MONDAY, 25 APRIL, 2005
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Poem: "Atavistic" by Irene McKinney from Vivid Companion. © Vandalia Press. Reprinted with permission.
Atavistic
I wanted to walk without clothing
in the woods beside the creek,
and to come to the barn at night.
and sleep beside the horses, curled
in the smell and scratch of hay
with the bitch and pups.
The life of the house was flat,
filled with monotonous talking,
passing to and fro among the rooms,
and for what. My mother hated
animals, the way they ate the
food and dirtied the floor.
They were her enemies; she fought
their right to be there and
would have wiped them off the earth
if she could have. If a cat or a dog
came too close to the back door she
threw scalding water on it, and
was righteous in her anger, shouting
that they were not human and
didn't feel real pain.
If we must choose sides, I said
as a child, I take
the side of the animals.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, born in England in 1599.
It's the birthday of the poet and novelist Walter de la Mare born in Kent, England (1873).
It's the birthday of the French novelist Claude Mauriac, born in Paris in 1914.
It's the birthday of the man who gave us Uncle Wiggily, Howard Garis, Binghamton, New York (1873).
It's the birthday of the novelist Padgett Powell, Gainesville, Florida (1952). He was 20 years old, in college, when he admitted to his English professor that he, Padget Powel, had never read anything by Faulkner. She was horrified. She gave him a copy of Absalom, Absalom! which inspired him to start writing fiction, or at least to try writing bad Faulkner parody.
He worked for a few years as a roofer in Texas. Then his girlfriend left him. He decided to go back to graduate school as a way of meeting some new girlfriend, and enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Houston. His professor was the writer Donald Barthelme, who became his mentor and his friend and who helped Powell publish his first novel Edisto (1984), the story of a boy growing up in South Carolina whose mother, a college professor, is trying to turn him into a writer.
He's gone on to write several more books, A Woman Named Drown, Edisto Revisited, and Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, as well as many short stories.
Padget Powell said, "Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper. It's perfectly good white paper that you mess up with and you spoil it and you fail. I learned to write predicating everything on failure."
And today is the birthday of Jay Anthony Lukas, New York City (1933). For many years, he was a roving national correspondent for the New York Times, the author of a number of famous nonfiction books: Don't Shoot—We Are Your Children (1971), about the generation gap. In 1985, he published Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, about the mob violence that erupted in Boston after the federal government school desegregation order.
Anthony Lukas suffered from depression for many years. On the morning of June the 5th, 1997, after meeting with his editor to talk about the last revisions to his last book, Big Trouble, Anthony Lukas came home to his apartment on the upper west side of New York and committed suicide.
TUESDAY, 26 APRIL, 2005
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Poem: "The Unwritten Poem" by Louis Simpson from The Owner of the House. © BOA Editions. Reprinted with permission.
The Unwritten Poem
You will never write the poem about Italy.
What Socrates said about love
is true of poetry—where is it?
Not in beautiful faces and distant scenery
but the one who writes and loves.
In your life here, on this street
where the houses from the outside
are all alike, and so are the people.
Inside, the furniture is dreadful—
flock on the walls, and huge color television.
To love and write unrequited
is the poet's fate. Here you'll need
all your ardor and ingenuity.
This is the front and these are the heroes—
a life beginning with "Hi!" and ending with "So long!"
You must rise to the sound of the alarm
and march to catch the 6:20—
watch as they ascend the station platform
and, grasping briefcases, pass beyond your gaze
and hurl themselves into the flames.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the humorist Artemus Ward, born near Waterford, Maine (1834), who said, "I am happiest when I am idle. I could live for months without performing any kind of labor and feel fresh and vigorous enough to go right on in the same way."
It's the birthday of the author Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn (1914).
It's the birthday of the novelist Anita Loos, born in Mount Shasta, California (1893), who gave us Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
It's the birthday of the blues singer Ma Rainey, born Columbus, Georgia (1886).
And it was on this day in 1937 that German bombers attacked and destroyed the city of Guernica in Spain. Hitler was one of the allies of the Fascist side, the side of Franco, in the Spanish Civil War, and he wanted to use the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for his new blitzkrieg military strategy.
It was a Monday, this day in 1937, a market day in Guernica, farmers were in the town square with their harvest, shoppers filled the street, and that afternoon the German Luftwaffe attacked.
The first wave of planes dropped blast bombs that destroyed the principal buildings; the second wave flew low, gunning down the citizens; and the third wave dropped incendiary bombs to burn any remaining parts of the city. The attack lasted for three and a half hours. When it was over, almost nothing of the city remained. It was the first time in history that a city was completely destroyed from the air.
One of the people who heard the news of the bombing the following day was the painter Pablo Picasso, who was in exile in Paris. He was trying to come up with an idea for a mural to be displayed at the World's Fair in Paris that summer, and when he heard about the bombing, he began a new painting called Guernica. He did it on a huge canvas: 12 feet high, 26 feet wide, worked on it for a little more than a month. The painting he produced showed no planes, no bombs, no explosions. It was just a black and white image of a wailing woman holding a dead child in her arms, a dead man on the ground holding a broken sword, a bull, a screaming horse, a woman on fire, a woman falling to one knee, another woman leaning in a window and shining a lamp on the whole scene.
It was done in a primitive, almost cartoonish style to look like newsprint. It was displayed at the Paris World's Fair and people weren't sure what to make of it. Leftist critics said the painting didn't have a direct enough political message, but some people saw the painting as a warning that everything they loved was about to be lost.
Two years later Hitler invaded Poland, using the same bombing strategy, and Picasso's painting went on to become the most famous antiwar painting of the 20th Century.
WEDNESDAY, 27 APRIL, 2005
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Poem: "Getting the Machine" by Joyce Sutphen from Naming the Stars. © Holy Cow! Press, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
Getting the Machine
It was good to hear
my own voice again
when I called, after
being gone for weeks.
I sounded the same.
I hadn't changed my name;
didn't have a foreign accent.
I just said I couldn't
come to the phone right then,
exactly the way I'd been
saying it for years,
and so I left myself
a little message
saying how sorry
I was I wasn't there,
and that I'd be
home soon. I tried to
think of what I'd want
to hear myself saying
and say it right.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, born in the Tyrol, Austria in 1898. He wrote five of them, the first in 1939, that begins, "In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines."
It's the birthday of the playwright, August Wilson, born Pittsburgh (1945). He grew up in a poor section of town in an apartment with no hot water, the only African-American kid in a private school. He dropped out of school, worked a series of menial jobs, but started going to the library every day, and there he fell in love with the works of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
He bought his typewriter in 1965, moved to St. Paul; in 1982, wrote his first play, Jitney, and two years later came Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
And today's the birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, born in Point Pleasant, Ohio (1822). He was the commander of the Union Armies at the end of the Civil War. He was the 18th president of the United States, and he was the author of his Personal Memoirs, in 1885: one of the few books ever written by an American president that qualifies as great literature.
After leaving the White House, President Grant went on a world tour with his wife, came back to this country, not sure what he wanted to do. His son was involved in banking. There was a financial boom at the time in the country and President Grant was persuaded to join his son in an investment banking scheme, which was profitable for a few years, and then the bubble burst. One of the partners had been embezzling money. Grant, who had thought he was a millionaire, found out that he was several millions dollars in debt. And less than ten years after he left the White House, he was completely broke.
He was desperate to earn money. He wrote two articles for Century magazine, one about the battle of Shiloh, the other about the capture of Vicksburg. After the first article appeared, Century gained 50,000 new subscribers, the number of advertising pages doubled, and the magazine's profits went up by about $100,000, of which President Grant was paid $500 per article.
So he set out to write a book of his memoirs, and Mark Twain gave him a great offer. He offered him 75 percent of the profits if Grant would publish with Twain's new publishing house. Grant signed the contract, hoping that the profits would help support his family after his death. At the time, he'd been diagnosed with throat cancer, and his health was deteriorating rapidly. He knew he didn't have long to live. He wrote as fast as he could, though he was in extreme pain. In a daze from pain medication, still he wrote 275,000 words in less than a year.
In the last few weeks of life, though he could not speak, he kept writing and revising and checking everything. Grant finished the book in July 1885, and died four days later.
Personal Memoirs was sold not in bookstores, but by subscription, door-to-door. Former Union soldiers in uniform sold it across the country. It was a huge success. The book eventually sold more than 300,000 copies, provided President Grant's family with $450,000 in royalties—the biggest payment for any book at that point in history.
And for years thereafter, critics and writers were surprised at how well President Grant had written. His memoir is now considered one of the greatest military memoirs ever written by an American.
THURSDAY, 28 APRIL, 2005
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Poem: "Knowledge" by Susan Cataldo from drenched: Selected Poems of Susan Cataldo 1979-1999. © Telephone Books. Reprinted with permission.
Knowledge
Kris said, You asked me two questions, why?
Why don't you ask me a Star Trek question next?
You asked me a Raymond Burr question & a
Pete Seeger question, why don't you ask me
a Robert Preston question? Like, what was
Robert Preston's real name? Robert Mescervey.
Or a James Stewart question? Like what did
James Stewart study in college? Architecture.
Or a Ricardo Montalban question? Like, where
was he born? Mexico City. That reminds me,
you can ask me an Abraham Lincoln question.
Like, what foods did he eat? He ate an apple
for breakfast, a biscuit & coffee for lunch
& sometimes he ate meat & potatoes for dinner.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Diane Johnson, born Moline, Illinois (1934). She's best known as the author of a trilogy about American expatriates in France: Le Divorce (1997), Le Mariage (2000) and her latest, L'Affaire (2003).]
It's the birthday of Harper Lee, born Nelle Harper in Monroeville, Alabama (1926). She went to law school, at the University of Alabama. She went to New York City where she got a job as a reservation clerk for an airline. She wanted to be a write, so she came home to write for about four hours every evening, and started working on a novel about the trial of a black man in a small town in Alabama.
And then on Christmas, 1956, a family she knew in Manhattan gave her a gift for Christmas—a check to give her one year off from her job to write whatever she pleased. And that year, Harper Lee wrote most of the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, (1960) which still sells about a million copies a year and which is studied in about three-fourths of all public middle schools and high school in America.
It's the anniversary of the mutiny on the Bounty—which took place in the south seas in 1789 on the British cargo ship the HMS Bounty—the most notorious mutiny in naval history. Wordsworth wrote a poem about it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was based on it. And, of course, there was the famous book by Nordhoff and Hall, which was made into a movie. In that book, and in the movies, the villain of the story always was the brutal Captain Bligh, but historians have argued that Captain Bligh wasn't any harder than the average sea captain, and was actually the hero of the story.
Mutinies were relatively common at the time. During the Napoleonic Wars, there were more than a thousand of them in British naval records. And most scholars believe the cause of the mutiny on the Bounty wasn't the mutineers' feelings towards their captain so much as their feelings about the women on the islands that they had just left behind.
Captain Bligh was sent to the South Seas to pick up bread fruit trees from Tahiti and take them back to the West Indies. Tahiti seemed like a paradise to all of them. The women were so beautiful and compliant.
A few days after the ship had left Tahiti, 11 crew members burst into the captain's cabin, forced him out on the deck, dressed only in his nightshirt, put him in a small life boat. 17 other members of the ship volunteered to go with him. They were given some bread and pork and rum and wine and 28 gallons of water, and set adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a boat a little more than 20 feet long and 7 feet wide with one sail and 6 oars.
With so many men, so many supplies aboard, the boat sat low in the water, just about six inches to spare. They set out for the island of Timor, 3,900 miles away, and Captain Bligh, using only a compass and a sextant, navigated their way through the Great Barrier Reef. They went through several storms on short rations of less than an ounce of bread and four ounces of water a day, and after 48 days at sea, they reached the island of Timor where they were welcomed by Dutch settlers. It was one of the most extraordinary feats of navigation in naval history.
FRIDAY, 29 APRIL, 2005
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Poem: "Fathers in the Snow" by Jill Bialosky from The End of Desire: Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
Fathers in the Snow
2.
After father died
the love was all through the house
untamed and sometimes violent.
When the dates came we went up to our rooms
and mother entertained.
Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night,"
the smell of Chanel No.5 in her hair and the laughter.
We sat crouched at the top of the stairs.
In the morning we found mother asleep on the couch
her hair messed, and the smell
of stale liquor in the room.
We knelt on the floor before her,
one by one touched our fingers
over the red flush in her face.
The chipped sunlight through the shutters.
It was a dark continent
we and mother shared;
it was sweet and lonesome,
the wake men left in our house.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Duke Ellington, born Washington, D.C. (1899).
It's the birthday of the poet C.P. Cavafy, born in Alexandria, Egypt (1863). His parents were Greek. He wrote in Greek but lived in Egypt almost his entire life. He lived with his mother until he was 36. The family apartment was just above a brothel, and across the street from a church and a hospital. Cavafy said, "Where could I live better? The brothel caters to the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die."
It's the birthday of the editor and publisher Robert Gottlieb, New York City (1931). He was the editor at Simon & Schuster, then at Knopf, then at the New Yorker magazine. Robert Gottlieb, who said, "There are four things in my life: work, the ballet, reading and my family. I don't do anything else. I don't have lunches, dinners, go to plays or movies. I don't meditate, escalate, deviate or have affairs. So I have plenty of time."
And it was on this day in 1983 Harold Washington was sworn in as the first black mayor of Chicago. He'd been in the U.S. Congress, representing a poor district in Chicago, which was 92 percent black, in a city that had been one of the most racially divided in the country for 100 years. The Democratic machine that ruled Chicago was known to deny municipal services to black neighborhoods, not enforce housing codes there, not fix potholes or sidewalks, send fewer policemen and firemen and invest less in the public schools. In 1980, unemployment in many black areas of Chicago was as high as 25 percent.
Harold Washington entered the primary race against two democratic candidates. He was the least well known, and had the least amount of money. One of his opponents spent ten million dollars in the primary, the other spent two million dollars. Washington spent less than $750,000. He didn't run any TV ads until the last week of the primary.
But he made a name for himself during the televised debates. He seemed to be the only candidate who talked like a real person, with some humor and some passion. And of course, it helped that the two white candidates split the opposition vote. And so Harold Washington won the primary with 82 percent of the black vote.
Usually whoever won the Democratic primary in Chicago would become the mayor. But when Washington was the Democratic nominee, many whites turned against him. Many of them voted for his Republican opponent, Buddy Epton, whose campaign slogan was "Epton, before it's too late."
The mayoral election turned out a record 82 percent. Harold Washington won by just over 40,000 votes out of about a million and a half cast.
He spent his first term fighting against members of his own party in the city council but tried to be the first mayor of Chicago to treat all the wards of the city equally. He became a kind of a folk hero in the city. He ran for re-election in 1987, won, and died of a heart attack a few months after the beginning of his second term.
SATURDAY, 30 APRIL, 2005
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Poem: "Morning Glories" by Mary Oliver from White Pine. © Harvest/Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich. Reprinted with permission.
Morning Glories
Blue and dark-blue
rose and deepest rose
white and pink they
are everywhere in the diligent
cornfield rising and swaying
in their reliable
finery in the little
fling of their bodies their
gear and tackle
all caught up in the cornstalks.
The reaper's story is the story
of endless work of
work careful and heavy but the
reaper cannot
separate them out there they
are in the story of his life
bright random useless
year after year
taken with the serious tons
weeds without value
humorous beautiful weeds.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the first inauguration in the history of the country. In 1789, George Washington was sworn in as first president of the United States. The inauguration took place in New York City, the temporary seat of the new federal government, though most people in the country felt that New York was the wrong city for the capital. It had been very pro-British during the revolution. Upper class New Yorkers imitated the British in their clothing and their interior decorating. Many New Yorkers even still celebrated the king's birthday.
As for General Washington, he was reluctant to be inaugurated at all. He was worried that he might be a complete failure as a president. He said, "I feel like a culprit who is going to the place of his execution."
He wanted to make a quiet entry into New York, but instead, his week-long journey from Virginia up to New York became a giant parade, there were crowds as he passed through each town, portraits put up all over, his initials G.W. on buttons. He took a barge across the Hudson from New Jersey to New York with a boat full of musicians next to him, cannons being fired from the shore. They landed at the foot of Wall Street on the East River, marched up Wall Street, and then to the new Presidential Residence on Cherry Street.
A few days later came the inauguration ceremony on the balcony of Federal Hall. Thousands of people were out in the streets, and Washington stepped out onto the balcony, not in a military uniform but in a plain brown suit made with cloth from a mill in Connecticut. He took the oath and then Robert Livingston shouted, "Long live George Washington, President of the United States!" Washington walked back inside Federal Hall, addressed the Senate chamber with one of the shortest inaugural speeches in American history, just 1,200 words long. There was a big fireworks display that night, and when it was over, the president had to walk home on foot because the streets were too crowded for his carriage.
The Bible that he swore his oath on has been used by many other presidents, including Harding, Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter and both presidents Bush.
It was on this day in 1939, the New York World's Fair opened to the public, called The World of Tomorrow, on a fair ground in Flushing Meadows.
World War II was on the horizon in Europe, and the World's Fair of 1939 was where thousands of Americans got a glimpse of the world that would await them after the war. It was their first look at television: President Roosevelt giving a speech at the opening of the fair. The Medicine and Public Health buildings showed a machine that could keep the heart of a chicken beating. Air conditioners were shown, FM radio, fluorescent lighting, dishwashers, and an early helicopter called an autogiro were all on display. There were dioramas showing model utopian cities of the future, with fax machines and videophones.
It's the birthday of the poet John Crowe Ransom, Pulaski, Tennessee (1888).
It was on this day in 1900, the legendary Casey Jones died in a train wreck of the Cannonball Express, running from Memphis to Canton, Mississippi.
SUNDAY, 1 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "Couple at Coney Island" by Charles Simic from Night Picnic. © Harcourt. Reprinted with permission.
Couple at Coney Island
It was early one Sunday morning,
So we put on our best rags
And went for a stroll along the boardwalk
Till we came to a kind of palace
With turrets and pennants flying.
It made me think of a wedding cake
In the window of a fancy bakery shop.
I was warm, so I took my jacket off
And put my arm round your waist
And drew you closer to me
While you leaned your head on my shoulder.
Anyone could see we'd made love
The night before and were still giddy on our feet.
We looked naked in our clothes
Staring at the red and white pennants
Whipped by the sea wind.
The rides and shooting galleries
With their ducks marching in line
Still boarded up and padlocked.
No one around yet to take our first dime.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's May Day, a pagan holiday that never developed a Christian equivalent, a celebration of the return of spring.
It's the anniversary of the opening of the Empire State Building, 1931, Fifth Avenue, 34th Street in New York City. It was built in just over a year.
It's the anniversary of the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations in London at the Crystal Palace, 1851, at the height of the industrial revolution. One of the chief organizers was the husband of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, who believed that works of industry should be celebrated just like works of art. The Crystal Palace, made almost entirely of glass and iron, the largest building in the world at that time, longer than six football fields, built in less than a year.
The new inventions on display included: the telegraph, the Singer sewing machine, a gas stove, a device that let a man shave with no soap or water, a Swiss Army knife with 80 different tools in it, and the Colt repeating revolver. It was open for six months, and attracted six million visitors at a time when the entire population of London was only two million.
It's the birthday of Joseph Heller, born in Brooklyn (1923), best known for his novel Catch-22, (1961) about a World War II bomber pilot, Yossarian, who spends his time trying to get himself declared insane so he can stop flying bombing missions. There's a regulation called Catch-22 which says that if you want out of combat duty you are, therefore, sane and you will have to fly them. If you wanted to fly them, then you would be crazy and you wouldn't have to.
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Bobby Ann Mason, born in Mayfield, Kentucky (1940), She grew up in the country, the daughter of dairy farmers. She became the first member of her family to go to college. She got her Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, writing her dissertation about Vladimir Nabokov. By the time she was done writing it, she said, "I was so sick of reading about the alienated hero of superior sensibility that I thought I would write about just the opposite."
So she started writing short stories about people back in Kentucky, people who grow up in suburban housing developments and who drive trucks for a living and listen to country music and spent their time watching TV and going to Wal-Mart.
She sent her second short story to the New Yorker magazine. They sent her an encouraging rejection letter. They rejected 19 more stories over the next couple years and then published the twentieth. Her first collection came out in 1982, Shiloh And Other Stories, followed by other books, including Love Life, the novel Feather Crowns and her most recent collection, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail.
Bobby Ann Mason who said, "I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere."
