MONDAY, 25 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Reject Jell-O" by Lucille Lang Day, from Wild One. © Scarlet Tanager Books. Reprinted with permission.
Reject Jell-O
The man I married twice—
at fourteen in Reno, again in Oakland
the month before I turned eighteen—
had a night maintenance job at General Foods.
He mopped the tiled floors and scrubbed
the wheels and teeth of the Jell-O machines.
I see him bending in green light,
a rag in one hand,
a pail of foamy solution at his feet.
He would come home at seven a.m.
with a box of damaged Jell-O packages,
including the day's first run,
routinely rejected, and go to sleep.
I made salad with that reject Jell-O—
lemon, lime, strawberry, orange, peach—
in a kitchen where I could almost touch
opposing walls at the same time
and kept a pie pan under the leaking sink.
We ate hamburgers and Jell-O
almost every night
and when the baby went to sleep,
we loved, snug in the darkness pierced
by passing headlights and a streetlamp's gleam,
listening to the Drifters and the Platters.
Their songs wrapped around me
like coats of fur, I hummed in the long shadows
while the man I married twice
dressed and left for work.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1897, that the novelist Jack London left San Francisco for the Klondike to join the gold rush. He was just 21. A few weeks earlier, a ship had arrived in San Francisco from the Klondike carrying more than a million dollars worth of gold, and London got his step-sister to mortgage her house and lend him the money for the trip.
It was a long, hard trip, a long haul over the famous Chilkoot Pass. And winter came before Jack London could even start looking for gold. He spent that winter in a little fur trader's cabin the size of a tool shed, reading the books he'd brought with him: Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost.
By spring, he'd realized that all the good claims had already been made. So instead of looking for gold, he talked to people, and he gathered their stories. He almost died of scurvy on the way home, but he went on to write about his experiences in his book The Call of the Wild, which became one of the most popular books of his time. Jack London said, "I never realized a cent from any properties I had an interest in up [in Alaska]. Still, I have been managing to pan out a living ever since on the strength of that trip."
Today is the anniversary of the day when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, to the great consternation of folk music fans.
Actually, Bob Dylan had grown up listening to rock and roll. He loved Elvis. He said once, "When I first heard Elvis's voice, I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was gonna be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail."
He played in rock bands in high school, but when he went to college at the University of Minnesota, he fell into the folk scene and started singing songs of Woody Guthrie. He performed wearing blue jeans and a work shirt.
But in 1964, he heard the Beatles and other British bands who played rock and roll the way Dylan remembered hearing it as a kid. He did some rock and roll on his album Bringing It All Back Home in 1965 and came out with his hit song that summer, "Like a Rolling Stone."
TUESDAY, 26 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "What We Need" by David Budbill, from While We've Still Got Feet. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
What We Need
The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,
which is why
every day
we need
a little poem
of kindness,
a small song
of peace
a brief moment
of joy.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of humorist Jean Shepherd, born in Chicago (1925). He grew up in Indiana. He's remembered for the autobiographical stories he told on the radio about a boy named Ralph Parker growing up in Hohman, Indiana. One of the stories was made into the movie A Christmas Story, which came out in 1983, about a boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas, although all the adults say that he'll shoot his eye out.
The stories that he told on the air were improvised. He wrote them down, published them in collections such as In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters. He told stories about the Midwest, which he called "that great inverted bowl of darkness."
In one of his stories, he remembered walking to school with a group of kids in the winter. He said, "Kids plodded ... through forty-five-mile-an-hour gales, tilting forward like tiny furred radiator ornaments, moving stiffly over the barren clattering ground with only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing ... All were painfully plodding toward the Warren G. Harding School, miles away over the tundra [so they could learn] geography lessons involving the exports of Peru."
It's the birthday of the writer Aldous Huxley, born in Surrey, England (1894), best known as the author of the novel Brave New World, about a future in which genetically engineered people take drugs to keep them happy, have sex all the time, and never fall in love.
It's the birthday of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin (1856). He got into politics in his 20s as a socialist. He wrote his first play Widowers' Houses, about the evils of slumlords.
He made a lot of people angry, but he revolutionized theater in England by writing plays about ideas when everyone else was writing sentimental melodramas. His most famous play was Pygmalion, about a cockney girl who learns to pass as a lady, which became the basis for the musical My Fair Lady.
It was George Bernard Shaw who said, "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."
It's the birthday of Carl Jung, born in Kesswil, Switzerland (1875). He was the founder of analytic psychology, the man who noticed that myths and fairytales from all different cultures had certain similarities which he called archetypes. He believed the archetypes come from a collective unconscious that is shared by all humans.
Carl Jung said, "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
It was on this day in 1942, William Faulkner took a job writing with Warner Brothers pictures in Hollywood. He did it because he needed the money. His first few novels had gotten good reviews but hadn't sold very well, so he tried to write something that he thought would appeal to the public. He wrote Sanctuary, about a bootlegger who kidnaps a college girl, which became his first best-seller, but there was a delay in the payment of royalties. So Faulkner went to Hollywood where he worked on films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not and he was very grateful to finally get back to Oxford, Mississippi
WEDNESDAY, 27 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Willy Loman" by Edwin Romond, from Dream Teaching. © Grayson Books, West Hartford, Connecticut. Reprinted with permission.
Willy Loman
After I hit 50
I stayed
in the back
of my room
during Death
of a Salesman.
Some mornings
it was too much to see
what comes
with the territory
of dreams
ringing up a zero
and I could not
let my class
catch their teacher
in tears
as you drove
your life
to a dead end
while I clutched
the script
like a mirror.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. It was a war that began in June 1950 when North Korea invaded the south. Almost 35,000 Americans were killed in the conflict, more than 5,000 captured or went missing. A corporal in the 1st Marine Division named Anthony Ebron said, "Those last few days were pretty bloody. Each time we thought the war was over we'd go out and fight again. The day it ended we shot off so much artillery that the ground shook. Then, that night, the noise just stopped. We knew it was over."
Harry Truman said that if he had signed the same armistice, the Republicans would have drawn and quartered him, but Dwight D. Eisenhower had run for president on the platform that he would end the war, and when he was elected, that's what he did.
It was on this day in 1940 that Bugs Bunny made his debut in a cartoon called "A Wild Hare." Warner Brothers' writers and animators set out to make a rabbit who would be the epitome of cool. They modeled bugs on Groucho Marx with a carrot instead of a cigar. Mel Blanc gave him a Brooklyn accent. He was a nonchalant rabbit who chewed on his carrot in the face of all of his enemies and he was famous for the line, "What's up, doc?" which he used in that first cartoon when he met Elmer Fudd who was hunting rabbits.
As America entered World War II, Bugs Bunny became the most popular cartoon character in America, always defeating his enemies through sheer cleverness, oftentimes as a quick change artist.
It's the birthday of the novelist Bharati Mukherjee, born in Calcutta (1940). She is the author of many novels, including The Holder of the World and Desirable Daughters.
She grew up in a wealthy Brahmin family, surrounded by servants and bodyguards. She wanted to be a writer from the time she was a child. She had read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. One night her father had a group of Americans over for dinner. He said, "I want my daughter to be a writer. Where do I send her?" They said the Iowa Writer's Workshop, so that's where she went and became an American citizen.
It's the birthday of Joseph Mitchell, born in Fairmont, North Carolina (1908). He was a reporter for the New Yorker magazine who wrote about eccentric people living on the fringe in New York City: gypsies, the homeless, fishmongers, and a band of Mohawk Indians who had no fear of heights and so they worked as riveters on skyscrapers and bridges. Most of his journalism is collected in the book Up in the Old Hotel.
It's the birthday of Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lexington, Kentucky (1916). She's the author of novels such as The Ghostly Lover and The Simple Truth and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books, dedicated to, as she said, "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and, above all, the interesting."
THURSDAY, 28 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Composition" by John Ashbery, from Where Shall I Wander © Ecco. Reprinted with permission.
Composition
We used to call it the boob tube,
but I guess they don't use tubes anymore.
Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking
and before falling asleep. Today's news—
but is there such a thing as news,
or even oral history? Yes, when you want to go back
after a while and appraise the accumulation
of leaves, say in a sandbox.
The rest is rented depression,
available only in season
and the season is always next month,
a pure but troubled time.
That's why I don't go out much, though
staying at home never seemed much of an option.
And speaking of nutty concepts, surely "home"
is way up there on the list. I feel more certain about "now"
and "then," because they are close to me,
like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,
as I am with them. I like to call to them,
and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in Stratford, England (1844). He was born to a family of High Church Anglicans. He converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. He preached in the slums of Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Working among poor people, he felt that poetry was too self-indulgent. He burned his early poems, but eventually he grew out of it. He sent his written poems to his friend Robert Bridges, who published them after Hopkins's death.
Gerard Manley Hopkins spent the end of his years in Dublin as a professor of Greek and Latin, teaching classical languages to students who didn't care for them, and he hated his work. He hated grading papers since so many of his students had failed their exams, but he tried to fight off his depression, and his last words before he died were, "I am happy, so happy."
It's the birthday of the novelist Malcolm Lowry, born in Cheshire, England (1909) whose masterpiece is Under the Volcano, set during the Day of the Dead in Mexico, 1938, about a former British consul who has a problem with alcohol and a troubled marriage, which mirrored Lowry's own life.
It's the birthday of the poet John Ashbery, born in Rochester, New York (1927). He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario, where he worked in the orchards every summer. His grandfather lived in a big Victorian house and read all the classics, and young John Ashbery looked forward to visiting his grandpa every summer so he could go through his library.
He went off to Harvard where his friends were the poets Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara, who, along with the poet James Schuyler, they became known as the New York School of Poetry, thought it wasn't really a school so much as just a group of friends who wrote poetry together.
He supported himself as an art critic; and in 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his book-length poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
John Ashbery said, "I've always felt myself to be a rather frustrated composer who was trying to do with words what musicians are able to do with notes."
FRIDAY, 29 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Touch Me" by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through. © W.W. Norton. Reprinted with permission.
Touch Me
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the one hundredth birthday of the poet Stanley Kunitz, born in Worcester Massachusetts (1905), who once said of his childhood, "It was not an auspicious start." His father committed suicide a few weeks before he was born. His mother refused to ever speak about it and never told him anything about his father.
The family dress manufacturing business was bankrupt when the father killed himself. His mother, however, even with three children to support, opened a dry goods shop sewing garments in the back room, and Stanley Kunitz said of his mother, "She was a woman of formidable will, staunch heart, and razor-sharp intelligence, whose only school was the sweatshops of New York."
He decided in the fourth grade that he wanted to be a poet when his teacher had the class read a poem by Robert Herrick with the lines, "Whenas in silks my Julia goes, / Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes." Young Stanley Kunitz loved that word, "liquefaction."
He went to Harvard on a scholarship, lived in the country after college, worked on a farm, and bummed around for a while. In the '50s, he moved to Greenwich Village and started hanging out with painters. He was still relatively unknown when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his third collection in 1958.
His great breakthrough as a writer, he thought, came when his mother and sisters had all died, and he said, "The disappearance of my family liberated me. It gave me a sense that I was the only survivor and if the experiences of my life ... were to be told, it was within my power to do so."
He won the National Book Award when he was 90 for his collection Passing Through.
Today is also the birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville, born in Paris (1805), the author of Democracy in America.
It's the birthday of Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis (1869), author of The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams.
It's the birthday of Don Marquis, the newspaper columnist, born in Walnut, Illinois (1878), who gave us Archy, the cockroach, and Mehitabel, the alley cat.
SATURDAY, 30 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Glow" by Ron Padgett, from You Never Know. © Coffee House Press. Reprinted with permission.
Glow
When I wake up earlier than you and you
are turned to face me, face
on the pillow and hair spread around,
I take a chance and stare at you,
amazed in love and afraid
that you might open your eyes and have
the daylights scared out of you.
But maybe with the daylights gone
you'd see how much my chest and head
implode for you, their voices trapped
inside like unborn children fearing
they will never see the light of day.
The opening in the wall now dimly glows
its rainy blue and gray. I tie my shoes
and go downstairs to put the coffee on.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist William H. Gass, born in Fargo, North Dakota (1924). He grew up in the town of Warren, Ohio, which Gass described as "a dismal, industrial town in a down-and-out valley full of steel, smoke, and sad, sullen people."
It was the depression. The Gass family moved from rented house to rented house. His mother was an alcoholic. His father was a bigot. Gass said, "My father was a man who read magazines and newspapers in order to find someone to hate. He'd say terrible things about blacks and Jews ... the depth of his bitterness scared me."
He decided to become a writer, but he knew he'd have trouble making a living writing the books he wanted to write, so he had to support himself as a professor of philosophy.
It took him a long time to come out with his first novel, which was Omensetter's Luck. It came out in 1966. Told in many voices, it's a story about a small 19th Century Ohio town. The book begins, "Now folks today we're going to auction off Missus Pimber's things. I think you all knew Missus Pimber and you know she had some pretty nice things. This is going to be a real fine sale and we have a real fine day for it. It may get hot, though, later on, so we want to keep things moving right along."
It's the birthday of Emily Brontë, born in Yorkshire, England in the village of Thornton (1818). She's the author of Wuthering Heights. She grew up in a family of avid readers and storytellers, she and her sisters. Their mother died when Emily was two. The children were pretty much left to their own devices. Emily was shy and reclusive, and whenever she left home, she got homesick.
Wuthering Heights came out in 1847; the story of a boy from the streets of Liverpool named Heathcliff who's adopted into a wealthy, land-owning family and falls in love with his adopted sister Catherine.
It's the birthday of the economist Thorstein Veblen, (1857), born in Cato, Wisconsin. He gave us the book The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption."
It's the birthday of Henry Ford, born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan (1863). He and his wife built a two-cylinder gas engine in their kitchen sink, and from it, Henry Ford built his first horseless carriage. He later came out with the Model T Ford, and built the Ford Motor Company, which created the assembly line.
Henry Ford cut out an hour of the workday and paid his employees twice as much as other employers. He said, "Every man should make enough money to own a home, a piece of land, and a car." And he gave his workers a five-day week because he didn't think anybody would spend money in the economy if they were working all the time.
SUNDAY, 31 JULY, 2005
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Poem: "Silence" by Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems ©. Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
Silence
Sometimes we don't say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change from day to day,
the high yellow turning to mustard and at last
to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches
of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these
therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I
saying all this to you anyway since you already
know it? But of course we always tell
each other what we already know. What else?
It's the way love is in a late stage of the world.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the economist Milton Friedman, born in Brooklyn (1912), author of A Monetary History of the United States. He started the school of monetarism, which argues for the laissez-faire principle that the government should not actively engineer business. In the '60s, he advocated school vouchers and a flat tax. He's also been an advocate for an all-volunteer army and an opponent of the war on drugs.
It's the birthday of the novelist J.K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling, born in Chipping Sodbury, England (1966). She's the creator of Harry Potter, who, in the first book about him, is an orphan forced to live with his aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley at Number Four, Privet Drive. He sleeps in a cupboard under the stairs. For the first ten years of his life, he's believed that his parents were killed in a car accident. But on his eleventh birthday, he learns that they were wizards and that they were murdered by a man named Lord Voldemort, who is trying to take over the world. The Harry Potter books follow Harry as he attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and learns how to use magic and tries to avenge his parents' death.
J.K. Rowling grew up in the suburbs of Bristol, England. She was telling stories when she was a little kid. She said, "The first story I ever wrote down was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends ... Ever since Rabbit, I have wanted to be a writer, although I rarely told anyone so."
She set out to be a secretary, learned French so she could get a job as a bilingual secretary, but she found that she hated office work. Instead of taking notes in meetings, she daydreamed and wrote possible names of fictional characters in the margins of her notebooks.
She was in her mid 20s when she took a four-hour trip by train across England, and the train stopped somewhere between Manchester and London. Rowling looked out at a field of cows and suddenly got the idea for a story about a boy who goes to a school for wizardry. She said, "Harry Potter just strolled into my head fully formed." She liked that it was a story about a boy who was powerless in the ordinary world but who gets to travel to a place where his power would be almost limitless. By the time the train trip was over, she had already invented most of the characters that would appear in the Harry Potter books.
She worked on the first one for about four years, during which time she got married, had a daughter, got divorced, and was living in Edinburgh as a single mother. She had to live on public assistance to finish the book. It came out in America in 1998, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and J.K. Rowling became one of the best-selling authors of all time.
