MONDAY, 2 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Urban Law" by Alison Hawthorne Deming from Genius Loci. © Penguin Poets. Reprinted with permission.
Urban Law
Rush hour and the urban outflow pours
across the Million Dollar Bridge. I wait
for the walk-light, cross-traffic slight but
caution's the rule when the city roars
toward all its separate homes. I get
the sign, little electric man, and step
into the street. A woman turns into
my lane, bearing down, eye-contact,
and still she guns it until I stare and
shake my head in disbelief at her
ferocity. She slows begrudged to let
me pass, runs down the window of her Saab
and shouts, "Why don't you wait for the light?"
and flips me the bird. I feel weepy like
a punished child, mind sinking to lament,
What's wrong with the human race? Too many
of us, too crowded, too greedy for space—
we're doomed, of course, so I head for coffee
and a muffin, walking sad and slow on
the return. I'm waiting again to cross,
picking fingersful of muffin from the
paper sack and watching the phalanx of
cars race by, not even a cell of a
thought in my mind that I might jump the change,
when a man who's got the green stops,
an executive wearing a crisp white
shirt and shiny red tie, and he raises
his palm to gesture me safely across,
making all the cars behind him wait while
I walk, and together at rush hour that
man and I redeem the whole human race.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1897 that Stephen Crane (1871) survived the sinking of a boat to Cuba and went on to write his short story "The Open Boat" about his experience.
It begins, "None of them knew the color to the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea."
"The Open Boat" was one of the first works of fiction based on actual reportage and led to a new genre.
It's the birthday of one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century, Isaac Asimov, born in Petrovichi, Russia (1920). He came with his family to the United States when he was three years old and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. From an early age Asimov was drawn to the magazine rack in his father's store. The one magazine his father let him read was the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, which his father hoped might interest him in the study of science.
His father was partly right. Asimov did become interested in science, and he went on to study biochemistry, but he also began writing science fiction short stories and publishing them in various pulp fiction magazines. He went on to become a professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of medicine and in 1950 he published his first novel Pebble in the Sky.
Around the same time Asimov took part in writing a textbook for medical students and he found that he loved explaining complicated things in ordinary language. It occurred to him that even though the modern world was built on countless scientific breakthroughs, most ordinary people didn't understand those breakthroughs any better than cave men would have. And so he set out to write about science for the general public. He said, "Little by little my science writing swallowed up the rest of me."
Asimov developed a regimen of working ten hours a day, seven days a week, producing between two and five thousand words a day. It helped that he suffered from a terrible fear of heights and a fear of flying, so he rarely traveled. Even by car, he rarely went beyond a four hundred mile radius around New York City. His wife kept a garden for years on the trellis of their apartment but Asimov never once set foot on that trellis.
Asimov's method was to write a book about any subject that interested him but which he didn't fully understand. He used writing as a way of teaching himself about everything. By 1970 Asimov had written more than a hundred books and he began branching out into areas other than science. He wrote about nuclear physics and organic chemistry, history, Greek mythology, astronomy, religion, in addition to his collections of limericks, mystery novels, autobiography and science fiction. He liked to point out that the world publishing record by one man was held by a British mystery writer, but that Asimov had probably published more books on more topics than anyone in history. By the time of his death in 1992 he had published more than 400 books.
His friend Kurt Vonnegut once asked him how it felt to know everything and Asimov replied, "I only know how it feels to have the reputation of knowing everything. Uneasy."
TUESDAY, 3 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Standard Plumbing" by Marie Harris from Weasel in the Turkey Pan. © Hanging Loose Press. Reprinted with permission.
Standard Plumbing
Plumbing supply places, like auto parts stores, have long
counters with bar stools for the customers. When I came in, the
man behind the counter was telling a story about the time he
and his friends had decided to celebrate getting home from
Vietnam and had bought a lot of Scotch and given one bottle to
a wino who drank half of it all at once and dropped dead.
Then the man, with Walter stitched on his shirt, asked what he
could do for me and I told him I had come to buy a toilet, the
cheapest, most basic toilet they had. He wanted to know if I
was putting it in one of my apartments or something and I said
no, it was for my own house and I was, oddly enough, buying
a toilet for the first time because we were installing indoor
plumbing. The other houses I'd lived in had always come with
toilets and I'd never given much thought to choosing one,
though today I'd kind of decided I wanted bone, not white. So,
in the process of getting the bowl and the tank and the seat and
some pipes and gaskets from the warehouse, we got to talking
about our outhouses and he allowed as how the one he had in
Florida when he was kid in the fifties hadn't been all that
bad, except for the bugs and sometimes a snake, and we both
agreed that there are times out there when you see things from
an unusual vantage, for instance: that view of the night sky in
winter is unparalleled.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien, born in South Africa (1892). His family came back to England after his father died and his mother taught him Latin and converted him to Catholicism. She died when he was twelve and friends said he stayed a Catholic and continued to study languages in her memory.
He went on to philology, or the study of the derivation of languages, at Oxford, and it was there that he met his friend C.S. Lewis. Lewis later said, "At my first coming into the world, I had been warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty, never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both." Despite Lewis' suspicion they took to one another right away and with a number of other men formed The Inklings, a group of writers who met in a local pub each week to talk about books and read aloud what they'd been writing. Lewis and Tolkien often talked late into the night about the idea that books could be "morally serious fantasy," dressing correct theology in the clothing of a ripping good tale.
Tolkien's idea for a novel came from his love for language. He was fluent in Classical Greek and Latin, Old Norse, Old English, medieval Welsh and Anglo-Saxon and an ancient form of German called Gothic, among other ancient European languages. He was so interested in the structure of language that he decided to invent an entire language of his own. He even invented a new alphabet to write in that language and when he began writing Lord of the Rings, he gave that new language to the Elves calling it "High Elvish." He later said, "I wrote Lord of the Rings to provide a world for the language... I should have preferred to write the entire book in Elvish."
Many critics now consider Lord of the Rings to be one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written. It's the story of Frodo Baggins, a lowly hobbit who sets out on a quest to destroy a magic ring so that it cannot fall into the hands of the evil Sauron.
It took Tolkien twelve years to write The Lord of the Rings, in part because he was a great procrastinator and refused to take any time off to work on the book. He was constantly stopping his writing in order to research various details he wanted to include, such as the proper way to stew a rabbit. He wrote to his editor more than once to say that he wasn't sure he could finish the book, but after twelve years he had finally done it. He wrote, "It is written... in my life-blood."
Tolkien wasn't sure anyone would want to read The Lord of the Rings since it was hardly the children's book his editor had asked for. He wrote, "My work has escaped from my control. I have produced a monster... a complex, rather bitter and rather terrifying romance. I now wonder whether many beyond my friends would read anything so long."
The book was moderately successful when the first volume came out in 1954, but it didn't become a huge bestseller until the 1960's when American college students fell in love with it and psychedelic rock bands like Led Zeppelin began writing songs about it. Tolkein never enjoyed having become a cult figure in his own lifetime. He tried to live quietly for the rest of his life.
J.R.R. Tolkein said, "Literature stops in 1100. After that it's only books."
He once said, "I am in fact, a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands. I smoke a pipe and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field).... I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much."
WEDNESDAY, 4 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "The Doctor" by Howard Levy from A Day This Lit. © CavanKerry Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Doctor
After days of healing,
he would get away to fish.
Curator of fluff and feathers,
he tied his own flies,
designed his own waders
and up to the lake country
for trout and walleye.
I would ask him, what is it
out there on the water,
and he would say, all week
I swim lead for my school of patients,
take this, take that,
don't eat this, don't eat that,
I tell them swim away from the hook,
don't take that bait, that bug there
has sharp metal innards,
that worm glints steel,
but we are such dumb fish,
such sorry things that we all get pulled
from our lives.
So, weekends,
I choose to be the redresser of balances.
I know that he hid behind this facile
diagnosis because I went with him once
and as we stood thigh-deep
in the cold and clear lake,
he began his meticulous detailings,
the striations of the bottom rocks
and how each different sediment
reflects the light, the distribution
of firs along the shore,
the speckling of the speckled trout
and each thing, he said,
is a symptom and so a clue
into the fevered chemistry of beauty.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Jacob Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1785). He and his younger brother Wilhelm, who was born a year later, collected and published Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812 which led to the birth of the study of folklore.
They grew up the sons of an affluent lawyer and as boys they loved to collect all kinds of things: plants, birds' eggs, butterflies, and unusual stones. But their father died when Jacob was eleven and Wilhelm was ten and the family had barely enough money to send them to school. They were both brilliant students, though, and they managed to finish high school and college in only four years.
They both went on the study law, and it was one of their law professors who introduced them to the idea of studying the songs and stories of ordinary people. At the time, most German intellectuals were interested in the future of German literature, but the brothers Grimm became obsessed with the neglected epics and ballads, stories and poems of Germany's past. Jacob began to spend all his time at antiquarian bookstores and he began learning as many languages as possible. He then followed his professor to Paris where he spent all his spare time in the National Library reading medieval manuscripts.
But Jacob and Wilhelm missed each other terribly while Jacob was in Paris. They wrote each other dozens of letters and when Jacob returned home they vowed never to be separated again. They shared a household for the rest of their lives.
European writers had long drawn on fairy tales for inspiration, but what Jacob and Wilhelm wanted to do was to collect and publish fairy tales as they were actually told, with no high literary embellishments. No one had ever done that before.
At first the project did not go well. Jacob sent Wilhelm out to the countryside to find storytellers but the peasants found him intimidating and refused to talk to him. They ultimately found more success when they began to ask friends and neighbors to help in the collecting. The six daughters of their next door neighbor proved to be great researchers and one of them ended up marrying Wilhelm.
But their most important discovery was a woman whose husband had died fighting as a mercenary in the American Revolution. She had memorized dozens of stories in her lifetime and she had a gift for telling them in a lively style. The brothers were amazed that when she told the stories more than once she altered very few words. It was she who gave the Grimms some of their most popular and enduring fairy tales including "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Snow White."
The first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales came out just before Christmas in 1812 and it was a huge success, though people wondered right from the start whether the stories were appropriate for children. The stories were full of child-eating witches and psychotic stepmothers. Cinderella's sisters chop off parts of their own feet in hopes of fitting into the golden slippers. When the wolf first sees Little Red Riding Hood he says to himself, "What a tender young creature! what a nice plump mouthful—she will be better to eat than the old woman." But despite the controversy Grimm's Fairy Tales became Germany's most widely read book after The Bible.
Jacob went on to devote himself to the study of German language and culture. He wrote first study of German grammar and his work helped German to become the accepted language for German universities replacing Latin and Greek.
Then, when he was dismissed from his job by a new ruler of his province Jacob Grimm decided to undertake the task of writing the first German dictionary. The brothers struggled with the project for most of the rest of their lives and the result is still considered the greatest dictionary of German, and one of the greatest dictionaries of all time. It was the precursor of the Oxford English Dictionary as well as many other similar works.
Jacob Grimm said, "The Lord made small things as well as big ones, and everything man looks at closely is full of wonder."
THURSDAY, 5 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "What She Taught Me" by Marjorie Saiser from Lost in Seward County. © The Backwaters Press. Reprinted with permission.
What She Taught Me
She taught me linking verbs, predicate nouns,
long division, have a Kleenex ready, an apple
a day. She taught me three-quarter time, Greenwich
Mean Time. She taught me do re mi, Mexicali Rose,
Rose, Rose, my Rose of San Antone. She taught me
Peas Peas Peas Peas, Eating Goober Peas.
She taught me that a peanut is a goober pea
in certain parts of the world, that it is fine
for things to be different in different parts
of the world, no two goobers alike in their
dry red skins, their pock-marked pods,
that there are latitudes and longitudes we have
never seen, that she had seen some part,
and so would I, that I need not
forego either the swings or baseball, that spelling
is on Friday and it is OK to learn more
than one list, including the hard list; it is not
showing off—it is using what you have.
That using what you have will not please
everybody, that marrying a man of a different stripe
is not a popular thing in a small town in the fifties,
and divorcing and coming home with a child
is even worse, and that you
get up every morning anyway,
and do your work.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet W. D. (William DeWitt) Snodgrass, born in Wilkinsberg, Pennsylvania (1926), the author of the collections Heart's Needle (1959), and The Fuhrer Bunker (1977).
It's the birthday of King Camp Gillette, born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (1855). His original idea as an inventor was to build a great utopian metropolis entirely powered by Niagara Falls which would house all sixty million Americans in great complexes of twenty-five story buildings on the south shore of Lake Ontario.
When he couldn't find support for that project he decided it would be better to invent something that almost everybody would find essential. He saw that if it were possible to throw away old razor blades and buy news ones instead of sharpening the old ones over and over again, at least half the people in the country would become prospective customers. Metal experts at MIT told him that sharpening little slivers of metal with a machine would be impossible; soon, another researcher designed an automatic honing device that did the job.
By 1895 he had made a crude disposable razor and within ten years had perfected the concept of giving the handles away to get people to buy the blades. Even as the head of a large capitalist concern he continued to cherish utopian dreams and he wrote books about a world in which "Selfishness would be unknown and war would be a barbarism of the past."
It's the birthday of Umberto Eco, born in the Piedmont region of Italy (1932). One of his household chores as a boy was to go down in the basement to retrieve the coal for the fire and it was down in that basement that he found his grandfather's collection of old books by Jules Verne, Marco Polo and Charles Darwin. Eco said, "I spent hours opening the old books and forgetting the coal."
He'd grown up under the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini and when he heard on the radio in 1943 that Mussolini had been imprisoned he couldn't believe it. He said, "It was inconceivable that this man, who since my birth had been a god, had been kicked out; I was astonished, amazed, amused... like a butterfly from a chrysalis, step by step I understood everything." He spent the last two years of World War II avoiding German soldiers and dodging bullets in the street. He began reading American literature and listening to jazz as a way of defying the Fascists.
He studied philosophy and chose to focus on the field of semiotics, in which all products of culture, from television commercials to lawn ornaments, are analyzed for their complex meanings. He wrote serious essays about James Bond movies and Superman comics and other products of pop culture that had previously been ignored by literary critics. Eco said, "I'm not saying there's no difference between Homer and Walt Disney. But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is."
Eco became one of the most renowned scholars in his field in part because he was so productive. He taught himself to walk faster, eat faster, and shave faster, all in an effort to get more work done. He once said, "I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper."
Then, one day, an Italian fiction publisher called him up and asked him if he'd like to contribute to a collection of detective fiction written by academics. Eco had never written any fiction, but the idea intrigued him so he told the publisher that he would work on something. He had spent his academic career studying the meaning of popular culture and how he had a chance to produce it himself. He got an idea for a murder mystery set in a monastery in the middle ages, and though he filled it with history, philosophy, and theology, he also used every trick he'd ever learned from studying detective novels and spy movies.
When Eco finished the novel called The Name of the Rose, he though his publishers were being way too optimistic when they ordered 30,000 copies to be printed. But when it came out in 1980, The Name of the Rose sold 2 million copies. It was one of the most successful novels ever written by an Italian author. Within a few years Umberto Eco had become one of the most famous intellectuals on the planet.
He's continued writing novels since then, including Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and The Island of The Day Before (1995).
Umberto Eco wrote, "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
FRIDAY, 6 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Serving Time" by Charles Simic from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late & New Poems. © Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Serving Time
Another dreary day in time's invisible
Penitentiary, making license plates
With lots of zeros, walking lockstep counter-
Clockwise in the exercise yard or watching
The lights dim when some poor fellow,
Who could as well be me, gets fried.
Here on death row, I read a lot of books.
First it was law, as you'd expect.
Then came history, ancient and modern.
Finally philosophy—all that being and nothingness stuff.
The more I read, the less I understand.
Still, other inmates call me professor.
Did I mention that we had no guards?
It's a closed book who locks
And unlocks the cell doors for us.
Even the executions we carry out
By ourselves, attaching the wires,
Playing warden, playing chaplain
All because a little voice in our head
Whispers something about our last appeal
Being denied by God himself.
The others hear nothing, of course,
But that, typically, you may as well face it,
Is how time runs things around here.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist, critic and photographer Wright Morris, born in Central City, Nebraska (1910), who is the author of eighteen novels, several collections of short stories, books of criticism and several memoirs. His novel, Plains Song, won the 1981 American Book Award for Fiction. He lived in California for many years and once said, "I am not a regional writer, but the characteristics of this region have conditioned what I see, what I look for, and what I find in the world to write about."
It's the birthday of journalist, poet, novelist and biographer Carl Sandburg, born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). As a hobo he collected and learned a number of folk songs and published them in a collection called The American Songbag (1927).
Eventually, he attended college and a professor, Phillip Green Wright, was the first to publish a book of Sandburg's verse, In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904. He went on publishing poems along with articles about the labor movement but he didn't have any real financial success until a publisher suggested that he write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, was Sandburg's first bestseller. He moved to a new home and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.
His Complete Poems won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.
Carl Sandburg said, "[Poetry is] the successful synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."
It's the birthday of poet Khalil Gibran, born in Bechari (Bsharri), Lebanon (1883). He wrote The Prophet (1923), and when he died, Gibran left all the royalties of his books to his native village in Lebanon.
It's the birthday of author and philosopher Alan Watts, born in Chislehurst, England (1915). He was a writer-philosopher who earned a reputation as the foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophy for the West.
It's the birthday of novelist and editor E.L. (Edward Lawrence) Doctorow, born in New York City (1931). He grew up in the Bronx where his father had a radio, record and musical instrument store in Manhattan which folded during the Depression. He later sold television sets and stereo equipment.
After high school Doctorow went to Kenyon College in Ohio to study poetry with the poet and teacher John Crowe Ransom. He said of Kenyon College, "There were lots of poets on campus, poetry was what we did at Kenyon, the way at Ohio State they played football."
After college Doctorow earned his living as an "expert reader" for film and television production companies in New York. He read a book a day, seven days a week, and writing synopses of each one for his boss. Doctorow eventually moved on to a job at a publishing house where he helped edit books by writers such as Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. He sometimes worked twenty hours a day but somehow he still found time to work on his own writing. He published more novels, including The Book of Daniel (1971) about the fictional son of the Rosenbergs which won the National Book Award, but he still hadn't had any great literary success.
Doctorow sat around for a year trying to come up with an idea for his next novel. He said, "I wrote endless pages that didn't take me anywhere. I got so desperate that I started to write about the wall that I face when I write. As it happened, that was the wall in my study in New Rochelle, N.Y. That house was built in 1906. So I started to think about the house and that street and what it must have looked like in 1906."
Not sure if he had a story or not, Doctorow began going through history books to learn about what was happening in New York in 1906. He went through books of photographs to see what the streets looked like and the clothes people wore. He purposely didn't try to look for any particular story but what emerged was his novel Ragtime (1975) which he later said was the easiest book he ever wrote. Set in the decade prior to World War I it includes characters like William Howard Taft, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini. It went on to become a huge bestseller and it was made into a movie.
Doctorow's other novels include Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005).
He also said, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
And, "Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
SATURDAY, 7 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Complaint" by James Wright from James Wright: Selected Poems. © Farrar, Straus, and Girous and Wesleyen Press. Reprinted with permission.
Complaint
She's gone. She was my love, my moon or more.
She chased the chickens out and swept the floor,
Emptied the bones and nut-shells after feasts,
And smacked the kids for leaping up like beasts.
Now morbid boys have grown past awkwardness;
The girls let stitches out, dress after dress,
To free some swinging body's riding space
And form the new child's unimagined face.
Yet, while vague nephews, spitting on their curls,
Amble to pester winds and blowsy girls,
What arm will sweep the room, what hand will hold
New snow against the milk to keep it cold?
And who will dump the garbage, feed the hogs,
And pitch the chickens' heads to hungry dogs?
Not my lost hag who dumbly bore such pain:
Childbirth and midnight sassafras and rain.
New snow against her face and hands she bore,
And now lies down, who was my moon or more.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker, born in Rochester, New York (1957). He started out wanting to be a musician and was good enough at the bassoon that he got into the Eastman School of Music. He planned to become a composer and then one day he saw his mother laughing uncontrollably at a New York Times Book Review essay on golf by the writer John Updike. Baker later wrote, "[My mother's laughter] was miraculous, sourced in the nowhere of print, unaided by ham mannerisms... Nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical."
At that moment Baker decided that instead of becoming a composer he wanted to be a writer. His most recent book is Checkpoint (2004).
Nicholson Bakers said, "Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again."
He also said, "It makes me unhappy when certain things change or things are superceded... my nine year old daughter's personality... Card catalogues... Jiffy Pop right now feels imperiled... I want to stop time and get things down on paper before they've flown off like a flock of starlings."
It's the birthday of novelist, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, born in Notasulga, Alabama (1891). She eventually finished high school in Baltimore while working full time as a live-in maid. In 1920 she enrolled in Howard University. Her first story, Spunk, was published in Opportunity magazine in 1925 when it won second prize in a fiction contest. At the awards dinner Hurston met author Fanny Hurst who hired Hurston as her assistant and arranged for her to receive a scholarship to Barnard College. While in New York Hurston published the "Eatonville Anthology," a series of fourteen brief sketches, some only two paragraphs long, including glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backwards farmer, the greatest liar in the village and a cheating husband.
Hurston came to the attention of anthropologist Franz Boas who got her a grant to collect folklore, songs and stories from black Southerners. Unfortunately her subjects were highly suspicious of her New York accent and manners. She said, "When I went about [talking] in carefully accented 'Barnardese,'... the men and women who had whole treasuries of material seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around here. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn't I try over there?'"
On returning to New York, Hurston became part of what has become known as the Harlem Renaissance. And it was there in just seven weeks that she wrote her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). It's the story of a black woman in rural Florida named Janie Crawford and her three marriages: the first to the farmer Logan Killicks who treats her like a slave, the second to the politician Jody Starks who treats her like a queen, and finally to the penniless Tea Cake Woods with whom she finally finds true love.
Although for a time Hurston was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money. She worked at odd jobs for the next ten years writing a few magazine articles every now and again. She wrote three novels which were rejected for publication. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed and she was buried in an unmarked grave.
Zora Neale Hurston said, "Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much."
SUNDAY, 8 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Things" by Fleur Adcock from Poems: 1960-2000. © Bloodaxe Books. Reprinted with permission.
Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
there are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and novelist John Neihardt, born near Sharpsburg, Illinois (1881). He moved to Nebraska in 1901 where he became fascinated with the Native Americans he met. His book of five epic poems, A Cycle of the West, begun in 1912 and published in 1942, was an account of the death of Crazy Horse and the Battle of Little Big Horn. His most famous work, based on on-person interviews, is Black Elk Speaks (1931).
It's the birthday of Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1935). He learned to play the guitar when he was twelve but never really learned to read music. He just knew how to mimic what he heard. He loved all kinds of music and his friends said that he could reproduce perfectly almost anything he heard on the radio.
But he'd grown up in a strictly religious family and his favorite music was gospel. He sang in his local church choir and later took his girlfriend to see local gospel performances. She later said that she was embarrassed by how he would sing along with the performers.
He had no clear ambition to become a professional musician. After high school he got a job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company and he began studying to become an electrician. His career as a recording artist only came about because of his love for his mother.
At the time, the Sun Record Company had a special recording studio where anyone could come in and pay a small fee to record personal records for themselves. In the summer of 1953 Elvis scraped together four dollars to record two songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" as a present for his mother. When the woman at the front desk asked him what kind of a singer he was he said, "I sing all kinds." She asked him who he sounded like and he said, "I don't sound like nobody."
The recording engineer that day liked Elvis's voice and somehow those recordings made their way into the hands of producer Sam Philips who specialized in recording "hillbilly music." Philips called Elvis back into the studio to see if he might have some real talent. Elvis sang a few slow ballads, which were his favorite songs to sing, and Sam Philips wasn't too impressed. And then, in between takes, Elvis and the other musicians started fooling around and singing a blues tune called "That's All Right, Mama." Sam Phillips asked them to start over from the beginning and recorded the song. He then rushed the record to the biggest DJ in Memphis.
When Elvis found out that the song, which he considered a joke, would be on the radio, he was so embarrassed that he hid in a local movie theater until his parents made him come home. That night the DJ in Memphis played Elvis's new song on the radio for the first time, and he received forty-seven phone calls and seventeen telegrams asking to play the song again. In the following week Memphis stores sold some 6,000 copies of the record. A few weeks later Elvis sang the song at a local music show at an outdoor park. He was extremely nervous while singing the song and started shaking his leg in rhythm to the music. The girls in the audience went crazy.
Elvis went on to record 149 songs that made the top 100 in the Billboard's pop charts including "Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock" and "Are you Lonesome Tonight?"
Elvis Presley said, "Some people tap their feet, some people snap their fingers, and some people sway back and forth. I just sorta do 'em all together, I guess."
It's the birthday of physicist Stephen Hawking, born in Oxford, England (1942). He went to Oxford University but never attended lectures. He was bored with most of his classes because they seemed too easy and it was only after an oral exam that his professors realized how smart he was. He had went on to get a Ph.D. and he was just starting to find his courses interesting when he was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that slowly destroys a persons ability to move any part of their body, while leaving the brain itself unharmed. His doctors gave him a life expectancy of two to three years.
At first Hawking was utterly depressed and considered giving up on everything. But then his condition seemed to stabilize and he got engaged to one of his classmates. He said, "[I realized that] if we were to get married, I had to get a job. And to get a job, I had to finish my Ph.D. I started working hard for the first time in my life. To my surprise, I found I liked it."
Hawking decided to focus his studies on the mysterious astronomical objects known as black holes and he developed new theories about how they function and what role they may have played in the origin of the universe.
In 1988, Hawking decided to sum up all the research on physics and astronomy in a book for nonscientists called A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). His publishers told him that in order for the book to be successful he had to avoid math altogether. They estimated that he would reduce his readership by fifty percent for every mathematical equation he included. So he included only one: E=MC2. A Brief History of Time went on to sell almost 10 million copies.Stephen Hawking said, "[Human beings] are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
