Thursday

Jul. 11, 1996

Poetics

by Howard Nemerov

THURSDAY 7/11

Today's Reading: "Poetics" by Howard Nemerov from TRYING CONCLUSIONS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1961-1991, published by University of Chicago Press, 1991.

"The President's Own" United States Marine Band, the nation's oldest professional music group which has played at every presidential inauguration since 1801, celebrates its 198th anniversary today.

The Bastille Days Festival opens today in Milwaukee on the streets of East Town.

It's the birthday of the physicist who built the first laser, Theodore Harold Maiman, born in Los Angeles in 1927.

It's the birthday in Stockholm of opera singer, Nicolai Gedda, in 1925.

It's the birthday of actor Yul Brynner, who gave 4,625 performances as the King of Siam on Broadway in THE KING AND I, born in 1920 on Sakhalin Island off Siberia.

It's the birthday of writer E(lwin) B(rooks) White in Mount Vernon, New York in 1899, who wrote in CHARLOTTE'S WEB: "It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything."

It's the birthday of department store owner, John Wanamaker, in Philadelphia, 1838, who held the first white sale in 1878, added the first electric lighting to a department store, the first soda fountain, first elevators, first full-page newspaper ads, and many other innovations.

It was on this day in 1804 that vice president Aaron Burr shot his political rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.


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

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
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