Monday, 22 NOVEMBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Yes" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
© Graywolf Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission.
Yes
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could you know. That's why we wake
and look out--no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the second First Lady in American history, Abigail Adams, born Abigail Smith in Weymouth, Massachusetts (1744). John Adams traveled a lot during their marriage, and so they kept up a frequent correspondence. She also wrote to other family and friends, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. She wrote about her garden, her children, the momentous historical events she was witnessing, and about politics. Thousands of her letters have been collected and published, and she is considered one of the great letter writers in American history. She called the pen her only pleasure.
In their letters, she addressed him as her "dearest friend." He addressed her as his "dear soul." She wasn't always happy to give up her husband's company for the country's benefit. When she learned that he would be staying away for an extra month in 1775, she wrote, "I was pleasing myself with the thought that you would soon be upon your return. It is in vain to repine. I hope the public will reap what I sacrifice."
She never hesitated to give John her opinions about public policy, and she made her most famous suggestion on March 31, 1776, when she wrote, "I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors."
When John wrote back, "I cannot but laugh...you are so saucy!" Abigail replied, "I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives...arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken; and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet."
It's the birthday of Andre Gide, born in Paris (1869). He was brought up in an extremely strict Calvinist household, and he struggled for most of his youth against sexual desires. He said, "[I was] crazed to such a point that eventually I came to seek everywhere some bit of flesh on which to press my lips."
He was traveling in North Africa in 1895 when he met the writer Oscar Wilde, who questioned his sexuality. At first, he was offended by Wilde's suggestion, but the encounter led him to embrace the fact that he was a homosexual. He went on to become one of the first modern writers to openly defend homosexuality in his book Corydon (1924), which became an underground classic, even though it was denounced and banned in mainstream literary society.
He was one of the most popular writers in France, in part because he was so controversial. For a long time, the Vatican proclaimed that it was a mortal sin to read any of his books. He's best known for his novels The Immoralist (1902) and The Counterfeiters (1926). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947.
Andre Gide said, "'Know thyself'[is] a maxim as pernicious as it is ugly...A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly."
And, "Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
It's the birthday of the woman who wrote under the name George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans in Warwickshire, England (1819). She was her father's favorite child, and he paid for the many tutors who taught her foreign languages and gave her all the best literature to read. Her father was shocked when, at the age of twenty-two, she told him that she had decided Christianity was a mix of fact and fiction, and she no longer wanted to go to church. He stopped speaking to her for nine weeks. She eventually made up with him, but she never changed her beliefs.
After her father's death, she traveled to Switzerland, wondering how she was going to support herself. Her father hadn't left her much money, and men didn't find her very attractive. She found herself spending all her time sitting in public places, staring at other people and taking notes. Her letters to friends were filled with observations of the people she met.
When she returned to England, she became a woman of letters at a time when there was almost no such thing. She impressed the owner of a literary journal so much that he let her become the poorly paid, unacknowledged editor of the Westminster Review, and under her guidance it became one of the most respected literary quarterlies in London.
Eliot also began to write fiction. She chose George Eliot as her pen name because George was the first name of her lover and she said, "Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily-pronounced word." She also described the name as, "A tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries."
At a time when most novels were full of exaggerated characters, wild coincidences, and sentimentality, Eliot devoted herself to writing about ordinary characters and ordinary life. She wrote, "Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world."
Eliot's first full-length novel Adam Bede (1859) was about carpenter who is betrayed by his love, Hetty Sorrel. Eliot said, "[It is] country story--full of the breath of cows and scent of hay." It was an immediate success. People across Europe, including Leo Tolstoy in Russia, called it a work of genius, and everyone wondered who this George Eliot was. Mary Evans decided to reveal her identity, and went on to become one of the most renowned writers of her lifetime. In 1871, she published her masterpiece, Middlemarch, which has been called one of the greatest English novels of all time.
George Eliot, who wrote, "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
It was about 12:30 PM on this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It was the only successful assassination of an American president carried out in the last hundred years, and the only presidential assassination ever caught on film. Almost every American alive at the time remembers where they were when they heard the news. Walter Cronkite cried when he made the announcement that the president was dead.
The alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested ninety minutes after the murder took place. Two days after his arrest, Oswald was being transferred to jail, in front of a crowd of on-lookers and TV cameras, when a local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby pulled out a gun and shot him.
Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over a presidential commission to investigate the assassination. The Warren Commission's report filled twenty-seven volumes with about 10 million words. In included the transcripts of 25,000 FBI interviews, 1500 secret service interviews, the testimony of 552 witnesses who appeared before the commission itself, as well as photos and related documents.
The writer Don DeLillo, who wrote the novel Libra (1988) about the Kennedy assassination, said of the Warren Report, "Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays, photos of knotted string, thousands of pages of testimony...It is all one thing, a ruined city of trivia...the Joycean Book of America."
The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that Jack Ruby had also acted alone. But even before the commission's report was released, books were already being published suggesting various conspiracy theories. Today, there have been more books written by amateur historians about the Kennedy assassination than any other event in history.
The theories include a right wing conspiracy within the U.S. Government, a group of right wing dissidents, anti-Castro Cubans and their supporters, left-wing pro-Castro Cubans, or the Mafia. One theory is that Oswald himself actually never returned from a trip to Russia, but had been replaced and impersonated by a KGB agent. Another theory claims that Oswald was not trying to kill the president at all, but just John Connally, the governor of Texas, who sat in front of Kennedy in the same limousine. Still another suggests that Kennedy was accidentally shot by a secret service agent.
Today, fewer than half of all Americans believe the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
Don DeLillo wrote, "What has become unraveled since that afternoon in Dallas is...the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared. We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity."
TUESDAY, 23 NOVEMBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Happiness" by Jane Kenyon, from Otherwise New & Selected Poems © Graywolf Press, 1997. Reprinted with permission.
Happiness
There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.
No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon.
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1889 the Jukebox made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It was called a "nickel-in-the-slot player" and was built by the Pacific Phonograph Co. and installed by entrepreneur Louis Glass and his business associate William S. Arnold.
The jukebox consisted of an Edison Class M Electric Phonograph inside a free-standing oak cabinet to which were attached four stethoscope-like tubes. Each tube could be activated by depositing a coin so that four people could listen to a single recording at one time - the sound equivalent of the peep-show nickelodeon. Towels were supplied so that Palais Royale patrons could wipe off the listening tubes between uses. Despite competition from player pianos, this primitive jukebox was a big hit across the country. In its first six months of service, the Nickel-in-the-Slot earned over $1,000.
It's the birthday of poet Christopher Logue, born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England (1926), whose works include Wand and Quadrant (1953), The Girls (1969), Kings: An Account of Books One and Two of Homer's Iliad (1991), War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad (1987) and All Day Permanent Red: An Account of the First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad (2003).
Logue grew up in Portsmouth where his mother had gone for her own mother's company. His father was in London much of the time where he rented a small house and worked as an official in the British postal service. Logue had an intense but hostile attachment to his mother. He was miserable in school and didn't feel like he fit in. He spent his time drawing and woodworking. He thought he would have made a better painter than a writer, but he chose poetry as his vocation.
He said, "People in the arts struck me as being free...I wanted, and still want, to create something exceptionally clear and hard and truthful. So it was poetry for me." When he left school he was advised he was not suitable for further education.
In 1944, Logue joined the Army and was sent to the Middle East with the Black Watch. He was found guilty of gunrunning and other offenses in Palestine and was imprisoned for two years. In 1948 after his discharge he went to London where he worked as a park keeper and a dental receptionist. He later qualified as the single registered pauper in the town of Bournemouth. During this time he read all of Shaw, Milton, and Dryden.
His father soon died and left him with fifty pounds. So Logue used the money to go to Paris in 1951. At that time, Alexander Trocchi and Samuel Beckett were around, George Whitman was developing the bookshop which is now famous as Shakespeare & Company, and magazines like Merlin and The Paris Review were starting. Logue made friends and found happiness. He said, "With the exception of my various love affairs I have remained happy ever since."
While nearly starving, he published Wand and Quadrant (1953) with money he raised in cafes. He became a Marxist the following year and dressed entirely in black. He wrote Songs in 1959, a mix of love sonnets, political poems, ballads and translations from Homer and Pablo Neruda printed in a variety of typefaces which Logue himself designed.
He has been described as an exhibitionist who seeks to raise the poet to the level of pop singer. In Who's Who he revealed himself to be "Count Palmiro Vicarion," who in 1957 published Lust--a pornographic novel, A Book of Limericks, and A Book of Bawdy Ballads.
Logue returned to London and took part in early poetry-and-jazz experiments, pioneering poster poems, going to prison again, and taking part in the literary and political scenes. He was there at the Albert Hall poetry reading at which three Beat poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Corso, joined with Logue, George MacBeth, and other locals to perform before an audience of several thousand. He said of the event, "It was the moment that spoke."
For over four decades, Logue has worked at rewriting and modernizing Homer's Iliad in English. He can't read a word of Ancient Greek, and works through the Iliad by consulting existing translations, getting a sense of what it's about, and then writing his own version. Logue said, "I write slowly and painfully. This would be fine except for the fact that I suffer greatly from long, alternating bouts of idleness and impatience."
Logue's latest installment is All Day Permanent Red (2003). Its name comes from a Revlon lipstick ad. The book recounts a single battle in the Trojan War and is entirely action.
It's the birthday of mystery writer, critic and lecturer Robert Barnard, born in 1936 in Essex, England. He spent many years in academia while establishing himself as a writer of crime fiction. His first crime novel, Death of an Old Goat (1974) was written while he was professor of English at the University of Tromso in Norway, the world's most northerly university. Since then he has written over thirty crime novels including A Scandal in Belgravia (1991), The Mistress of Alderley (1992), The Bones in the Attic (2001), and The Graveyard Position (2004). His detectives include Scotland Yard's Perry Trethowan and Yorkshire policeman Charlie Peace. He also writes historical crime novels as Bernard Bastable, often featuring Mozart as a detective.
Robert Barnard said he writes only to entertain. He regards Agatha Christie as his ideal crime writer and has published an appreciation of her work, A Talent to Deceive (1980), as well as books on Dickens and a history of English literature.
It's the birthday of poet Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel, in what was Czernowitz, Romania at the time of his birth (1920). It is now located in Ukraine. When Romania came under Nazi control during World War Two, Celan was sent to a forced labor camp, and his parents were murdered. Celan escaped and after the war, he settled in Paris where he published Mohn und Gedachtnis (Poppy and Memory, 1952) and established his reputation as poet in the German-speaking countries.
Though Celan spoke eight languages, he chose to write in German. A year after receiving the news of his parent's deaths, Celan wrote: "And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time, / the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme?" His German mother tongue reminded him of the loss constantly. He said, "Only in one's mother tongue can one express one's own truth. In a foreign language, the poet lies."
His most famous poem, "Todesfugue" (Death Fugue), is one of the great poems to come out of the Holocaust. It is a poem about the Nazi death camps and about Germans and Jews.
Celan became a teacher of German language at the Ecole Normale Sup&eaccent;rieure in Paris. Along with writing poetry, he translated works from such writers as Cocteau, Mandelstam, Rimbaud, Val&ecaute;ry, Char, du Bouchet, and Dupin. After being wrongly accused of plagiarism, Celan had a nervous breakdown and continued to suffer from bouts of depression throughout the 1960s. He drowned himself in the Seine river on May 1, in 1970, at the age of 49. In his pocket calendar he had written: "Depart Paul." The three books Celan left unfinished at his death appeared in 1986 under the title Last Poems.
Paul Celan said: "Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language... But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through."
And he said, "Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won."
It's the birthday of writer and critic Guy Davenport, born in Anderson, South Carolina (1927). He is best known for two books of essays, Every Force Evolves a Form (1987) and The Geography of the Imagination (1981). He has published seven collections of short stories and numerous translations of early Greek poets and playwrights. He was a professor of English at the University of Kentucky from 1964 to 1990. He is also a painter and illustrator and in 1996 a collection of Davenport's artwork, 50 Drawings, was published.
Guy Davenport said, "Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world."
WEDNESDAY, 24 NOVEMBER, 2004
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Gathering Leaves" by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost © Holt Rinehart Winston. Reprinted with permission.
Gathering Leaves
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like a rabbit and deer
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?
Next to nothing for weight;
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.
Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the children's book author Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England (1849). She was a successful author of books for adults in her lifetime, but today she's remembered for a book she wrote for children: The Secret Garden (1896). She wrote, "I can't help making up things. If I didn't, I don't believe I could live. I'm sure I couldn't live here."
It's the birthday of one of the pioneers of the self-help industry, Dale Carnegie, born in Maryville, Missouri (1888). He started out teaching night classes on public speaking at the 125th Street YMCA in Harlem. The YMCA didn't have much faith that people would pay for a public speaking class, so Carnegie made them a deal. If his classes didn't make a profit, the Y didn't have to give him anything, but if they did make a profit, he got half. After a few years, he was making forty or fifty dollars per class.
He said, "People came to my classes because they wanted to be able to stand up on their feet and say a few words at a business meeting without fainting from fright. Salesmen wanted to be able to call on a tough customer without having to walk around the block three times to get up courage."
He saved up enough money to rent out an office in Times Square and began teaching his own classes and printing his own instructional pamphlets. He eventually published his pamphlets in the book Public Speaking; A Practical Course for Business Men (1926), which became a standard public speaking textbook.
For the next few years, Carnegie began studying biographies of prominent men, paying special attention to what made them successful. He claimed to have read more than 100 biographies of Theodore Roosevelt alone. He began incorporating anecdotes about these famous people into his classes and his public lectures.
One day, a publishing executive who took one of his classes suggested that he write a book based on his lectures. He didn't want to, but he finally worked with a secretary to pull a book together and it was published in 1936 as How To Win Friends and Influence People.
The first printing of the book was 5,000 copies, but within a few months of its publication, it was selling 5,000 copies a day.