Wednesday

Dec. 30, 1998

More Snow

by Carl Dennis

WEDNESDAY 12/30

Poem: "More Snow," by Carl Dennis, from MEETINGS WITH TIME (Penguin Books).

It's the birthday of Swedish novelist SARA LIDMAN, born in Missenträsk, Sweden in 1923. Her early novels such as The Tar Still and Cloudberry Land are about her childhood in northern Sweden. In the 1960s and 1970s she wrote novels about the Vietnam War and the oppression of blacks in Africa.

It's the birthday of the musicologist ALFRED EINSTEIN, born in 1880 in Munich. He was a cousin of Albert Einstein and was born into a family of music critics. He worked as a music critic in the 1920s, but left Nazi Germany and settled in the United States. He is best known for revising the catalogue of Mozart's works—the "Köchel" catalogue—and for producing a critical new edition of Mozart's last 10 string quartets. He wrote a biography of Mozart (1945) and the first comprehensive study of the Italian madrigal (1949).

It's the birthday of the English novelist and poet RUDYARD KIPLING, born Joseph Rudyard Kipling in Bombay, India in 1865, author of many books and short stories about life in India at the turn of the century. Kipling was sent back to England at the age of 6, but returned to Indian as a journalist in 1882 and started publishing poems and short stories. In 1892 he married the daughter of an American publisher and moved to Brattleboro, Vermont with her, where he wrote some of his most well-known books including The Jungle Books (1894-95) and Kim (1901). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907—the first English writer to win it.

It was on this day in 1853 that the GADSDEN PURCHASE was agreed between the United States and Mexico. The agreement fixed the exact location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas. The United States gained about 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona for the price of 10 million dollars.

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

 

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