Wednesday
Dec. 18, 2002
Best Intentions
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Poem: "In the Airport Bar," and "Best Intentions," by X.J. Kennedy from The Lords of Misrule (The Johns Hopkins University Press).
In the Airport Bar
Cooling our heels within this bright
Pink neon-lit upholstered box,
While, outside, flames deice our flight
We rattle bourbon on the rocks,
Endure delay and, free from care,
Consume the day without half trying.
Our thirst for taking to the air
Quenched by fear of dying.
Best Intentions
Guilt keeps an attic crammed with things undone,
Old friends ignored, the months-unwritten letter,
Duties we'd sooner shrink from than confront,
But won't let go. Tomorrow we'll do better,
We tell ourselves, and yet remain inert,
Watching our best intentions by the minute
Incubate mildew like a dirty shirt,
An outgrown bassinet, mice nesting in it.
On this day in 1839, an American chemistry professor named
John William Draper
took a photograph of the moon with a camera made out of a cigar box. He
used a process like Daguerre's, but he came up with it by himself; Daguerre
hadn't made his invention public yet. The plate was exposed for twenty minutes,
and the image was one inch across. It was the first time anyone in the U.S.
tried to take a picture of something in the sky.
It's the birthday of playwright Christopher Fry, born Christopher Harris in Bristol, England (1907). He's the author of The Lady's Not for Burning (1948); the original production starred Laurence Olivier. He wrote, "The moon is nothing / But a circumambulatory aphrodisiac / Divinely subsidized to provoke the world / Into a rising birth-rate."
It's the birthday of jazz musician Fletcher
Henderson, born in Cuthbert, Georgia (1897). Most jazz musicians in
the twenties came from the wrong side of the tracks, but Henderson's mother
was a classical piano teacher and he had a college degree in chemistry. When
it was clear he was never going to be a chemist -- he figured no company would
ever hire a black man -- he worked as a song-plugger, then signed on to an all-black
recording company, and started to front a group of musicians from a New York
club who thought his educated ways might get them better jobs. Don Redman wrote
their arrangements, and when Louis Armstrong joined the orchestra for a year
and they realized what he could do, Redman threw out the old charts and arranged
the tunes so sections played against each other and musicians could take solos.
Henderson's was the first real jazz orchestra. In 1984, the clarinetist Bob
Wilbur found a stack of Henderson's arrangements in Lincoln Center. "They
were written in a very precise beautiful hand," he said. "In a way
they reminded me of Mozart's scores. They were absolutely meticulous, with no
signs of erasures or changes."
It's the birthday of writer Hector
Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pen name Saki, born in Burma (1870).
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®