MONDAY, 13 JUNE, 2005
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Poems: "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "A Drinking Song" by W. B. Yeats from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. © Macmillan. Reprinted with permission
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, born in Dublin (1865). He grew up at a time when Ireland was an English colony, and most members of the Irish Protestant upper-class were pro-British. The Catholic middle-class were in favor of Irish independence. It didn't help them get along that Catholics were denied equal access to education and jobs and government positions.
William Butler Yeats was brought up in a Protestant family, so he should have been pro-British, but he was actually more interested in mysticism. A friend of his took him to his first séance in 1886, during which, Yeats's whole body began to shake. He felt himself thrown back against the wall. It was terrifying, but it also confirmed for him the existence of the spirit world. He became interested in the occult. His father wanted him to become a scientist, but Yeats wrote to his father in a letter, "The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
He began wandering around in an old, dark cloak, studying fairytales and mythology and Buddhism, playing the part of a mystic poet. A woman described him as wearing seedy, black clothes with a big, black bow at his throat, muttering verse to himself with a wild eye.
It all changed when he met an Irish nationalist named Maud Gonne, who was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and then he became interested in Irish nationalism in order to impress her. He organized rallies for Irish independence and wrote nationalist plays and poetry.
Yeats came to believe that if he could just get in touch with the mythic history of the Irish people he could write about something that would tie the whole country together, Protestants and Catholics.
Maud Gonne had married somebody else—a soldier who was a hero of the Easter uprising in 1916. The Irish free state came about in 1921, and Yeats served as one of the first members of the new Irish senate.
It was William Butler Yeats who said, "The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work, and if he take the second, must refuse a heavenly mansion raging in the dark."
TUESDAY, 14 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Turtle" by Kay Ryan from Flamingo Watching. © Copper Beach Press. Reprinted with permission.
Turtle
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She's often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Flag Day, the day on which the stars and stripes officially became our national flag in 1777. No one knows for sure, but it was most likely designed by Congressman Francis Hopkinson and sewn by a seamstress in Philadelphia named Betsy Ross.
It's the birthday of the man who helped us find quotations, John Bartlett, born in Plymouth, Massachusetts (1820). His Familiar Quotations came out in 1855.
It's the birthday of the woman who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, born in Litchfield, Connecticut (1811). She lived for many years in Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Ohio didn't allow slavery, but Kentucky did, and so Cincinnati was a popular destination for escaped slaves. Harriet Beecher Stowe saw many slaves rushing across the frozen river in the winter, which was part of the inspiration to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book came out in 1852.
It was on this day in 1940 that the German Army marched into Paris. The French had surrendered the city a few days earlier. There was no violence when the Nazis came in. The German soldiers marched through the Arc de Triomphe, while Parisians watched from the sidewalks of the Champs-Elysèes. A few weeks afterward, Hitler made a visit. He came to the Eiffel Tower and the Opera building and visited Napoleon's tomb. Hitler said, in 1941, "I'm getting ready to flatten Leningrad and Moscow without losing any peace of mind, but it would have pained me greatly if I'd had to destroy Paris."
It's the birthday of the travel writer Jonathan Raban, born in Norfolk, England (1942). He grew up reading Huckleberry Finn, and in 1979 he flew into St. Paul, Minnesota, bought a little boat, set off down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He wrote about it in his first big travel book, Old Glory: An American Voyage, which came out in 1981.
And it was on this day in 1951 the world's first commercially produced electronic digital computer was unveiled, known as the UNIVAC. It weighed eight tons, and used 5,000 vacuum tubes. It cost a quarter million dollars, but it could perform a thousand calculations per second, the fastest rate in the world at the time. The first one was bought by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The president of IBM thought that computers were far too complex, and would never sell. But with the invention of the microchip in 1971, all the processing power of those thousands of vacuum tubes could be crammed into a tiny space.
In 1975, an engineer named Ed Roberts was one of the first people to try to market a computer to ordinary people. It didn't sell very well. You had to know how to turn hundreds of little switches. But it was an inspiration to Stephen Wozniak, who went on to found Apple, and also a young student at Harvard named Bill Gates.
WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "The Drink" by Ron Padgett from You Never Know. © Coffee House Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Drink
I am always interested in the people in films who have just had a drink
thrown in their faces. Sometimes they react with uncontrollable rage, but
sometimes - my favorites - they do not change their expressions at all. Instead
they raise a handkerchief or napkin and calmly dab at the offending liquid,
as the hurler jumps to her feet and storms away. The other people at the table
are understandably uncomfortable. A woman leans over and places her hand
on the sleeve of the man's jacket and says, "David, you know she didn't
mean it." David answers, "Yes," but in an ambiguous tone - the perfect adult
response. But now the orchestra has resumed its amiable and lively dance
music, and the room is set in motion as before. Out in the parking lot,
however, Elizabeth is setting fire to David's car. Yes, this is a contemporary
film.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Charles Dickens's famous illustrator Hablot Knight Browne, better known as "Phiz," born in Lambeth, near London (1815). He illustrated David Copperfield, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities.
It's the birthday of Saul Steinberg, born in a little village near Bucharest, Romania in 1914. He came to this country and became a long-time artist at the New Yorker magazine. He painted many covers, including his most famous, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," which shows a New Yorker's view of the country with New York City huge in the foreground and the rest of the country off in the distance, little bumps of details.
Saul Steinberg said of his childhood, "I got high on elementary things like the luminosity of the day and the smell of everything—mud, earth, humidity, the delicious smells of cellars and mold, grocers' shops."
His mother was a cake decorator. His father designed specialty cardboard boxes. As a boy, Steinberg liked to rummage through his father's supply of paper, rubber stamps, colored cardboard and blocks of type. He also loved to read, and he later said that he would have become a writer if he had inherited a better language, but instead he learned to draw.
He studied architecture in Italy, got a degree, and at the same time, started contributing satirical drawings to humor magazines. He got out of Europe in 1941, just in time to avoid World War II. He sailed for America from Portugal, carrying a passport which he had doctored with his own rubber stamps. Through the intervention of the editor of the New Yorker, he was allowed to enter the United States in 1942. He enlisted in the Navy, went off to fight in World War II, and then came back to draw cartoons and covers for the New Yorker. He parodied most of the popular styles of painting of the 20th Century, cubism and abstract expressionism, even children's art. His work was always playful and funny. In his drawings, he put Easter bunnies and the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse. He once drew Uncle Sam as a bullfighter, fighting a turkey instead of a bull. He loved to make elaborate counterfeit documents—currency, passports, licenses, and especially diplomas.
It was Saul Steinberg who said, "The life of the creative man is led directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."
THURSDAY, 16 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "ONE TIME MY DAD" by Richard E. McMullen from Not Only Love.
© Crowfoot Press. Reprinted with permission.
ONE TIME MY DAD
One time my dad said to me, I don't
see why people complain about how hard they work
or how tired they are. Nobody works hard but
farmers, miners, lumberjacks and foundry workers.
This was before power tools, tractors, and such things, and all
the work was done by hand. When farmers in Upstate New York
left to get away from the stones, what
they found in Southern Michigan were: more stones.
As they cleared the land, the horses hauled the black walnut trees
and stumps to the side of the field and the farmers burned them.
Black walnut was no good to them, too hard to work.
Grandpa Conde, when he finally left the farm and moved
to Milan, got a job in the foundry and walked to work
and back, six days a week, 12 hours
a day, for 50 cents a day. He thought
he was sitting pretty. Whenever the noon whistle blew, people
would say, Well, Hell's out for lunch. But he would sit
down in a cool place and eat his lunch.
Once, when she was a little girl, Aunt Ida
asked her father, who was working in his garden, why
he worked so hard and wasn't he tired? Grandpa
straightened up from his hoeing and answered: I never get tired.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Bloomsday, the day on which the action in James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place in 1904. Leopold Bloom, the main character of Ulysses, does not have much work to do, so he spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing some errands. He leaves his house on Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn't know very well. In the afternoon, he has a cheese sandwich, he feeds the gulls in the river, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, his stillborn son. He muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is going to cheat on him that afternoon at his house. In the evening, he wanders around the red light district of Dublin and meets up with a young writer named Stephen Dedalus, who is drunk. Leopold Bloom takes him home with him and offers to let him spend the night. And they stand outside, looking at the stars for a while. And then Bloom goes inside and climbs into bed with his wife.
It's the birthday of Joyce Carol Oates, born in Lockport, New York (1938). She is one of the most prolific writers anywhere, having published almost 100 books in 40 years. She's written novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essays. She was born into a hardworking, rural family. Her parents were poor and uneducated, but both of them had artistic leanings. Her father came home from a tool-and-die shop and played piano in the evenings.
She went to school in a one-room schoolhouse, and when she was eight, her grandmother gave her a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which she loved so much, she memorized the whole book word for word. She went to a good high school in a suburb of Buffalo and became the first member of her family to get a high school diploma.
She started writing novels when she was in high school. In the late '60s, she started publishing her most famous novels, including Them, Bellefleur and We Were the Mulvaneys.
It was Joyce Carol Oates who said, "We [humans] are the species that clamors to be lied to."
FRIDAY, 17 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "One Day A Woman" by Miller Williams from Imperfect Love. © Louisiana State University Press. Reprinted with permission.
One Day A Woman
One day a woman picking peaches in Georgia
lost her hold on the earth and began to rise.
She grabbed limbs but leaves stripped off in her hands.
Some children saw her before she disappeared
into the white cloud, her limbs thrashing.
The children were disbelieved. The disappearance
was filed away with those of other women
who fell into bad hands and were soon forgotten.
Six months later a half-naked man in Kansas
working on the roof of the Methodist Church
was seen by half a dozen well-known
and highly respected citizens to move
directly upward, his tarbrush waving,
until he shrank away to a point and vanished.
Nobody who knew about the first event
knew of the second, so no connection was made.
The tarbrush fell to earth somewhere in Missouri
unnoticed among a herd of Guernsey cows.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the African American poet James Weldon Johnson, born in Jacksonville (1871), who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
It's the birthday of novelist John Hersey, born in Tianjin, China, in 1914.
It's the birthday of the poet Ron Padgett, born in Tulsa in 1942.
It's the birthday of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, born in Lincolnshire, England (1703). He was saved from a fire when he was five years old, and came to believe that God had saved him for a purpose. He became an Anglican priest, and joined a religious study group. The group was nicknamed the Methodists because of their emphasis on methodical rules of living—they prayed, and they fasted according to strict schedules.
In 1735, John Wesley came to the colonies. He was the priest in a settlement in Georgia, but they didn't care for his preaching and they ran him out of town. He went back to England and traveled around the back country on horseback, preaching to all the ordinary people he came across, through England and Scotland and Ireland. He preached 42,000 sermons along the way.
He was always a member of the Anglican Church. His only idea was to create small groups within the Anglican Church to meet for prayer and Bible study. But when Methodist missionaries traveled to the United States, their ideas took hold. Their followers considered themselves members of a new church and they appointed their own bishops and ministers created their own laws, separate from those of the Church of England.
The Methodist Church became the church of many colonists on the frontier, and by 1850, the Methodist Church was the biggest denomination in the United States. A convert needed only to believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and was everyone's personal savior. Methodists believe that all other questions about Christianity were up for discussion.
Methodists established more colleges, more hospitals, child-care facilities, and retirement homes than any other Protestant denomination. William Booth, who founded the Salvation Army, was a Methodist. Methodists started Goodwill Industries in 1902. They also started the Temperance movement. A Methodist founded the YMCA. They were a big part of the abolitionist movement and the anti-segregation movement.
Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley, and President George W. Bush were all Methodists, as well as Barry Goldwater, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and Hillary Clinton.
SATURDAY, 18 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Sleep Positions" by Lola Haskins from Desire Lines. © Boa Editions, Ltd. Reprinted with permission.
Sleep Positions
This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses
In Iowa on top of pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue
In New York on black satin
In China on straw.
This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove,
looking only at our own lids
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.
O hairdresser, auditor, hard-knuckled puller of crab traps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had
a flying thought,
lie down.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Gail Godwin, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1937). She's the author of The Odd Woman, The Finishing School, and The Good Husband.
Her mother was a newspaper reporter who also wrote romance novels on the weekend. Gail Godwin moved to London as a young woman, got a job with a travel service, and wrote a novel in her spare time. She couldn't get it published anywhere. And then one day she wrote the first sentence of a story that began, "'Run away,' he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails." She had been writing fiction about women in their late 20s, and this sentence seemed to point to a different sort of story. She wrote "An Intermediate Stop" about an English vicar who writes a book about seeing God. He becomes famous, only to find that fame makes him miserable.
The story got Gail Godwin accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she wrote her first novel, The Perfectionists. Her first big success was the novel A Mother and Two Daughters in 1982.
It was Gail Godwin who said, "I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publishers' desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way."
It's the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Amy Bloom, born in New York City (1953), who practices psychotherapy, and writes fiction in her spare time. She wrote the novel Love Invents Us and the collection of short stories called, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You.
It's the birthday of the children's author and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1949). He's the author of the children's books Jumanji and The Polar Express.
It's the anniversary of the day in 1815, that Napoleon Bonaparte lost his last major battle at Waterloo in Belgium. It was Napoleon's attempt at a comeback. He had been defeated by the British, and was in exile on the island of Elba. After a year he got bored. He gathered an army, marched north toward Belgium to attack the English and the Prussian armies.
His plan was to split his own army, attack the English and Prussians, separately drive them apart, and then defeat them one at a time. But instead, his two flanks drove the English and the Prussians closer together. The rain slowed him down and gave the Prussians time to come in with reinforcements. Napoleon signed his abdication papers and went to live on the island of St. Helena off the coast of Africa. The word "Waterloo" came to mean an impossible struggle or a decisive and final defeat.
SUNDAY, 19 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Right Now" by Kenneth Fields from Classic Rough News. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission.
Right Now
It's nineteen years today since he last held
A drink in his hand or held his breath while smoke
Filled as much of him as he could stand
Till, letting it out, he sought oblivion
Of the trace of memory or anticipation,
And his life fell into a death spiral. Since then
He's been around folks like him. When he's been asked,
And sometimes, eager, when he hasn't been,
He talks to the ones who are not even sure
They want to learn how to stop killing themselves.
That feeling still seems close to him some days.
Right now he's okay, and that's enough, right now.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is Father's Day, a holiday in this country that goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She thought of her father who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition too.
So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father's birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did. And the tradition of Father's Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother's Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father's Day, not until 1972.
Mother's Day is still the busiest day of the year for florists, restaurants and long distance phone companies. Father's Day is the day on which the most collect phone calls are made.
It was Strindberg who said, "That is the thankless position of the father in the family—the provider for all and the enemy of all." Oscar Wilde said, "Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life."
It's the birthday of Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India (1947).
It's the birthday of the short story writer and memoirist Tobias Wolff, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1945). He is best known for his memoir, This Boy's Life.
It's the birthday of the film critic Pauline Kael, born in Petaluma, California (1919). She was a film critic for the New Yorker for almost 25 years.
It's the birthday of music critic Greil Marcus, born in San Francisco (1945). He is the author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, and other books.
It was on this day in 1964 that Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. After a long battle in the Senate, the act passed, outlawing all segregation on the basis of race in the United States: in hotels and motels, restaurants, cafeterias, lunch counters, gasoline stations, movies houses, theaters, concert halls, sports arenas, stadiums or any other place of entertainment.
The bill was quickly passed in the House of Representatives, but it was filibustered in the Senate for almost three months by southern Democrats. It finally came up for a vote in the Senate on this day in 1964, and every senator was present, including Senator Clair Engle of California, who was dying of a brain tumor and could not speak. In order to vote yes, he pointed to his eye.
