The stall is so tight he can't raise heels or knees
when the cowboy, coccyx to bareback, touches down
tender as a deerfly, forks him, gripping the rope—
handle over the withers, testing the cinch,
as if hired to lift a cumbersome piece of brown
luggage, while assistants perched on the rails arrange
the kicker, a foam-rubber band around the narrowest,
most ticklish part of the loins, leaning full weight
on neck and rump to keep him throttled, this horse,
"Firecracker," jacked out of the box through the sprung
gate, in the same second raked both sides of the belly
by ratchets on booted heels, bursts into five-way
motion: bucks, pitches, swivels, humps, and twists,
an all-over-body-sneeze that must repeat
until the flapping bony lump attached to his spine is gone.
A horn squawks. Up from the dust gets a buster named Tucson.
It's the birthday of John Clifford Mortimer, (books by this author) born in London (1923). He's best known as the author of the novels featuring the lawyer Rumpole of the Bailey.
He wrote his first novel when he was in law school, and he's continued to practice law his entire life, writing plays, novels, and screenplays in his spare time. He once boasted — with no particular vanity — of being "the best playwright ever to have defended a murderer at the Central Criminal Court." He became well known in Great Britain, but most Americans hadn't heard of him until the BBC's adaptation of his Rumpole books aired on PBS in the early '80s.
As a lawyer, Mortimer developed a reputation for fighting for civil rights and free speech. Mortimer once said that comedy is "the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, provided the comedy is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected, and the unsuccessful, and plays its part in the war against established rules."
It's the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir, (books by this author) born in Dunbar, Scotland (1838). In 1867, he was working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis when he almost lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. He later said, "I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone — that I should never look at a flower again." He was so affected by the incident that he decided to quit his job and walk across the country, living as close to nature as possible.
He walked for a thousand miles, from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and then he sailed to Cuba, Panama, and finally California, which would become his home for the rest of his life. He fell in love with the Sierra Mountains in California, and spent much of his time hiking and camping there. He also visited Alaska, South America, Australia, Africa, China, Europe, and Japan, studying plants, animals, rocks, and glaciers. He was largely responsible for the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890, and in 1892, he helped found the Sierra Club. He also published many books, including The Mountains of California (1894).
It's the birthday of Charlotte Brontë, (books by this author) born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1816). She's the oldest of the three famous Brontë sisters. Anne wrote Agnes Grey (1847), Emily wrote Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre (1847), about a smart, passionate governess working for a mysterious man named Mr. Rochester.
Wuthering Heights got mostly good reviews, and Jane Eyre was an even bigger success. But as soon as critics started to suspect that the novels were written by women, they turned against them, calling them "coarse," "unfeminine," and "anti-Christian." Within two years of the publication of Jane Eyre, all of Charlotte's siblings had died. She continued to write novels, including Villette (1853), but she was often sick and usually unhappy. She married her father's curate in 1854 but died soon after from complications with her pregnancy.
It's the birthday of humorist Josh Billings, born Henry Wheeler Shaw in Lanesboro, Massachusetts (1818). Billings said, "Don't take the bull by the horns, take him by the tail; then you can let go when you want to."
I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.
The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—
and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.
I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.
So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,
he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman
or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm
when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,
lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.
It's the birthday of Norwegian-American novelist O. E. (Ole Edvart) Rolvaag, born in Helgeland, Norway, in 1876. He grew up on Donna Island, a tiny treeless island just south of the Arctic Circle. When he was 15, he dropped out of school and began to go on daylong fishing expeditions. Five years later, he quit his life as a fisherman and sailed to the United States.
He landed in New York with almost no money and no prospects, and ended up walking the entire night to find a farm where the family could speak Norwegian. Eventually, he made his way to South Dakota, where he worked on his uncle's farm for three years. He got a degree from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and went on to write novels chronicling the experiences of Norwegian immigrants in the American Midwest, including his most famous book, Giants in the Earth (1927).
It's the birthday of American novelist Ellen Glasgow, (books by this author) born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1873. She penned realistic novels about Virginian society in the 19th century. She wrote The Deliverance (1904), about class conflicts in the wake of the Civil War, and she wrote In This Our Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942.
It's the birthday of philosopher Immanuel Kant, (books by this author) born in Königsberg, Germany, in 1724. He wrote hugely influential treatises, including Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgment (1790).
He never traveled more than 100 miles from his home city and held to a strict daily routine. It has been said that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his daily afternoon walks.
It's the birthday of Henry Fielding, (books by this author) born in Sharpham Park, Somerset, England (1707). He was one of the first great novelists to write in English.
He was a socialite and a womanizer, famous for his inspired bouts of drunkenness. He wrote more than 20 hit plays and became known for making fun of the politicians of his day. The prime minister at the time, Sir Robert Walpole, was fed up with all of the rowdy political satires that had become so popular in London theaters. He thought that Fielding in particular had gone over the line with some of his jokes; and so in 1737, the Theatrical Licensing Act was passed, which said that only plays licensed by the government could be performed.
Fielding knew that none of his plays would ever be approved by the government, so he quit writing plays and went to law school. Seven years later, he published his most famous novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, about a boy who is left on the bed of an aristocrat who decides to raise the child himself. As a young man, Tom is expelled from the house and goes on to have a series of adventures.
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April pérfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.
It's the birthday of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, (books by this author) born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1899). He described himself as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library." He learned to read and write English before he could do so in Russian, and his family spoke in a mixture of English, French, and Russian. But Nabokov's family had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.
In 1940, he sailed to America with his family, arriving in New York City poor and almost completely unknown. He struggled to support his family with a series of jobs teaching at New England colleges. Then, in the summer of 1951, he and his wife drove to Colorado in their Oldsmobile station wagon, and he began to work on a novel in the car about a middle-aged European man named Humbert Humbert who falls in love with a 12-year-old American girl named Dolores Haze. And that was Lolita (1955).
He later said that the novel was, in part, about his love affair with the English language. But it was hugely controversial, and the controversy helped the novel become a big best seller. Nabokov was finally able to quit teaching and move with his wife to a hotel in Switzerland.
Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, (books by this author) born in Stratford-on-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605).
Only a few scattered facts are known about his life. He was born and raised in the picturesque market town of Stratford-on-Avon, surrounded by woodlands. His father was a glover and a leather merchant; he and his wife had eight children including William, but three of them died in childbirth. William probably left grammar school when he was 13 years old, but continued to study on his own.
He went to London around 1588 to pursue his career in drama and by 1592 he was a well-known actor. He joined an acting troupe in 1594 and wrote many plays for the group while continuing to act. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, but that in Hamlet, he played the ghost.
Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him because he had no formal education. A group of scientists recently plugged all his plays into a computer and tried to compare his work to other writers of his day, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford. The only writer they found who frequently used words and phrases similar to Shakespeare's was Queen Elizabeth I, and she was eventually ruled out as well.
Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including "foul play," "as luck would have it," "your own flesh and blood," "too much of a good thing," "good riddance," "in one fell swoop," "cruel to be kind," "play fast and loose," "vanish into thin air," "the game is up," "truth will out" and "in the twinkling of an eye."
Shakespeare has always been popular in America, and many colonists kept copies of his complete works along with their Bibles. Pioneers performed his work out West. Many of the mines and canyons across the West are named after Shakespeare or one of his characters. Three mines in Colorado are called Ophelia, Cordelia, and Desdemona.
Shakespeare continues to be the most produced playwright in the world.
This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now
to our man Harry on the scene, what's
the story down there Harry? "Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems
to be doing fine, he's using a blue pen, most
poets these days use blue or black ink so blue
is a fine choice. His curtains are indeed blowing
in a breeze of some kind and what's more his radiator
is 'whistling' somewhat. No metaphors have been written yet,
but I'm sure he's rummaging around down there
in the tin cans of his soul and will turn up something
for us soon. Hang on—just breaking news here Chuck,
there are 'birds singing' outside his window, and a car
with a bad muffler has just gone by. Yes ... definitely
a confirmation on the singing birds." Excuse me Harry
but the poem seems to be taking on a very auditory quality
at this point wouldn't you say? "Yes Chuck, you're right,
but after years of experience I would hesitate to predict
exactly where this poem is going to go. Why I remember
being on the scene with Frost in '47, and with Stevens in '53,
and if there's one thing about poems these days it's that
hang on, something's happening here, he's just compared the curtains
to his mother, and he's described the radiator as 'Roaring deep
with the red walrus of History.' Now that's a key line,
especially appearing here, somewhat late in the poem,
when all of the similes are about to go home. In fact he seems
a bit knocked out with the effort of writing that line,
and who wouldn't be? Looks like ... yes, he's put down his pen
and has gone to brush his teeth. Back to you Chuck." Well
thanks Harry. Wow, the life of the artist. That's it for now,
but we'll keep you informed of more details as they arise.
It's the birthday of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, (books by this author) born in London, England (1815). His father was a British gentleman who had failed at being a lawyer, a scholar, and a farmer, and the family sank deeper and deeper into debt. The children at school made fun of his worn, muddy clothes and his teachers were exceptionally cruel. He later said, "[I may have] been flogged oftener than any human being alive." The only reason his family didn't fall into complete poverty was that his mother started writing books for a living, and he looked up to her so much that he decided to become a writer himself.
He got a job in London as a postal clerk. He struggled to pay his bills, he had a series of unhappy love affairs, and nothing came of his writing. Then, in 1841, he was offered a transfer to Ireland, and he saw it as a chance to make a clean start.
In Ireland, Trollope developed a social life for the first time. He went hunting, and he went to pubs and he fell in love and got married, all within a few years. Once he had settled down to his new life, he began to write fiction. In his job for the postal service, he rode a horse over all the rural routes himself, to ensure that a letter could be delivered to the remotest possible areas. It was while he was riding across the countryside that a fictional English county called Barsetshire sprang up in his mind.
In just eleven years, between 1855 and 1866, Trollope published six novels about the extended families and parishioners and civil service workers living in that imaginary county of Barsetshire, novels such as The Warden (1955), Barchester Towers (1857), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866), all of which were best-sellers.
The novelist Henry James said, "Trollope did not write for posterity. He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket."
Anthony Trollop said, "Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable."
On this day in 1916, the Easter Rebellion began on the streets of Dublin. The British police extinguished the rebellion a few days later. Called "the poet's rebellion," it was led by six patriotic poets and men of letters including Patrick Pearse and James Connolly. They barged inside and read their "Proclamation of Independence" to a baffled crowd. The rebellion seemed hopelessly unsuccessful until the British government valorized many of the rebels by executing them a few weeks later. The executions set in motion a movement for Irish nationalism, and in 1921 Ireland finally achieved independence from Great Britain—except for the six northernmost counties of the island that comprise Northern Ireland.
My wife is talking on the phone in Milwaukee
To her girlfriend in Brooklyn.
But, in the middle of all that, my wife has to go pee.
And it turns out that the girl in Brooklyn,
At the very same time, also has to go pee.
So they discuss this for a moment,
And they're both very intelligent people.
They decide to set their phones down and go to the bathroom
(This was back when people set their phones down).
So they do this, and now we have a live telephone line open
Between Milwaukee and Brooklyn
With no one speaking through it for about two minutes as
A girl in Milwaukee and a girl in Brooklyn go to the bathroom.
It's the birthday of Oliver Cromwell, born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, England in 1599. In 1653, he became lord protector of the Commonwealth, becoming the only person to ever have been the head of state of a republican Great Britain.
It's the birthday of fiction writer Howard Garis, (books by this author) born in Binghamton, New York (1873). He's the creator of the pink-nosed elderly rabbit named Uncle Wiggily. He published an Uncle Wiggily story in the Newark News six days a week for thirty-seven years.
It's the birthday of novelist Padgett Powell, (books by this author) born in Gainesville, Florida (1952). He was a twenty-year-old college student when he admitted to his favorite literature professor that he'd never read anything by Faulkner. She was horrified, and immediately gave him a copy of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which inspired him to begin writing serious fiction for the first time, but for a while all he managed to write was bad Faulkner parody.
Powell went to graduate school at the University of Houston, where one of his professors was the writer Donald Barthelme. Barthelme helped Powell publish his first novel, Edisto (1984), and he has gone on to write several more books, including A Woman Named Drown (1987), Edisto Revisited (1996), and Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men (2000).
It's the birthday of J. Anthony Lukas, (books by this author) born in New York City (1933). He went to Harvard and wrote for the campus newspaper, and went on to write for The New York Times.
He wanted to write a big, important book about a critical social issue in America. Then, in 1976, Lukas saw a photograph of an anti-busing rally in Boston, in which a group of white protesters was attacking a black passerby with an American flag. So he decided the great topic for his book was going to be racial desegregation, and how it was affecting the lives of ordinary people.
He spent three years interviewing the members of three families in Boston—one lower-class black, one working-class Irish Catholic, and one upper-class white liberal. Finally, after seven years of research and writing, he came out with Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985). It won all of the major nonfiction book awards for 1985, including the Pulitzer Prize.
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Walter de la Mare, (books by this author) born in Charlton, Kent, England (1873). He's known for his fantasy stories and poems for children.
It's the birthday of the "First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald, born in Newport News, Virginia in 1918. When she was sixteen she entered a contest at the Apollo Theater, at that time no more than a hip local club in Harlem. She had a dance routine worked out and walked on stage wearing ragged clothes and men's boots, but she froze up. Later she said, "I got out there and I saw all the people and I just lost my nerve. And the man said, 'Well, you're out here, do something!' So I tried to sing." She sang a popular song called "Judy" and got such an ovation that she went on to sing "The Object of My Affection." Soon after, she joined Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington as the only performers who could draw audiences at the Apollo from south of 125th Street.
Marilyn Monroe was one of Ella's biggest fans. Fitzgerald said, "I owe Marilyn a real debt. It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the '50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again."
My mother called to tell me
about an old classmate of mine who
was dying on the parish prayer chain—
or was very sick—or destitute—
or it had not worked out—the marriage—
or the kids were all on drugs—and
all the old mothers were praying intensely
for all the pain of their children
and for life—they were praying for life—
in their quiet rooms—sipping decaf coffee—
I bet they've been praying for me at times—
so I'll find my way—so I won't rob a bank—
I'll take them—the mystical prayers of old mothers—
it matters—all this patient and purposeful love.
It's the birthday of novelist Bernard Malamud, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits."
In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.
It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own desires and obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success and he went on to publish many more novels.
Malamud said, "I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."
And he said, "The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
It's the birthday of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, born in Rome (AD 121). He rose through the ranks of the Roman Senate and became emperor when in AD 161. He wrote a philosophical work called Meditations, and he's one of the few Roman emperors who is known as much for his writing as he is for his reign.
Before Aurelius came to power, the Roman Empire was experiencing incredible prosperity. It was the period known as the Pax Romana, a time of peace that lasted nearly two hundred years. The Roman Empire was the largest it would ever be, stretching from Scotland to the Arabian desert. The richest people lived in great villas with central heating systems. The historian Tacitus wrote that it was a time of "rare happiness ... when we may think what we please, and express what we think."
But almost as soon as Marcus Aurelius became emperor, Rome encountered a series of disasters. There were plagues, famines and wars. He was almost constantly trying to defend the Roman Empire against invaders; in the north his armies battled the Germans, and in the east they battled the Parthians.
In the midst of all this chaos, Marcus Aurelius consoled himself by keeping a kind of diary filled with philosophic meditations. He studied the Stoic philosophers, who believed in detaching yourself from everything in the universe that's outside of your power to control.
His Meditations was first printed in Zurich in 1559.
It was on this day in 1937 that German bombers attacked and destroyed the city of Guernica, Spain, in the Basque part of the country. It was the first time in the history that a city was completely destroyed from the air.
The bombing inspired the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso to make his famous painting Guernica, which was first shown at the Paris World's Fair in 1937. When the painting was finally shown in Spain in 1981—six years after the death of Spain's Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco—it had to be displayed behind bulletproof glass.
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he's a getting;
The sooner will his Race be run,
And nearer he's to Setting.
That Age is best, which is the first,
When Youth and Blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, goe marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
It's the birthday of the Ulysses S. Grant, born in Point Pleasant, Ohio (1822). He was the commander of the Union Armies at the end of the Civil War and served as the eighteenth president of the United States. After serving as president, he joined his son in an investment banking business.
The banking venture was extremely profitable for a few years, and then the bubble burst. One of the bank's partners had been keeping false books and embezzling money into his private account. Grant, who had thought he was a millionaire, found out that his partnership in the failed bank left him several million dollars in debt. Less than ten years since he had been president of the United States, he had gone completely broke.
He had previously rejected requests to write about his experience as a Civil War general. Now he desperately needed the money. Mark Twain offered him 75 percent of the profits if Grant would publish with Twain's newly started publishing house.
But by that time, Grant had also been diagnosed with throat cancer and his health deteriorated rapidly. He realized that he didn't have long to live, and wrote his memoirs as fast as he could. In extreme pain, and in a daze from pain medication, he still managed to write 275,000 words in less than a year. In the last few weeks of his illness, he couldn't even speak, but he kept writing and revising, and checking everything he wrote against the official records to make sure it was all factual. He finished his memoirs in July 1885, and died four days later.
Grant's book did not appear in bookstores, but was sold by subscription, and it was Mark Twain's idea to send out former Union soldiers, in uniform, to sell the subscriptions door to door across the country. The book eventually sold more than 300,000 copies. It provided Grant's family with $450,000 in royalties, the largest amount of royalties that had ever been paid out for a book at that point in history.
Critics and writers of the time were shocked at how well Grant wrote. His book Personal Memoirs (1885) is one of the few books ever written by an American president that qualifies as great literature.
Among the most famous passages in the book is Grant's description of Robert E. Lee's surrender at the Appomattox Court House. Grant wrote, "What General Lee's feelings were I do not know ... [but] my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause (slavery) was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."
It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, (books by this author) born in Meran, Tyrol, Austria (1898). The first of the five "Madeline" books tells tells the story of a young Parisian girl's trip to the hospital to have her appendix removed. He got the idea when he was in the hospital recovering from a bicycle accident and there was a girl in the next room over who had just had her appendix out.
Madeline (1939) begins: "In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. In two straight lines they broke their bread, and brushed their teeth, and went to bed. They smiled at the good, and frowned at the bad, and sometimes they were very sad. They left the house at half past nine, in two straight lines, in rain or shine ... the smallest one was Madeline!"
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1929). His first novel was The Sky Changes, the story of a couple's attempt to save their crumbling marriage by taking a road trip across America.
It's the birthday of playwright August Wilson, (books by this author) born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). He wrote many plays, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990). He died on October 2, 2005.
It's the birthday of Anglo-Irish writer Mary Wollstonecraft, (books by this author) born in London in 1759, one of the first women to argue in favor of equality between the sexes in her book Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
