MONDAY, 20 JUNE, 2005
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Poems: "Chocolate" by Sandra M. Gilbert from Belongings. © W.W. Norton & Co. Reprinted with permission.
Chocolate
In the end, in the long-term
wing of the assisted living
home, in the small white chamber
looking out on the patio's locked-in
blooms or in the big plain
"day room" with its blaring
TV and hopeful posters,
they fed my mother
ground-up piles of pallid
stuff in bowls clamped onto
a plastic tray and at first
she smiled, delicious, delicious,
as she sucked the oozing
juices, the last pap,
smiling surrounded by fellow
diners drooping and mumbling
in their places until
after a while she tightened
her lips against the food and
instead began unknotting,
unknotting the flowered
gown, unclothing her wasting
nakedness still white and smooth
and then at the very end,
when dreamy and slim
as a teen she welcomed
old friends and relatives who flickered
on the walls, the curtains
of the tiny room, nodding,
hello, sit down, to the shiny
nothing, she'd eat nothing
but chocolate, only chocolate,
so every day I brought an oblong
Lindt or Hershey
and square by square
she took in mouthfuls,
smiling and nodding, square
by square, delicious, dear,
until she finally
swallowed the whole dense bar.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1893 that the verdict was announced in the trial of Lizzie Borden. She was accused of murdering her father and her stepmother with an ax. It was one of the first murder trials in America that got covered by the national press because of the sensational nature of it.
Her father was the president of a bank. He was one of the richest and stingiest men in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts. He'd come home on a hot August morning, 1892, taken a nap on his couch, and about an hour later Lizzie started calling out to the neighbors that her father had been killed. The police found the stepmother upstairs was also dead. They determined the murder weapon had been some kind of hatchet.
The case against Lizzie Borden was entirely circumstantial. Nobody had seen the murders. No weapon was found. There was no physical evidence linking Lizzie to the crime. All the police could prove was that she had been in the house at the time of the murders. She had a lot of money to gain from it, and she'd recently tried to buy poison at the local pharmacy.
The trial lasted two weeks. Lizzie was found innocent. No one else was ever tried for the murder. After the trial, she bought herself a three-story mansion where she lived for the rest of her life.
It's the birthday of the author Vikram Seth, born in Calcutta, India (1952). He grew up in a wealthy Indian family and was sent to England for school. He came to the United States in 1975 to get a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford, but he also took poetry classes on the side.
He got a grant to travel to China and spent two years there. And in the summer of 1982, he decided to walk and hitchhike from China back to India, traveling through Tibet and Nepal. He carried a journal with him and wrote down his thoughts throughout the journey. That became his first book, From Heaven Lake, published in 1983. It got great reviews.
He moved back to Calcutta to live with his parents in the late '80s, and began working on his novel A Suitable Boy. It took him several years to write. It was 5,000 pages long and got trimmed down to 1,500 pages. It still is one of the longest works of fiction ever published in English. It became a bestseller in India, England, and the United States when it finally came out in 1993.
TUESDAY, 21 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "A Thunderstorm in Town" by Thomas Hardy from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy © St. Martins Press. Reprinted with permission.
A Thunderstorm in Town
She wore a new 'terra-cotta' dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom's dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the summer solstice, the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere. Today is the longest day of the year, and tonight is the shortest night. It's not that we are any closer to the sun. In fact, the earth is about three million miles further from the sun at this time of year. The difference is due to the fact that the planet is tilted on its axis, with the northern hemisphere tilted toward the sun. And it's that slight tilt, only 23 1/2 degrees that makes the difference between winter and summer and allows most of the plants we eat to germinate. Wheat and many other plants require an average temperature of at least 40 degrees Fahrenheit to grow; corn, 50 degrees; rice, an average temperature of 68 degrees.
It's the birthday of Jean-Paul Sartre, born in Paris (1905). He started out as a novelist and a playwright. He published his first novel, Nausea, in 1938, and received great reviews. He was drafted into World War II, and captured by the Germans. He was released, and went back to Paris in 1941 and joined the resistance. During that time, he developed his philosophy of existentialism which made him famous, in which he said that the world is basically meaningless, but that once we realize this we can each create our own meaning. He wrote about it in his book Being and Nothingness, in 1943.
It's the birthday of novelist Ian McEwan, born in Aldershot, England (1948). His father was a Scottish soldier in the British Army. McEwan grew up in various places around the world: Singapore and North Africa. He went to a boarding school in England and then to a creative writing program in East Anglia, taught by the writer Malcom Bradbury, where he was allowed to write fiction for credit and found that it came very easily to him.
At the time, most English fiction was rather tasteful and polite. McEwan said, "It was nicely modulated, full of observation about class and furniture. I wanted much more vivid colors. I wanted something savage." His first book was full of short stories about incest, infanticide and bestiality. His first novel, Cement Garden, is about a group of children who hide their dead mother in the basement by covering her with cement. His novel The Innocent featured one of the lengthiest scenes of human dismemberment in contemporary literature. Critics started calling him "Ian Macabre."
His more recent novels, like Amsterdam and Atonement, are less grisly, but he's still one of the few literary writers in England who doesn't shy away from violence and suspense in his work. His novel Saturday came out this year.
It's the birthday of the author Mary McCarthy, born in Seattle (1912), author of several novels including The Group, and also her memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, which came out in 1957. Gore Vidal said, "She was our most brilliant literary critic, [because she was] uncorrupted by compassion."
WEDNESDAY, 22 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "The Bracelet: To Julia" by Robert Herrick. Public Domain.
The Bracelet: To Julia
Why I tie about thy wrist,
Julia, this silken twist;
For what other reason is 't
But to show thee how, in part,
Thou my pretty captive art?
But thy bond-slave is my heart:
'Tis but silk that bindeth thee,
Knap the thread and thou art free;
But 'tis otherwise with me:
—I am bound and fast bound, so
That from thee I cannot go;
If I could, I would not so.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1944 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the G.I. Bill of Rights, one of the most important pieces of legislation of the modern era. It did not receive much press attention at the time—the newspapers were busy reporting on the Allied invasion of Europe.
The G.I. Bill passed in part because of the tragic experience of veterans of the First World War. Many of them had lost their jobs and become homeless. They had been promised a bonus when they reached retirement age, but many worried they'd never live that long. A group went to Washington, D.C. to demand their bonuses early. They had to be driven out of the city with tanks and tear gas.
Economists in the '40s were predicting a postwar depression, and politicians were terrified of the idea of nine million unemployed veterans wandering the country. So they wrote the G.I. Bill to guarantee unemployment benefits for a year. A congressional committee threw in the idea that veterans should get money to go to college if they wanted to. Many presidents of some of the most prestigious universities thought it was a terrible idea.
Even the supporters of the bill didn't think that many G.I.s would really want to go to college. But about a million veterans applied for the money within the first year after the war. Ultimately, 2.2 million veterans used the money to get a higher education, many of them the first members of their families to go to college.
Before the war, about 10 percent of Americans had gone to college. After the war, that figure rose to about 50 percent. And contrary to most expectations, the grade point averages at most colleges went up with the influx of veterans. Dropout rates went way down. Professors at the time said the veterans were the most serious students they'd ever seen. The cost to the government was about $5 1/2 billion, but the result was to spur one of the great economic booms in American history.
One of those who went to college on the G.I. Bill was born on this day—Joseph Papp, the theater producer, born in Brooklyn (1921). He was in the Navy during World War II. He went to the Actors Lab Theatre in Hollywood on the G.I. Bill and founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954.
It's the birthday of novelist Dan Brown, born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1964). He was the author of one of the best selling books in recent memory, The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003. It's about a Harvard professor who investigates the murder of a curator at the Louvre and finds many of the clues in paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Dan Brown's first novel was Digital Fortress, followed by Angels & Demons and Deception Point, three novels which sold about 20,000 copies combined.
He got the idea for The Da Vinci Code when he heard about some conspiracy theories about secret messages in Da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper. The book combines conspiracy theories about a monastic order called the Knights Templar, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Holy Grail. The book has gone through more than 50 printings. There are now almost 25 million copies of it in print.
It has sparked a lot of controversy, especially in the Catholic Church, because the book argues that much of what we hold to be true about Christianity was actually decided at a single meeting of bishops in Nicea in Turkey in the year 325.
THURSDAY, 23 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "From June to December" by Wendy Cope from Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. © Faber and Faber. Reprinted with permission.
From June to December
Summer Villanelle
You know exactly what to do—
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh—
I think of little else but you.
It's bliss to have a lover who,
Touching one shoulder, makes me sigh—
You know exactly what to do.
You make me happy through and through,
The way the sun lights up the sky—
I think of little else but you.
I hardly sleep-an hour or two;
I can't eat much and this is why—
You know exactly what to do.
The movie in my mind is blue—
As June runs into warm July
I think of little else but you.
But is it love? And is it true?
Who cares? This much I can't deny:
You know exactly what to do;
I think of little else but you.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's Midsummer Night's Eve, also called St. John's Eve. St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers. It's a time when the hives are full of honey. So the full moon that comes this month was called the "mead moon" because honey was fermented to make mead, which is where the word "honeymoon" comes from. It's a time for lovers. As an old Swedish proverb says, "Midsummer night is not long, but it sets many cradles rocking."
It's the birthday of the playwright Jean Anouilh, born in Bordeaux, France in 1910. His work spanned five decades. His plays include The Lark, The Waltz of the Toreadors, and Becket. Jean Anouilh said, "I am a good maker of plays. I have a trade at my fingertips ... The man who makes his fellows forget their condition for three hours, who makes them forget death, is doing a good and useful job. He need commit himself no further."
It's the birthday of the mathematician Alan Mathison Turing, born in London in 1912. He was a pioneer in the development of the computer. He was a graduate student at Kings College when he wrote a paper on computable numbers, in which he introduced his idea for what was later called the Turing Machine, which could perform step-by-step mathematical operations, reading a series of ones and zeros from a tape, which is the theoretical basis of the way computers work today.
During World War II, he served with the Government Code and Cypher School, where he played a significant part in breaking the German "Enigma" code. He also championed the idea of artificial intelligence. His scientific works were never completed. He was arrested in 1952 for violation of Britain's homosexuality statues. Two years later, he committed suicide.
It's the birthday of the poet Anna Akhmatova, born near Odessa, Russia in 1888. She wrote "Requiem" and "Poem Without a Hero," after her son was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. After her former husband was executed in 1921, she burned many of her poems, and for a time she would not write down new ones, so her friends kept them by memorizing them.
It's the birthday of the novelist Michael Shaara, born in Jersey City, New Jersey (1929). He is the author of Killer Angels, about The Battle of Gettysburg.
And it's the birthday of Alfred Kinsey, in Hoboken, New Jersey, (1894). His Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, created a sensation by shattering many myths about sexual practices, showing that some things considered perversions were practiced by so many people as to be considered almost normal.
FRIDAY, 24 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Desire" by Stephen Dunn from. New and Selected Poems 1974–1994.
© W.W. Norton, 1994. Reprinted with permission.
Desire
I remember how it used to be
at noon, springtime, the city streets
full of office workers like myself
let loose from the cold
glass buildings on Park and Lex,
the dull swaddling of winter cast off,
almost everyone wanting
everyone else. It was amazing
how most of us contained ourselves,
bringing desire back up
to the office where it existed anyway,
quiet, like a good engine.
I'd linger a bit
with the receptionist,
knock on someone else's open door,
ease myself, by increments,
into the seriousness they paid me for.
Desire was everywhere those years,
so enormous it couldn't be reduced
one person at a time.
I don't remember when it was,
though closer to now than then,
I walked the streets desireless,
my eyes fixed on destination alone.
The beautiful person across from me
on the bus or train
looked like effort, work.
I translated her into pain.
For months I had the clarity
the cynical survive with,
their world so safely small.
Today, walking 57th toward 3rd,
it's all come back,
the interesting, the various,
the conjured life suggested by a glance.
I praise how the body heals itself.
I praise how, finally, it never learns.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Ambrose Bierce, born in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio. He is best known to us for his Devil's Dictionary, a book of ironic definitions:
"Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited."
"Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her."
It's the birthday of the poet Stephen Dunn, born in Forest Hills, New York (1939). He's the author of more than ten books of poetry, including Different Hours which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. His collection Local Visitations came out a couple years ago.
His first love was basketball. He was a star on the 1962 Hofstra basketball team that went 25 and 1 that year. Stephen Dunn was nicknamed "Radar" for his accurate jump shot.
He found a job writing brochures for Nabisco and worked for them for seven years. He made a comfortable living. He didn't enjoy his work too much, so he quit, and moved to Spain with his wife. They lived for almost a year on $2,200. He wrote a novel and then began writing poetry. He came out with his first collection in 1974, Looking for Holes in the Ceiling.
And it was on this day in 1997, the Pentagon tried to end the speculation that the United States had intercepted a wrecked alien spacecraft along with alien bodies 50 years ago in Roswell, New Mexico.
There had been a lot of reports of UFOs during the summer of 1947, and during this flying saucer craze, a man in Roswell found debris on his ranch from something that had crashed—and the Air Force came to clean it up.
Newspapers around the world picked up the story. The government later said the object found had been a weather balloon, but UFO enthusiasts thought it was an alien invasion, and the government was trying to cover it up. At a press briefing in 1997, the Pentagon said the bodies found in Roswell had been test dummies and not aliens. Many enthusiasts still beleive that that press briefing, too, was part of the cover-up.
SATURDAY, 25 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "Pasta" by Kate Scott from Stitches. © Peterloo Poets. Reprinted with permission.
Pasta
In the yellow kitchen her pink hands
play with creamy dough. Squares of sun frame
things that shine; spoons, cups, hair.
She sits the fat belly on the table.
She pokes it with one finger, it dimples.
Stroked with flour, her rolling pin
works roundness to flatness,
teases out a thin cream sheet.
She picks up the sheet with a nimble pinch,
feeds it into the teeth of the steel machine.
She turns the handle, smiling at me
Though I know she is tired, not very happy.
She hangs the frail strips on chairs, on doors.
As the dampness lifts they start to flutter.
She hangs them lightly over her arm, padding to the stove.
She boils water, opens wine, puts vegetable in pots.
Lights click. Smells blossom.
Everything feels suddenly invited.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1857, novelist Gustave Flaubert went on trial in Paris for charges of indecency in Madame Bovary. He was acquitted and the novel came out in book form that same year. It had been published as a magazine serial a year earlier.
It's the birthday of the man who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell, born in a small village in India (1903). As a journalist, he traveled to Spain to write about people fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He signed up to fight against the Fascists. He went to the front, saw little fighting, and when he got his first chance to shoot a Fascist, Orwell could not bring himself to do it because the man was running out of an outhouse pulling up his pants. Orwell wrote, "I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists,' but a man who is holding up his pants is not a 'Fascist.' He is a fellow creature."
The experience of the Spanish Civil War changed Orwell's life. He came to believe that it was neither Fascism nor Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme. He became one of the first writers on the left to speak out against Stalin and Communism, and wrote Animal Farm as a political allegory about the Communist revolution.
He spent the last years of his life writing 1984. He died a few months after it was published. It has since been translated into 62 languages and has sold more than ten million copies.
It was George Orwell who said, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention."
And it was on this day in 1942, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the commander of the U.S. troops in Europe. He had been a military man for more than 20 years. He'd never seen combat. All he'd ever done was train soldiers.
He wrote a guide book of World War I battlefields in France. He trained the Army in the Philippines. He was promoted to colonel and moved to a base in Louisiana where he supervised enormous military games in the summer of 1941, preparing for a possible land war in Europe. His strategy was so successful that he was promoted. And after Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower was put in charge of the strategy for an allied invasion of Europe.
SUNDAY, 26 JUNE, 2005
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Poem: "For a Father" by Elise Partridge from Fielder's Choice.
© Vehicule Press. Reprinted with permission.
For a Father
Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard,
crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge;
wheels clacketing down the pocked macadam,
you veered almost straight into the neighbor's hedge?
We ran after you laughing, shouting, Wait!
Or that August night you swept us to the fair?
The tallest person boarding the ferris wheel,
you rocked our car right when we hit the apex
above the winking midway, to make us squeal.
Next we raced you to the games, shouting, Wait!
At your funeral, relatives and neighbors,
shaking our hands, said, "So young to have died!"
But we've dreamt you're just skating streets away,
striding the fairgrounds toward a wilder ride.
And we're still straggling behind, shouting, Wait—!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the playwright Sidney Howard, born in Oakland (1891), who adapted Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind for the screen. It was Sidney Howard who said, "One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it."
It's the anniversary of the first publication of the New York Daily News. It was first published on this day in 1919.
On this day in 1963, 1,250,000 West Berliners turned out to welcome President Kennedy to their city. He made his famous speech that ended with the line, "As a free man I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"
In 1974 on this date, barcodes were first used in supermarket checkout lanes.
It's the birthday of the novelist Colin Wilson, born in Leicester, England (1931). He made a big name for himself in 1956 with a book called The Outsider, a history of alienation in western civilization. He has since published more than 100 books of fiction and non-fiction.
It's the birthday of a man made famous for something he didn't actually do. Abner Doubleday, born in New York in 1819, was a distinguished general in the Civil War, and it's been alleged that in Cooperstown, New York, he mapped out a baseball diamond and invented the game of baseball in 1839. He was not even in the area in that year. He never referred to the game in any of his diaries. Nonetheless, Cooperstown became the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
It's the birthday of children's book author Walter Farley, born in Syracuse, New York (1916). He was famous for his 20 novels about The Black Stallion.
It's the birthday of Pearl S. Buck, born in Hillsboro, West Virginia (1892). She was raised in Chinkiang, China by her Presbyterian missionary parents. She wrote about that experience in her famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). It was part of a trilogy which won her the Nobel Prizes for Literature in 1938.
And it was on this day in 2000, that rival scientific teams completed the first rough map of the human genome. Scientists had discovered the structure of DNA back in 1953, but it took the Human Genome Project nearly 50 years to pin down exactly how DNA makes us who we are.
They discovered that there is only a modest amount of genetic variation. The DNA of any two humans is about 99.9 percent identical.
