MONDAY, 10 JULY, 2006
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Poem: "The Bean Field" By John Clare from Poems of John Clare's Madness. Public domain.
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The Bean Field
A bean field full in blossom smells as sweet
As Araby, or groves of orange flowers;
Black-eyed and white, and feathered to one's feet,
How sweet they smell in morning's dewy hours!
When seething night is left upon the flowers,
And when morn's bright sun shines o'er the field,
The bean-bloom glitters in the gems o' showers,
And sweet the fragrance which the union yields
To battered footpaths crossing o'er the fields.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1925 that the Scopes Monkey Trial began in Dayton, Tennessee. In March of that year, the Tennessee legislature had declared it illegal to teach any doctrine that denied the Biblical story of divine creation. The American Civil Liberties Union immediately placed an ad in Tennessee newspapers asking for any teacher willing to challenge the state's law. It was the manager of a struggling mining company in Dayton, Tennessee, who spotted the ad, and he thought that the case might bring some publicity to his city. He persuaded a twenty-four-year-old high school teacher named John Scopes to take on the challenge. Scopes had never actually taught evolution in the classroom, but he had used an evolutionist textbook to help students review for a test. That was enough to qualify him as a defendant.
The liberal lawyer Clarence Darrow offered to argue for Scopes' defense. And the former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan volunteered to lead the prosecution. Most people assume that Bryan was a Christian fundamentalist who just wanted to keep religion in the classroom. But in fact, Bryan objected to Darwin's theory in part because it had given rise to the eugenics movement. Bryan said, "The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak."
The biology textbook at the heart of the Scopes Trial actually advocated the segregation of the races for the sake of improving the gene pool. Bryan believed that Darwin's theories damaged the very concept of humanity.
Many people thought Darrow would put Christianity itself on trial, but the judge in the case wouldn't let him. The judge announced at the start that the case would not consider the constitutionality of the law or its wisdom. It would only determine whether John Scopes had violated the law.
Clarence Darrow wasn't allowed to call any of the famous scientists from Harvard and the University of Chicago as witnesses. So he called the prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan as a witness. Bryan agreed to be cross-examined. Over the course of two hours, Clarence Darrow asked Bryan a series of questions in an effort to show that the Biblical creation story could not stand up to scientific reasoning.
Bryan was so exhausted by the case that he died five days after it was over. The jury convicted John Scopes, and he was fined $100. Darrow never got to appeal the case, because a higher court overruled the conviction on a technicality. The law stood on the books for more than forty years, until 1967, when it was struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment.
It's the birthday of the short-story writer Alice Munro, (books by this author) born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up and moved away from her hometown as soon as she could. She became a housewife and tried to write, but she didn't have much success until her marriage broke up in the 1970s, and she took a trip back to her hometown to help care for her aging father. She had planned only to stay for a year, but she found that the rural landscape she'd hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world.
She has gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since.
It's the birthday of the novelist Marcel Proust, (books by this author) born in Paris (1871). He's the author of an autobiographical novel that is more than three thousand pages long, and which has been translated and retranslated into English so many times that people now call it by two different English titles: Remembrance of Things Past or the more literal In Search of Lost Time.
When Proust submitted the first volume of the novel for publication, one publisher said, "I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep." All the other publishers agreed, and Proust had to publish the first volume himself in 1913. Few of his socialite friends expected that his book would amount to anything, so they were all surprised when it was hailed as a masterpiece.
TUESDAY, 11 JULY, 2006
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Poem: "Bathrooms" by Elisabeth Kuhn from Average C-Cup. © Turning Point. Reprinted with permission
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Bathrooms
The condo I just bought has two. Some houses
had three. What to do with them all? Use one?
Turn the others into extra closets?
Reserve one for guests? There are none
I'd invite. I talk too much to too
many people all day. On conference
weekends I have to talk Sundays too,
and when I close my door, I want silence.
Back home we were seven. Our bathroom the only
room we could lock in a house without keys.
We'd sit, read, dream, alone, not lonely,
until testy banging disturbed our peace.
Then we'd sigh, flush, put down our text,
and turn our sanctuary over to the next.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom, (books by this author) born in New York City (1930). His book, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), argued that all great writers are obsessed with breaking away from the great writers of the past. The book made him famous.
Bloom is one of the last critics in America who believes that great literature is a product of genius. He treats characters in books as though they are real people, and he believes that we should read not to learn about historical periods or political climates but to learn about the human soul.
In the last several years, he has begun writing books for general readers, because he thinks that scholars have forgotten how to read for pleasure. Many of his recent books have become best-sellers, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) and How to Read and Why (2000).
It's the birthday of E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White, (books by this author) born in Mount Vernon, New York (1899). In addition to writing children's books, he was also a great essayist, and he wrote many of his essays about taking care of a small farm. He especially liked writing about the personalities and goings-on of his farm animals. In his essay, "The Geese," he wrote, "I have had geese ... for a number of years and they have been my friends. 'Companions' would be a better word; geese are friends with no one, they badmouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get use to their ingratitude and their false accusations."
White was a young advertising copywriter in 1925, when he happened to purchase the first issue of The New Yorker magazine at a newsstand in Grand Central Station. He bought it and eventually joined the staff in 1926.
In 1929, he took a vacation to Ontario, working at a summer camp that he had gone to as a kid, and he seriously considered quitting his job at The New Yorker to become a camp director. He had just turned thirty, and he was disappointed that he hadn't written anything other than a lot of humorous magazine pieces. He wrote in a letter to Katherine Angell that he considered himself a failure as a writer, a mere hack, and he wasn't sure what the point was in continuing. She wrote back to say that there was no question in her mind that he was a great writer, even if he hadn't produced a masterpiece yet. When White returned to New York, he married her.
They eventually moved to a farmhouse in Maine, where White kept animals. He was particularly fond of his pigs and felt guilty about turning them into ham and bacon. One day, while he was walking through his orchard, carrying a pail of slop to his pig, he got an idea for a story about how a pig's life could be saved. He said, "I had been watching a large spider in the backhouse, and what with one thing and another, the idea came to me."
That was Charlotte's Web, which came out in 1952. It's the story of Wilbur, a runt pig saved from slaughter when a spider named Charlotte begins to weave words about him into a web above his pen. After saving his life, she lays her eggs and dies. White's publishers tried to get him to change the unhappy ending, but he refused.
Charlotte's Web became the masterpiece E.B. White had been trying to write his whole life.
E. B. White wrote, "All I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world."
WEDNESDAY, 12 JULY, 2006
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Poem: "Sunday Morning, Late August" by Deborah Cummins from Beyond the Reach. © BkMk Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Sunday Morning, Late August
She's never sat at a steamy café near Pont Neuf
and fed a lover a perfect tarte tatin,
never slept naked in a rented room
on Place de la Madeleine, shutters open to the rain.
Already, a thousand times before this morning,
she's wished to be someplace else if only
a little further down the beach.
In this small town on the Cape, even clouds
drag away their important business.
Flimsy chairs face seaward, as if in wait
for something glorious, drastic.
An ocean away from Boulevard St. Germain,
the water shimmers like unspooled foil.
Some other life lies elsewhere:
hers, unclaimed.
But why, now, as her husband crosses the yard
and with customary gestures plucks—
oh, how banal—a common daisy,
does her blood, running its old familiar route,
deliver such bounty to her heart?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, (books by this author) born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He's the author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849). He went off to Harvard when he was just sixteen. He was twenty-seven when he built a small cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, and wrote about his time there.
Thoreau said, "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."
It's the birthday of the lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, (books by this author) born in New York City (1895). Together with the composer Richard Rodgers, he was part of the famous songwriting duo Rodgers and Hammerstein. Their Broadway hits include the musicals Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959).
It's the birthday of poet and politician Pablo Neruda, (books by this author) born in Parral, Chile (1904). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. In his Nobel lecture he said, "All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are."
It's the birthday of (Gaius) Julius Caesar, born in Rome around 100 B.C. He was the great military leader who managed to capture most of what became France and Great Britain for the Roman Empire.
In a series of dispatches from the battlefield, Caesar became his own war correspondent. Unlike many of the Roman poets and historians of the era, Caesar wrote short descriptive prose that was easy for ordinary people to understand. His stories of military victories turned him into a national hero, but the Roman Senate increasingly saw him as a threat. It passed legislation requiring him to lay down his military command and return to Rome.
But Caesar realized that he had the largest and most battle-tested army in the empire under his command. And if he returned to Rome, his political opponents would end his career. And so, on January 10, 49 B.C., Caesar crossed the Rubicon River with his army, directly challenging the authority of the Senate. The result was a civil war. Though he was outnumbered in many of the major battles, Caesar won the war. And he was extremely merciful with captured military leaders, because he wanted them as his allies. That might have been his biggest mistake, since it was a group of those men he spared that began to conspire against him.
He was an absolute dictator of Rome, with ambitious plans to redistribute wealth and land. But a group of senators, led by Brutus and Cassius, wanted to bring back the old republic. So they organized an assassination on the steps of the Senate.
The Roman republic never returned. Instead, Rome would be ruled by a series of emperors for the rest of the empire's existence.
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Poem: "Ex-boyfriends in Heaven" by Gwen Hart from Lost and Found. © David Robert Books. Reprinted with permission.
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Ex-boyfriends in Heaven
Ex-boyfriends never go to hell,
no matter how many times
you suggest it. No, they ascend straight
to heaven, where they speak French,
wear matching socks, and always,
always arrive on time, with a full
tank of gas and a bottle of wine.
They never curse your cat
or your mother, never call you up
drunk doing Arnold Schwarzenegger
impressions, never say Hey Rita
if your name is Tammy,
never say Hey Tammy
if your name is Joan.
They're better trained than dogs
and they smell better, too, better
than Twinkies or camellias, better
than anything on earth. Once
in a while, they take a holiday,
drive their Porsches down
through the clouds
in one long line and ring
the doorbell in your dreams,
offering tender apologies, tender
chicken cutlets, tender love.
But before you take one sack
of groceries, before your lips
graze a clean-shaven jaw,
before you let one polished
Oxford loafer through your door,
remember that as soon as they cross
the threshold, the truth will slip
in behind them: ex-boyfriends only
exist this way in heaven, or
whatever you want to call it,
their new lives without you.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the Nobel Prize winning playwright and poet Wole Soyinka (books by this author), born in Abeokuta, Nigeria (1934). He won a scholarship to England's University of Leeds, where he studied Shakespeare. While he was in school, he learned that his home country would soon be freed from its colonial rulers, and he couldn't wait to return home to a newly independent nation. So he was horrified when the new native rulers of Nigeria turned out to be just as corrupt as the colonial rulers had ever been.
In 1965, on the day of an unfair election in Nigeria, Soyinka drove to the local radio station, where they were about to broadcast a prerecorded victory speech by the corrupt new president. Soyinka walked in the front door of the radio station with a gun and a reel of audiotape, and he forced to station managers to play a dissenting broadcast instead. Somehow, he managed to stay out of jail until 1967, when he was thrown in prison.
He spent the next two years in solitary confinement. They would not give him anything to write with, so he made his own ink and wrote on toilet paper and cigarette packages. His prison writings were incredibly popular, and they were eventually collected in Poems from Prison (1969) and The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972).
In time, Soyinka went into exile in England, where he began teaching at Cambridge. It was there that he wrote his play Death and the King's Horseman (1976).
He's continued fighting against corruption in Nigeria while writing books. In 1994, he had his passport revoked by Nigerian officials, and had to escape his home country on a twelve-hour motorbike ride over the border. He spent the next several years writing his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, but he didn't finish it until he was able to return to Nigeria. The memoir came out this year (2006).
Wole Soyinka said, "A book if necessary should be a hammer [or] a hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world."
It's the birthday of Russian short-story writer Isaak Babel (books by this author), born in the Jewish ghetto in Odessa, Ukraine (1894).
It's the birthday of novelist Dale Peck (books by this author), born on Long Island, New York (1967). He made his name in the literary world before he reached the age of thirty with the books Martin and John (1993), about a young man's attempt to cope with his lover's death from AIDS, and The Law of Enclosures (1996).
His collection of book critiques, Hatchet Jobs, was published in 2004. It's a collection of scathing book reviews he's written over the years.
On this day in 1798, William Wordsworth (books by this author) wrote one of his greatest poems, "Tintern Abbey."
FRIDAY, 14 JULY, 2006
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Poem: "After" by Lucille Broderson from Beware. © Spout Press. Reprinted with permission.
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After
The eaves sag on the house,
the dog grays,
its eyes film over,
there are lumps on its legs.
It doesn't get you up in the morning.
Even your daughter's love
for you, her Daddy, goes.
You die and she looks at her mother
for the first time.
You leave and your clothes
hang untouched for a year.
On a hanger, a suitcoat with a shirt under it,
a tie folded in at the neck.
Your wife leans against it, crying.
Now your son wears it,
feels comfortable, he says.
He's seen your bankbook, knows
how much money you left.
Your wife raises her face
to another man, wants more from him
than he can ever give.
There's no end to her yearning.
Touching, touching, that's all she wants.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Owen Wister, (books by this author) born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1860). He attended Harvard, went to study music in Paris, came back to be a lawyer in Philadelphia, but he became very ill and decided to rest for the summer out in Wyoming. He learned all about the ways of the Old West, keeping diaries on his many trips west of Wyoming. He used his knowledge of life on the frontier to write The Virginian (1902), which became a major success. It made the cowboy into an American folk hero. It also made famous the line, "When you call me that, smile."
It's the birthday of the singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, born in Okemah, Oklahoma (1913). He wrote "This Land Is Your Land," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Vigilante Man," "Hobo's Lullaby," "Hard, Ain't it Hard," "Pastures of Plenty," "This Train is Bound for Glory," "I Got No Home in the World Anymore," "Billy the Kid."
It's the birthday of short-story writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, (books by this author) born in Leoncin, Poland (1904). His father failed to finish rabbinical school but worked as an unofficial rabbi anyway, counseling the people in his neighborhood in the front room of the family's tiny three-room apartment. Singer described his father's living room as "a kind of court of law, synagogue, house of study, and a psychoanalyst's office where people of troubled spirit would come to unburden themselves." Singer spent much of his childhood eavesdropping on the people who sought his father's advice.
His older brother was a free thinker who gave Singer a kind of parallel education to the religious education he got from his father. His father forbid him to read anything other than religious writings, but when he was ten years old, his older brother gave him a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) translated into Yiddish. His brother also gave him books on forbidden subjects like astronomy and evolution, and he never forgot the night his brother declared at the dinner table that there was no God.
After Hitler came to power, Singer decided to move to the United States. He settled in New York City in 1935, and immediately felt terribly homesick. He got a job writing reviews for the Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward, but for ten years he wrote almost no fiction at all. When Hitler invaded Poland, he fell into a deep depression, worried sick about his mother and younger brother. He later learned that they had frozen to death in a forest with other Jewish prisoners.
He also felt as though he was living in the shadow of his brother, who had also moved to New York City and had already become a successful writer. Then, in 1944, his older brother died of a heart attack. Singer later called his brother's death the greatest misfortune of his entire life, but it cured his writer's block. The first result was his book The Family Moskat (1950), which told the story of a Jewish family in Warsaw at the turn of the century. It was a description of a culture that had been almost completely wiped out by the Holocaust.
Singer wrote in Yiddish and belonged to the Yiddish community in New York City, but he knew that his work would never reach a wide audience unless it was translated into English. So he arranged for translations of all his work to be published in conjunction with the Yiddish versions simultaneously. The result was that he became more widely read in English translation than he was in Yiddish.
Singer went on to become one of the most popular Jewish writers of the 20th century, and he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978.
SATURDAY, 15 JULY, 2006
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Poem: "Lucky" by Michael Blumenthal from Against Romance. © Pleasure Boat Studio. Reprinted with permission.
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Lucky
Off to the market to buy a lottery ticket,
I consider the possibilities of luck: good luck.
bad luck, beginner's luck, hard luck, the luck
of the draw, and I realize I am lucky, in fact,
to be here at all, on this benignly lit street
on a night in October, as luck would have it,
and I know that it's not just the luck of
the Irish, but any man's, to walk the streets
of his town, beneath the shapely moon,
and ponder the dumb luck that brought him here,
against all odds, into the vast lottery of minnow
and ovum, and to know he has once again lucked out,
this very night, spent as it has been without
accident or incident, a small testimonial
to the quietudes that are still possible,
the only half-felt wish for some grand stroke
of luck that will change everything, that will
change, really, nothing at all, our lives being,
in some sense, beyond the vicissitudes
of luck and yearning, the night being lovely,
the day finite, many of those we know whose luck
has already run out, and we not yet among them,
thank the beneficence of Lady Luck, our stars
just now flickering into flame
as the night lucks in.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the painter and engraver who signed his works with just his first name Rembrandt, born Rembrandt van Rijn in Leiden, Netherlands (1606). He was one of the greatest portrait artists of all time, because he was so good at capturing facial expressions. His most famous painting is known as The Night Watch (1642), and it shows a group of men getting ready to go on a patrol of the city. All of the men in the painting paid to be in it.
It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer Richard Russo, (books by this author) born in Johnstown, New York (1949). He's the author of many novels about small-town life in New England, including Nobody's Fool (1993) and Empire Falls (2001). He grew up in Gloversville, New York, a small town that Russo found suffocating and depressing, and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. So he went away to college in Arizona.
Russo started a novel about a woman who had moved to Arizona from a small town in New York state. He wrote five hundred pages, but it was a mess. He showed his novel to a friend, who pointed out that the only good parts were the flashbacks to the woman's hometown in New York. So Russo started over and rewrote his novel about that town in New York state, and the result was his first novel Mohawk (1986).
Russo said, "The thing about small towns is that ... in cities you can escape. In small towns you have to deal with everybody. ... You can't simply walk past the poster in the restaurant that announces the auction for the family with the house that burned down. In New York City you habitually walk past people in far more desperate straits than that. You're more your brother's keeper in a small town."
It's the birthday of novelist Iris Murdoch, (books by this author) born to Anglo-Irish parents in Dublin (1919). Her novels include A Severed Head (1961), The Sea, The Sea (1978), and Jackson's Dilemma (1995). She wrote twenty-six novels, all of them in longhand, copied them out, sealed the two handwritten manuscripts in plastic bags, and carried them down to her publisher herself. She was a perfectionist, and she never let publishers change a word of what she had written.
Murdoch said, "Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."
SUNDAY, 16 JULY, 2006
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Poem: "The Garret" by Ezra Pound from Selected Poems 1908-1969. © Faber & Faber. Reprinted with permission.
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The Garret
Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.
Dawn enters with little feet
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1945 that the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., one hundred and twenty miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started in 1939. The bomb contained a ball of plutonium about the size of a baseball, surrounded by a ring of uranium and a series of detonators. Its main pieces were placed on the backseat of an army jeep and driven to the test site, where the bomb was assembled and positioned at the top of a hundred-foot steel tower for the test explosion.
At 2:00 a.m. on this day in 1945, a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico. The men assembling the bomb had to do so in the midst of a lightning storm, wondering what would happen if lightning struck the tower. But the weather cleared up just before dawn. They started the countdown fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. The physicists and military men watched from about 10,000 yards away. They all wore Welder's glasses and suntan lotion.
One of the physicists who was there that day said, "We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. ... Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen ... it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. ... There was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one."
The ball of fire rose rapidly, releasing four times the heat of the interior of the sun, followed by a mushroom cloud that extended forty thousand feet into the sky. Tests showed that it had released energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT. The burst of light was so bright that it lit up the moon. An army captain in Albuquerque who knew about the test could see the explosion from his hotel room, more than a hundred miles away.
Later, when the scientists went to examine the site of the explosion, they found a crater in the ground 1200 feet in diameter. The ground was covered with a green, glassy substance, which was actually sand that had been fused into glass by the heat.
At the time, the military announced that an ammunitions dump had exploded, and a few weeks later the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
It was on this day in 1951 that the J.D. Salinger's first and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published. In 1941, Salinger (books by this author) sent The New Yorker a story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a troubled teenager named Holden Caulfield, and The New Yorker bought it. It was November of 1941, and The New Yorker planned to run the story in their Christmas issue. But that December, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Salinger's story was put on hold. It was considered too trivial in a time of war.
Salinger enlisted in the army and he participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. For the next several months he saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. At the end of the war Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from a nervous breakdown.
It was after Salinger's release from the hospital that he sent out for publication the first Holden Caulfield story narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, a story called "I'm Crazy." It was published in Collier's in December of 1945. One year later, in 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," which they had been holding onto since before the war began.
Salinger continued publishing short stories for the rest of the 1940s, most of them in The New Yorker, and in 1949, the editor, Robert Giroux, wrote him to ask if he wanted to publish a collection of short stories. Giroux didn't hear back from Salinger for months, and then, one day, Salinger walked into his office.
Giroux said, "A tall, sad-looking young man with a long face and deep-set black eyes walked in, saying, 'It's not my stories that should be published first, but the novel I'm working on ... about this kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.'" Giroux said he'd love to publish it, but when it was finished one of his superiors thought the kid in the book seemed too crazy. So Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye with Little, Brown and Company, and it came out on this day in 1951.
It reached the best-seller list after being in print just two weeks, and it stayed there for more than six months. It has gone on to sell more than sixty million copies.
