MONDAY, 16 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: From The Choice, by John Pomfret.
The Choice
That life may be more comfortable yet,
And all my joys refined, sincere and great,
I'd choose two friends, whose company would be
A great advance to my felicity:
Well-born, of humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and men, as well as books, have known.
Brave, generous, witty, and exactly free
From loose behavior or formality.
Airy and prudent, merry, but not light;
Quick in discerning, and in judging right.
Secret they should be, faithful to their trust;
In reasoning cool, strong, temperate and just;
Obliging, open, without huffing, brave,
Brisk in gay talking, and in sober, grave;
Close in dispute, but not tenacious, tried
By solid reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to lust, revenge, or envious hate,
Nor busy meddlers with intrigues of state;
Strangers to slander, and sworn foes to spite:
Not quarrelsome, but stout enough to fight
Loyal and pious, friends to Caesar, true
As dying martyrs to their Maker too.
In their society, I could not miss
A permanent, sincere, substantial bliss.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Robert Service, born in Preston, Lancashire, England (1874). He's best known for the poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," and "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and other works about life among the sourdoughs in the Yukon. He didn't spend very much of his life in Canada, though, and although he wrote about miners, he wasn't a miner himself—when he lived in Whitehorse, he was a bank teller. The Gold Rush was already over, and most of the prospectors had left. He liked to recite poems at church socials, and sold a couple of poems to the local newspaper. "Give us something about our own bit of earth," the newspaper editor told him. "There's a rich paystreak waiting for someone to work." That very Saturday night, Service got the idea for his poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew. It eventually sold three million copies; the royalty checks from publishers never stopped coming.
In "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" he wrote,
"A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was hi light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave, and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was dangerous Dan McGrew."
It's the birthday of William Kennedy, born in Albany, New York (1928). His first novel, The Ink Truck, came out in 1969, and didn't sell very well. Thirteen publishers rejected Ironweed (1984), about a derelict on the run from his own past. But it won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and a Pen/Faulkner award, all in the same year. William Kennedy said "The more serious you are as a writer, the more you feel yourself an outsider."
It's the birthday of critic and novelist Susan Sontag, born in New York City (1933). She wrote the widely anthologized essay "Notes on Camp," and a study called Illness as Metaphor (1978).
TUESDAY, 17 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Byzantine Faces," by Robert Lax from A Thing That Is (The Overlook Press).
Byzantine Faces
i won't believe
i'm really
alive
until i'm gladder
to be alive
here now
than to have
been alive
there then
living in greece
i may be
thinking
i am, was,
alive there
then
some byzantine
time
some classical
time
why think
that good?
i should
know better
i think good
any time except
the eighteenth
century
(not too bad)
the nineteenth
century
(bad enough)
or the twentieth
really, i'm
glad to be
alive in the
twentieth
not only glad
to be just
alive
but even to
be alive
just now
right now
yes, but i keep
remembering
a light in the
eyes of certain
figures in
frescoes
certain figures
in mosaics
that made
me wish
i was living
then
as though
living then
were to
live
forever
some life
some liveliness
in the eye
that seemed
eternal
eternally
alive
eternally
infinitely
joyous
& penetrating
(warm with
the warmth
of life
exploding,
even, with,
the joy
of life)
yet there
forever
is it
that see
ing them
in some
mu
se
um
seeing
them still
preserved
still
living
made me
envy
their
state
?
not
sure
am
not
sure,
either,
that it
was envy
they gave
me, but
rather a
life
a spark
of living
to keep
alive
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston (1706). Books were hard to come by when he was a young apprentice in his brother's printing shop, but he got hold of an odd volume of Addison and Steele's The Spectator and used it to teach himself how to write. He took notes on each of the pieces, then hid the book and tried to reconstruct the essays from the notes alone. He toyed with the idea of becoming a poet, but his father assured him that "verse-makers were generally beggars," and he turned his attention to the cultivation of virtue and the aid of humanity. He became better known than any of the leaders of the Revolution except George Washington; he signed every document associated with the founding of the Republic, and took Paris by storm when he appeared at court to secure an alliance with France. He invented bifocals and the glass harmonica, charted the Gulf Stream on his way across the Atlantic, and chased tornadoes on horseback. He was flirtatious on up into his seventies. In 1731, Franklin founded America's first circulating library so that people could borrow books to read even though they might not have been able to afford to buy them. He was the author, printer, and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanack, an annually published book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information, beginning in 1732. It contains maxims such as "Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" and "In this world nothing can said to be certain except death and taxes.
It's the birthday of Charles Brockden Brown, born in Philadelphia (1771). He was the first man in the United States to try and make a living writing novels. His masterpiece was Wieland (1798), a gothic horror novel whose plot turned on "spontaneous combustion, demonic ventriloquism, murder and madness."
It's the birthday of Anne Brontë, born in Yorkshire (1820). She was the youngest of the Brontë sisters. Her first novel was Agnes Grey (1847). She died at the age of twenty-nine.
It's the birthday of the novelist Ronald Firbank, born in London (1886).
It's the birthday of Nevil Shute, born in Middlesex, England (1899), who wrote A Town Like Alice (1950) and a famous book about the end of the world, On the Beach (1957).
WEDNESDAY, 18 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem:"A Time to Talk," by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt).
A Time to Talk
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, 'What is it?'
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, born in London (1779). His name is attached to the Thesaurus, but he had a long career as a physician and a scientist before he compiled it. As a younger man, he experimented with laughing gas, figured out how to improve the public water supply, invented the log-log slide rule, and wrote a paper which was the first to describe the persistence of images on the retina, thought to have been the first step toward the development of the movie camera. In Roget's Thesaurus you can find all sorts of suggestions for words that you want synonyms for. For "talk," he suggests: "chatter, chat, prate, prattle, patter, babble, gab, gabble, gibble-gabble, jabber, blab, blabber, blather, blether, clatter, run on, rattle on, ramble on, run on like a mill race, talk till one is blue in the face."
It's the birthday of Joseph Farwell Glidden, born in Clarendon, New York (1813). For centuries hedgerows and stone walls were the only way to keep livestock contained; in the American West, cowboys followed herds of cattle to make sure no harm came to them. Glidden saw an exhibition in which a wooden rail with nails protruding from it kept livestock at a distance. He rigged up an old coffee grinder to twist strands of wire around each other, then clipped off the protruding ends to make barbs. A number of men filed patents for similar barbed fences at the same time, and there was a tremendous fight, but Glidden won, and his barbed wire factory made him one of the country's richest men. That was the end of the Wild West. Long cattle drives came to an end, and longhorn cattle began to disappear; it wasn't necessary to breed cattle tough enough to survive out on the range anymore.
It's the birthday of A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne, born in St. John's Wood, London (1882). He wrote for the humor magazine Punch, and he was the author of a successful play called Mr. Pim Passes By. But once he published Winnie the Pooh, nobody ever remembered anything else he had written. In a little verse, he lamented: When I wrote them, little thinking/All my years of pen - and - inking/Would be almost lost among/Those four trifles for the young.
It's the birthday of Oliver Hardy, born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia (1892). He studied law and sang professionally before he met Stan Laurel; they were one of the few teams to move smoothly from the vaudeville hall to full-length film comedies. They were most famous during the thirties, and they won an Oscar for a short film called The Music Box, in which they attempted to get a piano up a steep staircase.
It's the birthday of Cary Grant, born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England (1904). He came to the United States as an acrobat. He failed his first screen test; the studio said he was bow-legged and that his neck was too thick. After he was signed by Paramount, he had a three-year run in which he made his best-known films—Bringing up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). He said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me."
THURSDAY, 19 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "To Helen," by Edgar Allan Poe
To Helen
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfum'd sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo ! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche from the regions which
Are Holy land !
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Julian Barnes, born in Leicester, England (1946). He's the author of The History of the World in Ten-and-a-Half Chapters (1989) and Flaubert's Parrot (1984); the latter won prizes for fiction in both England and France. Both of his parents were French teachers, and they spent their vacations driving around the French countryside.
It's the birthday of Patricia Highsmith, born in Fort Worth, Texas (1921). She wrote suspense novels in which unspeakable crimes often turned out to have been committed by unexpectedly mild-mannered people. Although Alfred Hitchcock filmed her first novel, Strangers on a Train, Hollywood wasn't interested in any of the others; they were too morally ambiguous. Many of the characters were homosexual; good characters weren't necessarily rewarded, and murderers weren't necessarily punished. Her work sold much better in Europe, and she spent most of the rest of her life there, living as a semi-recluse with a menagerie of cats and dogs. Finally, after her death in 1995, her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was made into a film, forty-five years after its original publication.
It's the birthday of Alexander Woollcott, born in Phalanx, New Jersey (1887). He was critic and writer for the early New Yorker and a model for the tyrannical character Sheridan Whiteside in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939).
It's the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1809). His parents died while he was still a baby, and although he was taken in by a man who eventually made a large fortune, he was disowned after a series of bitter arguments with his foster father. He continued to charm possible sponsors for the rest of his life. Rich men and women would offer to help him, but they withdrew when he got drunk at the wrong time, or refused to say what they wanted him to, or squandered the funds they had given him. He wrote pointed criticism at a time when reviews were supposed to be complimentary; when he was able to publish his own work, the writers he criticized took the opportunity to revenge themselves upon him. Nothing he published won him much attention until his poem "The Raven" appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845. Children followed him down the street chanting "Nevermore, nevermore!" and he was asked to recite the poem at all sorts of gatherings. He was also a journalist and edited the Broadway Journal. About New York Poe wrote, "I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Manhattan. Some portions of its interior have a certain air of rocky sterility which may impress some imaginations as simply dreary-to me it conveys the sublime."
It's the birthday of James Watt, born in Greenock, Scotland (1736). There were steam engines before Watt became interested in them, but they couldn't do much real work; too much steam was lost when it condensed inside the chamber as it cooled, and the engines used too much coal to be worthwhile. Watt became obsessed with the problem, and spent two years making little model steam engines, one after another. He solved the condensation problem and that is what made him famous.
FRIDAY, 20 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Despond," by Jim Harrison. Appearing in Saving Daylight, forthcoming April, 2006 by Copper Canyon Press.
Despond
At midnight in his living room a man
is angry at a fly that is bothering him.
How can this be?
A man is angry at things
that never happened
and never will happen.
He's angry at the woman he'll never meet
because she refuses to meet him
because, not existing herself,
she has no idea that he exists.
He's frying potatoes that don't exist
at sunset. The frying pan is a black sun
and out the window in the gathering dark
the ocean looks so heavy that it might fall
through the earth and join another ocean.
At dawn he wakes. There's a fly in the room
but perhaps it's a miniature bird. Magnified,
the sound is the basso rumbling of the universe
the peculiar music galaxies make when they fray
against each other. He sleeps again, his hand
on his dog's heart which says don't be angry.
She senses the steps of the last dance saved for us
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Italian film director Federico Fellini, born in Rimini, Italy (1920). As a young man, he enrolled in the University of Rome Law School to avoid military service, but he never attended classes. He worked instead as a cartoonist for a satirical magazine and as a gag writer for a vaudeville troupe. In 1943, he was ordered to undergo a medical examination for the army, but his medical records were destroyed in a bombing. He spent the next two years in the slums of Rome eluding the German Occupation troops, who searched the city for men to replenish the armed forces and to work in slave-labor camps.
After the war, Fellini turned to filmmaking, and made a string of films about beggars, gypsies, swindlers, and prostitutes. He was made famous by his film La Dolce Vita (1960). He was a charming, bear-like man, who always wore a wide-brimmed black hat, and gestured with both hands, even while driving one of his favorite motorcars. He overdubbed all his actor's voices because he believed that most people didn't have voices that matched their appearance. He once said, "You can't teach old fleas new dogs."
It's the birthday of Nathaniel P. Willis, born in Portland, Maine (1806). He worked as a writer and editor for many publications, including American Monthly Magazine and The New York Mirror. Early in his career, he reviewed Edgar Allen Poe's poem "Fairyland," which he hated. He and Poe later became friends, and in 1845 Willis was the first to publish Poe's most famous poem, "The Raven."
It's the birthday of filmmaker David Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana (1946). He originally wanted to be a painter, but as a student at the Philadelphia School of Fine Art he started to experiment with film, which he called "moving paintings." Ten years later, he finished his first full-length movie, Eraserhead (1977) and it was a tremendous critical success. He went on to direct Blue Velvet (1986), which many consider his masterpiece.
It's the birthday of actor and comedian George Burns, born Nathan Burnbaum in New York, New York (1896). He lived to be one hundred years old and once said, "The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
It's the birthday of wildlife conservationist and author Joy Adamson, born in what is now Opava, Czechoslovakia (1910). She was the author of Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds (1960), about a lion named Elsa, which she and her husband raised from a cub and then returned to the wild.
On this day in 1961, 87-year-old Robert Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Although Frost had written a new poem for the occasion, titled "Dedication," faint ink in his typewriter and the bright sun made the words difficult to read, so instead he recited his poem "The Gift Outright" from memory.
SATURDAY, 21 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Birches," by Robert Frost from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt and Co.).
Birches
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of singer, songwriter Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, born in Mooringsport, Louisiana, 1888. He is known for his versions of "Goodnight Irene" and "Rock Island Line." He was an inmate at Angola Prison in Louisiana when a white man named Alan Lomax arrived, asking to record any songs the prisoners knew. Lomax was traveling across the south making field recordings for the Library of Congress. Lomax helped him obtain a pardon and took him to New York where he was a big hit.
It was on this day, in 1952, that William Shawn succeeded Harold Ross as the editor of the New Yorker magazine.
It's the birthday of Richard P. Blackmur, reclusive literary critic, born in Springfield, Massachusetts (1904). He was expelled from high school in 1918 after a dispute with the headmaster, and he never completed a formal education. He read the classics at the local library, but always felt uneasy about his homemade education and did his best to conceal its shortcomings. He went on to become a leading American literary critic and taught at Princeton.
SUNDAY, 22 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Bloody Men," by Wendy Cope from Serious Concerns (Faber & Faber).
Bloody Men
Bloody men are like bloody buses
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.
You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.
If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of romantic poet Lord Byron, born George Gordon Noel in Aberdeen, Scotland (1788). Byron was the product of his father's second marriage. His father, nicknamed "Mad Jack," struggled with debt, made his living by seducing rich women, and may have killed his first wife, though he was never charged with the crime.
In 1809 Lord Byron traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean and kept a diary of his adventures and exploits. While traveling in Albania, he let a friend read the diary, and his friend persuaded him to burn it. He rewrote the story of his travels as a partially fictionalized book-length poem called Child Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). The book made Byron one of the most popular poets of his time.
He was also an outspoken politician in the House of Lords. In 1812, workers in the weaving industry were rioting and destroying machinery in Nottinghamshire because of poor wages and working conditions. The Tories introduced a bill to punish the destruction of weaving machinery by death. Byron fiercely opposed the bill, speaking on behalf of workers' rights, and published a poem on the topic that said, in part, "Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,/When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans,/That life should be valued at less than a stocking,/And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones."
Byron wrote many more books of poetry, including Don Juan (1819), and lived a life of controversy and excess. When he died at age 36, several interested parties burned his unpublished memoirs before he'd even been buried.
It's the birthday of English essayist, philosopher, poet, historian, and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, born in London, England (1561). He spent much of his intellectual life challenging Aristotle's view that knowledge should begin with universal truths. He said, "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." In Novum Organum (1620), Bacon wrote that scholars should build their knowledge of the world from specific, observable details. His theory is now known as the scientific method, and is the basis of all experimental science. His scientific method eventually killed him. When driving in the country one day, he got the idea to test the effect of cold on the decay of meat, bought a fowl, and stuffed it with snow. Later that day he came down with a cold, which killed him.
It's the birthday of crime writer Joseph Wambaugh, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1937). He is the author of The Onion Field (1973), The Choir Boys (1975), The New Centurions (1970), and many other books.
It's the birthday of poet, Howard Moss born in New York, New York in 1922. A quiet, unassuming man, he served as poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine for almost four decades.
It's the birthday of the man who brought us Conan the Barbarian, science fiction author Robert E. Howard, born in Peaster, Texas (1906).
