MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "The Retarded Children Play Baseball" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark © David R. Godine, Boston. Reprinted with permission.
The Retarded Children Play Baseball
Never mind the coaches who try
to teach them the game,
and think of the pleasure
of the large-faced boy
on second who raises hand and glove
straight up making the precise
shape of a ball, even though
the ball's now over
the outfield. And think of the left
and right fielders going deeper
just to watch its roundness
materialize out of the sky
and drop at their feet. Both teams
are so in love with this moment
when the bat makes the ball jump
or fly that when it happens
everybody shouts, and the girl
with slanted eyes on first base
leaps off to let the batter by.
Forget the coaches shouting back
about the way the game is played
and consider the game
they're already playing, or playing
perhaps elsewhere on some other field,
like the shortstop, who stands transfixed
all through the action, staring
at what appears to be nothing.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Emily Post, born in Baltimore (1873). Her husband lost a lot of money in a stock market panic. They divorced. Emily Post had to raise her two daughters by herself. She tried writing novels, but then her publisher asked her to write a manual about etiquette. It came out in 1922, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. She became the arbiter of good manners and wrote a syndicated newspaper column as well.
Emily Post said, "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners no matter what fork you use."
It's the birthday of Thomas Wolfe, born in Asheville, North Carolina (1900). He spent many years trying to become a playwright, then had an affair with an older, married woman named Aline Bernstein. She became his muse and convinced him to write a novel. He dedicated his novel Look Homeward Angel to her.
Thomas Wolfe died young, of meningitis, and left behind a crate full of notebooks and manuscripts. His editor went through the crate and created two novels out of the material there, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again.
It's the birthday of the author and veterinarian James Herriot, born James Alfred Wight in Sunderland, England (1916). He started in Glasgow, became a veterinarian on the moors of Yorkshire. He liked to tell stories about the people he met and funny events.
One day he was telling his wife about what had happened to him that day. He said he wanted to put part of it in a book. She said, "You're never going to write a book. You've been talking about it for 25 years. You've never written anything." Herriot said, "That did it. I went straight out and bought a lot of paper and got down to the job." His books All Creatures Great and Small and All Things Bright and Beautiful were best-sellers in the early '70s.
It's the birthday of Gore Vidal, born in West Point, New York (1925) who, in 1948, published a novel, The City and the Pillar, the story of a young, gay man, which got scathing reviews. The New York Times refused to review his next five novels in the paper. It was a great blow to his career. He had to write pulp fiction under pseudonyms but eventually won his way back with historic novels and his best-seller of 1968 Myra Breckinridge.
It was Gore Vidal who said, "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."
TUESDAY, 4 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "Pie" by X.J. Kennedy, from Lords of Misrule © Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission.
Pie
Whoever dined in this café before us
Took just a forkful of his cherry pie.
We sit with it between us. Let it lie
Until the overworked waitperson comes
To pick it up and brush away the crumbs.
You look at it. I look at it. I stare
At you. You do not look at me at all.
Somewhere, a crash as unwashed dishes fall.
The clatter of a dropped knife splits the air.
Second-hand smoke infiltrates everywhere.
Your fingers clench the handle of a cup
A stranger drained. I almost catch your eye
For a split second. The abandoned pie
Squats on its plate before us, seeping red
Like a thing not yet altogether dead.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the famous artist Frederic Remington, born in Canton, New York (1861). He was famous for his paintings and bronze sculptures of the American West.
It's the birthday of Edward L. Stratemeyer, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey (1862). He's famous as the man who created the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and Nancy Drew. He wrote about 150 books of his own, then started the Stratemeyer Syndicate with a team of ghostwriters to write books based on his outlines. The Stratemeyer Syndicate still sells about six million books every year.
It's the birthday of Damon Runyon, born in Manhattan, Kansas (1884). He was a newspaper man. He moved to New York in 1910. The musical Guys and Dolls was based on his stories. He said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
It's the birthday of Brendan Gill, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1914). He was a novelist, playwright, and essayist. He wrote for many years for the New Yorker magazine. His novels included The Trouble of One House, about an Irish Catholic family, much like his own, in which the mother dies young. He wrote books on architecture, biographies of Lindbergh, Cole Porter, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Brendan Gill loved writing and loved the city of New York. He said, "You feel, in New York City, the energy coming up out of the sidewalks. You know you're in the midst of something tremendous, and if something tremendous hasn't yet happened, it's just about to happen."
It's the birthday of Roy Blount Jr., born in Indianapolis (1941). He grew up in Decatur, Georgia and learned to read from Uncle Remus and Mark Twain. He went to Vanderbilt, graduated, and got a job writing sports for Sports Illustrated. His first book, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, came out in 1974. It's about the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Roy Blount said, "I have written about politics, sports, music, food, drink, gender issues, books, comedians, language, travel, science, animals, economics, anatomy, and family life, preferably about all of those things together."
It's the birthday of the novelist Anne Rice, born in New Orleans (1941). Her father was a postal worker and wrote fiction in his spare time. Her mother was an actress. Anne Rice got married and had a daughter, but her daughter was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of five, and died.
Rice wrote her first novel after that, about a vampire who becomes so lonely, he decides to turn a five-year-old girl into a vampire to keep him company. That novel was Interview With a Vampire. It came out in 1974.
WEDNESDAY, 5 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "The Future" by Wendell Berry, from Given © Shoemaker Hoard. Reprinted with permission.
The Future
For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Jonathan Edwards, born in South Windsor, Connecticut (1703). He was a popular preacher of his day. He was considered the leader of the Great Awakening, the great religious revival that swept across the eastern United States before the revolution.
It's the birthday of the French encyclopedist Denis Diderot, born in Langres, France (1713). Over the course of 20 years, he wrote his great Encyclopedia—not only wrote it, but typeset it himself by hand. Denis Diderot said, "The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I've spent more than 60 years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice."
It's the birthday of the Irish author Flann O'Brien, born Brian O'Nolan in Strabane, Ireland (1911). He was a civil servant in Dublin. He wrote in his spare time. His masterpiece was considered to be At Swim-Two Birds, which came out in 1939. It's a book with three beginnings, three endings, three different strands running alongside each other for the length of the book. It's a book about a man writing a novel about a novelist.
It's the birthday of one of the few writers ever to become the leader of a country, and that was Vaclav Havel, born in Prague (1936), to a well-to-do family. He was a teenager when the family's property was seized by the Communists as they took control of the country.
In the 1960s, Havel wrote a series of absurdist plays, including The Garden Party and The Memorandum, attacking the Communist Party. He spent the 1980s in and out of prison, writing plays that he could not see performed in his own country. In 1989, after he was arrested and imprisoned yet one more time, he was released because thousands of people protested. He had become a national hero. And after the collapse of the Communist regime, he helped negotiate the transition to democracy and, in December '89, was elected president.
It was Vaclav Havel who said, "If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become president."
It's the birthday of the short story writer and novelist Edward P. Jones, born in Arlington, Virginia (1950). He was raised in Washington, D.C. by his mother who couldn't read or write. She washed dishes and worked as a maid to support the family. To support his mother and himself, he edited a publication about tax law called Tax Notes.
Then in 1992, he came out with a collection called Lost in the City, stories about African Americans living in the capital. It got awards. It got him a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, out of which came his first novel The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
THURSDAY, 6 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "Wild Card" by Cathryn Essinger, from My Dog Does Not Read Plato. © Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission.
Wild Card
The local newspaper reports
a Houston housewife has found
a three foot long snake indigenous
to California in her electric toaster.
I need to talk to this woman. I want
to know what kind of bread attracts
snakes, if she goes to church on Sundays
and if she believes in chance.
While I have her on the phone, I want
to ask about other irregularities, such as
the Osage orange that showed up
on my front step, a fruit so large
no creature could have carried it.
And what does she make of the wild card
I found in a pile of leaves-a Jack of Spades
masquerading as some variety of oak?
Or the crow who paces the patio,
carrying a packet of taco sauce,
dipping his beak casually, as if
hot sauce were his natural food.
I'd ask about the mouse I found
this morning in the dog's bowl,
frantic, half drowned, the small cap
of his skull bobbing like a tiny buoy.
Still, he swam, betting against all odds
that some housewife might appear
on this Sunday morning, looking for eggs
or waffle mix, and the opportunity to tip
the bowl onto a sunny porch where
a small thing, who has never questioned
the implacable nature of the universe,
could have another chance.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the soprano Jenny Lind, born in Stockholm (1820). Hans Christian Andersen was in love with her. He wrote the story "The Nightingale" as a tribute to her. Chopin was in love with her too. She almost married him.
On this day in 1847, Charlotte Brontë published her novel Jane Eyre about an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess. It was a great success.
On this day in 1866, John and Simeon Reno pulled off the first train robbery in American history. Trains had been robbed before while they sat in the station or in freight yards, but the Reno brothers stopped in Ohio and Mississippi a railroad train on the move. They blocked the tracks in Jackson County, Indiana.
On this day in 1930, William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying was published. It's the story of the Bundren family and the journey they take to bury their mother Addie in the family cemetery. They go through a storm and a flood and there's a flock of vultures following their wagon. Falkner wrote the book while he was working the night shift at a power plant. He said he wrote it in six weeks without changing a word. And he said that of all his books, he liked As I Lay Dying the best.
The Jazz Singer, the first talking motion picture was released on this day in 1927.
On this day in 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened its doors to the public in Paris. It was the nightclub that Henri Toulouse-Lautrec liked to paint and where the Can-Can was introduced.
It's the birthday of George Horace Lorimer, born in Louisville, Kentucky (1867). He was the editor of the Saturday Evening Post for almost 40 years.
It's the birthday of the novelist and critic Caroline Gordon, born in Merry Mont, Kentucky (1895). Her novels included Penhally, Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Old Red and Other Stories.
Caroline Gordon said, "A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."
FRIDAY, 7 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "Instructions" by Sheri Hostetler, from the anthology A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry © Reprinted with permission of the author.
Instructions
Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God.
Find god in rhododendrons and rocks,
passers-by, your cat.
Pare your beliefs, your absolutes.
Make it simple; make it clean.
No carry-on luggage allowed.
Examine all you have
with a loving and critical eye, then
throw away some more.
Repeat. Repeat.
Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut.
There will only be one or two
things you will keep,
and they will fit lightly
in your pocket.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Desmond Tutu, born in Klerksdorp, South Africa (1931). He was elected the first black archbishop of Cape Town and the head of the Anglican Church in South Africa.
It was Desmond Tutu who said, "When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."
It's the birthday of the novelist Thomas M. Keneally, born in Sydney Australia (1935). He's the author of Schindler's Ark. It came out in 1982, and it became the movie Schindler's List.
It was on this day in 1955 in San Francisco at the Six Gallery, the poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" for the first time. The poem begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." His friend Jack Kerouac sat on the edge of the stage and when Ginsberg was done, the audience exploded in applause.
When Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the poem "Howl" out of his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, he was arrested and tried for obscenity, but he was found not guilty.
It's the birthday of the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in Newark (1934), whose collection of poems Funk Lore came out in 1996. Amiri Baraka said, "A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom."
It's the birthday of the poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, born Diane Fink in Waukegan, Illinois (1948). She wrote her first book of poems, The Planets, entirely about astronomy. It came out in 1976. She became a journalist as well. She wrote essays about animals. She's best known for her book A Natural History of the Senses, a collection of essays about her own experiences of sight and sound, smell, touch and taste.
Diane Ackerman said, "I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."
It's the birthday of the poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, born near Spokane, Washington (1966) on an Indian reservation. His first big success was his collection of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It was one of the first works of fiction to portray Indians as Americans who watch all the same TV programs as everybody else and eat the same breakfast cereal.
Sherman Alexie said, "All too often Indian writers write about the kind of Indian they wish they were. So I try to write about the kind of Indian I am. I'm just as much a product of The Brady Bunch as I am of my grandmother."
It's the birthday of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, born in Paris (1955). He made his debut at Carnegie Hall at the age of nine.
SATURDAY, 8 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "There was a man of double deed" by Anonymous. Traditional.
There was a man of double deed
There was a man of double deed
Sowed his garden full of seed.
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow;
When the snow began to melt,
'Twas like a ship without a bell;
When the ship began to sail,
'Twas like a bird without a tail;
When the bird began to fly,
'Twas like an eagle in the sky;
When the sky began to roar,
'Twas like a lion at the door;
When the door began to crack,
'Twas like a stick across my back;
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a penknife in my heart;
When my heart began to bleed,
'Twas death and death and death indeed.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, October 8, 1871. The 335,000 people in Chicago woke up to a warm, sunny day after three months of drought. Around 8:45 in the evening, the great fire broke out at a barn on the west side. The fire traveled quickly. By midnight it had jumped the Chicago River. It was traveling northeast and up river, traveling up to 30 miles an hour at times. There were high winds that sent burning planks soaring for hundreds of yards through the air. People were running out of their houses, running north, taking their cats, and their dogs with them. By the next morning, the heart of the business district was in flames and by the 10th, more than three square miles were completely destroyed.
Nearly 300 people died. The rebuilding began almost immediately. And two years after the fire, the value of real estate in Chicago had gone up from what it had been before the fire. By 1880, the population had risen to 500,000, and then it more than doubled by the turn of the century.
On the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, the worst natural fire in history occurred around a lumbering town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. It ruined more than a million acres of forest and killed about 1,500 people. There is a mass grave in town where 350 unidentified bodies were buried.
It's the birthday of Frank Herbert, the science fiction author, born in Tacoma, Washington (1920). He was a very early member of the environmentalist movement. His masterpiece was Dune, published in 1965, about a desert planet where people survive only because they've learned to conserve and recycle water.
It's the birthday of the comic book writer Harvey Pekar, born in Cleveland (1939). He is the creator of the American Splendor comic book series. He was a file clerk at a VA hospital and a record collector, and through record collecting, he met the comic book artist R. Crumb. Pekar complained that comic books were all about superheroes or monsters. Nobody wrote comic books about real people. So he set out to write a comic book about his own life and R. Crumb agreed to do the illustrations. The first issue came out in 1976. Pekar wrote about every aspect of his life, his job, his friends, meeting his wife and marrying her, their difficulties as a couple, and going through cancer treatment.
Harvey Pekar said, "I wanted to write literature that pushed people into their lives rather than helping people escape from them."
It's the birthday of one of the best selling children's book authors of all time, R.L. Stine, Robert Lawrence Stine, born in Bexley, Ohio (1943). He is the creator of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series of horror novels for young people. His Fear Street series was the first modern book series for children that sold equally well to both boys and girls.
SUNDAY, 9 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "Vocations Club" by Paula Sergi from Family Business. Finishing Line Press. Reprinted with permission.
Vocations Club
We met on Tuesdays after school
with Sister Mary Agnes,
the two Mary Lous, Julie, Kay and me
to learn about being nuns.
The convent sounded good;
a room of my own, a single bed,
time to think and pray, no fighting
over what we'd watch-Bonanza versus Dragnet,
or who would get the couch.
I dug those crazy nun outfits, and hated hand-me-downs
with too long sleeves and too tight waists.
I'd take the smell of polished wood and incense
over burnt grilled cheese and sour milk.
I'd have a good job, teaching kids
and all the chalk I'd want,
long, unbroken pieces that echoed off the board,
all eyes on me as I'd tap directions,
conducting my classroom all day.
People, I'd begin, today we're talking about...
whatever I want to !
Nuns got great rosaries with fancy beads
and lots of gifts at Christmas.
And the solitude of celibacy sounded pretty good,
better than worrying about French kissing
like my sister, better than pining for men,
like mom, whose men left anyway.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the day observed by many people as Leif Erikson Day, honoring the Norwegian explorer Leif Erikson, who landed in North America, some believe, in New England on this day in the year 1000.
It's the anniversary of the first English Luddite riots against the introduction of machinery for spinning cotton in Manchester, England on this day in 1779.
It's the birthday of the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, born in Paris (1835). He wrote 13 operas in his lifetime and was a little chagrined that the only one of them that the public really liked was Samson and Dalila, though his Carnival of the Animals was also popular; as was his Third Symphony.
It's the birthday of the historian Bruce Catton (1899), born in the very small town of Petosky in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He was the son of a Congregational minister. As a boy, Bruce Catton grew up hearing the stories of old men who'd fought in the Grand Army of the Republic during the Civil War.
He went to Oberlin and joined the Navy in World War II. He became a newspaper man in Cleveland and Boston and was 49 before he published his first book. He's best known for his narrative writings on the Civil War: Stillness at Appomattox, Mr. Lincoln's Army and Glory Road.
Bruce Catton said, "I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate the faith of the old veterans and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do."
It's the birthday of Charles Rudolph Walgreen, born in Knox County, Illinois, near Galesburg (1873). He became a pharmacist, worked in drugstores in Chicago, and in 1909, organized the firm that in 1916 became the Walgreen Company, the largest chain of drugstores in the country.
He was the first to add other lines of goods, in addition to pharmaceuticals and health items, to drugstores. He popularized the drugstore lunch counter, and it was said that the malted milk was first served in a Walgreen's drugstore.
