MONDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: "Long Island Sound" by Emma Lazarus. Public Domain.
Long Island Sound
I see it as it looked one afternoon
In August,-by a fresh soft breeze o'erblown.
The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon,
A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon.
The shining waters with pale currents strewn,
The quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove,
The semi-circle of its dark, green grove.
The luminous grasses, and the merry sun
In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide,
Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp
Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide,
Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep
Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon.
All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1819, the young John Keats took a walk out around Winchester, England and wrote a poem called "To Autumn," which begins:
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run."
It was on this day in 1991 that a body was found frozen in a glacier in the Alps between Austria and Italy. A German tourist found the body and called the Austrian police. They tried to free the body from the ice with a jackhammer. It was only when an anthropologist showed up to examine the body that they realized it was a very, very old corpse—5,300 years old, in fact—of a man between 25 and 35 years old. He was five feet, two inches tall, with hair about three inches long. He had tattoos. He wore an unlined fur robe, a woven grass cape, and size six shoes stuffed with grass for warmth.
He came to be called the Iceman, and what made him such a remarkable discovery for anthropologists was the fact that he died while he was out walking on an ordinary day wearing ordinary clothing. He carried a copper axe and a fur quiver for his arrows, the only quiver from the Neolithic period that has ever been found. His arrows had sharp flint points and feathers that were affixed at an angle that would cause the arrows to spin. And he carried mushrooms in his bag that scientists speculate were used for medicine.
It was not until ten years later that a forensics expert noticed in an x-ray that the Iceman had an arrowhead lodged in his back. He had been murdered.
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Lord of the Flies, William Golding, born in Cornwall, England (1911). He was a school teacher who joined the British Navy during World War II and was shocked by the violence and cruelty of war. He came back and wrote Lord of the Flies about a group of boys were who stranded on a desert island and struggle for survival. One of them tries to establish a democracy, but a bunch of boys break off from the main group, and it turns into violent anarchy.
William Golding wrote eleven more books after Lord of the Flies, including Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize in 1980. His own favorite of his own books was The Inheritors, about the destruction of Neanderthal Man by Homo sapiens.
TUESDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: excerpt from "The Old Life" by Donald Hall, from The Old Life. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission.
excerpt from The Old Life
There are miseries
of childhood that an old man's mind—alien
in the hour of injections
and restraints, ignorant of what
day or season it is—
will clutch to itself with angry tears.
I wanted a Mickey Mouse
watch as much as, later in life,
I wanted a job,
a prize, or a woman. It disappeared
a month after my fifth
birthday, and sixty years afterward
I grieve for it whenever
I regret something lost.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1519 that Ferdinand Magellan set out with his armada of five ships and 237 men on what became the first known voyage around the globe. Magellan was out to claim the Spice Islands for Spain. He had no idea how far he'd have to travel. The best-known map at the time placed Japan just a few hundred miles off of Mexico. Magellan's ships were small, and they were not of the best quality, but they reached South America by winter and began to sail south along the coast. The men began to see strange new animals, including birds that they called "ducks without wings," now known as penguins.
They met a very tall tribe of people who herded llamas, and Magellan nicknamed them "patagones" from the Spanish for "big feet." And that piece of South America became known as Patagonia.
They almost turned back a dozen times, but they finally saw a narrow passage like the mouth of a river. They followed it to the other side, and they found themselves in a much calmer sea, which Magellan named the Pacific Ocean.
Magellan estimated that they would reach the Spice Islands in a few days. The weather was perfect for sailing, and everyone was hopeful. But days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and the ships began to run out of food. Somehow, Magellan managed to sail past nearly every single island in the South Pacific, so there was no way to get more food. The men were reduced to eating oxhides and llama skins, and many died of starvation. They finally reached their destination in March, three and a half months after rounding the tip of South America.
Magellan himself died on one of the islands, trying to convert the local people to Christianity by force. Of the five original ships, only one made the entire journey back to Spain, carrying seventeen men, the only survivors of the original 237. As a reward, the captain of that single remaining ship was given a globe with a Latin inscription that said, "Thou first circumnavigated me."
It's the birthday of the novelist Upton Sinclair, born in Baltimore (1878). In 1904, he spent two months working in a meat packing plant to investigate the industry. He was horrified by the working conditions and wrote his novel The Jungle (1906) that made him famous and which led to federal regulation of the meat packing industry.
It's the birthday of the poet Ray Gonzalez, born in El Paso (1952). He's the author of the short story collection The Ghost of John Wayne and the editor of numerous anthologies of Latino literature.
It's the birthday of the great editor Maxwell Perkins, born in New York City (1884), who edited F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.
And today is the birthday of the poet Donald Hall, born in New Haven (1928). He's the author of many collections of poems, including The Museum of Clear Ideas, and The Old Life, The Painted Bed, and a collection of stories, Willow Temple, published a year ago.
He grew up listening to his grandfather reciting long narrative poems like "Casey at the Bat," as he sat on a three-legged stool milking his Holsteins. Donald Hall's first literary hero was Edgar Allen Poe. He said, "I wanted to be mad, addicted, obsessed, haunted and cursed; I wanted to have eyes that burned like coals, profoundly melancholy, profoundly attractive."
He taught for 17 years at the University of Michigan and then decided to quit and live by his wits and move to a farm in New Hampshire that had been in his family for generations.
Donald Hall said, "I try every day to write great poetry—as I tried when I was 14. What else is there to do?"
WEDNESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: "Changing Diapers" by Gary Snyder, from Axe Handles © Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington D.C. Reprinted with permission.
Changing Diapers
How intelligent he looks!
on his back
both feet caught in my one hand
his glance set sideways,
on a giant poster of Geronimo
with a Sharp's repeating rifle by his knee.
I open, wipe, he doesn't even notice
nor do I.
Baby legs and knees
toes like little peas
little wrinkles, good-to-eat,
eyes bright, shiny ears
chest swelling drawing air,
No trouble, friend,
you and me and Geronimo
are men.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of a famous literary critic, Sir Edmund Gosse, born in London (1849). He was famous in his own time as the man who rescued the reputation of the poet John Donne, whom nobody read at the time until Edmund Gosse wrote a book about him.
And he was the man who brought Henrik Ibsen to the attention of the English-reading and English play-attending audience. But we know him best as the author of a single book, his memoir, Father and Son, about his struggle to break away from his own father.
Gosse grew up in a strict fundamentalist Puritan congregation called the Brethren, where dancing, gambling, tobacco and the theater were all considered sinful, but worst of all, his parents believed that telling stories was a sin. Gosse wrote in his autobiography, "Not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy ... Never in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, 'Once upon a time!' I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance, and although I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name."
As a boy, he was forbidden to read anything other than religious works. He was not allowed to go to college, so he got a job as a clerk in the British Museum and went to live in London. And just before he left, he realized that he had lost his faith in God. He became obsessed with literature instead of religion, and in 1907 published his book Father and Son about his childhood.
Edmund Gosse, who had grown up in a house without stories, died in 1928 in a house with a library that was so large, it was sold for a small fortune.
It's the birthday of the novelist Herbert George (H.G.) Wells, born in Bromley, England (1866). He had a job writing biology textbooks until he developed a respiratory illness in his late 20s. He thought he didn't have long to live, so he left his wife. He ran away with another woman, and he began writing furiously. And in just three years, he published all the novels for which we know him: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds.
It's the birthday of the novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine (1947). His father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Stephen was just two. He has no memories of his father, but one day he found a whole box full of his father's science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and that box of his father's books inspired him to start writing horror stories.
He studied creative writing in college. He tried to write some literary stories, but he found that writing about giant man-eating rats was a lot more fun. He worked at a gas station after college and at a laundromat. His wife worked at Dunkin' Donuts. He did his writing in the furnace room of his trailer home. He did the first drafts typed single-spaced and no margins to save paper.
He was working as a teacher when he wrote his first novel about a weird high school girl with psychic powers named Carrie White. He gave up on the book at one point and threw it in the trash. His wife rescued it. Carrie was published in 1973. The hard cover didn't sell well, but then his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000.
It's the birthday of the man who first put high quality literature into paperbacks, Sir Allen Lane, born in Bristol, England (1902), the founder of Penguin Books.
THURSDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: "Something Else" by Christian Barter, from The Singers I Prefer. © CavanKerry Press, Ltd. Reprinted with permission.
Something Else
I know a woman who calls me
every week or so when she has something
on her mind and starts by saying,
"I have something to talk about
but let's start by talking about
something else." It helps her get it out.
So I ask her how she is and she says
okay and tells me about some poet
or politician she's met and how
he wasn't at all what she expected
or about the DC weather,
the traffic jams, the dirty Metro.
Sometimes she never gets around to her point
at all, but ends by saying,
"Now I don't want to talk about it
anymore." Last week I had a fever
for four days and the world
took on a kind of flickering darkness—
it seemed so thin, so insubstantial,
not the kind of place a person could live.
This guy who came to the card game
last night, he says he dreams
of a dead friend all the time,
this friend walks out of a black alley,
walks always in a kind of shadow.
I asked him what it's like to be dead,
the guy said, fumbling a face-down card,
and he said it's not a place, heaven,
it's a feeling, the feeling of knowing
everything you never knew. Then the friend
told him one of the numbers to play
this week in Megabucks. Sometimes, though,
she does get around to what's on her mind—
a sadness for her little sister, killed
in a wreck, or a fear that we
won't see each other again, won't ever
feel whatever that was we felt when we
were making love. I don't know if we will.
I don't know if she will ever see
her little sister again except in dreams,
which is somewhere, I guess.
The number was eight.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1961, John F. Kennedy signed legislation that created the Peace Corps, an idea originally proposed by Senator Hubert Humphrey in 1957, but it was John Kennedy who made it a reality. He had given a speech about the Peace Corps at the University of Michigan in October 1960 to 10,000 students who waited until 2:00 in the morning to hear him. He asked the crowd if anybody there would be willing to serve their country by traveling abroad and helping develop the poorest nations of the world, and the audience shouted back that they would. And so he was inspired to include in his inaugural address the famous line: "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."
Today is the first day of autumn. In the next few weeks, the shortening of daylight hours will tell the trees around us that winter is coming and they'll begin shutting down their food-making process, preparing to live on the sugar they've stored for the winter. All the green chlorophyll in their leaves will be withdrawn into the trees' branches and the leaves will turn red and yellow and orange and brown.
It's the anniversary of an execution in New York City, 1776. Nathan Hale was hanged at 11:00 a.m. by the British at the gallows at which he uttered his famous last words, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
It's the birthday of the novelist and playwright Fay Weldon, born in Worcestershire, England (1931), author of Puffball, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and her autobiography, Auto Da Fay.
A few years ago she caused a controversy when she became the first writer that we know of to be paid for a product placement in a novel. The Italian jewelry company Bulgari paid her an undisclosed sum to mention their brand in her book The Bulgari Connection.
FRIDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen. Reprinted with permission.
Glory Days
I had a friend was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside sat down had a few drinks
But all he kept talking about was
Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
Well there's a girl that lives up the block
Back in school she could turn all the boy's heads
Sometimes on a Friday I'll stop by
And have a few drinks after she put her kids to bed
Her and her husband Bobby well they split up
I guess it's two years gone by now
We just sit around talking about the old times,
She says when she feels like crying
She starts laughing thinking about
Glory days
My old man worked 20 years on the line
And they let him go
Now everywhere he goes out looking for work
They just tell him that he's too old
I was 9 nine years old and he was working at the
Metuchen ford plant assembly line
Now he just sits on a stool down at the legion hall
But I can tell what's on his mind
Glory days yeah goin back
Glory days aw he ain't never had
Glory days, glory days
Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight
And I'm going to drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
A little of the glory of, well time slips away
And leaves you with nothing mister but
Boring stories of glory days
Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the Greek poet Euripides, born near Athens in 480 B.C. Of the poets of Greek tragedy whose plays we know, Euripides' survive in the greatest number—19 of them—including Medea.
It was on this day in 1806, Lewis and Clark returned from their westward expedition after over two years away.
It's the birthday of Ray Charles, born in Albany, Georgia (1930).
It's the birthday of the singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen, born in Freehold, New Jersey (1949). He was a working class kid. His father took odd jobs. His mother worked as a secretary. Bruce didn't do well in school. He didn't seem to have much ambition. Then he saw Elvis on TV, and he scraped together $18 to buy a secondhand guitar. Music was his way of being noticed by people. By the time he was 14, he was playing in local bands on the bar circuit, bands with names like the Rogues, the Castiles, the Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom.
He played at prisons and mental hospitals, a rollerdrome, shopping center parking lot, and he played at firemen's balls. His first album was Greetings from Asbury Park (1973). In just a few years, he'd been on the cover of Time magazine. He was a best-selling artist.
Monmouth County, where Bruce Springsteen grew up, lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other county in New Jersey. He read the New York Times obituaries, and he saw how many times one of his songs was played at a memorial service and how many of the articles mentioned that the deceased had loved Springsteen's music. There was a headline for one man, Jim Berger, that read: "Fan of the Boss," so Springsteen called up his widow, Suzanne. Another fan was a firefighter named Joe Farrelly, and Springsteen called his wife as well. She later said, "I got through Joe's memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call."
SATURDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: "Our Other Sister" by Jeffrey Harrison, from Feeding the Fire. © Sarabande Books. Reprinted with permission.
Our Other Sister
for Ellen
The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second
before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who'd gone away.
What my motives were I can't recall: a whim,
or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA
that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel
and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.
Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she'd stopped calling.
I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember
how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I'd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel
the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister
had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, born in St. Paul (1896). He was working on his first novel when he met Zelda Sayre at a military dance in Montgomery, Alabama and fell in love. He told her she looked like the heroine in his novel.
They got engaged, but her parents didn't approve because he didn't have any money, so he moved to New York and tried to publish the novel. It was rejected twice. He moved home with his parents in St. Paul to rewrite it again.
While he worked on it, Zelda wrote him letters about the men she was dating and how maybe they should break off the engagement. His novel was about a man who loses a girl because he doesn't have enough money, so he quoted lines from Zelda's letter in the book. He changed the title to This Side of Paradise.
It was accepted by Scribner in September 1919. He took a train to Montgomery. She agreed to marry him. This Side of Paradise came out in 1920, when he was just 23, and he became an overnight sensation. He and Zelda got married a week after publication at St. Patrick's in New York City.
They were the most famous literary couple of their day and perhaps any other. They were so famous that the Hearst papers had a reporter whose only job was to cover what they did. They were beautiful people. Dorothy Parker said, "Scott and Zelda looked like they'd just stepped out of the sun."
Fitzgerald wrote a play, The Vegetable, produced in 1923. It was a flop. He sailed off to France in May of 1924. He started writing a novel about a bootlegger named Jay Gatsby. He worked on it all that summer. Fitzgerald was never satisfied with it. He said, "I never at any one time saw Gatsby clear myself, for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself."
By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, Fitzgerald had started to crash too. His marriage was coming apart. He was running out of money. His drinking was catching up with him. It took him nine years to write his next novel, Tender is the Night, which got mixed reviews in 1934. He died in 1940, at the age of 44, in a year in which all of his books together sold 72 copies with royalties of $13.
SUNDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER, 2005
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Poem: "Hiding" by Donald Hall, from The Painted Bed © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission.
Hiding
I know she's gone for good.
I watched her die, but Gus is
Not sure. In the birch wood
He searches, looks, fusses.
When we walk home today
He sniffs at her armchair.
"She won't come back," I say.
He climbs an attic stair
And sticks his intent nose
Under a hamper's lid,
As if, for all he knows,
She slipped back in and hid.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1957, nine black teenagers entered Central High School in Little Rock, escorted by members of the 101st Airborne Division. The Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in the decision, Brown v. Board of Education, three years before. But schools were still segregated in Little Rock, though it was considered a relatively liberal southern city. There was no segregation on buses or libraries or parks; just schools. So teachers at the all-black schools in Little Rock handed out applications to attend the all-white Central High, which was one of the best in the state.
One of those nine black students, Minnijean Brown, remembers picking out her best outfit for the first day of classes. She wasn't worried. She said, "I figured, 'I'm a nice person. Once they get to know me, they'll see I'm okay. We'll be friends." But they never even got close to the school building that first day. They were surrounded by a crowd of segregationist white students and parents. One of them was chased away from the school by a mob.
The nine students tried twice to enter the building. Each time the crowd grew more threatening, shouting and spitting at them. Footage of their second attempt was broadcast on television across the country, and Americans were shocked to see how badly they were being treated.
And so on this day in 1957, the third day they tried to get in, President Eisenhower sent 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to escort them up the front steps and into their classrooms. The soldiers remained in the school for the rest of the year. The nine black students were taunted, they were humiliated, and they were abused in various ways.
After the experience of that year, most of the nine black teenagers tried to keep a low profile. Only one of them became a civil rights activist; the others became an accountant, a corporate vice president, social worker, real estate agent, psychologist, a teacher, and two of them homemakers. All nine of them were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1998.
Today is the birthday of William Faulkner, born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He wrote most of his books about his hometown of Oxford, a town of about 1500 people at the time.
William Faulkner dropped out of high school, took a few courses at the University of Mississippi, and got a D in English there. He had to resign from his job at the post office because he kept magazines until he had read them himself.
He went off to New Orleans where he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to write, and Faulkner did. He wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay. It came out in 1926. Between 1926 and 1932, Faulkner wrote some of his best works: Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August.
Most scholars at the time thought his work was too dark, too lurid. By 1944, all but one of his books was out of print. People in Oxford, Mississippi thought he was washed up. But in 1945, Viking brought out a Portable Faulkner edition, which brought attention back to his work. And then a few years later, he won the Nobel Prize for literature, and all his books were brought back into print.
