MONDAY, 15 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Learning the Bicycle," by Wyatt Prunty, from Balance as Belief. © John Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Learning the Bicycle
for Heather
The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she'll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Wyatt Prunty, (books by this author), born in Humboldt, Tennessee (1947). When he went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, he found that he was the only one in his poetry class who had been in the military, the only one with short hair, and the only one who didn't write poetry in free verse.
It's the birthday of author Paul Zindel, (books by this author), born on Staten Island in New York (1935). He has written many novels for young adults, including The Pigman (1968).
It's the birthday of the man who created the land of Oz, Frank Baum, (books by this author), born in Chittenango, New York (1856). He published the first book in his series, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in 1900.
It's the birthday of short-story writer and novelist Katherine Anne Porter, (books by this author), born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas (1890). She was a descendant of Daniel Boone, but she actually grew up in poverty, in a small log house on the edge of a dirt farm. Her mother died when she was two years old, and her father was so stricken by grief that he couldn't provide for the family. They had to move in with Porter's grandmother.
Her grandmother died when she was eleven, and Porter had to move in with her cousins. She spent two years in a drama school, the only real education she ever received, and then briefly started a small school of her own devoted to singing and dramatic arts. Just after her sixteenth birthday, she married a twenty-one-year-old railway clerk. But she wasn't happy in her marriage and in 1914 she ran away to Chicago where she hoped to make it as a movie actress. When she arrived in the city, she changed her name, Callie Russell, to her grandmother's name, Katherine Anne.
She got a job in a song-and-dance show, but then she caught tuberculosis. Once the disease was diagnosed, she was sent to a sick house for the poor where there was almost no food for the patients and women were dying all around her. She might have died there herself, but her brother paid for her to switch to a high-class sanatorium in Texas.
Porter spent two years recovering at the sanatorium, surrounded by a group of intelligent young women, including some journalists and writers. Inspired by their example, she got a job as a journalist, and began to write for a variety of newspapers, first in Denver and then in New York City, covering entertainment news and social events.
In 1919, she met a group of Mexican activists, and they persuaded her to go to Mexico to write about the coming revolution there. She used her experience in Mexico to write the story "Flowering Judas," about a young American woman living in Mexico just before the revolution. The story made her literary reputation when it was published, and it became the title story of her first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930). She was forty years old.
Her books of stories got excellent reviews, and critics compared her to some of the greatest writers in American history, but she didn't make much money from her fiction and had to support herself with journalism for most of her life. She once said, "I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water."
She worked for more than twenty years trying to write a big novel called Ship of Fools. When it was finally published in 1962, it made her rich, but it got mixed reviews. Most critics consider her best work to be her short stories. Her Collected Stories came out in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Katherine Anne Porter said, "My life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it."
TUESDAY, 16 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Homeplace," by Jo McDougall, from Towns Facing Railroads. © University of Arkansas Press. (buy now)
Homeplace
Awake while you sleep,
I tie and untie the strings of what went wrong:
the farm auctioned, my father buried in Minnesota,
you and I alone
in a rented room.
I remember my father when I was six
pushing open a gate on the farm road,
stirring the dust of August.
The locusts sizzling in the grass,
a hum of dragonflies hanging sleepy above us.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1717 that the French playwright and poet Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille for insulting the government. Voltaire, (books by this author), used the opportunity to begin writing his first play, and when he got out of prison a year later, he produced a series of successful plays that made him one of the most popular writers in Europe. He spent the rest of his life in and out of exile from France, speaking out against political and religious repression.
It was on this day in 1868 that President Andrew Johnson was acquitted in his impeachment trial by only one vote. The trial took place in the wake of the Civil War, during the period of Reconstruction. The Republicans were infuriated when President Johnson readmitted southern states to the Union and refused to punish southern politicians for participating in secession.
The final vote came down to one person, Edmund G. Ross, a freshman senator. He didn't like Johnson and had received hundreds of letters urging him to convict him, but he worried that a conviction would damage the office of the presidency forever. He still hadn't decided what to do on the day of the vote, and sat at his desk, nervously tearing pieces of paper into shreds. When he was finally called, he stood up and voted "Not Guilty."
It's the birthday of poet Adrienne Rich, (books by this author), born in Baltimore, Maryland (1929). Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World (1951), came out when she was only twenty-one years old. She has gone on to write many books of poetry, including Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978).
It's the birthday of journalist Studs Terkel, (books by this author), born Louis Terkel in the Bronx, New York City (1912). In the 1960s, he decided to start interviewing ordinary people for a book called Division Street (1967), about the changing demographics of Chicago. Terkel went on to publish a series of books in which he interviewed ordinary people about different subjects. He published Working (1974), The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984), RACE: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession (1991), and Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (2001).
His book Hope Dies Last came out in 2003. Terkel, who is now in his nineties, has said that he wants his epitaph to read, "Curiosity never killed this cat."
It was on this day in 1763 that James Boswell first met Samuel Johnson, the man who would become the subject of his life's work. Boswell, (books by this author) was twenty-three years old at the time, bumming around London, going to parties and brothels, and feeling like he was wasting his life. He kept a very detailed diary and wanted to be a writer, but he didn't know what to write about other than himself. His literary hero was the scholar and writer Samuel Johnson. Boswell had heard that Johnson sometimes stopped by a particular bookshop in London, so Boswell began to spend time there in hopes of running into the great man.
Boswell was drinking tea at the bookshop on this day in 1763, when his friend Thomas Davies told him that Johnson had just come into the shop. Boswell got incredibly nervous when Johnson came into the room. They got into an argument about a man they both knew, and the meeting ended poorly, but Boswell wouldn't give up. He went to a party at Johnson's house a few weeks later, and after the party was over Johnson asked him to stay a little longer to talk. Boswell ended up telling Johnson the story of his life and his struggle to find a vocation. The two men became close friends, and Boswell began to write a book about Johnson that would become his obsession.
Boswell tried to write down everything Johnson did and said in his presence, in order to preserve it for posterity. Boswell's attention occasionally irritated Johnson, and Johnson once said to Boswell, "You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both."
Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson came out in 1791, after Johnson's death, and it became a best-seller. By 1825, all of Samuel Johnson's writings were out of print, and they didn't come back into print for another hundred years. But Boswell's book about Johnson went through forty-one English editions in the nineteenth century alone. Boswell managed to write a book about Johnson that is more interesting to us today than the books that Johnson wrote.
WEDNESDAY, 17 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Hard River," by James Finnegan. Reprinted with permission of the poet. (buy now)
Hard River
I pulled back
the jaundiced curtains
of the room rented
for four weeks in Wichita.
I didn't care
that the only thing I could see
from the window was the highway,
because I would watch the highway
the way I used to watch the river
with a six of beer and nowhere to go
after work, just watch
the cars and trucks
flow on and on, heading home
or to work or nowhere in particular,
knowing out there somewhere
someone was listening to the radio,
the same station I was listening to
with this man talking, just talking
into space, wavelengths over furrows
in the wide stretches of farmland,
knowing no one cares
about what he's saying,
still he talks and syllables and seconds
and dust settle like silt in the open air,
a child asleep across the backseat
of a car, tires throbbing over
slabs of pavement, no spare
in the trunk and two hundred miles
from here to wherever is there
on the hard river that carries them along
and if they're lucky
takes them home.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Dorothy Richardson, (books by this author), born in Abingdon, Berkshire, England (1873). Her great work was the thirteen-volume autobiographical novel Pilgrimage (1938). In 1911, she moved to a cottage in Cornwall and began writing her first novel. She wasn't satisfied with it, so she threw it away and started searching for a new subject. Eventually she decided to write about her own life, and everything in the novel would be filtered through the mind of her persona, Miriam Henderson, with no narrator to make sense of her thoughts. That style of writing became known as "stream of consciousness," and she was the first person to use it in the English language, before more famous writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
It's the birthday of young-adult novelist Gary Paulsen, (books by this author), born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1939). He's the author of dozens of books, including Canyons (1990), Woodsong (1990), and Hatchet (1988).
Paulsen ran away from home when he was fourteen years old, and held a series of manual labor jobs across the country. He decided to be a writer while he was working as a satellite technician for an aerospace firm in California. He drove off to northern Minnesota, rented a cabin on a lake, and wrote his first novel while living off his own vegetable gardens.
While he was living in the north Minnesota woods, he took up dog sled racing and ran the Iditarod dog sled race twice. After the second run, he got sick and had to give up the sport. He started devoting the same amount of energy to writing that was required for dog sled racing. He wrote for nineteen or twenty hours every day; he once said he is "totally, viciously, obsessively committed to work. ... I don't drink, I don't fool around, I'm just this way. ... The end result is there's a lot of books out there."
Paulsen has published more than 175 books and more than 200 articles for children and young adults.
It's the birthday of playwright and novelist Dennis Potter, born in Berry Hill, Gloucestershire, England (1935). When he was twenty-six years old he developed a severe form of arthritis that stiffened his joints and made his skin blister. He would be in and out of hospitals for the rest of his life, and he sometimes had to lie in bed for days at a time. But he took advantage of this time to start writing seriously, starting out as a television critic for a London newspaper and then creating his own TV shows. He had incredible faith in television. He said, "I first saw television when I was in my late teens. It made my heart pound. Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights."
Most of his early TV shows were political satires that were hugely controversial in England. He went on to write innovative dramas and miniseries like Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986).
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Poem: "Easter Morning," by Jim Harrison. Reprinted with permission of the poet. (buy now)
Easter Morning
On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.
We're not supposed to have "peasants"
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a '51 Dodge and a '72 Pontiac.
When his kids ask why they don't have
a new car he says, "these cars were new once
and now they are experienced."
He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we're made of.
I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there's lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.
Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can't figure out why
they're getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.
Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you're staring at them.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Frank Capra, (books by this artist), born in Bisaquino, Sicily (1897). Capra lived in Sicily for the first six years of his life until his family immigrated to Los Angeles. He sold newspapers in the Sicilian ghetto in Los Angeles, and he made money playing the banjo at nightclubs so he would be able to go to college. He studied chemical engineering at Cal Tech, paying his way by running the student laundry, waiting tables and wiping engines at a power plant.
In 1922, he was poor and unemployed and living in San Francisco, when he read in the newspaper that a man named Walter Montague was launching a new movie studio in an abandoned gymnasium. Capra called him up and talked his way into getting a job directing his first movie, a one-reel film based on a Rudyard Kipling poem.
For the next six years, he worked as everything from a prop man to a comedy writer. In 1928, he signed a contract with Columbia. Five years later he made his first big hit, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1933), for which he won the first of three Academy Awards for Best Director. In the next fifteen years he made a string of successful movies, most of them about a naïve and idealistic man from small-town America who goes up against greedy politicians and lawyers and journalists. Capra said the moral of his movies was: "A simple honest man, driven into a corner by predatory sophisticates, can, if he will, reach down into his God-given resources and come up with the necessary handfuls of courage, wit, and love to triumph over his environment."
His movies were so distinctive and so influential that the word "Capraesque" has made it into the dictionary. The 2000 American Heritage Dictionary defined it as "of or evocative of the movies of Frank Capra, often promoting the positive social effects of individual acts of courage."
His movies include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which was also about a small-town hero who battles corruption, but it was darker and more cynical than any of his earlier movies, and it didn't do very well at the box office. For some reason, Capra didn't renew its copyright in 1974, and it fell into the public domain. PBS was the first network to play it every year around Christmas. Other stations started picking it up, and now watching It's a Wonderful Life on TV is a holiday tradition for families across the country.
Capra said, "I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire."
FRIDAY, 19 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Waking Elsewhere," by Cecilia Woloch, from Late. © Boa Editions, Ltd. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Waking Elsewhere
I woke up dreaming my mother's garden—
fields in autumn, green turning gold,
grasses scythed down in the late, dark sun;
and here will be corn, she was saying, tomatoes,
flowers I never knew she loved.
I woke to a child climbing into my bed
—four-year-old girl of my sister's son—
hair like silk and the color of wheat
falling into her eyes, begging me to get up.
And in my mother's kitchen the strong light smelled of coffee
and autumn, in fact. In fact, my mother,
who hasn't gardened in twenty years, was taking a bath.
I heard her splashing through the walls. It was October;
the child came forward, one fresh egg cupped in her palm.
I woke up dreaming the harrowed fields,
sharp with stubble, my mother's lands.
She was already preparing for spring; she was already
stepping naked from the bath, away from grief—
a widow with work to do, weeds in the yard,
and the child calling softly to me, come on, come on, come on.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of director and screenwriter Nora Ephron, born in New York City (1941). She's written and directed nineteen movies, including Silkwood (1983), When Harry Met Sally (1989), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993).
It's the birthday of Malcolm X, (books by this author), born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska (1925). In 1964, the year before he was assassinated, he published The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
It's the birthday of American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, (books by this author), born in Chicago, Illinois (1930).
When she was eight years old, her father, who was a real-estate broker, had a friend of his from work buy a house for him in a white neighborhood. A few weeks after the family moved in, they were attacked by an angry mob. Lorraine just missed being hit by a brick thrown through her bedroom window. Her father took the case to the Illinois Supreme Court, and his victory there in 1959 paved the way for racial desegregation in cities across the country.
It was that experience that gave Hansberry the idea for her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), about the Younger family, who live in a cramped house on the South Side of Chicago. When they receive a 10,000-dollar life insurance check, they have to decide whether or not to move into a larger house in an all-white suburb. The title of the play was taken from a Langston Hughes poem.
A Raisin in the Sun was Hansberry's first play; she wrote it when she was twenty-eight years old, and she had no idea how to go about getting it produced. One night, she read the first part of the play to a group of friends that included the music publisher Philip Rose. Rose called Hansberry the next morning and volunteered to produce the play, even though he had never produced a play in his life. He happened to be friends with Sidney Poitier, so he called him up, and Poitier arranged for the black director Lloyd Richards to take on the project.
It opened in March of 1959 with a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, and Louis Gossett. A preview audience gave it a lukewarm response and Hansberry wasn't expecting it to do very well, but the opening-night audience loved it, and it went on to play for more than five hundred performances over two years. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play of 1959.
A Raisin in the Sun was the first Broadway play to be written by a black woman. For most members of the audience, it was the first time they had seen the life of a regular black family portrayed on stage or in film. For blacks, it opened the door for actors and directors to produce plays on Broadway, including August Wilson and Ntozake Shange. In 1961 it was made into a movie.
SATURDAY, 20 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "Looking for a Rest Area," by Stephen Dunn, from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling. © University of Massachusetts Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Looking for a Rest Area
I've been driving for hours,
it seems like all my life.
The wheel has become familiar,
I turn it
every so often to avoid the end
of my life, but I'm never sure
it doesn't turn me
by its roundness, as women have
by the space inside them.
What I'm looking for
is a rest area, some place where
the old valentine inside my shirt
can stop contriving romances,
where I can climb out of the thing
that has taken me this far
and stretch myself.
It is dusk, Nebraska,
the only bright lights in this entire state
put their fists in my eyes
as they pass me.
Oh, how easily I can be dazzled—
where is the sign
that will free me, if only for moments,
I keep asking.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, (books by this author), born in Kallundborg, Denmark (1882). She's best known for her historical novels about medieval Norway, especially the three-volume Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22) and the four-volume Olav Audunsson (1924).
Her father was an archeologist who specialized in the Middle Ages and Undset became interested at a young age in medieval history, especially the folktales and myths of Scandinavia. When she was sixteen she got a job as a secretary for an engineering company and she worked there for the next ten years, writing her first novel in her spare time. She finished it when she was twenty-two years old, but her book wasn't accepted by any publishers. She spent the next two years writing her second novel, and in 1907 Mrs. Marta Oulie was published. Its first line is, "I have been unfaithful to my husband." Critics were outraged, but sales went through the roof, and it wasn't long before she was able to quit her job and devote all of her time to writing.
In the early 1920s, when she was forty-two years old, Undset converted to Catholicism. Her family wasn't religious at all, and Norway was almost exclusively Protestant, so becoming a Catholic was a risky and unusual thing to do. But it was around this time that she wrote Kristin Lavransdatter, which is set in the Catholic Norway of the Middle Ages. Its main character is a young woman who is forced to choose between marrying a man she doesn't love and disgracing her family.
Kristin Lavransdatter was a huge success, and in 1928 Undset won the Nobel Prize for literature. When the Nazis gained control of Norway in early 1940, Undset joined the Resistance and moved to Sweden. Eventually she had to flee to the United States, where she made money by giving lectures across the country. She returned to Norway after the war, but she never published another book.
Undset is still one of the most popular writers in Norway today. The Kristin Lavransdatter series was made into a three-hour-long movie in 1995, and more than half the population of Norway bought tickets to see it.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author), born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the nineteenth century—La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.
He wrote about everyone and everything, about banks, offices, factories, the stock market, the media and the first commercial advertisements.
Balzac had a huge influence on later nineteenth-century French novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Henry James thought he was the best novelist of all time, and Willa Cather once said, "If one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live." Today, Balzac is rarely studied in American schools. Even in France, Balzac's novels are outsold by writers like Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, and Collette.
Balzac said, "All happiness depends on courage and work."
SUNDAY, 21 MAY, 2006
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Poem: "I shall keep singing!" by Emily Dickinson. (buy now)
I shall keep singing!
I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes—
Each—with a Robin's expectation—
I—with my Redbreast—
And my Rhymes—
Late—when I take my place in summer—
But—I shall bring a fuller tune—
Vespers—are sweeter than Matins-Signor—
Morning—only the seed of Noon—
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1927 that Charles Lindbergh landed his plane in Paris, (books by this author), completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight. Lindbergh grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota and first wanted to become a pilot when he saw planes passing over his town as a boy. He eventually got a job as an airmail pilot, flying between St. Louis and Chicago. It was an incredibly dangerous job at the time. Of the first forty pilots hired, thirty-one died in crashes. But in his first four years on the job, Lindbergh flew 7,189 flights without a single incident.
A man named Raymond Orteig was offering a $25,000 award for anyone who could successfully fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Several pilots had tried to win the prize and died in their effort. Lindbergh decided that the way to win it was to fly alone, saving on weight. He got financial backing from St. Louis businessmen and bought a single-engine plane with a large gas tank, which he called the Spirit of St. Louis.
In order to keep the plane as light as possible, he redesigned it himself to make it lighter. He didn't take a radio, a parachute, or any navigational equipment. He started down the runway at 7:51 a.m. on May 20, 1927. The gasoline tank was so heavy that he had trouble getting the plane into the air, and only cleared the telephone lines by twenty feet.
From the take-off in New York, he flew north over Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, navigating by checking maps against the landmarks he could see on the ground. He reached Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and then flew in toward the city of St. John's because he wanted people to know he'd gotten at least that far. People who saw his plane said they could almost read the serial number on the underside of the wing. It was the last land Lindbergh would see until he reached Ireland.
He turned east toward Europe just as night was falling. For the next fifteen hours, no one would know if he was alive or dead. People across America would later say that they stayed up thinking about Lindbergh that night, praying for his safety. The humorist Will Rogers wrote in his column, "No attempt at jokes today. A ... slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before."
After reaching the halfway point of his journey, Lindbergh began to hallucinate, and even saw a coastline before his calculations said that he should. When he flew toward it, the coastline vanished. After more than twenty-four hours, Lindbergh spotted fishing boats on the water. He reached Ireland a few hours later, and turned south toward Paris.
As he approached the airfield where he was supposed to land he was confused by the strange array of lights. He had to circle around awhile before he realized that the lights were cars stuck in traffic, people trying to get to the airfield to see the landing.
Lindbergh touched down at 10:24 p.m. on this day in 1927, thirty-three and a half hours after he'd taken off. About 150,000 people mobbed the landing strip in Paris, shouting, "Vive Lindbergh!" When he got out of his plane, the crowd picked him up and passed him over their heads, before he even had a chance to step on the ground.
He became one of the most famous men in the world overnight. Several songs were written about him and a dance called "The Lindy" was named after him. New York City gave him the largest ticker-tape parade of all time, and he received the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "In the late spring of 1927, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams."
Lindbergh went on to write two books about the flight, including We (1927) and The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), which won a Pulitzer Prize for biography.
