MONDAY, 10 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "Considerations" by Louis McKee from River Architecture: Poems from Here and There. ® Cynic Press. Reprinted with permission.
Considerations
It was one of those decisions
that had to be made
in a moment. A Puerto Rican girl
walked across the street
in front of my car.
Fifteen or so and well
on her way to beauty, her face
was fired gold in the night.
She was headed uptown
where the streets are scarred
and sad, and I remember
how dangerous it is
for a girl to be beautiful
in some neighborhoods.
I wanted to get out
of the car and run to her
rescue, a Galahad
breaking with middle age
and tired legs and heart.
Before I could do anything, though,
the light changed
and the cars around me roared
their engines and moved out
groping for something
they believed would change things.
Like everyone else,
she would have to save herself.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was opening night for Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin on this night in 1935. Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics based on the play by DeBose and Dorothy Heyward. It opened at the Alvin Theater in New York City.
It's the birthday of the playwright Harold Pinter, born in East London (1930). He was the son of a Jewish tailor, and was raised in a working class neighborhood and acted in plays. In school, his first full-length play was The Birthday Party. It debuted in the West End in 1958. He came to create a body of work the people called "the comedies of menace," in which ordinary situations turn absurd because of characters acting out of character for inexplicable reasons.
It's the birthday of the journalist Daniel Pearl, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1963). He grew up in California. He went to work for The Wall Street Journal in 1990. While on assignment in Pakistan, he was kidnapped by terrorists in January 2002 and executed six days later. Some of his best work is collected in the book At Home in the World.
It's the birthday of the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (1917). He grew up in New York City. By the age of 13, he had won the amateur night contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem so many times they wouldn't let him compete anymore.
He was just 19 years old when he joined the house band at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, along with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and with them, he helped develop a new kind of jazz known as bebop.
Today is Columbus Day, observing Christopher Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. He actually came ashore in the New World on the 12th of October. Of course, he didn't discover America. There were people living here at the time. There had even been Europeans to explore the New World before him: Celts, Phoenicians, and even the Vikings had been here around the tenth century.
Most of the ideas we have about Columbus are myths that were created by Washington Irving, who wrote one of the first modern biographies of Columbus and made most of it up. But Columbus's voyage was the first to publicize the existence of the Americas to the rest of Europe, sparking the waves of colonization that came afterward.
Columbus was trying to find a new trade route to Asia. He got the idea to sail around the world in the opposite direction. He just miscalculated the size of the earth. He thought it was about 3,000 miles from Spain to Japan when, in fact, it's about 13,000.
He sailed off in three little ships, none of them bigger than a tennis court: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. On October 12, 1492, he saw land on the western horizon. It was one of the islands of the Bahamas.
Today is the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi, born near Parma, Italy (1813), to a tavern owner. He was just 26 years old when his first opera Oberto was performed at La Scalia in Milan. A few years later, his opera Nabucco premiered, and the audience applauded for ten minutes after the first scene. Even the stage hands stopped what they were doing to watch and clap backstage.
TUESDAY, 11 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "On the Death of a Colleague" by Stephen Dunn from Landscape at the Edge of the Century. © W.W. Norton. Reprinted with permission.
On the Death of a Colleague
She taught theater, so we gathered
in the theater.
We praised her voice, her knowledge,
how good she was
with Godot and just four months later
with Gigi.
She was fifty. The problem in the liver.
Each of us recalled
an incident in which she'd been kind
or witty.
I told about being unable to speak
from my diaphragm
and how she made me lie down, placed her hand
where the failure was
and showed me how to breathe.
But afterwards
I only could do it when I lay down
and that became a joke
between us, and I told it as my offering
to the audience.
I was on stage and I heard myself
wishing to be impressive.
Someone else spoke of her cats
and no one spoke
of her face or the last few parties.
The fact was
I had avoided her for months.
It was a student's turn to speak, a sophomore,
one of her actors.
She was a drunk, he said, often came to class
reeking.
Sometimes he couldn't look at her, the blotches,
the awful puffiness.
And yet she was a great teacher,
he loved her,
but thought someone should say
what everyone knew
because she didn't die by accident.
Everyone was crying. Everyone was crying and it
was almost over now.
The remaining speaker, an historian, said he'd cut
his speech short.
And the Chairman stood up as if by habit,
said something about loss
and thanked us for coming. None of us moved
except some students
to the student who'd spoken, and then others
moved to him, across dividers,
down aisles, to his side of the stage.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1962, Pope John XXIII convened the first session of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, also known as Vatican II. Vatican II resulted in some of the greatest changes in the history of the Catholic Church. As a result of it, Catholics were allowed to pray with Protestants and attend weddings and funerals in Protestant churches. Priests were encouraged to say mass facing the congregation rather than facing the altar, and Priests were allowed to perform mass in languages other than Latin.
It's the birthday of François Mauriac, born in Bordeaux, France (1885), who wrote about Bordeaux in many of his novels: The Desert of Love, The Knot of Vipers, A Kiss for the Leper. On the eve of World War II, he spoke out against the Germans. He sided with Charles de Gaulle in the '50s in opposition to colonial policies in Morocco, and he condemned torture in Algeria by the French army.
It's the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, born in New York City (1884). Her father was an alcoholic and her glamorous mother made fun of Eleanor for her plain looks. She was in Italy visiting her grandmother when she bumped into her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the two began a secret courtship that wound up in their marriage in 1905.
It's the birthday of the crime novelist Elmore Leonard, born in New Orleans (1925). His family moved around a lot and finally settled in Detroit, where he grew up. He started out writing western novels, and then switched to crime. He doesn't write mysteries or detective novels, just novels about interesting characters who break the law, including Fifty-Two Pickup, La Brava. His latest novel The Hot Kid came out this year.
WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "It Is Not the Fact That I Will Die That I Mind" by Jim Moore from Lightning at Dinner. © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
It Is Not the Fact That I Will Die That I Mind
but that no one will love as I did
the oak tree out my boyhood window,
the mother who set herself
so stubbornly against life,
the sister with her serious frown
and her wish for someone at her side,
the father with his dreamy gaze
and his left hand idly buried
in the fur of his dog.
And the dog herself,
that mournful look and huge appetite,
her need for absolute stillness
in the presence of a bird.
I know how each of them looks
when asleep. And I know how it feels
to fall asleep among them.
No one knows that but me,
No one knows how to love the way I do.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's right about now that Oktoberfest gets underway in Munich—it's the biggest festival in the world. Nearly six million people attend. They drink more than ten million pints of beer. Oktoberfest has its origins in the big wedding party that happened on this day in 1810. Crown Prince Louis of Bavaria was marrying Princess Therese of Saxonia, and they held a big party out in front of the city gates.
It's the birthday of Robert Fitzgerald, born in Geneva, New York (1910). He wanted to become a journalist in the big city, but he never could learn to write fast enough. And so he became a classics professor at Harvard and produced the most beautiful English translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey in the last century.
It's the birthday of the novelist Richard Price, born in New York City (1949). He grew up in a housing project in the Bronx in a tough neighborhood full of street gangs. But Price didn't take part in gangs. He suffered from a mild form of cerebral palsy. He said, "I was a member of the Goldberg gang—we walked down the street doing algebra."
He wrote his first novel, The Wanderers (1974), about a group of teenagers trying to make it out of the Bronx, and it was a big success.
Price went off to Hollywood to try to write screenplays, then came back to the East Coast and started to hang out with cops in Jersey City. He spent three years following the cops around, getting to know some of the drug dealers as well, carrying a notebook, writing down everything he saw and heard. The result was his novel Clockers (1992) about a young drug dealer named Strike who's trying to make enough money to get out of the drug business without getting killed or arrested. It was one of the first works of fiction that tried to describe the crack cocaine trade from the point of view of the dealers, and it was a huge success.
Richard Price said, "I want to create an awareness that certain people exist. Let me just put them on paper so the reader can see who they are."
It's the birthday of the playwright and novelist Alice Childress, born in Charleston, South Carolina (1916). She's best known for her novels A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich and A Short Walk.
It's the birthday of the psychologist and author Robert Coles, born in Boston (1929). He had embarked on a career as a child psychologist, but one day in New Orleans in 1960, he saw a white mob surrounding a six-year-old black girl named Ruby Bridges, and he decided that someone needed to write about a world where that could happen. He wrote a book called Children of Crisis (1967). And in 2003 he published a book called Bruce Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing.
THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "How To Be a Poet" by Wendell Berry from Given: New Poems. © Shoemaker Hoard, Washington, D.C. Reprinted with permission.
How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
that you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1792 in Washington D.C. that the cornerstone was laid for the presidential residence, now known as the White House. The Frenchman, Pierre L'Enfant, who designed Washington, D.C. wanted the residence to look like the palace of Versailles. George Washington thought that was a little too fancy, so he got an Irish architect named James Hoban to reduce the design to one-fifth of its original size. Washington laid the cornerstone and supervised the construction. John Adams was the first president to call it home.
People nicknamed it the White House from the very beginning. There was a coat of whitewash brushed on the sandstone to protect it against winter. Thomas Jefferson was the one who installed flushing toilets. Andrew Jackson got the first shower. Martin Van Buren brought in central heating. Rutherford B. Hayes introduced the telephone. Benjamin Harrison had it wired for electricity. President Truman brought in the first TV set.
It's the birthday of novelist Conrad Richter, born in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania (1890). He wrote a trilogy about frontier life in Ohio: The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950).
It's the birthday of Arna Wendell Bontemps born in Alexandria, Louisiana (1902). He moved to New York City to become part of the Harlem Renaissance with Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. His first novel was God Sends Sunday in 1931, and his masterpiece, Black Thunder, was published in 1936.
It's the birthday of the poet and translator Richard Howard, born in Cleveland (1929). He was a translator of more than 150 books, most of them from French, including The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. Howard's own selected poems, Inner Voices, came out last year.
It's the birthday of comedian Lenny Bruce, born on Long Island (1925). He was one of the first comedians who didn't tell jokes as such but just stood up on stage and talked about things, politics, society, and religion.
It's the birthday of songwriter Paul Simon, born in Newark (1941). He was an English major at Queens College. He formed a duo with his boyhood friend Art Garfunkel, and they made their first album in 1964. It didn't sell well. The two men split up and Paul Simon went to Europe to work as a folk singer. But while he was there, the Simon & Garfunkel song "The Sound of Silence" made its way up the Top 40 charts, all the way to number one.
FRIDAY, 14 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "Smell and Envy" by Douglas Goetsch from Nobody's Hell. © Hanging Loose Press. Reprinted with permission.
Smell and Envy
You nature poets think you've got it, hostaged
somewhere in Vermont or Oregon,
so it blooms and withers only for you,
so all you have to do is name it: primrose
—and now you're writing poetry, and now
you ship it off to us, to smell and envy.
But we are made of newspaper and smoke
and we dunk your roses in vats of blue.
Birds don't call, our pigeons play it close
to the vest. When the moon is full
we hear it in the sirens. The Pleiades
you could probably buy downtown. Gravity
is the receiver on the hook. Mortality
we smell on certain people as they pass.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, in which William Duke of Normandy came across the channel from France and defeated the army of Harold II of England. The Normans became the rulers of England, and French was introduced into the English language. William had an army of about 7,000 cavalry and infantry. Harold had about as many men, but many of them untrained peasants. It was a close battle until William Duke of Normandy pretended to retreat and drew the Englishmen out of their position in pursuit and then turned and annihilated them.
It's the birthday of a great military man, Dwight D. Eisenhower born in Denison, Texas (1890). He grew up in a poor family that was very religious. His mother was a pacifist. When her son chose to go to West Point for college, she broke down in tears. He graduated in the class of 1915 and took a position training soldiers after he graduated.
He wanted to go overseas to fight in World War I, but it ended a week before he was supposed to go over to Europe. He wrote a guidebook of World War I battlefields, but was then stationed in the Philippines.
He finally got back to the United States in 1939, and was stationed at a based in Louisiana where he supervised the largest military games ever carried out in this country, a simulation designed to help prepare for a land war in Europe. Eisenhower planned the strategy for the invading army, and the following December, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was put in charge of the strategy for an Allied invasion of Europe.
It's the birthday of the poet and essayist Katha Pollitt, born in New York City (1949).
It's the birthday of the poet e.e. cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894).
It's the birthday of the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, New Zealand (1888). She was the daughter of a successful businessman who sent her away to school in England. Her parents came to get her from England when she was 18. They brought her back to New Zealand, and she found that she no longer had anything in common with them.
She became one of the wildest bohemians in New Zealand. She had affairs with men and women, lived with Aborigines, and published scandalous stories. She moved back to London and lived in the bohemian scene there. At one point, she married a man she barely knew, and left him before the wedding night was over because she couldn't stand the pink bedspread.
She didn't begin to write the stories that made her famous until her younger brother came to see her in 1915. They had long talks, reminiscing about growing up in New Zealand. He left that fall for World War I and was killed two months later. She was devastated by his death, and she wrote a series of short stories about her childhood, including "The Garden Party" which many critics consider to be her masterpiece.
She said, "Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare fiddle?"
SATURDAY, 15 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "White Towels" by Richard Jones from The Blessing: New and Selected Poems. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
White Towels
I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the Roman poet Virgil, born Publius Vergilius Maro near Mantua, Italy (70 B.C.). His father was a peasant, a farm worker who married the boss's daughter. So the boy, Virgil, was sent off to Milan, Rome, and Naples for his education. He missed the countryside, so he came back to the family farm and wrote poetry.
He lived at a time of civil wars, and his first collection of poems, known as the Eclogues, about farmers and shepherds and the rural landscape, was very popular because it reminded people of a simpler time before things had gotten so bad. At the request of the government, he wrote poems to persuade Romans to go back to the countryside and to work the land again. He wrote four volumes of these poems about agriculture, known as The Georgics, and they offered instruction in farming, animal husbandry, and beekeeping.
The emperor Augustus was so impressed by Virgil's work that he gave Virgil two villas to live in and a stipend to live on for the rest of his days. And so Virgil set out to write an epic poem which he called The Aeneid, which told the story of Aeneas, one of the soldiers in the Trojan War, traveling home from Troy to found a new city that would become Rome.
Virgil worked on it for 11 years. He took a trip to Greece so he could pick up some details for one of the sections of the poem. On the voyage he caught a fever, came back to Italy, and died before the poem was completed.
It's the birthday of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, born in Prussia (1844).
It's the birthday of the novelist P.G. Wodehouse, (Pelham Grenville Wodehouse), born in Guildford, England (1881). His father was a magistrate in Hong Kong. His mother traveled back and forth between England and Hong Kong, so Wodehouse was raised by a series of aunts. He wanted desperately to go to college, but his father went bankrupt and couldn't pay for his education. Wodehouse got a job as a bank clerk instead and started writing humorous stories and poems on the side.
It was as a journalist that Wodehouse first came to the United States—to cover a boxing match—and he fell in love with America right away. He said, "Being [in America] was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying."
He moved to Greenwich Village in 1909 and started to write stories for the Saturday Evening Post about an imaginary cartoonish England, full of very polite but brain-dead aristocrats such as Bertie Wooster, who was looked after by his butler Jeeves. The first Jeeves book, My Man Jeeves, came out in 1919, and it was followed by many others.
People who knew P.G. Wodehouse said that he was incredibly dull in person, not a funny man at all, and did not seem to have any emotions. But he authored some of the funniest books in the English language.
P.G. Wodehouse wrote, "It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't."
It's the birthday of the novelist Italo Calvino, born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba (1923), who edited the anthology Italian Folktales.
It's the birthday of the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., born in Columbus, Ohio (1917), author of The Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days, who said in his autobiography that "People are likely to have read most of the books they're ever going to read by the time they're 25."
SUNDAY, 16 OCTOBER, 2005
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Poem: "One Hundredth Birthday" by Kim Bridgford from Instead of Maps. © David Robert Books. Reprinted with permission.
One Hundredth Birthday
Your birthdays now are lit with irony,
And years build up like tombstones on the cake.
You use one candle for simplicity.
Anticipation mixes with an ache
That makes you wonder how you got this far,
And when. At thirty, things became a blur,
And then the weary nonsense of the rest.
One hundredth birthday bash! It's a mistake,
You say, and they count out for you, alike,
With rapid fingers all your days. No test:
You can't believe you are three numbers strong.
You've become a span of time where people go
To reevaluate where man went wrong.
Time's diplomat, you smile, and then you blow.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, in which the abolitionist John Brown, leading a group of seventeen whites and five blacks, attacked the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to lead an uprising of the slaves. He failed, was arrested, and was hung for his efforts.
It's the birthday of Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin (1854). His mother was a famous poet and journalist and Irish nationalist. His father was an ear and eye doctor. Oscar went to college at Oxford where he began to affect an aristocratic accent and began dressing in velvet knee breeches. He stayed in England after college and became part of a movement in art and literature called Aestheticism, whose motto was "Art for art's sake."
Oscar Wilde said, "Even a good sense of color is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong."
He went on a big lecture tour of the United States, traveling to Des Moines, Denver, St. Paul, Houston, and Pennsylvania—just to name a few. He returned to London in 1883 and made his reputation in 1891 with his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a beautiful young man who remains young while a portrait of him grows old.
And then in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde burst on the British theater scene with four consecutive comedy hits: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Oscar Wilde said, "There is no such thing as a romantic experience. There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so."
It's the birthday of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, born in a hotel room on Broadway in New York City (1888). His father was a famous actor. The boy spent much of his childhood on trains and hotels, following his father around on tours.
He flunked out of Princeton. He got a series of odd jobs, went off gold prospecting in Honduras, was an actor in vaudeville, and wrote for a small town newspaper. He spent six months in a sanatorium recovering from TB. He began to read Ibsen and Strindberg and then to write plays: Anna Christie in 1922, Strange Interlude soon after, and Long Day's Journey into Night, which was produced posthumously.
