MONDAY, 23 JANUARY 2006
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Poem: "Casabianca," by Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

Casabianca

The boy stood on the burning deck
    Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
    Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
    As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
    A proud, though childlike form.

The flames roll'd on ... he would not go
    Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
    His voice no longer heard.

He call'd aloud ... "Say, Father, say
    If yet my task is done!"
He knew not that the chieftain lay
    Unconscious of his son.

"Speak, Father!" once again he cried
    "If I may yet be gone!"
And but the booming shots replied,
    And fast the flames roll'd on.

Upon his brow he felt their breath,
    And in his waving hair,
And look'd from that lone post of death,
    In still, yet brave despair.

And shouted but one more aloud,
    "My Father! must I stay?"
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud
    The wreathing fires made way.

They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,
    They caught the flag on high,
And stream'd above the gallant child,
    Like banners in the sky.

There came a burst of thunder sound ...
    The boy-oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
    With fragments strew'd the sea!

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
    That well had borne their part,
But the noblest thing which perish'd there
    Was that young faithful heart.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Stendhal, the French novelist and essayist, born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble, France (1783). He hated his father, called his hometown "the capital of pettiness" and fled to Paris as soon as he could. He was disappointed in Paris, though. The streets were muddy and there were no mountains, and he caught a sickness there that made his hair fall out. He wore a toupee for the rest of his life. To get out of Paris, he enlisted in Napoleon's army and participated in the invasion of Italy and later the failed invasion of Russia.

After leaving military service, he contributed to journals and periodicals using dozens of pseudonyms, among them: William Crocodile, Old Hummums, and Stendhal. He was obsessed with the idea of hidden identities, and even signed personal letters with false names. In 1818, he fell in love with the wife of a Polish officer. After she had rebuffed his advances, he trailed her for days across Italy, disguising himself by wearing a pair of green spectacles. When she finally caught and accused him of following her, he said it was fate that had brought them together. She didn't believe him, and left Italy soon after. In despair, he moved back to Paris and produced the book length essay On Love (1822).

He published his first novel, Armance (1827) five years later, when he was 44, and went on to write his masterpieces The Red and the Black (1830), about the social classes, professions, politics, and manners of early nineteenth-century France, and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). He said, "It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover."

It's the birthday of experimental poet Louis Zukofsky, born on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1904.

It's the birthday of jazz guitarist Django Reinhard, born Jean Baptiste Reinhardt, in Liberchies, Belgium (1910). He formed the Quintet of the Hot Club of France with violinist Stephane Grappelli and quickly became internationally known as one of the very few major European jazz musicians.

It's the birthday of painter Édouard Manet, born in Paris, France (1832). He's known for his controversial paintings such as "Luncheon on the Grass" that showed two clothed men and a nude woman sitting on the grass. His work was harshly received by the critics of his day, but the younger painters who were strongly influenced by his work started a movement called Impressionism.

It's the birthday of French actress Jeanne Moreau born in Paris, France (1928). She is best known for the roles she played in French New Wave movies such as Jules and Jim (1962) and The Bride Wore Black (1968).

It's the birthday of actor Humphrey Bogart, born in New York City (1899). He was expelled from Massachusetts' Phillips Academy and immediately joined the Navy to fight in World War I serving as a ship's gunner. One day, while roughhousing on the ship's wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, and a splinter became lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became one of his most distinctive onscreen qualities.

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TUESDAY, 24 JANUARY 2006
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Poem: "Street Moths," by X.J. Kennedy from The Lords of Misrule (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Street Moths

Mature enough to smoke but not to drink,
    Grown boys at night before the games arcade
Wearing tattoos that wash off in the sink
    Accelerate vain efforts to get laid.

Parading in formation past them, short
    Skirts and tight jeans pretending not to see
This pack of starving wolves who pay them court
    Turn noses up at cries of agony—

Baby, let's do it! Each suggestion falls
    Dead to the gutter to be swept aside
Like some presumptuous bug that hits brick walls,
    Rating a mere Get lost and death-ray eyes.

Still, they keep launching blundering campaigns,
    Trying their wings once more in hopeless flight:
Blind moths against the wires of window screens.
    Anything. Anything for a fix of light.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City (1862). She belonged to an aristocratic ship-owning and real estate family, connected to the cultured high society of New York City. Wharton wrote her first novel when she was eleven years old. She wrote: "It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity—this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father ... I date the birth of her identity from that day ... It was always an event in the little girl's life to take a walk with her father, and more particularly so today, because she had on her new winter bonnet ... The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue ... On Sundays after church the fashionable of various denominations paraded there on foot, in gathered satin bonnets and tall hats."

She never got along with her mother, who taught Wharton that lying was a sin, but who often punished her for telling the truth. Wharton puzzled over this contradiction for most of her life and wrote about characters who cannot reveal the truth about themselves because of the society in which they live.

She married young, enduring a proper but loveless marriage to banker Edward Robbins Wharton for 28 years. He suffered from mental illness, and the story is she was in love with another man named Walter Berry, whose large photo she kept on her mantelpiece next to the photo of her husband. The novels she is most remembered for are about frustrated love, such as Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald she wrote, "To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers." She invited Fitzgerald to a tea party in Paris soon after The Great Gatsby was published. The meeting of the two has become a literary legend. In one version of the story, Fitzgerald arrived drunk, and after a few minutes of sipping tea he stood and told a story about an American couple who mistakenly stayed at a Paris bordello, thinking it a hotel. He stopped in the middle of the story, expecting his hostess to be shocked. Edith Wharton refilled his teacup and said, "But Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't told us what they did in the bordello." She was, after all, a novelist.

It's the birthday of British zoologist and writer, Desmond Morris, born in Wiltshire, England (1928), who got his Doctorate of Philosophy degree at Oxford University for his doctoral thesis on the Reproductive Behavior of the Ten-spined Stickleback. He once said, "We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are risen apes."

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WEDNESDAY, 25 JANUARY, 2006
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Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen in London, England (1882). Her father was the editor of a popular series of reference books, The Dictionary of National Biography, and Woolf later said that she had been cramped in the womb by the weight of those heavy volumes. From an early age, her father gave her access to his extensive library, and he taught her, "To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not." After the death of both her parents, she moved with her siblings into the unfashionable but cheap neighborhood of Bloomsbury, which soon became the literary and intellectual center of England. Woolf's brother hosted evening meetings that came to include D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and others. Woolf suffered most of her life from bouts of depression, and one doctor prescribed long walks as a remedy. It was on these walks that she conceived of many of her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). These novels employed a new brand of stream of consciousness, distinct from James Joyce and others. She said, "On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points."

It's the birthday of poet Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). The son of a poor farmer, he followed his father's example and spent the first half of his life engaged in the backbreaking labor of premodern farming. People in his village thought he was odd because he always carried a book, and they disapproved when they saw him reading as he drove his wagon slowly along the road. He got into trouble with the family of a girl named Jean Armour, who had become pregnant. He'd left another woman after she had become pregnant, but he loved Armour and didn't want her to suffer the indignities of being an unwed mother. He eventually married her, against her father's wishes. Burns pursued a career as a poet and became known for his conversational poems about Scottish life in books like Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). He and his wife had nine children, the last one born on the day of Burns's funeral.

It's the birthday of African American novelist Gloria Naylor, born in Queens, New York (1950). She began her first book The Women of Brewster Place while attending Brooklyn College and working as a switchboard operator. The book, which focuses on the stories of several women who have come to live on the dead-end street, Brewster Place, won the American Book Award for best first novel in 1983.

It's the birthday of filmmaker Tobe Hooper, born in Austin, Texas (1943). In 1974 he co-wrote and directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Many critics either condemned the film or refused to review it, but the London Film Festival named it outstanding film of the year. He went on to direct Poltergeist and Salem's Lot.

It's the birthday of author William Somerset Maugham, born in Paris, France (1874). He wrote the novels The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and Of Human Bondage (1915), about Philip Carey—a sensitive, orphaned boy born with a clubfoot, who is raised by a religious aunt and uncle, and eventually falls into a doomed love affair with a lady named Mildred. Maugham wrote, "Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother."

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THURSDAY, 26 JANUARY, 2006
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Poems: "The Muse and I Are Alone" and "The Muse Lends a Hand," by Robert Long

The Muse and I Are Alone

On the usual corner, we're
Up and out earlier than usual.
No winos around: too cold. The Muse
Wears white pants and the usual heavy metal
Jacket. He's pouty, half-asleep,
Turns toward me, his back
To the screaming crosstown wind.
I'm leaning against a video store
Steel grate. Hollywood light bulbs
Race around the window perimeter.
If you looked from across the avenue
You'd see us: a guy with a briefcase
Full of paper and a kid
With a backpack stuffed with books,
Framed by blinking lights,
Like forgotten celebrities.

The Muse Lends a Hand

The wind picks up; my hat blows off my head.
I'm trying to light a cigarette.
The hat hits the Muse in the knees, drops
To the sidewalk. Facing me,
He wears a baseball cap backwards, and looks stern
This morning. He bends, picks up the hat,
Hands it to me. "Thank you," I say.
He says nothing but watches
As I replace the hat on my head.
He turns, searches the avenue for evidence
Of our bus. I feel undignified.
The Muse is always composed;
His role is to trigger creative impulses
In others. He adjusts his bookback,
Steps to the curb, stares
Into the relentless gray dream
Of 7:13 a.m. Philadelphia.
The Muse looks tired of living.
A woman in a dirty raincoat asks me
If the K bus has passed. "No," I say.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's Australia Day today, the 26th of January.

It's the birthday of children's book author Mary Mapes Dodge, born Mary Elizabeth Mapes in New York City (1831). In 1851, she married the lawyer William Dodge, who had lent her father money to experiment with chemical fertilizers. The marriage lasted seven years, until William left one day and never returned. He had drowned, possibly by suicide, having suffered financial difficulties brought about by his loans to his father-in-law. In her grief, Dodge moved with her sons to her father's estate, and she set up a study for herself in the attic of an old building nearby. In 1865 she published a novel called Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates, and it became a best-seller. The book takes place in Holland, though she'd never been to the country.

It's the birthday of playwright Christopher Hampton born on Fayal Island in the Azores (1946). Hampton wrote many plays and screenplays, including a screen adaptation of the French novel Dangerous Liaisons, about two people who can't admit they love each other, and therefore spend their energies trying to destroy the loves of others, which won an Academy Award in 1988. He said, "No human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate."

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FRIDAY, 27 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Good People," by W.S. Merwin.

Poem text no longer available.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in Salzburg, Austria (1756). He was a child prodigy. He toured Germany at the age of six, and at seven his father Leopold, a music teacher, took young Wolfgang and his older sister on a three-year tour of Europe's royal courts. He said, "People err who think my art comes easily to me ..." In his 35 years, he composed forty-nine symphonies, forty concertos, and a wide range of other works, including operas such as The Marriage of Figaro (1784) and The Magic Flute (1791). Mozart wrote: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together" make genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

It is the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, born in Daresbury, Cheshire, England (1832). He was a mathematician. He had a terrible stutter, but it went away when he talked with children. One day, he took the three young Liddell sisters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice, on a river boat ride up the Thames for a picnic. He told them a fantastic story about Alice and "Her Adventures Underground." They begged him to write it down, and he did, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), along with Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), became one of the most popular children's books in the world. He said: "In some ways, you know, people that don't exist are much nicer than people that do."

It's the birthday of composer Jerome Kern, born in New York City (1885). In May of 1915, Kern and his wife planned to sail to Liverpool on the Lusitania. Kern overslept, they missed the boat, and days later it was torpedoed. He had a passion for gambling—he sometimes lost thousands of dollars a night—and for book collecting. The books became too much of an obsession, and so in 1928 he decided to sell them. The "Kern Sale" was big news. It was the roaring 20's, euphoria filled the auction house, and no one could believe it when the sale brought in almost two million dollars. Kern invested most of it in stocks; the market crashed later that year. His classic songs include "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "Ol' Man River," and "The Last Time I Saw Paris."

It's the birthday of Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, born in Montreal (1931). His first novel, The Acrobats (1954), is about a young Canadian painter in Spain with a group of expatriates and revolutionaries. Richler was a sharp cultural critic, and his books The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), St. Urbain's Horsemen (1971), and Joshua Then and Now (1980) all deal with greed and success. He wrote a collection of humorous essays titled Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974), and a series of children's books. He said, "Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials."

It's the anniversary of two events that made life a lot easier for writers: on this day in 1880, a patent was issued to Thomas Edison for the electric lamp, and in 1948, the Wire Recording Corporation of America announced the sale of the first tape recorder, for $149.50.

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SATURDAY, 28 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "This is the Garden," by E.E. Cummings

This is the Garden

this is the garden: colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing
strong silent greens serenely lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden: pursed lips do blow
upon cool flutes within wide glooms, and sing
(of harps celestial to the quivering string)
invisible faces hauntingly and slow.

This is the garden. Time shall surely reap
and on Death's blade lie many a flower curled,
in other lands where other songs be sung;
yet stand They here enraptured, as among
the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep
some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It is the birthday of (Sidonie Gabrielle) Colette, born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, France (1873). At the age of 20, she married an older man, a writer and critic who employed a number of ghostwriters. He convinced Colette to write down stories about her childhood—and embellish them with juicy details. When she did, he published them in his name as Claudine at School (1900), the first novel in the Claudine series, about an outspoken, clever young woman who discovers a love affair between the headmistress and one of the younger female teachers.

Colette's early writing was forced labor; her husband locked her in a room until she had produced enough pages for the day, and he kept the royalties. After fleeing her husband in 1906, Colette became a Parisian music-hall performer infamous for baring one breast while dancing. At the Moulin Rouge, she caused even more controversy when she took a woman into a passionate embrace. The show caused a riot. The curtain had to be brought down early, and Colette became the talk of the town. The scandals continued; later, she had an affair with her stepson.

Still, Colette continued to write at least one book a year, producing more than 80 volumes, including Chéri (1920), My Mother's House (1922) and Sido (1930). Proust admired her, and wrote to her to say that her novella Mitsou (1930), about a music-hall artist who falls in love with an officer on leave, had moved him to tears. She was one of the great "cat ladies"—she kept up to two dozen in her house. Her novel, La Chatte (The Cat, 1933), deals with a kind of love triangle between a man, a woman, and a cat. In 1944, at the age of 72, she published Gigi, about a spontaneous young girl who is trained, by courtesans, in "the honorable habits of women without honor"—how to choose the right wines, eat fancy food, look after one's hygiene. Adapted for the theater in 1951, with a young Audrey Hepburn in the title role, and made into a movie, it became her best-known work.

When she died in 1954, Colette was denied a Catholic funeral, but thousands attended the state funeral provided by the French government—the first for a woman. A plaque on her house in Paris reads, "Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life." She said, "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." She said, "The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike," and "What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."

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SUNDAY, 29 JANUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Tree," by Jane Hirshfield

Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the man who wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls." The time was the American Revolution, and the writer was Thomas Paine, born in Thetford, England (1737). He joined with Washington's Army when the war broke out, and at nights after fighting, he worked on a collection of essays titled The American Crisis (1783). His pamphlet, Common Sense (1776), was a best seller and helped inspire the move toward a declaration of independence. At the end of the Revolution he returned to England, where he published The Rights of Man (1789), a response to anti-revolutionary sentiment there. After reading it, his friend Benjamin Franklin said, "I would advise you not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person." He was imprisoned in France in 1794, where he wrote The Age of Reason (1795). This book angered his critics further, until he was brought back to the United States in 1802 by Thomas Jefferson. Here, he received much public abuse for his writing, and he died poor and alone in 1809.

It's the birthday of comedian and actor William Claude Dukenfield, W.C. Fields, born in Philadelphia, (1880). He wrote The Bank Dick (1940), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), and My Little Chickadee (1940), and other films. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he was asked what he wanted as his epitaph. He said, "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

It's the birthday of novelist, essayist, and environmentalist Edward Abbey, born in the town of Home, Pennsylvania (1927). He lived in the Southwest for most of his life. His most famous work, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), is about a gang of four "environmental warriors" who liberate sections of the Utah and New Mexico wilderness through sabotage. After a stint as a caseworker in a Brooklyn welfare office, he moved west to work as a fire lookout and ranger in Arches national park, which he did for 15 years. He turned the experience into his book, Desert Solitaire (1968). "There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California."

It is the birthday of playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, born in Tagnarog, Russia (1860) into a peasant family. At a very young age, his grandfather was able to buy the freedom of his family from serfdom. His father owned and operated a grocery store until it went bankrupt when Chekhov was 16.

He studied medicine, became a doctor, but he said, "Besides medicine, my wife, I have also literature, my mistress." He began writing serious fiction, including the "The Steppe," a novella-length story, and his first play, The Seagull. The play was met with awful reviews; at its first performance, Chekhov left mid-performance, vowing never to write for theater again. Two years later, in 1898, Constantin Stanislavsky re-produced the play to raves. This success inspired him to go on to write the plays The Three Sisters (1901), The Cherry Orchard (1904), and Uncle Vanya (1896), all now classics of the theater.

Anton Chekhov said, "Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."

He once wrote to a friend, "Critics are like horseflies which prevent the horse from ploughing ... only [one] made an impression on me. He said I would die in a ditch drunk."

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