Poem: "Cases" by Parker Towle, from Body Language. © The Library of America. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Cases

Man in his late seventies comes in with his wife,
weak, lost twenty-five pounds, can't eat, hard to talk,
seeing double off and on past eighteen months,
been to a family doctor and two specialists.

They don't know, I've got some ideas. It's
beyond my scope, here in the rural north country.
I get him tucked away in the medical center
by the following morning. He's out in five days

with a diagnosis, I was right for once. He's
eighty percent better on treatment, says
he's two hundred percent. Gives me the credit
for once. The gray hair helps. Man comes in

to emergency with loss of vision in one eye.
works full-time, in his sixties. It goes away
and he wants to go home. Internist and eye doctor
find nothing. I find something and say, No.

Family says I'm overreacting but they all agree,
reluctantly. Urgent angiogram-surgery on the
neck arteries is booked for the following morning.
That night his opposite side becomes paralyzed.

Emergency surgery cleans out a nearly
blocked vessel. They don't appreciate the
postoperative pain. They don't appreciate my
style or anything about me. He walks out

saved from an almost certain permanent
disability. Woman comes in with a headache,
high blood pressure, in her fifties. I do a spinal,
few red cells, radiologist gets me on the phone.

He says the CAT scan's negative, I'm not
so sure and send her down country for an
angiogram. Radiologist was right and I was
wrong — no aneurysm in her brain. Young

mother of two comes in with seizures hard to
control all her life, and paralyzed on the right side
from birth. I consider a CAT scan a waste of money:
the gray hair stands for experience, remember?

She gets slowly worse over the years. Her family
doctor does a CAT scan, finds a malformation
of the brain. We just ain't so smart, my old
teacher used to say when I was an intern. A man

comes in, in his sixties, can't work, losing weight,
muscles are twitching, hard to swallow, hard
to talk. Do some tests, tell his wife and him
he's got Lou Gehrig's Disease, it will affect

his breathing, he's going to die, it will be
tough, we'll try some things. We do, he gets
worse, can't walk, can't feed himself.
I visit the house: a small cape with a screened

Porch behind a variety store in a small town in
New Hampshire. He gets worse, I
visit some more, talk some to him,
to his wife and son, the man dies.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Jacob Grimm, (books by this author) born in Hanau, Germany (1785). He and his younger brother Wilhelm, who was born a year later, collected and published Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812, which led to the birth of the study of folklore.

It's the birthday of the man who invented a system of reading and writing for the blind, Louis Braille, born in Coupvray, France (1809). He was blinded in his father's harness shop when he was three years old. But even without his eyesight, he was the best student in his school, and went on to become a famous organist and cellist in Paris.

But when he was still a student, Louis Braille was frustrated by his inability to read and write. Then, he heard about a French army officer who had devised a system of written communication of raised dots and dashes for nighttime battles. Braille borrowed the idea of the dots, and set about creating an alphabet that could be read by touch. He decided that each letter would be represented by a different arrangement of six dots packed close enough that each letter could be read by a single fingertip.

Braille died in 1852, and his alphabet for the blind didn't come into widespread use until 1878, when it was presented at an International Congress in Paris. It went on to be used for virtually every major world language, and it was adapted for mathematical calculations and musical notations. Braille's system made it possible for the first time for the blind to learn to read and write and to enter practical professions.

But today, reading and writing of Braille is something of a dying art. There are now far more audio versions of books than there are books printed in Braille, and there are software programs to convert written text into audio. Today only about 10 percent of blind children in this country learn to read Braille.

FRIDAY, 5 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "Pandora" by Kelley Jean White, from Body Language. © The Library of America. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Pandora

September.
Second-year medical student.
An early patient interview
at the Massachusetts General Hospital
Routine hernia repair planned, not done.
Abdomen opened and closed.
Filled with disease, cancer.

The patient is fifty-six,
a workingman, Irish
I sit with him, notice
the St. Christopher medal
around his neck.
Can't hurt, can it? he laughs.
I have become his friend.

I bring him a coloring book picture
that shows this thing, this unfamiliar
organ that melted beneath our hands
at dissection:
Pancreas.

Leaving his room, crying,
avoiding classmates,
I take the back stairs.
I find myself locked,
coatless in the courtyard outside.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the poet W. D. (William DeWitt) Snodgrass, (books by this author) born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania (1926). He started writing poetry at a time when the poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had persuaded most poets writing in English that poetry should be full of imagery and symbols and allusions to mythology, but that it shouldn't contain any obviously personal details.

But while Snodgrass was studying poetry at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in the early 1950s, his marriage began to fall apart, and he couldn't help but write about it in his poems. He showed some of these personal poems to his teacher, the poet Robert Lowell, but Lowell didn't like them.

Snodgrass kept working on the poems for the next few years, while he took a variety of teaching jobs. He eventually sent the revised drafts to Robert Lowell again, and this time Lowell thought they were amazing. They even influenced Lowell's decision to start writing personal poems of his own. Lowell helped Snodgrass get his first poetry collection published, and it came out in 1959, called Heart's Needle. It was Snodgrass's first book, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Snodgrass's work helped inspire a whole new school of poetry in which American poets began to write openly about their personal lives for the first time in decades. Snodgrass has since been called one of the founders of confessional poetry, but he said, "The term confessional seems to imply either that I'm concerned with religious matters (I am not) or that I'm writing some sort of bedroom memoir (I hope I'm not)."

But in defense of writing personal poems, Snodgrass said, "The only reality which [a poet] can ever surely know is that self he cannot help being. ... If he pretties it up, if he changes its meaning, if he gives it the voice of any borrowed authority, if in short he rejects this reality, his mind will be less than alive. So will his words."

It's the birthday of Umberto Eco, (books by this author) born in the Piedmont region of Italy (1932). He started out as a philosopher and literary critic, and became one of the first intellectuals to study popular culture, writing serious essays about James Bond movies and Superman comics and other products of pop culture that had previously been ignored by literary critics.

Then, one day, Eco decided to produce some popular culture himself. He got an idea for a murder mystery set in a monastery in the middle ages, and he called it The Name of the Rose. When it came out in 1980, The Name of the Rose sold 2 million copies. He's continued writing novels since then, including Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and The Island of the Day Before (1995).

It's the birthday of the humorist and conservative columnist Florence King, (books by this author) born in Washington, D.C. (1936). She wrote a column from 1991 to 2002 in National Review magazine called "The Misanthrope's Corner," and she's also the author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1985), a fictionalized memoir about her grandmother.

Florence King said, "[To be a wit] you must have a dismal outlook on life and human nature. You have to be a misanthrope, a loner, an introvert — all the things Americans don't want to be and don't think people should be. Wit goes for the jugular; humor goes for the jocular." She also said, "The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners."

SATURDAY, 6 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "Poe's Anvil" by David Ray, from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems. © The Backwater Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Poe's Anvil

At the drive-in theater where they sell junk
on Sundays we saw a man and his wife standing
by a pick-up truck trying to sell his anvil.
It sat up in the truck's bed — it was black,
heavy, and elegant like a mammoth's tusk.
And his name was written on it like a signature,
in iron that once ran like ink. His name was Poe.
I talked with him and he recalled briefly
days when his anvil stood outside a shed,
a workshop like a harbor set in a sea
of green tomato fields, and inside
he had a coal fire and a bellows and he watched
the tractor replace mules and the car
replace wagons. He tired of horse-shoes,
wagon wheels and plows, of hitches, harrows,
and lugs, of axles, crankcases and flywheels,
and he sat somewhat amused (and dying, his wife
told us), presiding over the sale of his own
monument, which he wanted someone to go on
hammering on, and in the midday city sun
the theater's white screen was blank
like a faded quilt or Moby Dick's stretched skin.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of journalist, poet, novelist, and biographer Carl Sandburg, (books by this author) born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). He was a poet and a political journalist, but he didn't have any real financial success until a publisher suggested that he write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, was Sandburg's first best-seller. He moved to a new home and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes.

It's the birthday of poet Khalil Gibran, (books by this author) born in a mountain village in Lebanon (1883). When Gibran was a boy, his mother decided to leave her alcoholic husband and take her four children to America. They settled in Boston, where they had relatives, and it was there that a charity worker noticed that Gibran appeared to be artistically gifted. Members of the aristocratic Boston society found him charming, and they began inviting him to social gatherings, where he discussed philosophy and poetry. Numerous aristocratic ladies fell in love with him and became his patrons, but he never married any of them.

One day, a man named Alfred A. Knopf was invited to a gathering at Gibran's apartment. Knopf was just starting up a publishing company, and when he saw how fascinated people were with Gibran, he decided to offer the man a publishing contract. Gibran's first two books with Knopf weren't very successful, but his third was a book called The Prophet. When it came out in 1924, The Prophet sold slowly at first, but its sales kept growing and growing over time. By 1931, it had been translated into 30 languages. In the 1960s, it became popular with college students. And today, passages from it are still read at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. It is the best-selling book in Alfred A. Knopf's history.

It's the birthday of novelist, critic, and photographer Wright Morris, (books by this author) born in Central City, Nebraska (1910). He had started writing novels by the time he was in his 20s, but he first became known for his photography. In 1940, he set out on a 15,000-mile tour around the United States, taking photographs along the way. He focused on capturing the inanimate objects of rural America. He took pictures of tiny churches, grain elevators, and farm implements as well as the clothing in closets, the objects in dresser drawers, and the decorations on mantelpieces.

Morris eventually began to use his photographs to inspire his fiction. In 1946, he published The Inhabitants, a collection of photographs of American houses with a series of stories written in the voices of people who might have lived in those houses.

He went on to publish more than 30 books of both fiction and photography and he won the National Book Award twice, for his novel The Field of Vision in 1956 and his novel Plains Song for Female Voices in 1980.

It's the birthday of novelist and editor E.L.(Edward Lawrence) Doctorow, (books by this author) born in New York City, New York (1931). He grew up in the Bronx. His father had a store in Manhattan that sold radios, records, and musical instruments. It folded during the Depression, and he later sold television sets and stereo equipment.

After high school, Doctorow went to Kenyon College in Ohio to study poetry with the poet and teacher John Crowe Ransom. After college, he earned his living as an "expert reader" for film and television production companies in New York. He eventually moved on to a job at a publishing house, where he helped edit books by writers such as Norman Mailer and James Baldwin.

In 1971 he published his novel The Book of Daniel (1971), which won the National Book Award, but it was his next book, Ragtime (1975), that became his first real best-seller. He later said it was the easiest book he ever wrote. Set in the decade prior to World War I, it includes characters like William Howard Taft, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, and Harry Houdini.

SUNDAY, 7 JANUARY, 2007
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Poem: "Guys Like That" by Joyce Sutphen. Used with permission of the author

Guys Like That

Drive very nice cars, and from
where you sit in your dented
last-century version of the
most ordinary car in America, they

look dark-suited and neat and fast.
Guys like that look as if they are thinking
about wine and marble floors, but
really they are thinking about TiVo

and ESPN. Women think that guys
like that are different from the guys
driving the trucks that bring cattle
to slaughter, but guys like that are

planning worse things than the death
of a cow. Guys who look like that —
so clean and cool — are quietly moving
money across the border, cooking books,

making deals that leave some people
rich and some people poorer
than they were before guys like that
robbed them at the pump and on

their electricity bills, and even
now, guys like that are planning how
to divide up that little farm they just
passed, the one you used to call home.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the man who wrote The Exorcist (1971), one of the most popular novels of the 1970s, William Peter Blatty, (books by this author) born in New York City (1928).

It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker, (books by this author) born in Rochester, New York (1957). He started out wanting to be a musician, and was good enough at the bassoon that he got into the Eastman School of Music. He planned to become a composer, and then one day he saw his mother laughing uncontrollably at a New York Times Book Review essay on golf by the writer John Updike. Baker later wrote, "[My mother's laughter] was miraculous, sourced in the nowhere of print. ... Nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical."

At that moment, Baker decided that instead of becoming a composer, he wanted to be a writer. He supported himself as an office temp and a technical writer and spent years trying to produce a novel, but he had a terrible time with plot. So he wrote a novel with almost no plot at all, just details about ordinary life that he'd been thinking about for years. And the result was The Mezzanine (1988), an entire novel that takes place during an office worker's lunch hour, while he travels to a store to buy a new shoelace.

Baker has gone on to write a book about his obsession with John Updike, U and I: A True Story (1991), and a novel about a single erotic phone conversation between two strangers, called Vox (1992). His most recent book is Checkpoint (2004), about a man who wants to assassinate the president.

It's the birthday of novelist, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, (books by this author) born in Notasulga, Alabama (1891). She was working full time as a live-in maid when, in 1920, she enrolled in Howard University. Her first story, "Spunk," was published in Opportunity magazine in 1925, when it won second prize in a fiction contest. At the awards dinner, Hurston met author Fanny Hurst, who hired Hurston as her assistant and arranged for her to receive a scholarship to Barnard College. While in New York, Hurston published the "Eatonville Anthology," a series of 14 brief sketches, some only two paragraphs long, including glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backward farmer, the greatest liar in the village, and a cheating husband.

She eventually became part of the Harlem Renaissance. And it was there, in Harlem, in just seven weeks, that she wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). It's the story of a black woman in rural Florida named Janie Crawford and her three marriages: the first to the farmer Logan Killicks, who treats her like a slave, the second to the politician Jody Starks, who treats her like a queen, and finally to the penniless Tea Cake Woods, with whom she finally finds true love.

Although for a time Hurston was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money. She worked at odd jobs for the next 10 years, writing a few magazine articles every now and again. She wrote three novels that were rejected for publication. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed, and she was buried in an unmarked grave.

It's the birthday of cartoonist and illustrator Charles Addams, (books by this author) born in Westfield, New Jersey (1912). By 1935, he had a contract with The New Yorker to draw cartoons for them; he also sold cartoons to Life, Collier's, and Cosmopolitan. In 1937, he began to draw cartoons featuring a macabre family, including Morticia, Lurch, Wednesday, Pugsley, Grandmama, and Thing, characters that eventually became known as the Addams Family.

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

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