MONDAY, 20 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "A Wake" by Malena Morling from Astoria. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
A Wake
I Called Michael and he told me he just got home from a
wake. "Oh, I am sorry," I said. "No, no," he said, "it was
the best wake I have ever been to. The funeral home was
as warm and cozy as anyone's living room. We had the
greatest time. My friend looked wonderful, much better
dead than alive. He wore his red and green Hawaiian shirt.
He was the most handsome corpse I'd ever seen.
They did such a good job! His daughter was there and
a lot of old friends I had not seen in years. You know,
he drank himself to death. He'd been on and off the
wagon for years, but for some reason this is what he
ended up doing." As my friend kept talking, I thought
of Lorca and what he wrote about death and Spain: "A
dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man that any-
place else in the world" and "Everywhere else, death is
an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not
in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live
indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the
sunlight."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain, born in Hoquiam, Washington (1967). He got a job as a school janitor and started playing in local rock bands, living at various friends' houses and on the street, occasionally sleeping under a bridge. He and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach (1989), under the name Nirvana. The album was received well enough that they began to play live venues in nearby cities like Olympia and Seattle. They signed to a major label for their next album, Nevermind (1991), and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.
He became internationally famous almost overnight. The way he dressed—in torn jeans, flannel shirts and striped sweaters—began to influence clothing designers. His abrasive music was played at high school dances and sporting events, and it changed the kind of music that got played on the radio. But Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994 he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.
It's the birthday of filmmaker Robert Altman, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1925). His father was a successful insurance salesman, and a compulsive gambler. Altman said, "I learned a lot about losing from [my father]. That losing is an identity; that you can be a good loser and a bad winner; that none of it—gambling, money, winning or losing—has any real value."
Altman served during World War II as a bomber pilot and then got a job making industrial films for various corporations. He started working on television shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Bonanza, but the television executives didn't like him. He always wanted important characters on his TV shows to die unexpectedly because he thought that was more realistic. He didn't think there was enough realism in television.
His first success as a Hollywood filmmaker was the movie M*A*S*H (1970). Altman has since become known for movies using large casts of characters and overlapping, improvised dialogue.
Robert Altman said, "To play it safe is not to play."
It was on this day in 1950 that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas embarked on his first reading tour of the United States. At the time, Thomas was a fairly successful poet in England, and Americans were extremely enthusiastic about his work. Thomas had always wanted to travel to America because he'd grown up in Wales watching American cowboy movies and American cartoons. The man who arranged for the reading tour picked him up at the airport, and they drove toward Manhattan. When Thomas saw the skyline he said, "I knew America would be just like this."
He was immediately put in the literary spotlight, but he claimed not to enjoy his new fame. In an interview with the New York Times Book Review, he said he missed being a young unknown poet. When asked why he came to New York, Thomas said, "To continue my lifelong search for naked women in wet mackintoshes."
The tour lasted until June, and Thomas spent that time traveling to various American universities, where he attended faculty parties and then gave readings to packed houses of several thousand listeners at each performance. Thomas had never finished college himself, and was terrified of academics. So he got terribly drunk at all the faculty parties, shouting obscenities and coming on to all the women. Everyone was shocked and horrified.
And when the time would come for Thomas to give his reading, even though he had been nearly incapacitated a few hours before, he would always come out on stage and stun the audience with his performance. He had a deep, sonorous voice, and audiences would hang on his every word. He didn't just read his own poetry. He recited a huge number of poems by other poets, and only finished the show with one or two poems of his own.
The reading tour seemed to go on and on. He traveled all the way to California and back. In letters to his wife, he complained that the tour was wearing him out. He wrote, "I'm hardly living. I'm just a voice on wheels."
TUESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Nonsense Song" by W. H. Auden from As I Walked Out One Evening. © Vintage International. Reprinted with permission.
Nonsense Song
My love is like a red red rose
Or concerts for the blind,
She's like a mutton-chop before
And a rifle-range behind.
Her hair is like a looking glass,
Her brow is like a bog,
Her eyes are like a flock of sheep
Seen through a London fog.
Her nose is like an Irish jig,
Her mouth is like a 'bus,
Her chin is like a bowl of soup
Shared between all of us.
Her form divine is like a map
Of the United States,
Her food is like a motor-car
Without its number-plates.
No steeple-jack shall part us now
Nor fireman in a frock;
True love could sink a Channel boat
Or knit a baby's sock.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the few contemporary novelists to sell a lot of books to young men, Chuck Palahniuk, born in Burbank Washington (1962). He comes from a family with a violent background. His grandfather murdered his grandmother when his father was little. Palahniuk's parents had a rocky marriage and he often had to turn up the TV at night to drown out the sound of fighting.
He wanted to be a writer in college, but his writing professors didn't like him. One tried to get him to drop the class, and another told Palahniuk that he'd never have an original thought. So Palahniuk started pouring his energy into living on the edge. He would go out to bars at night and take on an alternate identity, calling himself Nick. And he would use that identity to act out all of his aggression, getting into bar fights and other semi-legal activity.
He got a job as a diesel mechanic at Freightliner Trucks, which paid well but made him miserable. He became addicted to drugs and alcohol. And then he moved to a house near a hill that somehow blocked his TV's reception. At first he was miserable without television, but it inspired him to start reading on a regular basis for the first time since he was a teenager. He discovered the work of contemporary fiction writers like Amy Hempel and Denis Johnson, and they inspired him to start writing fiction of his own.
The first novel Palahniuk tried to publish was turned down by a series of publishers because it was too violent and bleak. Palahniuk decided he had a choice. He said, "I could either write something that's less dark and upsetting or I could write something that's ten times as dark and upsetting."
The result was his novel Fight Club (1996), about a cult leader named Tyler Durden, who encourages his followers to get together at night and fistfight each other as a way of escaping their meaningless lives. Fight Club didn't get much publicity when it came out, but it started selling by word of mouth among young men in high school and colleges across the country. It was made into a movie in 1999.
It's the birthday of columnist and humorist Erma Bombeck, born in Dayton, Ohio (1927). She got a job at the Dayton Journal-Herald writing obituaries and features for the women's page, but when she married a sportswriter there she chose to quit her job and stay home with the kids. She spent a decade as a fulltime mother, and then in 1964 she decided she had to start writing again or she would go crazy. She said, "I was thirty-seven, too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security, and too tired for an affair."
Within a few years, she was one of the most popular humor columnists in America. She went on to publish many books, including Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983) and Family: The Ties That Bind ... and Gag! (1987).
She wrote, "My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?"
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer David Foster Wallace, born in Ithaca, New York (1962). Growing up, he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player, but when he got to college his teachers singled him out as someone who might become an important philosopher. One of his teachers actually told him that he was a genius. Wallace said, "It was the happiest moment in my life. I felt like I would never have to go to the bathroom again—that I'd transcended it."
His first novel came out in 1987 and then he fell into a depression. He started sitting in on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Boston, and found them to be incredibly powerful and uplifting. They gave him an idea for a science fiction novel about a future America where everyone is addicted to something. That novel was Infinite Jest (1996), which became a bestseller even though it was more than 1,000 pages long with 100 pages of footnotes.
It's the birthday of poet W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden, born in York, England (1907). He grew up in an industrial area of northern England. He loved the huge mining machines designed for breaking up rocks. He originally wanted to become a mining engineer but, one afternoon when he was fifteen, a friend asked him if he ever wrote poetry. He never had, but being asked the question made him want to start. So he did.
WEDNESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Starting from Scratch" by Ingrid Wendt from Moving the House. © BOA Editions. Also included in the anthology Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework. © University of Iowa Press. Reprinted with permission.
Starting from Scratch
To begin with, none of your neighbors began here.
Everyone moved in years before you moved into
a pattern you found yourself part of
before you intended: flowers, fences,
attention to the details your mother always took care of,
duller than film on dishes it was always your job to wipe.
Nobody spoke about courage.
Nobody said you could choose this life.
It happened, it didn't, the fact
you could choose to remain would become
what's yours to control: hours
of sleeping and waking, meals, the home
you need to go out in the world from.
Neighborhood customs you know you can count on.
Recipes, grapes exchanged for zucchini, the garden
someone will know when to plant.
The book you suggest. The pattern of limits
no one has asked for, told over coffee, lives
like yours you could have become
starting from scratch. Each day
the way you will live before what comes next.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the first president of the United States, George Washington, born in Westmoreland County, Virginia (1732). He started out his career as a successful land surveyor and farmer, and he spent much of the rest of his life trying to get back to that. He was reluctant to advocate for armed rebellion against the British, but he eventually saw that it was inevitable. He served as commander in chief of the revolutionary armies, and after the new U.S. Constitution was ratified he was the clear choice for newly created office of the president. No other candidates were even considered. Washington was elected unanimously. He was the first elected president in world history.
Washington was in an awkward position as the first president because he knew that he was helping to invent the presidency by everything he did in the office. He wrote, "I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent."
When a Senate committee came up with an official title for him, "His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of the Same," George Washington insisted on being called "Mr. President" instead.
Washington did believe in a certain amount of formality. He always wore a sword in public, and he never spoke casually to anyone at public events, including close friends. He didn't even shake hands; he just gave a formal bow. And he rode around New York City in a luxurious cream and gold carriage with silver-plated decorations and Washington's coat of arms on the doors, pulled by a matched set of six white horses with leopard-skin saddle blankets. When people criticized him for having such a fancy vehicle, Washington replied that it had been a gift to his wife.
It's the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in Rockland, Maine (1892). Her mother couldn't afford to send her to college, but when she was nineteen she entered a poem called "Renascence" in a poetry contest hoping to win the large cash prize. One of the judges was so impressed that he started a correspondence with her, fell in love, and nearly divorced his wife. Her poem didn't win first prize, but when she recited it at a public reading in Camden, Maine, a woman in the audience offered to pay for her to go to Vassar College, and Millay accepted.
She had red hair and green eyes and when she'd lived in Camden, Maine, people had often stopped and stared at her on the street, she was so beautiful. When Millay moved to Greenwich Village after college, most of the men in the literary scene fell in love with her. The critic Edmund Wilson was one of those smitten men.
Millay wrote poems about bohemian parties and free love in her collection A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), and she became one of the icons of the Jazz Age. When she gave readings of her poetry, she drew huge crowds of adoring fans. Many critics considered her the greatest poet of her generation. The poet Thomas Hardy said, "There are only two great things in the U.S., the skyscrapers and the poetry of Millay."
She wrote, "My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—/ It gives a lovely light!"
It's the birthday of the author and illustrator Edward Gorey, born in Chicago, Illinois (1925). He's known for writing and illustrating many morbidly funny books. His first was The Hapless Child (1961), about a little girl named Sophia who is picked on and abused, sold into slavery, forced to make artificial flowers, and finally run over by a car.
It's the birthday of poet Gerald Stern, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1925). He was in his late thirties when he suddenly realized that his life was almost half over and he began to write poems furiously. He has gone on to write many more collections, including Leaving Another Kingdom (1990), Bread Without Sugar (1992), and Odd Mercy (1995).
THURSDAY, 23 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Politics" by William Butler Yeats. Public Domain.
Politics
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the greatest diarists in the English language, Samuel Pepys, born in London (1633). He managed to work his way up from poverty when it was almost impossible to do so in England. His parents were a tailor and a washerwoman, but he had an upper-class cousin who helped him get into good schools and got him government jobs.
His constant fear of losing his position made him an extremely hard worker, and he eventually worked his way up to the top of society. Pepys began his diary in 1659, and he would keep it for almost ten years. No one knows what inspired him to start it, but he was a great collector. He collected ship models, scientific instruments, portraits, ballads, money and women, and some critics see his diary as an attempt to collect his whole experience of the world.
It wasn't uncommon at the time for well-educated men to keep a journal, but most of these men wrote dry descriptions of their travels, politics and public affairs. As far as we know, Pepys was the first Englishman to fill his diary with descriptions of his most personal and ordinary experiences: his aches and pains, what he liked to eat, going to the bathroom, his marital love life, and his extramarital affairs, graphic details that novelists wouldn't start incorporating into their work for more than two hundred years.
Pepys was brutally honest about himself and often wrote about his failed attempts to seduce servant girls and bar maids. During the height of the Plague, as many as 10,000 Londoners died every week. Pepys wrote: "The nights (though much lengthened) are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before ... my brewer's house shut up, and my baker with his whole family dead of the plague."
Pepys wrote: "The truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and, out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it."
It's the birthday of the journalist and novelist William Shirer, born in Chicago (1904). He graduated from college in the spring of 1925 and he had a steady job waiting for him the following autumn, so he decided to spend his last summer before becoming a real adult traveling in Paris. He borrowed $200 from his father, which he figured would last about two months, and took off to the bohemian capital of the world.
Once he got there, he found that he loved European life. He became friends with writers and artists and began to think that he didn't want to go home. He tried to get a job with one of the local newspapers, but nobody would take him. So at the end of two months, he went to his own going away party, assuming he'd be leaving the next day for America. That following morning, he got a job offer from the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune.
He went on to become one of the foremost American foreign correspondents to cover the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II. His first book was Berlin Diary (1941), and then The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1961), which was the first historical overview of Nazi Germany for general readers.
It's the birthday of the sociologist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (1868). He grew up in New England and didn't experience racial inequality until he went to college at Fisk University in Nashville. He did his graduate studies at Harvard; he was the first African American to get his Ph.D. there.
He became an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and for his first sociological study he personally surveyed five thousand African Americans living in Philadelphia about their background, family structure, employment, income, social activities and other aspects of their lives. It was the first serious sociological study of blacks in America and it was the first time that someone had attempted to prove that poverty and crime in black communities was the result not of racial inferiority but of racial barriers and in education and employment.
He's best known for his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It was a collection of essays, and one of the first attempts by an African American to describe the experience of racism in post-slavery America. Du Bois wrote, "It is a peculiar sensation ... this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Du Bois went on to found the N.A.A.C.P., and he grew more and more alienated from the United States. He eventually joined the communist party and moved to Africa, renouncing his American citizenship. He died in Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington.
FRIDAY, 24 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "In the Yellow Head of a Tulip" by Malena Morling from Astoria. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
In the Yellow Head of a Tulip
In the yellow head of a tulip
in the sound of the wind entangled in the forest
in the haphazard combination of things
for sale on the sidewalk
an iron next to a nail-clipper next to a can of soup
next to a starling's feather
in the silence inside of stone
in tea in music in desire in butter in torture
in space that flings itself out in the universe
in every direction at once without end
despite walls despite grates and ceilings
and bulletproof glass
the sun falls though without refracting
in the wind hanging out its own sheets
on all the empty clotheslines
in the bowels of rats
in their tiny moving architectures
in a world that is always moving
in those who are unable to speak but know how to listen
in your mother who is afraid of her own thoughts
in her fear in her death
in her own derelict loneliness
in the garden late at night
between the alder tree and the ash
she rocks herself to sleep in the hammock
a little drunk and wayward
in everything she is that you are not
in the well of the skull
in the fish that you touch
in the copper water
in its breath of water
in your breath, the single bubble rising
that could be you
that could be me
that could be nothing
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Wilhelm Karl Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1786). Along with his older brother Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm helped publish the collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812), the first collection of folklore in modern publishing history.
Of the two brothers, Wilhelm was more romantic and literary. Jacob did most of the theorizing about folklore and Wilhelm did most of the actual footwork. At first, the story collecting did not go well. The idea was to find ordinary peasants around the countryside to tell their stories, but when Wilhelm went on his first expedition, the peasants were too intimidated to talk to him. In a letter back to Jacob, Wilhelm wrote, "The fairy tale collecting is going along wretchedly."
Ultimately, Wilhelm had to ask friends and family to help in the collecting. And it was Wilhelm who realized that the best people to help him gather folk stories were women because it was women who did most of the storytelling in the first place. It was common for women to gather together and exchange stories for entertainment.
So Wilhelm called upon the six daughters of his next door neighbor to help in the project. They were all eager to do so, but the best collector was a pretty young woman named Dortchen Wild. She and Wilhelm would meet together on a regular basis, often in a nice spot in the countryside, and she would tell him the stories she'd heard from memory while he wrote them down. They later got married. Among the stories she contributed to the final collection were "The Six Swans" and "Hansel and Gretel."
It is the birthday of a poet who's famous in part for his disappearance, Weldon Kees, born in Beatrice, Nebraska (1914). His first book of poems The Last Man (1940) was a hit. He moved to New York City and began attending parties with literary critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. But he never felt comfortable in that society.
Then he got into painting, and some of his works hung alongside Picasso in an exhibition at the Whitney. Then he moved to San Francisco, where he began making experimental films and he got involved with the Beat scene.
Then, on July 19, 1955, Kees's Plymouth Savoy was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge with the keys in the ignition. When his friends went to search his apartment all they found was the cat he had named Lonesome and a pair of red socks in the sink. His sleeping bag was missing and so was his savings account book. He left no note. No one is sure if Weldon Kees jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge that day or if he went to Mexico.
It's the birthday of poet, novelist, and short story writer Maxine Chernoff, born in Chicago, Illinois (1952). She's the author of the short story collection Signs of Devotion (1993) and the novels American Heaven (1996) and Boy in Winter (1999).
SATURDAY, 25 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "When I am gone, recall my hair" by Edith Wharton from Edith Wharton: Selected Poems. © The Library of America. Reprinted with permission.
When I am gone, recall my hair
When I am gone, recall my hair,
Not for the light it used to hold,
But that your touch, enmeshed there,
Has turned it to a younger gold.
Recall my hands, that were not soft
Or white or fine beyond expressing,
Till they had slept so long and oft,
So warm and close, in your possessing.
Recall my eyes, that used to lie
Blind pools with summer's wreckage strewn.
You cleared the drift, but in their sky
You hung no image but your own.
Recall my mouth, that knew not how
A kiss is cradled and takes wing,
Yet fluttered like a nest-hung bough
When you had touched it like the Spring.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the "Father of Modern Pathology," Giovanni Battista Morgagni, born in Forli, Italy (1682). He's remembered today for his book On the Seats and Causes of Disease, published in 1761, in which he describes in great detail the results of 640 autopsies he performed on patients who died from diseases. It's considered one of the most important works in the history of medicine. Before Morgagni, it was still widely believed that diseases were caused by an imbalance in four human fluids called humors—phlegm, blood, gall and choler. Morgagni laid the foundation for modern pathology.
It's the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. He showed an early talent for drawing, and so he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter when he was just thirteen years old. He might have spent the rest of his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter.
He saved up his own money to take evening classes in drawing and anatomy. He didn't learn much from his teachers, but a group of his classmates introduced him to a new idea that art should try to be closer to life and free from past tradition. One of these classmates was Claude Monet and the idea they'd come up with would become known as Impressionism.
At the time, paintings were produced in studios and they were painstakingly sketched out before the painter even began to put any color on the canvas. But Renoir and his friends began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases. They were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature, painting straight onto the canvas.
The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. But they eventually caught on.
Renoir said, "In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat."
It's the birthday of novelist Karl May, born in Ernstthal, Germany (1842). He was in prison when he began to read about American pioneers and cowboys and Indians and got the idea for a series of novels about the adventures of a heroic German immigrant named Charley and his Apache Indian friend Winnetou. As soon as he published the books, they became hugely popular, especially among German adolescent boys. His novels became some of the most widely read books in Europe.
May's novels are still incredibly popular in Germany. Many of his novels have been made into movies and TV shows, and in northern Germany thousands of people still go to see an annual festival that puts on plays based on May's plots.
It's the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England (1917). He had written several novels, none of which was particularly successful, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches. He went to see a doctor and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live.
Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. He's best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). It begins: "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter."
SUNDAY, 26 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash. © Hi Lo Music. Reprinted with permission.
Folsom Prison Blues
I hear the train a comin'; it's rollin' 'round the bend,
And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when.
I'm stuck at Folsom Prison and time keeps draggin' on.
But that train keeps rollin' on down to San Antone.
When I was just a baby, my mama told me, "Son
Always be a good boy; don't ever play with guns."
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
When I hear that whistle blowin' I hang my head and cry.
I bet there's rich folk eatin' in a fancy dining car.
They're prob'ly drinkin' coffee and smokin' big cigars,
But I know I had it comin', I know I can't be free,
But those people keep a movin', and that's what tortures me.
Well, if they freed me from this prison, if that railroad train was mine,
I bet I'd move on over a little farther down the line,
Far from Folsom Prison, that's where I want to stay,
And I'd let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1564 that the playwright Christopher Marlowe was baptized in Canterbury, England. We're not sure of his birthday. He was one of the most prominent playwrights of his lifetime, surpassed only by Shakespeare. When he began his career most English plays were written in rhyming couplets, but Marlowe wrote in blank verse, without end rhymes. Other playwrights, including Shakespeare, followed his example.
And while he was writing there is evidence that he also worked as a secret agent for Queen Elizabeth. In the 1590s, while he was producing his plays, church officials began to accuse him of espousing atheism, a charge that could be punished by torture. On May 18, 1593, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but he died in a fight over a bar bill before the police could find him.
Conspiracy theorists have wondered about Marlowe's death for centuries, and there is a group called the Marlovians who believe that Marlowe's death was actually faked by the Queen in order to protect Marlowe from the Church. They believe the Queen actually whisked Marlowe away to Italy where he continued writing plays. They also believe that Marlowe used an actor named Shakespeare as a front man to cover up his identity.
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Les Misérables (1865) Victor Hugo, born in Besançon, France (1802). He was a leader of the French Romantic movement in literature. He published The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831. It's a historical novel, set in fifteenth-century Paris, about a gypsy girl named Esmeralda and the deaf and deformed bell ringer of the Notre Dame Cathedral, Quasimodo. Two men get into a fight with a knife over Esmeralda and when one man is stabbed, Esmeralda is charged with the crime. The hunchback Quasimodo tries to save her, but she is executed by the police. Quasimodo catches the man responsible and throws him from the tower of the cathedral. The book ends with the later discovery of not one but two skeletons in Esmeralda's tomb—Esmeralda's and Quasimodo's, locked in an embrace.
It's the birthday of the singer and songwriter Johnny Cash, born in Kingsland, Arkansas (1932). He grew up in the middle of the Great Depression, his parents struggling to pay the bills on a cotton farm they'd bought with help from a New Deal program. When he was twelve years old Cash watched his brother die in a table-saw accident. He never forgot how his mother had to return to working the farm the day after the funeral.
It was his mother who played guitar and sang songs to Cash and his siblings. But Cash didn't learn how to play music himself until he enlisted in the Air Force and went off to Germany. He began playing music and performing there with his fellow servicemen.
One night, they were showing a movie on the base about the conditions at a prison back in America called Folsom Prison. The movie made such an impression on Cash that he decided to write a song about it called "Folsom Prison Blues." When Cash got discharged, he took a job as a door-to-door appliance salesman in Memphis. But around the same time, he hooked up with a couple other musicians and got an audition at Sun Records. The third song they recorded was "Folsom Prison Blues" and it made Cash famous.
He married June Carter in 1968 and they were married until June's death in May of 2003. Johnny Cash died a few months later.
