Poem: "Map" by Gary Snyder, from Left Out in the Rain. © Shoemaker & Hoard. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Map

A hill, a farm,
A forest, and a valley.
Half a hill plowed, half woods.
A forest valley and a valley field.

Sun passes over;
Two solstices a year
Cow in the pasture
Sometimes deer

A farmhouse built of wood.
A forest built on bones.
The high field, hawks
The low field, crows

Wren in the brambles
Frogs in the creek
Hot in summer
Cold in snow

The woods fade and pass.
The farm goes on.
The farm quits and fails
The woods creep down

Stocks fall you can't sell corn
Big frost and tree-mice starve
Who wins who cares?
The woods have time.
The farmer has heirs.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is the anniversary of the surrender that ended the American Revolutionary War, in Yorktown, Virginia in 1781. George Washington had had a difficult spring. His troops were low on supplies and food, their clothing was in shreds, and there had been a steady stream of desertions from his ranks.

By summer, Washington had only a few thousand troops camped at West Point, New York. The British expected Washington to attack New York City, which he had been planning to do for most of the spring. But when he learned that the British forces under the control of Lord Cornwallis were building a naval base on the Yorktown Peninsula in Virginia, he decided impulsively to march his army from New York to Virginia, in the hopes of trapping Cornwallis and capturing his army.

Washington's plan was one of his boldest moves of the entire war—moving his army 400 miles in order to catch his enemy by surprise. He had to march his troops toward New York City first, to scare the British into hunkering down for an attack. Then he quickly moved south.

Washington's men and their French allies marched every day from 2:00 a.m. until it grew too hot to continue. It was a hot summer, and on one day, more than 400 men passed out from the heat. Few armies in history had ever moved so far so fast. Lord Cornwallis learned of Washington's approach before he arrived, but Cornwallis chose not to flee, because he thought his troops would be evacuated by the British navy. He didn't realize that the British ships had already been routed by a French fleet from the south. So in the early weeks of October, he watched as Washington's troops surrounded the city and began a siege. After several days of bombarding the city with gun and cannon fire, Washington received word that Cornwallis would surrender. Washington requested that the British march out of the city to give up their arms, and the surrender began at 2:00 A.M on this day in 1881. The one soldier who didn't surrender was Cornwallis himself. Instead, he sent his sword with his second in command to be offered to the French general, signifying that the British had been defeated by the French, not the Americans.

In didn't matter though. England didn't have enough money to raise another army, and they appealed to America for peace. Two years later, the Treaty of Paris was signed, and the war was officially over.

It's the birthday of the novelist Tracy Chevalier, (books by this author) born in Washington, D.C. (1962). Her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring became a best-seller when it came out in 2000.

After college, she got a job as a reference book editor, editing anthologies of literature. She worked the job for 12 years, getting more and more bored. She said, "I wasn't having much fun. ... But I hung on—I thought things would eventually improve." So she decided to start writing novels. Her first novel, The Virgin Blue, was a moderate success.

Chevalier wasn't sure what to write about next. One day she was lying on her bed, and she looked up at a poster on her wall of the Johannes Vermeer painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." She'd owned the poster since she was 19 years old, and she looked at it all the time. She later said, "It's such an open painting. I'm never sure what the girl is thinking or what her expression is. Sometimes she seems sad, other times seductive. [That morning] I looked up at the painting and wondered what Vermeer did or said to the model to get her to look like that. And right then I made up the story."

Chevalier started writing the novel in February of 1998, and it was around the same time that she got pregnant. She knew she had to finish the book before the baby was born, or she might never finish it, so she wrote as quickly as she could, and managed to finish two weeks before the birth of her son.

It's the birthday of the novelist who writes under the name John le Carré, (books by this author) born David Cornwell in Poole, England (1931). He got a job in the queen's secret service as a young man, but he found the actual work of a spy pretty boring. He said, "[It was] spectacularly undramatic."

Since he was disappointed in his life as a spy, le Carré decided to entertain himself by writing novels. He had to keep his identity secret, so he used the pen name John le Carré. He said, "I wanted something three-syllabled and exotic." Le Carré means "the square" in French. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), was so successful that he quit his job as a spy and began to write full time.

It's the birthday of the novelist Philip Pullman, (books by this author) born in Norwich, England (1946). He's best known as the author of a trilogy of fantasy novels that have been best-sellers among children and adults, and the last of which, The Amber Spyglass (2000), was the first children's novel ever to be nominated for Great Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.

Philip Pullman said, "There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book."

FRIDAY, 20 OCTOBER, 2006
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Poem: "Samurai Song" by Robert Pinsky, from Jersey Rain. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1892 that the city of Chicago officially dedicated the World's Columbian Exposition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing to America. Though it was formally dedicated on this day in 1892, the planning ran behind schedule, so the fair wasn't actually held until the following summer.

The area designated for the fair covered almost 700 acres along the shore of Lake Michigan, and a giant "white city" was built in the style of classical architecture. The children's book writer L. Frank Baum was one of the visitors to the fair, and used the White City as the model for his Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1900).

At night, everything was lit up with a string of electric lights, the first time electric lights were used on such a large scale in America. In fact in was at the Chicago World's Fair that most Americans first saw electricity in use. Among the many things first introduced to Americans at the fair were postcards, fiberglass, the zipper, the ice cream cone, Cracker Jacks, Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat, belly dancing, spray paint, the Pledge of Allegiance, and, of course, the Ferris Wheel. It was the most successful world's fair ever held in the United States. In its half-year of existence, it drew 27 million visitors, or about half the American population at the time.

It's the birthday of the poet Robert Pinsky, (books by this author) born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1940). He's the author of many collections of poetry, including Sadness and Happiness (1975), The Want Bone (1990), and Jersey Rain (2000). He said, "The longer I live, the more I see there's something about reciting rhythmical words aloud—it's almost biological—that comforts and enlivens human beings."

Today is the birthday of political humorist Art Buchwald, (books by this author) born in Mount Vernon, New York (1925). This past February (2006), Buchwald was diagnosed with kidney failure. He decided he didn't want to go through dialysis, so he checked into a hospice and expected to die within a few weeks. A huge number of people came to say goodbye. He said, "You had to take a ticket like in a shopping center because there were so many people coming in. But as time went on, they kept saying, 'Wait a minute. Why are you still here?'"

For a reason doctors can't explain, Buchwald's kidneys had started working again. So he decided to write a book about the experience of getting ready to die and then not dying. It's called Too Soon to Say Goodbye, and it comes out this November. It includes eulogies that Tom Brokaw and Mike Wallace wrote in anticipation of his death, because Buchwald said, "I told them, 'I'm not going to be cheated out of a funeral.'"

Art Buchwald said, "I always wanted to get into politics, but I was never light enough to make the team."

It's the birthday of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, (books by this author) born in Charleville, France (1854). He was a wild bohemian as a young man. He hopped trains to Paris, usually without a ticket, where he lived on the street and often wound up in jail. He had a habit of taking off his clothes and shouting obscenities in public, and that tended to put people off. But everyone agreed that his poetry was the work of a genius, and the poet Paul-Marie Verlaine fell in love with him. The two had a scandalously open homosexual affair that shocked the rest of the Paris literary scene. But they had a bitter break-up, and the relationship ended when Verlaine tried to murder Rimbaud with a pistol, shooting him in the arm. Verlaine went to prison and Rimbaud went back to his mother, and wrote one of his last books, A Season in Hell (1873). He then gave up on poetry and took off to wander around the world, winding up in Africa, where he became an arms dealer.

SATURDAY, 21 OCTOBER, 2006
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Poem: "A Child's Evening Prayer" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Complete Poems. © Penguin Books. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

A Child's Evening Prayer

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay
God grant me grace my prayers to say:
O God! preserve my mother dear
In strength and health for many a year;
And, O! preserve my father too,
And may I pay him reverence due;
And may I my best thoughts employ
To be my parents' hope and joy;
And O! preserve my brothers both
From evil doings and from sloth,
And may we always love each other,
Our friends, our father, and our mother:
And still, O Lord, to me impart
An innocent and grateful heart,
That after my last sleep I may
Awake to thy eternal day!
                                   Amen.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of one of the greatest science-fiction writers of our time, Ursula K. Le Guin, (books by this author) born in Berkeley, California (1929). She is the author of many classic science-fiction novels, including A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Her father was the well-known anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and she grew up listening to native American legends. She would later say, "My father studied real cultures and I make them up—in a way, it's the same thing."

It's the birthday of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (books by this author) born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England (1772). As a child, he was caught up in an epidemic of some mysterious fever, and it was during that illness that he began to have vivid nightmares that would recur for the rest of his life, and which he said inspired many of his poems.

He went through a rough time in college, racking up debt, having his heart broken, getting into trouble for his radical political views. He considered suicide, but instead he decided to enlist as a private in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons under an assumed name. He worked on a plan to found a utopian society in Pennsylvania, and single-handedly tried to start his own magazine. The magazine work proved to be extremely taxing, and he grew increasingly miserable until one day he was introduced to the poet William Wordsworth.

They met only briefly in 1795, but they struck up a correspondence in which they discussed poetry and showed each other their work. Wordsworth encouraged him to focus on poetry, rather than his journalism, and so that's what he did. Writing poetry made him happier and happier, and after finishing a particularly long and ambitious poem, he decided he needed to see Wordsworth in the flesh, so he set out to walk to Wordsworth's house, miles away. When he approached Wordsworth's house, he was overcome with happiness. Wordsworth's wife said, "Coleridge did not keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field, which he cut off at an angle."

It was the beginning of a 37-year friendship, and the most important friendship of either man's life. The two men took long walks together throughout that summer, at day and night. They both had a habit of composing poetry while walking, though one of their friends, the essayist William Hazlitt wrote, "[Coleridge preferred] uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk."

That first year of friendship with Wordsworth was the most productive period of Coleridge's life. It was sometime that autumn of 1797 that Coleridge wrote the famous lines, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea."

Just a few months later, Coleridge went on a winter walk with Wordsworth and then began to write a ballad about a tragic sea voyage. He spent the next year filling it with images from his lifelong nightmares. And that was his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798). It tells the story of a sailor who brings a curse on his ship when he kills an albatross.

Within a few years, Coleridge's life began to go down hill. He became addicted to opium, which killed his creativity and ruined his friendship with Wordsworth. He failed to complete most of the numerous ambitious projects he started, including a 1,400-page work of geography, a two-volume history of English prose, a translation of Faust, a musical about Adam and Eve, a history of logic, a history of German metaphysics, a study of witchcraft, an epic on the fall of Jerusalem, and an encyclopedia.

It was on this day in 1879 that the inventor Thomas Edison finally struck upon the key to inventing a workable electric light in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He started off using platinum wire, just as everyone had before him, but after more than a year of frustration, he decided to try carbonized cotton thread. At 1:30 in the morning on this day in 1879, he hooked a carbon filament up to an electric circuit and it glowed from 1:30 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. the following afternoon.

SUNDAY, 22 OCTOBER, 2006
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Poem: "What You Realize When Cancer Comes" by Larry Smith, from A River Remains. © WordTech Editions. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

What You Realize When Cancer Comes

You will not live forever—No
you will not, for a ceiling of clouds
hovers in the sky.

You are not as brave
as you once thought.
Sounds of death
echo in your chest.

You feel the bite of pain,
the taste of it running
through you.

Following the telling to friends
comes a silence of
felt goodbyes. You come to know
the welling of tears.

Your children are stronger
than you thought and
closer to your skin.

The beauty of animals
birds on telephone lines,
dogs who look into your eyes,
all bring you peace.

You want no more confusion
than what already rises
in your head and heart.

You watch television less,
will never read all those books,
much less the ones
you have.

Songs can move you now, so that
you want to hold onto the words
like the hands of children.

Your own hands look good to you.
old and familiar
as water.

You read your lover's skin
like a road map
into yourself.

All touch is precious now.

There are echoes

in the words thrown
before you.

When they take your picture now
you wet your lips, swallow once
and truly smile.

Talk of your lost parents
pulls you out, and
brings you home again.

You are in a river
flowing in and through you.
Take a breath. Reach out your arms.
You can survive.

            A river is flowing
                        flowing in and through you.
                        Take a breath. Reach out your arms.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the humorist and columnist John Gould, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1908). He was an essayist and columnist who spent 60 years writing a weekly dispatch from his farm in Maine for The Christian Science Monitor. His column is believed to be the longest-running column ever in a U.S. newspaper.

It's the birthday of novelist and poet Ivan Bunin, (books by this author) born near Voronezh, Russia (1870). He was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize. Bunin took a job as a statistician for the government, which required that he travel around the countryside, observing the changing conditions of rural life. It was the perfect job for a writer, because he began to incorporate his observations into his fiction. Russian writers had for years been sentimentalizing the lives of peasants as more simple and beautiful than the lives of the middle class. But Bunin observed first hand that the lives of peasants were often brutal and miserable, and that they frequently responded to the harsh conditions of their lives with violence. In 1910, Bunin published his first great book, The Village.

His work was extremely difficult to translate, because much of his fiction read like poetry. And so his work hasn't made it to a much wider audience since his death in 1953. But there have been two new translations of his short stories in the last few years. Sunstroke: Selected Stories came out in 2002 and The Elagin Affair and Other Stories came out in 2005.

It's the birthday of the novelist Doris Lessing, (books by this author) born in Kermanshah, Persia, which is now Iran (1919). She grew up in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. She published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in 1950.

It's the birthday of the true-crime writer Ann Rule, (books by this author) born Ann Stackhouse in Lowell, Michigan (1935). She was working at a suicide hotline center when she met a young, charming law student named Ted Bundy, who, it turned out, was guilty of the murders of more than 30 women in five states. She went on to write a book about him called The Stranger Beside Me (1980), which became one of the best-selling true-crime novels ever written.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch^®.

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