MONDAY, 2 MAY, 2005
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Poems: "John, Tom, and James" and "Jack" by Charles Henry Ross. Public Domain.
John, Tom, and James
JOHN was a bad boy, and beat a poor cat;
Tom put a stone in a blind man's hat;
James was the boy who neglected his prayers;
They've all grown up ugly, and nobody cares.
Jack
THAT'S Jack;
Lay a stick on his back!
What's he done? I cannot say.
We'll find out tomorrow,
And beat him today.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Benjamin Spock, in New Haven (1903) who wrote The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which began, "You know more than you think you do."
It's the birthday of the lyricist Lorenz Hart, New York City, (1895) who was a young man in his 20s, drifting around, writing some verse, when he met Richard Rodgers, a teenager composer. They worked on some amateur shows together. Rodgers was just about to give up music, and go into the underwear business, when their show The Garrick Gaieties became a big hit in 1925. They went on to write many successful musicals and many great songs: "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," and "The Lady is a Tramp."
It's the birthday of the journalist Theodor Herzl, born in Budapest in 1860, who became the most prominent spokesman for Zionism in Europe.
It's the birthday of Catherine the Great, born Sophie Auguste Friederike in Stetten, Prussia (1729). When she was 15 she married the sixteen-year-old Grand Duke Peter, the heir to the Russian throne. He was a strange, young man who spent all of his time playing with toy soldiers. Catherine was miserable in her marriage. She had many affairs, but in her boredom, she also became a great reader. She loved the philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire.
After her husband became Czar in 1761, the country sank into chaos. Peter was killed in a scuffle with his guards, and Catherine the Great ruled over Russia, encouraged the humanities, promoted book publishing, journalism, architecture, and the theater.
And it was on this day in 1611 that the first edition of the King James Bible was published in England. It was one of the greatest works ever written by a committee, and it was produced during a chaotic time in England. There was an epidemic of the black plague the year before. 30,000 Londoners had died. Puritans in the country were agitating against the monarchy, and a group of underground Catholics were plotting to assassinate the king.
King James I, had thought that a new translation of the Bible might help bind the country together. There had been other English translations, but he wanted a Bible that would be the definitive version.
Previous versions had been translated from Latin. This one would be translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. Other translations had had scholarly translators' notes in the margins. This one would have as few explanatory notes as possible and appeal to the widest audience, and he wanted it to sound right since it would be read aloud in churches. So when the committee of translators gathered, each man read his verses aloud, to be judged and revised by the others.
It was a committee of 54 of the best linguists in the country: Lancelot Andrewes, George Abbot, and John Layfield. At the time, words like "thee" and "thou" and "sayeth" had already gone out of fashion in England, but the translators wanted the language of the Bible to sound old, to sound like long ago and far away. Some of the phrases in the King James have become enduring expressions: "the land of the living," "sour grapes," like a lamb to slaughter," "salt of the earth," "the apple of his eye," "to give up the ghost."
For decades most people preferred the Puritan Geneva Bible because it was plainer. It was only after the civil war in England that the King James version came into fashion. People were nostalgic for the period before the war, and they saw the King James Bible as an artifact of a simpler time.
TUESDAY, 3 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "An Observation" by May Sarton from A Private Mythology. © W.W. Norton & Co. Reprinted with permission.
An Observation
True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother's hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of May Sarton, poet and essayist, novelist, born in Belgium in the village of Wondelgem in 1912. Her family fled the country during World War I. She grew up in Massachusetts, but settled in New York City. She wanted to become an actress, and she spent eight years during the Great Depression before her theater company went out of business. She said, "After my theater failed, I never looked back. It was like a fever out of my system. The theater is an angel with feet tied to bags of gold. You can't move without money. It's much better to be a writer. You just need a room."
In the same year her theater shut down, she published her first book of poems, Encounter in April (1937).
She went on to write many more books of poems, and many novels. None of the books sold especially well. She struggled to pay the bills. In her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, (1965) she wrote, "There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart."
That novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, tells the story of an elderly lesbian poet looking back on her life, and it was May Sarton's way of announcing her sexuality to the world. Around the same time, the mid '60s, she also began publishing her journals, writing about her daily routines, what she called "the sacramentalization of ordinary life."
And though she didn't get much critical attention, she began to develop a large following. She'd go off to read her poetry at colleges, and when she showed up, the rooms were packed and she got standing ovations.
In the last 15 years of her life, she published a series of journals about aging: At Seventy and After the Stroke. May Sarton, who said, "If I were in solitary confinement, I'd never write another novel and probably not keep a journal, but I'd write poetry because poems, you see, are between God and me." She said, "My cat likes to go out at one in the morning, so I have to let him out. And at two he meows to come in. [During that time] I make notes for poems. And then in the morning, when I'm all there, as much as I ever am, I work at them. I would not still be a poet without the cat."
It's the birthday of the songwriter Betty Comden, born in Brooklyn (1915), who, along with Adolph Green, wrote Wonderful Town, Singin' in the Rain and other musicals.
It's the birthday of the playwright William Inge, born in Independence, Kansas (1913), who wrote Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, all written within seven years in the 1950s.
WEDNESDAY, 4 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "By Her Aunt's Grave" by Thomas Hardy. Public Domain.
By Her Aunt's Grave
'Sixpence a week', says the girl to her lover,
'Aunt used to bring me, for she could confide
In me alone, she vowed. 'Twas to cover
The cost of her headstone when she died.
And that was a year ago last June;
I've not yet fixed it. But I must soon.'
'And where is the money now, my dear?'
'O, snug in my purse... Aunt was so slow
In saving it—eighty weeks, or near.'...
'Let's spend it,' he hints. 'For she won't know.
There's a dance to-night at the Load of Hay.'
She passively nods. And they go that way.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1626 that Dutch explorer Peter Minuit landed on what is now Manhattan island, where a little settlement had been established on the southern tip by the Dutch East India Company, called New Amsterdam.
The Dutch had been drawn to Manhattan for many reasons. For one thing, it had access to the Atlantic, but it was protected by Sandy Hook, Long Island, and Staten Island. It was the perfect entrance point for shipping.
And also it was extraordinarily fertile and full of wildlife. Wild roses grew there. The fragrance of flowers drifted far out to sea. The oysters were huge, 12 inches; there were giant lobsters, six feet across; so many fish in the streams they could be caught by hand; flocks of birds, wild swans, blackbirds.
A few days after Peter Minuit arrived, he bought the island of Manhattan from the local tribes with cloth, beads, hatchets, other merchandise worth about $24, about $1 for each square mile of land.
New York City was one of the first great cities of the world to draw its population from all over the world. Even when there were less than 1,000 people living there at the beginning, there were more than 18 different languages spoken. New York City has at different times been the largest Irish or Jewish or Italian or black African city in the world. It was, and still is today, the most poly-lingual city on the planet.
O Henry wrote, "If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays, it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson called New York. Cosmopolitan, they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. 'Little old New York's good enough for us'—that's what they sing."
It's the birthday of the educator Horace Mann, born in Franklin, Massachusetts (1796). In 1837, he took over the state Board of Education at a time when public schools in Massachusetts were in serious decline. He established teachers' colleges. He founded a professional journal. He got more money for salaries and new schools and books, and he argued with the legislature for free common, nonsectarian education, conducted by professional teachers.
It was on this day in 1948 that Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead was published. He was just 25 years old. The book made him one of the most famous novelists in America.
Norman Mailer had gone off to World War II with the idea that he would use his experience to write a great novel. When he got to the South Pacific, though, he was assigned to a desk job, and he had to volunteer as a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the mountains of the Philippines in order to get the material that he wanted.
He wrote the book in 15 months. It's a story of an infantry platoon, that includes a Mississippi dirt farmer, a Mexican-American, a coal miner from Montana, a middle-class Kansas salesman, a Chicago hoodlum, an Irishman from Boston, and a Jew from Brooklyn.
And it's the anniversary of the shooting at Kent State University in Ohio, (1970). It started as a protest against the war in Vietnam, when a platoon of National guardsmen, for reasons nobody knows, turned and fired into a crowd of students and killed four of them. There was never a trial, and no one was ever disciplined.
THURSDAY, 5 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "The sun has burst in the sky" by Jenny Joseph from Selected Poems. ©Bloodaxe Books. Reprinted with permission.
The sun has burst in the sky
The sun has burst in the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.
The sea laps the great rocks
Because I love you
And takes no heed of the moon dragging it away
And saying coldly 'Constancy is not for you.'
The blackbird fills the air
Because I love you
With spring and lawns and shadows falling on lawns.
The people walk in the street and laugh
I love you
And far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday marking the defeat of the French invaders at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Cinco de Mayo is an even bigger holiday in this country than in Mexico. It's estimated Americans will eat 54 million avocados today, most of them in the form of guacamole.
It's the birthday of Karl Marx, born in Trier, Prussia (1818). He went to school at a time of severe repression. The Prussian government kept the teachers under police surveillance to make sure they wouldn't teach anything too radical and so the students, including Marx, became extremely radical.
As a result of his beliefs, Marx was not able to get a job as a professor after he got his doctorate in philosophy. And without a job, he spent his time analyzing history and came to the conclusion that all historical events were caused by economic forces.
He got involved in communism, the belief that all private property should be abolished, moved around Europe, writing for newspapers, studying, wanting to write a book about his economic ideas. But Marx was an obsessive researcher, and never knew when to stop reading and start writing. He only became productive after he met Friedrich Engels, a socialist who was also wealthy—the heir to a textile business.
Their main theory was that the economic system was a perpetual conflict between those who controlled the capital and those who provided the labor, that the conflict would never be resolved peacefully, that in a free market, workers would continue periodically to lose their jobs, their standard of living would fall, and this would inevitably lead to violent revolution. He believed that giant corporations would dominate the world's industries, that globalism in trade would make markets even more unstable.
Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, and revolution did break out afterward in France, Italy, and Austria. Marx's newspaper was shut down. He had to flee the country. He moved to London, worked for years on his last book, Das Kapital. His family in poverty, Marx said, "I don't suppose anyone has ever written about 'money' when so short of the stuff." A spy from Prussia was keeping tabs on him and wrote, "Washing, grooming and changing his clothes are things he does rarely. He does not shave at all!"
He fed his family on bread and potatoes, and when one of his children died, his wife had to borrow money from a neighbor to buy a coffin.
When Marx died in 1883, only 11 persons came to his funeral.
It's the birthday of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813.
It's the birthday of the great food writer and food lover James Beard, born in Portland, Oregon, (1903). He said, "I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around."
It's the birthday of Richard Rovere, born in Jersey City, New Jersey (1915). He was a writer for many years for the New Yorker magazine, the author of a biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
FRIDAY, 6 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "Everything in Life is Divided" by Cortney Davis from Leopold's Maneuvers. © University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted with permission.
Everything in Life is Divided
Everything in life is divided:
twenty-four hours that fade from day to night,
the sand at Martha's Vineyard, where we vacationed last year,
separating us from the ocean
where we swam, then returned to our blanket,
the two of us making one marriage,
sharing the apple sliced to reveal the identical
black seeds of its surprised face.
Even our bodies can be halved, although less evenly:
lungs partitioned into lobes, the heart's blood
pumped from right to left, the brain's two hemispheres
directing our arms, our legs,
our lives into the two possibilities of the Greek mask.
My life's work, too, is divided—
one side of my desk, unfinished poems;
on the other, nursing books with dog-eared pages.
Aren't we all somehow divided?
Like when my daughter was in labor, my first
grandchild emerging into the room's blue air,
suddenly entering new territory,
and how, when after the delivery my daughter kept bleeding,
I couldn't look at the newborn in the incubator
but stood fast beside my child, the woman who once
slipped from my life into her own and now had divided herself
again
while I balanced in my hands Joy and Fear, cradling them both
until the bleeding stopped.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the man who wrote The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux, born in Paris (1868).
It's the birthday of Orson Wells, Kenosha, Wisconsin (1915). He made his Broadway debut in Romeo and Juliet at the age of 19. He founded the Mercury Theatre when he was 22. When he was 23 he came out with his famous broadcast of War of the Worlds, which caused great hysteria on the East Coast. And when he was 26, he made his masterpiece, the movie Citizen Kane.
It's the birthday of the poet Randall Jarrell, born in Nashville (1914).
It's the birthday of the first man to try to understand how things that happen to us as children might affect us psychologically as adults, that we don't always know why we do the things we do, and that talking about it might make us feel better. That was Sigmund Freud. He was born in the little town of Freiberg in what was then the Austrian Empire (1856) on this day.
He started out as a medical doctor and scientist, in Vienna, studying the anatomy of eels. One of his superiors told him that because he was Jewish, he would never go far in that line of work.
So Freud decided to go into the field of psychology, which was less crowded and where he thought he might be able to break new ground. He was interested in the subject of hysteria. Most hysterics were women, it was felt, at the time. And they were given various treatments, most of them horrible.
Freud learned that some doctors were treating hysteria using hypnosis, talking the patient out of his or her symptoms. So Freud learned hypnosis himself and developed what he called "the talking cure," getting people to tell stories about their own lives. He thought maybe the symptoms of the hysterics were the result of stories they'd never been able to tell anybody. To relieve them of self-consciousness, he had them lie down on a couch so they wouldn't have to look at him and he sat behind them as they talked and he encouraged them to free associate.
He developed the idea that his patients were not conscious of all their desires and fears, that their unconscious minds could reveal themselves in various ways.
He came out with The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. He went on to write many more books, many of them read by the general public because of their frankness about sexuality. Sigmund Freud's ideas are no longer part of mainstream psychotherapy, but he had a huge impact on literature.
SATURDAY, 7 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "The Thirty Favorite Lives: Amager" by Jack Gilbert from Refusing Heaven. © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
The Thirty Favorite Lives: Amager
I woke up every morning on the fourth floor,
in the two-hundred-year-old walls made
of plaster and river grass. I would leave
the woman and walk across beautiful København
to the island of Amager. To my small room
in the leftover Nazi barracks that looked out
on a swamp. Most of the time it was winter.
I would light my hydrant-sized iron stove
and set a pot on top, putting in hamburger
and vegetables while the water was getting hot.
Starting to type with numb hands. The book
I planned to write in two weeks for a thousand
dollars already a week behind (and threatening
to get beyond a month). Out of money and no
prospects. Then the lovely smell of soup
and the room snug. I would type all day
and late into the night. Until the soup
was finished. Then I would start back across
the frozen city, crunching over the moats,
loud in the silence. The stars brilliant.
Focused on her waiting for me, ready to fry
sausages at two in the morning. Me thinking idly
of the ancient Chinese poet writing in his
poverty, "Ah, is this not happiness."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet Robert Browning, born in London (1812). He's best known for his poem "My Last Duchess," about a duke who keeps a portrait of his late wife even though he had her killed for flirting with the portrait painter.
Robert Browning said, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
And it's the birthday of the philosopher David Hume, born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1711. He was born at a time when Edinburgh was one of the poorest, most backward cities in Europe. It was muddy, no sewage system, polluted by peat smoke. Alcoholism was everywhere. Even children drank whiskey every day.
On top of all the drinking there was a very strict religious climate. If you skipped church on the Sabbath, there were groups of religious police known as the Seizers who would grab you on the street and take you to mass. Less than 15 years before Hume was born in 1711, there was an 18-year-old college student put on trial for saying openly that he thought Christianity was nonsense, and he was convicted and he was hanged for blasphemy.
There was, on the other hand, great literacy in Edinburgh. Religious leaders believed that everybody ought to be able to read the Bible, and so all children learned how to read, including young David Hume, who grew up fascinated by philosophy—which caused him to lose his faith when he was 18 years old. He wrote to a friend, "I found a certain boldness of temper growing in me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority. I was forced to seek out some new medium by which truth might be established. " And that was philosophy.
He became obsessed with the idea of truth, of how people can know the truth about anything. He wrote his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), in which he argued that it may be impossible to know anything for sure about the world, that we can experience the world but never fully understand it.
David Hume became the leading figure of a group of Scottish intellectuals, including the economist Adam Smith, who invented the study of economics; Adam Ferguson, who helped invent sociology; James Hutton, who invented geology; Joseph Black and William Cullen, who invented modern chemistry; James Watt, who developed the steam engine; James Boswell, who wrote the greatest biography of all time; Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the first great novel; and Hugh Blair, who was the first University professor to teach a course in English literature.
In 1755, the Church of England tried to prosecute him for his skepticism, but the case was dismissed and David Hume became one of the first to openly question the existence of God and suffer almost no consequences.
It was David Hume who said, "Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme happiness."
SUNDAY, 8 MAY, 2005
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Poem: "In the Santa Clarita Valley" by Gary Snyder from Danger on Peaks. © Shoemaker Hoard Publishers. Reprinted with permission.
In the Santa Clarita Valley
Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal "Denny's" sign
starry "Carl's"
loopy "McDonald's"
eight-petaled yellow "Shell"
blue-and-white "Mobil" with the big red "O"
growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It is Mother's Day. James Joyce said, "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not."
And Mark Twain said, "My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."
It's the birthday of the great bluesman Robert Johnson, born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi (1911). He was a bluesman about whom very little is known for sure, though we do know that in 1937 he recorded 41 songs in just two recording sessions. He had two photographs taken of himself at about the same time. Those were the only recordings he made and the only pictures taken of him. He died the following year at the age of 27.
People in the Delta said that Robert Johnson had decided as a young man that he hated working on a farm. He spent his time hanging around juke joints, watching a bluesman named Son House. And whenever Son House would take a break, Johnson would pick up his guitar and start banging on it. But people didn't think he was very good, so finally he left town. He came back six months later with his own guitar. When he sat down to play it, people couldn't believe how good he'd gotten in just a short period of time.
It was then that they began to spread the rumor that Robert Johnson had learned to play guitar with black magic, that he'd met the devil one night at the crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for skill at the guitar. People who saw him perform said that he often played guitar with his back to the audience, trying to keep other guitarists from stealing his technique.
He sang many songs about being on the road, "Traveling Riverside Blues," "Ramblin' on My Mind," "Sweet Home Chicago." Though he's known for blues, people who saw him perform said that he played all kinds of songs from hillbilly and bluegrass to Bing Crosby. If he heard a song on the radio in the afternoon, he'd sing it that night.
He died in 1938 after he'd sung at a bar in Greenwood, Mississippi, and many people believe that he was poisoned by a glass of whiskey laced with strychnine given to him by the bartender because Robert Johnson had seduced the bartender's lady.
The first album of his songs, King of the Delta Blues Singers, came out in 1961. His complete recordings were released in 1990. Robert Johnson sang, "You may bury my body down by the highway side, so my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride."
It's the birthday of the poet Gary Snyder, San Francisco (1930). He's had a long, steady career as a poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, and a counterculture hero.
As a student, he worked on a trail crew at Yosemite National Park. He said, "I had given up on poetry. Then I got out there and started writing these poems about the rocks and blue jays. I looked at them. They didn't look like any poems that I had ever written before. So, I said, these must be my own poems." And they became his first book, Riprap, which came out in 1959.
It's the birthday of the novelist Thomas Pynchon, born in Glen Cove, Long Island (1937). His second novel made him famous in 1966, The Crying of Lot 49, about a secret international postal service called W.A.S.T.E., which uses a muted trumpet as its logo.
In 1973, Pynchon published Gravity's Rainbow.
He didn't publish another book for the next 17 years, became kind of a mythical figure, famous for his reclusiveness. Then in the late 1990s, an article in New York magazine revealed that he lived in New York City with his wife and son. He wasn't hiding out. He just wasn't seeking publicity.
