The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poem: "To Luck" by W. S. Merwin, from Present Company. © Copper Canyon Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

To Luck

In the cards and at the bend in the road
we never saw you
in the womb and in the crossfire
in the numbers
whatever you had your hand in
which was everything
we were told never to put
our faith in you
to bow to you humbly after all
because in the end there was nothing
else we could do
but not to believe in you
still we might coax you with pebbles
kept warm in the hand
or coins or the relics
of vanished animals
observances rituals
not binding upon you
who make no promises
we might do such things only
not to neglect you
and risk your disfavor
oh you who are never the same
who are secret as the day when it comes
you whom we explain
as often as we can
without understanding

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of naturalist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, (books by this author) born in New York City (1941). He was five years old when his father took him to the Museum of Natural History, and he saw his first dinosaur skeleton, a 20-foot high tyrannosaurus. He went on to study geology and paleontology and wrote his dissertation on an extinct land snail native to the Bahamas. He once said that his research on the taxonomy of the snail was of interest to about eight people in the world, but, he said, "Those eight people really care."

In 1974, he was offered a job writing a monthly column for Natural History magazine. He decided that his guiding focus in the column would be the theory of evolution, but aside from that, he would write about whatever he was interested in, from the history of Mickey Mouse to the unreliability of IQ tests. His essays were collected in books such as The Panda's Thumb (1980) and The Flamingo's Smile (1985), and he became one of the most famous scientists in America. He believed he was successful simply because he tried to be a good writer. He said, "So many scientists think that once they figure it out, that's all they have to do, and writing it up is just a chore. I never saw it that way; part of the art of any kind of total scholarship is to say it well.''

Stephen Jay Gould said, "Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree."

It's the birthday of the poet who wrote under the initials H.D., Hilda Doolittle, (books by this author) born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1886). She met Ezra Pound when she was a teenager and they fell in love, but her father forced her to break off the relationship. They stayed friends, and Pound brought her armfuls of books to read every day. She followed him to Europe and when she showed him some of her poems he loved them and sent them to Poetry magazine, signing them for her, "H.D. Imagist." He invented a new school of poetry based on her work that he called Imagism, which broke from formal metered verse and used clear, simple language to describe the world. She went on to publish many collections of poetry, including Sea Garden (1916) and Red Roses for Bronze (1929).

She wrote, "To sing love, / love must first shatter us."

It's the birthday of Lutheran minister and publisher Isaac Kaufmann Funk, (books by this author) born in Clifton, Ohio (1839). After serving as a minister, he founded a publishing house and began to publish anti-alcohol pamphlets and religious journals. In 1877, he partnered with a former classmate named Adam Willis Wagnalls, and they published many books together. But the book that we remember them for is Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of the English Language. It was the first English dictionary that gave definitions of words with the most current definition first and the oldest definition last, rather than the other way around. At the time, dictionaries were thought of as historical records of the language. Funk and Wagnalls made dictionaries practical.

It's the birthday of Czech poet and novelist Franz Werfel, (books by this author) born in Prague (1890). He wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, about the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), about the 14-year-old girl who had seen visions of the Virgin Mary.

Poem: "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver, from House of Light. © Beacon Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 2001 terrorists flew two planes into Twin Towers in New York City, causing both towers to collapse. In the weeks following the attacks, many writers and other artists wondered how to respond to what had happened.

One of the first groups of writers to take action were the reporters for The New York Times, who began writing portraits of the victims in a special section of the paper called "Portraits of Grief." The journalists involved decided that they would try to write portraits of every victim of the attack whose family they could reach. And they decided that the stories would focus on how the victims lived, not how they died.

The portraits were shorter than the average Times obituary, at about 150 words, and they skipped things like college degrees, jobs held, and names of surviving family members. They just tried to capture some detail or anecdote that would express each person's individuality. There was a firefighter who wore size 15 boots; a pastry chef who could eat as many desserts as she wanted without gaining weight; a man who put toothpaste on his wife's toothbrush when he got up before her; and a grandmother who wore pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a metallic gold raincoat.

Ultimately, 143 reporters worked on the project, and they managed to write about 1,910 of the 2,749 victims. They would have written about every victim, but some families didn't want to participate or couldn't be found. The portraits were collected in the book Portraits 9/11/01 (2002).

One of the people who read the "Portraits of Grief" was the singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen, and he noticed how many of the victims of the attacks had loved his music. So he started calling the spouses of the victims on the telephone to express his condolences. One of the people he called said, "I got through Joe's memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call."

Less than a year later Springsteen released his album The Rising (2002), with songs written in response to the attacks, many of the lyrics based on the stories people told him in those phone calls.

The novelist Don DeLillo has just come out with a novel about the September 11 attacks called Falling Man (2007). When asked why he wanted to write about the attacks, DeLillo said, "They say that journalism is the first draft of history and maybe in a curious way fiction is the final draft. Not because it's more truthful, but because it can enter unknown territory. A writer can work his way into the impact of history on interior lives. He can examine what a character sees, thinks, feels, hears, even what a character dreams."

It's the birthday of a writer who loved New York, William Sydney Porter, (books by this author) who wrote under the name O. Henry, born in Greensboro, North Carolina (1862). He moved to New York City in 1902, and he was overwhelmed by the size and vitality of the city. He said, "I would like to live a lifetime on each street in New York. Every house has a drama in it." He wrote his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi," in three hours, in the middle of the night, with his editor sleeping on his couch.

It's the birthday of D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence, (books by this author) born in Eastwood, England (1885). He wrote poetry and plays and literary criticism, but he's best known for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

He spent most of his adult life struggling against his own government. During World War I, he was suspected of being a German spy, because his wife was German and he opposed the war. British authorities were constantly trailing him and accusing him of sending signals to the Germans with white scarves and night-lights. Most of all, he struggled against censorship. More than almost any other writer at the time, he believed that in order to write about human experience, novelists had to write explicitly about sex. When he published his first important novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), he found that his editor had deleted numerous erotic passages without his permission.

D.H. Lawrence said, "Be still when you have nothing to say; [but] when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

Poem: "Late For Summer Weather" by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume 1 1909–1939. New Directions, 1991. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Late For Summer Weather

He has on
an old light grey Fedora
She a black beret

He a dirty sweater
She an old blue coat
that fits her tight

Grey flapping pants
Red skirt and
broken down black pumps

Fat Lost Ambling
nowhere through
the upper town they kick

their way through
heaps of
fallen maple leaves

still green-and
crisp as dollar bills
Nothing to do. Hot cha!

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the journalist and editor H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken, (books by this author) born in Baltimore, Maryland (1880). He published his first two articles when he was 18 years old, each of them less than 50 words long. On the morning those articles appeared in the paper, Mencken said, "I was up with the milkman ... to search the paper and when I found both of my pieces, exactly as written, there ran such thrills through my system as ... 100,000 volts of electricity could not have matched."

Mencken went on to become one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America. His masterpiece was The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech.

H.L. Mencken said, "The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics."

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, (books by this author) born in a village outside of Colombo, Ceylon, a country that is now known as Sri Lanka (1943). He went to school in Canada, where he began his writing career as a poet, and went on to publish his novel The English Patient (1992), about a nameless burn victim who begins telling stories about his life to his nurse. The novel won the Booker Prize and it was made into a movie in 1996.

It's the birthday of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, (books by this author) born in Lviv, Poland [now part of the Ukraine] (1921). He was a young man when Nazis invaded Poland and he had to hide his Jewish identity. After the war, he decided that regular realistic fiction wasn't sufficient to describe the world anymore, so he wrote fiction that took place thousands of years in the future. He's best known for his novel Solaris (1961), about a scientist who travels to a space station near a strange planet and meets the ghost of his wife.

It's the birthday of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, born in New York City (1892). He thought more people would read good books if books were more beautiful to look at. So he used beautiful, easy-to-read type and high-quality paper, and he was the first publisher to cover his books with brightly colored jackets.

It was on this day in 1609 that the explorer Henry Hudson sailed up the river to which he would give his name. He had been hired by the Dutch East India Company to find a passage to Asia through the North Pole, and he thought the Hudson River might be that passage. The Mohican Indians called the river "Great Waters Constantly in Motion." Hudson sailed up the river with his men on this day in 1609, and they anchored their ship that night on an area of land that would become Manhattan's West 42nd Street.

Hudson and his men sailed up the river for about a month, until they reached what would become Albany. By then Hudson had decided that this wasn't the Northwest Passage, and he turned back. He and his men were almost killed by Indians on his return journey, but they reached the open sea on October 4 and headed back to Amsterdam.

Henry Hudson never saw that river again, and though it became known as the Hudson River, he probably died thinking of it as one of his many failures. During his last known voyage, his men mutinied and forced him into a tiny lifeboat, where he was set adrift in what became known as the Hudson Bay. No one knows what happened to him.

It was on this day in 1940 that four teenage boys discovered the Lascaux cave paintings, one of the greatest works of prehistoric art ever found — more than 200 paintings and 1,500 engravings of animals, including bulls, deer, oxen, herds of horses, stags, and cats, painted in various shades of yellow, red, brown, and black. There is also a single painting of a man, lying on his back as though dead, hidden off in a far corner of the cave.

Anthropologists were particularly impressed with the quality of the paintings. They were not primitive stick figures of animals, but realistic drawings with beautiful, fluid lines, showing the various creatures turning their heads, walking through water, falling off cliffs. The paintings cover the walls all the way up to the ceiling, and there were holes in the wall where the prehistoric artists inserted logs to reach the higher levels. Art historians have compared the Lascaux cave paintings to the work of Picasso. Others have called Lascaux the prehistoric Sistine Chapel.

Poem: "Found Poems" by Robert Phillips, from Spinach Days. © The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Found Poems

i.

     (from a letter by Emily Dickinson)

When you wrote
you would come in November
it would please me
it was November then-but the time
has moved. You went
with the coming of the birds-they will go
with your coming,
but to see you is so much sweeter than birds,
I could excuse the spring. . .
Will you come in November, and will November
come, or is this the hope that opens
and shuts like the eyes of the wax doll?

ii.

    (from a letter by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The only just judge,
the only just literary critic,
is Christ,

who prizes, is proud of,
and admires, more than
any man,

more than the receiver himself
can, the gifts of
his own making.

iii.

    (from a letter by Katherine Mansfield)

Dear Princess Bibesco,
I am afraid you must stop
writing these little love letters
to my husband while he and I
live together. It is one of the things
which is not done in our world.

You are very young. Won't you
ask your husband to explain to you
the impossibility of such a situation?
Please do not make me write to you
again. I do not like scolding people
and hate having to teach them manners.

iv.

    (from a letter by Vincent Van Gogh)

I think that I still have it
in my heart someday
to paint a bookshop
with the front yellow and pink,
in the evening, and the black
passerby like a light
in the midst of darkness.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Sherwood Anderson, (books by this author) born in Camden, Ohio (1876). He was a manager at a mail-order paint company in Elyria, Ohio. But one day, out of the blue, he stood up from his desk and walked out of the office, ignoring everyone who asked where he was going. He was missing for several days, during which his wife received a bizarre letter from him that said, "There is a bridge over a river with cross-ties before it. When I come to that I'll be all right. I'll write all day in the sun and the wind will blow through my hair."

He was found four days later, wandering around in nearby Cleveland. He was diagnosed as having had a nervous breakdown, but he later claimed that he'd only pretended to be crazy so that the paint company wouldn't take him back. And he never did go back. He left his job and he and his wife moved to Chicago to join what became known as the Chicago Renaissance.

Anderson began writing every day, and one rainy night he got out of bed without any clothes on and began to write, as if in a trance, what became the first story for his collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919). He never wrote another book as successful as Winesburg, Ohio, but his simple prose style had a great influence on other writers, including Ernest Hemingway. In fact, a few years after Winesburg, Ohio came out, Anderson met the young Hemingway and wrote him letters of introduction so that he could go to Paris and meet writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He also encouraged the young William Faulkner, whom he met in New Orleans. He inspired Faulkner to write his first novel and helped him get published.

Sherwood Anderson said, "I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them."

It's the birthday of Roald Dahl, (books by this author) born in Llandaff, South Wales (1916). He was known for his dark short stories for adults, published in collections such as Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss, Kiss (1959). But he eventually switched to writing books for children, including James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), and Matilda (1988).

Roald Dahl said, "A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."

It's the birthday of English man of letters J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley, (books by this author) born in Bradford, England (1894). He wrote more than a hundred books of fiction, essays, and drama. His favorite of his own novels was Bright Day (1946), about his hometown before World War I. He wrote, "We plan, we toil, we suffer — in the hope of what? ... The title deeds of Radio City? ... A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs."

Poem: "Love at First Sight" by Jennifer Maier from Dark Alphabet. © Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Love at First Sight

You always hear about it—
a waitress serves a man two eggs
over easy and she says to the cashier,
That is the man I'm going to marry,
and she does. Or a man spies a woman
at a baseball game; she is blond
and wearing a blue headband,
and, being a man, he doesn't say this
or even think it, but his heart is a homing bird
winging to her perch, and next thing you know
they're building birdhouses in the garage.
How do they know, these auspicious lovers?
They are like passengers on a yellow
bus painted with the dreams
of innumerable lifetimes, a packet
of sepia postcards in their pocket.
And who's to say they haven't traveled
backward for centuries through borderless
lands, only to arrive at this roadside attraction
where Chance meets Necessity and says,
What time do you get off?

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of philosopher and educator Allan Bloom, (books by this author) born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1930). He's best known as the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), about what he believed was the decline of higher education in the United States.

He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and at Cornell, and he witnessed the student protests in the 1960s that forced universities to stop teaching their required Western civilization classes. He argued that by giving up on the Western canon of literature, Americans had given up on wisdom. He wrote, "We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. [We] play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."

It was on this day in 1812 that Napoleon's army invaded the city of Moscow. The troops were exhausted and hungry by the time they reached Moscow. Napoleon's secretary later wrote, "A curious and impressive sight was this sudden appearance of the great city ... spreading out at the end of a naked plain, topped with its 1,200 spires and sky-blue cupolas, strewn with golden stars, and linked one to the other with gilded chains."

Napoleon was eager for battle, and he had hoped to capture shelter and provisions when they took the city. But as they approached, they found the gates standing open and the streets deserted. Then they noticed that all over the city, small fires had started. The Russians had set fire to their own city. By that night, the fires were out of control.

The French writer Stendhal was among the soldiers that day, and he watched the city burn. He wrote in his diary, "It was a splendid spectacle, but it would have been better to be alone, or else surrounded by intelligent people in order to enjoy it."

Since it was impossible to spend the winter in the ruined city, Napoleon began his retreat on October 19 across the snow-covered plains. It was one of the great disasters of military history. Thousands died of starvation and hypothermia. Of the nearly 500,000 men who had set out in June, fewer than 20,000 French soldiers survived.

It was on this day in 1901 that then Vice President Theodore Roosevelt learned he had become the 26th president of the United States, after the death by assassination of President William McKinley.

Roosevelt was on a camping trip in the Adirondacks when he got the news that McKinley was on his deathbed, and he rode a buckboard wagon down the mountain in the middle of the night to learn that he had become the youngest president of the United States.

Poem: "Sonnet" by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room. © Random House, 2002. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

Sonnet

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blowout the lights, and come at last to bed.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the mystery novelist and playwright Agatha Christie, (books by this author) born in Devon, England (1890). Her first few books were moderately successful, and then her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926. That same year, Christie fled her own home after a fight with her husband, and she went missing for 10 days. There was a nationwide search, and the press covered the disappearance as though it were a mystery novel come to life, inventing scenarios and speculating on the possible murder suspects, until finally Christie turned up in a hotel, suffering from amnesia. During the period of her disappearance, the reprints of her earlier books sold out of stock and two newspapers began serializing her stories. She became a household name and a best-selling author for the rest of her life.

Christie averaged about two novels a year for the rest of her writing career. She jotted down ideas for ingenious murder methods all the time, on scraps of paper and napkins. Her murderers were always members of the upper class, people who dressed well, spoke well, and had great manners, but who just happened to also be killers. She said, "I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest."

It's the birthday of humorist Robert Benchley, (books by this author) born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1889). He said, "I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine."

It's the birthday of the first best-selling American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, (books by this author) born in Burlington, New Jersey (1789). He wrote many novels, but he's best known for his series of five novels called the Leatherstocking Tales, including Last of the Mohicans (1826), about frontier violence and adventure. At the time, most Americans read English literature about kings and queens, because they thought it was more romantic than their own difficult, colonial lives. James Fenimore Cooper was the first American author to make the wild, untamed life in America seem romantic.

It's the birthday of children's author Robert McCloskey, (books by this author) born in 1914 in Hamilton, Ohio. He's best known for his book Make Way for Ducklings (1941), about a family of ducks in downtown Boston. It begins, "Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking for a place to live. But every time Mr. Mallard saw what looked like a nice place, Mrs. Mallard said it was no good. There were sure to be foxes in the woods or turtles in the water, and she was not going to raise a family where there might be foxes or turtles. So they flew on and on. When they got to Boston, they felt too tired to fly any further."

Robert McCloskey went on to write many other books for children, including Blueberries for Sal (1949), A Morning in Maine (1953), and Time of Wonder (1958).

It's the birthday of François VI, duke de La Rochefoucauld, born in Paris (1613), an author whose entire literary reputation is based on a single slim book that he published in 1665 called Maxims, a collection of humorous and ironic maxims about human life and behavior.

Rouchefoucauld wrote, "There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard that there was such a thing."

And, "Everybody complains of his memory, but nobody of his judgment."

And, "We all have strength enough to endure the troubles of others."

Poem: "Valentine for Zephyr, Age 12" by Francette Cerulli from The Spirits Need To Eat. © Nine-Patch Press, 1999. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

Valentine for Zepher, Age 12

The night before valentines are due,
I take you to the movie about Vincent
whose paintings you love. Too late
I realize it's a mistake. You knew about his ear
and you know the definition of prostitute,
but neither one of us was ready
to see him cut himself until he bled,
see him in the brothel
with his rotten teeth and his real women.

On the way home in the starry night we hold hands,
wonder what his parents must have been like,
what cruelty may have happened to him,
and you show me the belt of Orion,
clean and shining and always in place.

Remember this forever, then:
I cannot imagine not loving you,
even when this body is gone.

So if I ever die, look up into the dark
and find me hundreds of times there,
each place you can faintly imagine a line
tracing the shape of a valentine.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the English writer known for his play The Beggar's Opera, John Gay, (books by this author) born to a poor family in Barnstaple, England (1685). The Beggar's Opera, first performed in 1728, is a social and political satire that he wrote for England's middle and lower classes. The opera's heroes are a beggar, a highwayman, a jailer's daughter, and a few prostitutes, and they act out the human corruption Gay saw in all levels of English society and government.

It was on this day in 1620 that the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World. The passengers were mostly members of a Protestant congregation who believed that the only way to practice their religion freely would be to separate themselves from the Church of England. They called themselves Separatists or Saints, but today we call them Pilgrims.

They originally commissioned two boats for the journey: the Speedwell and the Mayflower. But when they set out for their journey, the Speedwell began to leak. They returned to England and tried to repair the Speedwell, but it was not fit for travel. So on this day in 1620, they set sail in the Mayflower, leaving the Speedwell behind. They were behind schedule, so the weather wasn't as good. With strong cross currents, the Mayflower averaged only two miles an hour. The passengers had to spend most of the 66-day journey below deck, away from the rain and cold.

There were no sanitary facilities, and there was little fresh water for washing. Many of the passengers became seasick. They ate cold food — cheese and fish or salted beef. They also ate a lot of something called "ship's biscuit," which was a kind of bread that had been baked three times in order to drive out all moisture. It could last for up to five years and had to be dunked in water to be eaten.

On December 21, just over three months after they left England, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, their new home. Only half the colonists and crew survived that first winter. But when the Mayflower returned to England in April 1621, none of the colonists chose to return with it. They all remained committed to building the colony they had started. An estimated 35 million people are direct descendants of those Mayflower Pilgrims.

It's the birthday of American novelist John Knowles, (books by this author) born in Fairmont, West Virginia (1926). He is best known for his novel A Separate Peace (1959).

It's the birthday of Henry V, the king of England immortalized by Shakespeare, born on this day in Monmouth, Wales (1387). He was the first king of England to grow up speaking and writing fluently in English. Previous kings had spoken either French or Saxon.

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