mercury poisoning while being treated for syphilis, while others think he died from an illness brought on by a meal of badly cooked pork. Others insist that Mozart was murdered by his rival Antonio Salieri.
It is also popularly believed that Mozart died poor and forgotten, but that is not true. His popularity had declined, but his work was still in demand in Prague and other parts of Europe. His financial difficulties stemmed from his inability to live within his means, not from a lack of income. Mozart was buried in a mass grave because the country was battling an outbreak of bubonic plague, and not because his family could not afford a proper burial.
Mozart said, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them."
And, "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
It's the birthday of Jerome Kern, born in New York City (1885). He is best known as the composer of Broadway musicals like The Cat and the Fiddle (1931) and Roberta (1933).
Kern's mother encouraged his musical gifts from the time he was very young, but Kern's father wanted his son to join the family retail business. Kern followed his father at first. And then, when he was sixteen, Kern mistakenly ordered 200 pianos for the family retail store, when he was supposed to order only two. Kern had a long lunch with the factory owner who took his order, and the two of them got drunk, and so they failed to notice the mistake. Then all the pianos were delivered. Kern said, "You've no idea what that many pianos coming off a truck look like."
After this, Kern's father allowed him to study at the New York College of Music. Then Kern worked as a song-plugger and an in-house composer for a local publisher. When he was 19, Kern traveled to London, and he received his first real training in the theater. He also married his wife Eva there, in 1910. Kern and his wife returned to America, where he enhanced the scores of European musicals and worked as a rehearsal pianist. Then he met Oscar Hammerstein II, who became a lifelong friend, and the two collaborated on Show Boat in 1927. This musical gave us the songs "Ol' Man River" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man." In 1933, Kern and Hammerstein produced Roberta, which included the famous song "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes."
Kern moved to Hollywood in 1935, and he enjoyed success there. He wrote "The Way You Look Tonight" for the movie Swing Time, and the song won an Academy Award™. In 1941, Kern and Hammerstein wrote "The Last Time I Saw Paris" because Paris had just been occupied by Nazi Germany, and that song also won an Academy Award.
Kern died in 1945 with Hammerstein at his side. At the memorial service, Hammerstein said of his friend Jerome Kern, "He stimulated everyone. He annoyed some. He never bored anyone at any time."
FRIDAY, 28 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "At My Funeral" by Willis Barnstone, from Life Watch. © BOA Editions Limited. Reprinted with permission.
At My Funeral
I take a seat in the third row
and catch the eulogies. It's sweet
to see old friends, some I don't know.
I wear a tie, good shoes, and greet
a stranger with a kiss. It's bliss
for an insecure guy to hear
deep words. I'll live on them, not miss
a throb, and none of us will fear
the night. There are no tears, no sad
faces, no body or sick word
of God. I sing, have a warm chat
with friends gone sour, wipe away bad
blood. And sweet loves? I tell a bird
to tip them off. Then tip my hat.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1986 that the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. That evening, President Ronald Reagan eulogized the lost astronauts in one of the finest addresses of his presidency. He said, "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped 'the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"
It's the birthday of the French novelist Colette, born Sidonie Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauver-en-Puisaye, France (1873). She is best known as the author of Cheri (1920) and Gigi (1945), but Colette published over fifty novels in her lifetime, many of them autobiographical.
Colette's first books are known as the Claudine series, and they were published under the name "Willy," which was the pen name of her first husband. These books follow the improper adventures of a young French woman. According to one story, her husband would lock Colette in a room until she had written enough words. This treatment, while cruel, also meant that Colette wrote four novels in four years.
Colette began working in the music halls of Paris when she divorced her husband. She became the talk of Paris for baring a breast on stage. She caused a riot at the Moulin Rouge for doing a pantomime of sexual intercourse during a sketch. It was also during this time that Colette began having affairs with women, as she would do between marriages throughout her life. She became involved with her manager, a woman known as "Missy" who was also a niece of Napoleon III.
When World War I broke out in Europe, Colette began working as a freelance journalist, but she also converted her home into a hospital for the war wounded. She remarried and gave birth to a daughter, who later claimed that her parents had neglected her. Colette also had a mysterious relationship with her stepson, and many people speculated that they had an affair. The publication of Cheri in 1920 only fueled that speculation. It is the story of an aging woman engaging in an affair with a young, inexperienced man.
The publication of Cheri also brought Colette great fame as a writer. By the end of the 1920's, Colette was widely regarded as France's greatest woman writer. She became the first woman admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy, and in her later years achieved the same legendary status as Gertrude Stein, the American expatriate living in Paris.
In 1935, Colette married her third husband, a pearl salesman who had lost his business in the Depression. He was Jewish, and as a result had difficulty finding work. Colette supported him financially, and helped him hide when Germany occupied France in World War II. Colette's most famous novel, Gigi, was published in 1945, when she was seventy-two years old. Three years later, the novel was adapted into a film, and in 1958 it was adapted into a popular musical.
When Colette died in 1954, she was given a state funeral, and thousands of mourners attended the service.
Colette said, "By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet."
It's the birthday of Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming (1912). He is best known for his innovations in abstract expressionist painting. He was often called "Jack the Dripper" because of his radical painting style.
Pollock's family moved to Arizona and California when he was a boy, and during this time Pollock first saw Indian sand paintings, which fascinated him. He later attended art school in California, where he studied seriously and drew a series of anatomy drawings.
In 1929, Pollock began studying under Thomas Hart Benton, the realist mural painter, at Manhattan's Art Students League. Pollock said, "He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting." Pollock became deeply influenced by Pablo Picasso's work, and the work of other surrealist painters, and this led Pollock to experiment with his painting. He developed the "drip" technique, where he would draw or drip paint onto enormous canvases. Sometimes he applied paint directly from the tube, and other times he used aluminum paint to make his work more brilliant. He was so energetic in his attacks on the canvas that his approach to painting became known as "action painting."
Jackson Pollock said, "Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you."
It's the birthday of the English novelist and critic David Lodge, born in London, England (1935). He is the author of several novels, many of which resemble Lodge's own life.
Lodge was born in suburban London to a traditional Catholic family, and he was raised in the years following World War II. His early novel, The Picturegoers (1960), is about a Catholic family in South London who take in a university student as a lodger. Other early novels bear striking resemblance to Lodge's own life: Ginger, You're Barmy (1962) draws upon Lodge's own compulsory service in the British military, and The British Museum is Falling Down (1970) follows the comical story of a Catholic graduate student working on his thesis. Aside from his semi-autobiographical novels, Lodge closely protects his privacy.
Lodge is the creator of the fictional town of Rummidge, which is based on Birmingham, England, and has been the setting for several novels. He has also created the imaginary American state of Euphoria, located between North California and South California, and is home to a state university in the city of Esseph, which is a fictionalized version of Berkeley, where Lodge taught for a brief time. His novels set in academia are usually satirical in nature.
David Lodge said, "A novel is a long answer to the question 'What is it about?' I think it should be possible to give a short answer—in other words, I believe a novel should have a thematic and narrative unity that can be described."
SATURDAY, 29 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter" by Robert Bly, from Silence in the Snowy Fields. © Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted with permission.
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the 25th president of the United States, William McKinley, born in Niles, Ohio (1843). McKinley began the trust-busting era and led the U.S into the Spanish-American War, which brought the Spanish colonies of the Philippines and Puerto Rico under American control. He served two terms, being reelected in 1900, but he was shot on September 6, 1901 by anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz while at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He died from the wounds eight days later.
McKinley's portrait appeared on the five hundred dollar bill from 1928 to 1946. He said, "Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not in conflict; and that our real eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war." He also said, "That's all a man can hope for during his lifetime—to set an example—and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history."
It's the birthday of novelist, short-story writer, and poet, Virgil Suarez born in Havana, Cuba (1962). He's the author of over fifteen books, including his first novel, Latin Jazz (1989) and the poetry collection, Landscapes and Dreams (2003). He's well known for compiling several anthologies of Cuban and Latin American writers. His father worked as a cutter in a garment factory. They left Cuba in 1970, first fleeing to Spain, and then finally to Los Angeles. He says, "I wrote to remember, and to put things in order. The life of an exile is chaos."
It's the birthday of writer and revolutionary Thomas Paine, born in Thetford, England (1737). He's best known for writing Common Sense (1776), the pamphlet that convinced many Americans, including George Washington, to fight for independence from England. The original title Paine came up with for the pamphlet was Plain Truth, and he also is credited with proposing the name "United States of America" for the new nation.
Paine was fired twice in four years from his job as a tax collector in England when he was a young man. His first recorded writing was a short article arguing for better salaries and working conditions. Paine was also an inventor, holding a patent in Europe for the single span iron bridge. He worked with John Fitch on steam engines, and he also developed a smokeless candle.
Paine published a series of pamphlets during the Revolutionary War called The American Crisis (1776). The first pamphlet begins with the famous line, "These are the times that try men's souls." It was so inspiring that George Washington had it read to all Patriot troops to boost morale after some early battle losses. Paine said, "War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."
Paine met with Napoleon in 1800, and Napoleon supposedly told him that a gold statue should be erected to Paine in every city in the world. Today, there are only five statues worldwide dedicated to him, and one is in Paris, France.
He said, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." He also said, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Edward Abbey, born in Indiana, Pennsylvania (1927). He's best known for his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1976), a best seller that follows a group of ecological radical activists and explores the idea of extremist action to protect the environment. The book made him a cult hero. He said, "The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders."
Abbey's father was a farmer named Paul Revere, and Abbey was raised on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains. He served in the U.S. Army in Italy in 1945 and 1946. He moved to the Southwest in 1947 and stayed there for the rest of his life.
In 1956 he began working as a park ranger and a fire lookout for the National Park Service. He worked there for fifteen years, and this led him to write about the wilderness of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. He said, "For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!" His book Desert Solitaire (1968) is about his time working as a ranger in Arches National Park, Utah. In it he argues for, among other things, a ban on cars in wilderness preserves. In a memorial piece about Abbey, Edward Hoagland says of him, "Personally, he was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly and cowboy qualities, and even when silent he appeared bigger than life."
Abbey said, "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds."
It's the birthday of comedian and actor W.C. Fields, (sometimes listed as April 9, 1879) born William Claude Dukenfield, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1880). He wrote the screenplays for some of his best-known films, including The Bank Dick (1940), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939).
It is the birthday of playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, born in Tagnarog, Russia (1860). His grandfather had been a serf who bought the family's freedom, and Chekhov's father owned a small grocery store. Anton was one of six children. His father insisted his sons learn Greek because there was a large Greek colony in Tagnarog, and he thought it would be good for business reasons, so Chekhov started his education in a Greek school. He loved the theatre and managed to go to plays often, even though high school students were forbidden from going. Chekhov was very good at impressions, and he put on performances for his family with help from his brothers.
Chekhov's father went to Moscow when their business failed, and Chekhov stayed behind along with one of his brothers to finish school. He began writing for newspapers and small magazines to make some money, and eventually Chekhov went on to study medicine. By the time he earned his medical degree, he was already well known as a humor contributor to popular Russian magazines such as Zritel (The Spectator) and Sputnik. He still considered himself mainly a doctor, although he practiced very little except during the cholera epidemic of 1892-93. He said, "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress. When I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."
Chekhov's early full-length plays were failures, but his play the Seagull (1896), although at first getting terrible reviews, was revived in 1898 by Stanislavsky, and that time it was a success. Chekhov said, "One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake." Chekhov's most famous plays are Uncle Vanya (1899), The Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). All were written in the last decade of his life.
Chekhov caught tuberculosis in 1897 and lived abroad, in Crimea, and finally in Yalta from 1900 on for health reasons. He said, "Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too." He also said, "When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured."
In 1901 he married the actress Olga Knipper, who played many of the female roles in his plays after his death. It was a happy marriage, but they spent most of their time apart because she was acting in Moscow and he had to stay in Yalta because he was sick. He said, "If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry."
He died in 1904 and was buried in Moscow. The crowds that were watching the funeral procession held up all traffic. Chekhov said, "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
SUNDAY, 30 JANUARY, 2005
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Poem: "Calf Born in Snow" by Patricia Gray, from Rupture. © Red Hen Press, L.A. Reprinted with permission.
Calf Born in Snow
I can still hear the loud moan
in my grandfather's kitchen,
where the woodstove was open
for the failing fire's warmth, and
on the oven door, wrapped
in an old quilt, lay the new Charolais calf-
a twin that survived its snowy birth
that morning, though its brother died-
both of them the color of muddy snow,
this one too weak to stand.
We tried to feed him his mother's milk,
but he seemed to forget he was eating
and slept, so that by ten that night, when
he raised his head suddenly, making
a loud maa-a-a-a sound, I could scarcely
believe it. "He's getting better!"
Dad put his hand on my shoulder.
"Quiet. He's dying," was all he said-
old knowledge, deep as the Blue Mountains.
Still, I'd witnessed that final, wonderful
rallying, as if every ounce of life pulled
together to raise the calf's head,
to leave his sound so indelibly there.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the 32nd president of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born in Hyde Park, New York (1882). He was the only president to be elected to four terms. He was also the first president to regularly address the nation over the radio, through weekly speeches he called "fireside chats." He appointed nine Supreme Court Justices while in office, more than any other president except George Washington. He said, "Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough." He also said, "I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm."
He was an only son and tutored at home until he was fourteen years old. He watched and collected birds as a child and was convinced of the importance of forests and the environment from a young age. The first eight years of his presidency saw the biggest effort on the part of any president before or since to stress the importance of protecting our natural resources.
He said, "Remember you are just an extra in everyone else's play."
It's the birthday of Australian-born novelist and short story writer Shirley Hazzard, born in Sydney, Australia (1931). She's best known for her novel The Transit of Venus (1980), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981.
It's the birthday of humorist and novelist (Frank) Gelett Burgess, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1866). He wrote more than 35 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several plays, including the satirical book Are You A Bromide? (1897). He was the co-founder and editor of Lark, a humor magazine that was usually printed on expensive Chinese bamboo paper, always without page numbers and uncut, with fancy drawings and poster art in addition to writing. His well-known quatrain about a Purple Cow appeared in the first issue of Lark. It reads, "I never Saw a Purple Cow; / I never Hope to See One; / But I can Tell you, Anyhow, / I'd rather See than Be One." The fame of the poem followed him for a long time, and years later he wrote, "Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow; / I'm sorry now I wrote it; / But I can tell you, Anyhow, / I'll Kill you if you Quote it."
Burgess went to MIT and after graduating worked as a draftsman with the Southern Pacific Railway for three years. He later taught topographical drawing at the University of California, and later got a job as a designer of a magazine called The Wave and started contributing to magazines himself. He was so successful that after only twenty-five issues he left California for New York to become a professional writer.
Burgess had a habit of making up new words to make fun of people's quirks. His best known term is the much-used word "blurb," which he defined as "self-praise; to make a noise like a publisher." Burgess said, "If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead."
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Richard (Gary) Brautigan, born in Tacoma, Washington (1935). He was an important cult and literary figure in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He was called a "hippie author," but most of his writing was about death, anxiety, and change. He said, "It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult."
Brautigan reportedly never knew his real last name until he graduated from high school. He had been going by the last name "Porterfield," which was his mother's second husband's last name. His own parents never married. He said, "I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come."
Brautigan moved to San Francisco, where he wrote his best-selling novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967). The back cover has only the word "Mayonnaise" in white letters on a solid red background. It's a tradition to flirt in coffee shops by showing someone the back cover from far away and then refusing to explain. Brautigan said, "If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows."
He committed suicide in 1984 at the age of forty-nine. He said, "Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?" He also said, "All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds."
It's the birthday of historian and author Barbara Tuchman, born in New York City, New York (1912). She's best known for her book The Guns of August (1962), a history of the outbreak of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, (1970). She won Pulitzer Prizes for both books.
Tuchman's father was a one-time owner and publisher of The Nation, as well as the founder of the Theatre Guild. Her maternal grandfather was the ambassador to Constantinople under president Woodrow Wilson, and her uncle was the Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She said, "The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard."
Tuchman never went to graduate school, and never took a single course in writing. In deciding to write, she said, "The single most formative experience, I think, was the stacks at Widener Library where I was allowed to have as my own one of those little cubicles with a table under a window, queerly called, as I have since learned, 'carrels,' a word I never knew when I sat in one. Mine was deep in among the 940's (British History, that is) and I could roam at liberty through the rich stacks, taking whatever I wanted. The experience was marvelous, a word I use in its exact sense meaning full of marvels. It gave me a lifelong affinity for libraries, where I find happiness, refuge, not to mention the material for making books of my own."
Tuchman said, "Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library."
She also said, "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
