“Mothers and Daughters” by Jo McDougall from In the Home of the Famous Dead. © The University of Arkansas Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline in Tyumen, Russia (1888). He got his new name as the result of a printer’s error on the first song he ever sold; the printer typeset “Berlin” instead of “Baline,” so Irving kept the new name. His family immigrated to New York City when the boy was five years old, and his father, a Jewish cantor, died three years later. The son left school then, to go to work to help support the family. He sold newspapers and sang on the streets for handouts, and even worked for a singing Bowery beggar named Blind Sol, leading him to various bars, keeping track of his money, and occasionally singing with him. He was able to buy his mother a rocking chair with his earnings. Later, he got a job as a singing waiter in Chinatown, where he would occasionally write and perform songs with his fellow waiters.

He published his first song in 1907, and was paid 37 cents for it. His first big success came in 1911, with Alexander’s Ragtime Band. “Ragged time” music was the rage, and Berlin’s song became one of the most popular and enduring examples of it. Less than a decade later, he was writing complete musical scores, revues, and Broadway shows. He never learned to read or write music, and he only composed in the key of F-sharp. He once said, “I feel like an awful dope that I know so little about the mechanics of my trade.” He wrote many beloved American songs, including “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

In 1925, he fell in love with a debutante, Ellin Mackay. Her father, who was head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company and very wealthy, disapproved of this rags-to-riches Lower East Side immigrant upstart. He took his daughter away to Europe, but his “out of sight, out of mind” strategy failed, because Berlin reached her ears through the radio. He wrote romantic ballads like “Always” and dedicated them to her. They were married in a civil ceremony when she returned to New York, and they remained married for 62 years, until her death in 1988.

It’s the birthday of writer Mari Sandoz, born near Hay Springs, Nebraska (1896). Her parents were Swiss immigrants, and her childhood was dominated by her violent and passionate father. He was a homesteader, orchardist, agronomist, and a “homestead locator,” finding homesteads for hundreds of other settlers. This made him the enemy of local cattlemen who wanted to keep the land free for cattle. They even attempted to have him killed. He was frustrated by the harsh life of homesteading and the deadly tensions between homesteaders and cattlemen, and he took it out on his family. He often beat his wife, and his children, too — he first beat Mari when she was just three months old.

As the eldest of six children, Mari was expected to devote her time to helping on the farm and raising her younger brothers and sisters. When she finally went to school at age nine, not only was she illiterate, but her family spoke Swiss German so she also didn’t know a word of English. Her accent was so thick that the other students couldn’t even understand her name. She was determined and smart, and she taught herself English in the evenings. She attended school only erratically, but she learned English quickly and well. Her father disapproved of her reading, so she smuggled books in under her shirt and hid them in the attic in the straw mattress that she shared with the baby.

Sandoz was a good writer, and when she was 11, one of her stories was printed in the children’s section of the Omaha newspaper. She showed her parents, and her father was furious. He beat her, locked her in the cellar, and forbade her from ever writing again. She continued to write in secret. At the age of 17, she finally finished eighth grade. One day, badly dressed and weighing only 75 pounds, she sneaked off and rode a horse to a neighboring town to take the rural teachers’ exam. She passed the exam and hoped to escape her old life, but she ended up in an abusive marriage. Five years later, she petitioned for divorce, writing that she had suffered “extreme mental cruelty.” She moved to Lincoln, where she hoped to begin a life as a writer.

That life did not come easily. She worked menial jobs, and although she didn’t have a high school diploma, an administrator at the University of Nebraska found a loophole so that she could take classes. For more than a decade, she survived mostly on tea and crackers from the dining hall. She was severely underweight and wore threadbare clothes. She continued to write and submit short stories — she later estimated that she had received more than 1,000 rejection letters, which she saved in a scrapbook.

In 1928, she learned that her father was dying, and she went back home to see him. He had continued to disapprove of her life — he told her that writers and artists were the “the maggots of society” — and so she was amazed when, on his deathbed, he declared his last wish: that she write the story of his life. She threw herself into writing Old Jules, a biography of her father, but it was rejected by every major publisher in the country. Finally, in 1933, she couldn’t take it anymore. She was malnourished, exhausted, and poor. She took 70 manuscripts and burned them in a washtub in her yard, then moved back in with her mother; but she hadn’t burned Old Jules, and on a whim she submitted a revised version to a nonfiction contest through the Atlantic Press. She won the contest, Old Jules (1935) became a Book of the Month Club selection, and it sold so well that Sandoz was able to support herself.

She went on to write many more books of fiction and nonfiction, including Slogum House (1937), Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942), Cheyenne Autumn (1953), and The Story Catcher (1963).

It was on this day in the year 868 A.D. that the Diamond Sutra was printed. It is the world’s oldest book bearing a specific date of publication. The Diamond Sutra is a collection of Buddhist teachings — the word sutra comes from Sanskrit and means teachings or scriptures. The Diamond Sutra is set up as a dialogue between the Buddha and Subhuti, one of his elderly disciples. This copy of the Diamond Sutra was printed with wood blocks on seven strips of paper — each page was printed from a single block. These seven sheets were bound together to form a scroll about 16 feet long.

The scroll was discovered in Turkestan, in 1900, among a thousand bundles of manuscripts walled up in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.

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

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“In the Library” by Charles Simic from The Voice at 3:00am. © Harcourt, 2006.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is Mother’s Day. The holiday was the idea of a woman named Anna Jarvis, a schoolteacher who had lived with her mother for most of her life. After her mother died, she got the idea to set aside one day a year for the celebration of mothers. She chose the second Sunday in May because that was when her own mother had died. The first Mother’s Day celebration was held at Anna Jarvis’s church on May 10, 1908, and at the end of the service Anna Jarvis gave each mother a carnation, because carnations had been her mother’s favorite flowers.

The idea for the holiday spread across the country, and then in May of 1914, an Alabama legislator named Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin introduced a bill to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. When President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill, he ordered flags to be flown on Mother’s Day from all public buildings. Cotton Tom said, “The flag was never used in a more beautiful and sacred cause than when flying above that tender, gentle army: the mothers of America.”

The First Transcontinental Railroad was completed on this date in 1869. It was a project that had been discussed since the 1830s, when railroads were really taking off in America, and Europeans were settling in California in increasing numbers. But people couldn’t decide on the best route. Some argued for a central route through Wyoming and Nebraska, and others felt a southern route through Texas was better because it would avoid the Rocky Mountains. As time went on, the Pony Express proved that the central route was passable even in the winter — which had been a major concern — and Texas allied itself with the Confederacy in the Civil War, so the central route won. The southern transcontinental route was eventually built in 1881, and the Interstate 10 highway roughly follows that route today.

The building of a transcontinental railroad was one of Abraham Lincoln’s big goals during his presidency. He signed legislation to construct the line in July 1862, and two companies were hired: Central Pacific would build from west to east, and Union Pacific would build from east to west. The law arranged to pay the companies per mile, and they exploited that provision whenever they were able. The main stockholder of Union Pacific, Thomas Clark Durant, had been Lincoln’s employer before Lincoln entered politics. Even though the law stated that no stockholder could own more than 10 percent of the company, Durant worked around this through the use of proxies. He arranged to add extra miles to the track and usually ran it conveniently through land that he owned, so he got paid for that too. When this came to light in 1872, it became one of the major scandals of the 19^th century.

It wasn’t just corruption that marred the project. Chinese immigrants did much of the hard labor, and they were paid much less than their white counterparts. And the railroad route went through American Indian lands in violation of government treaties. Hunting grounds were disrupted, and bison — the Native Americans’ main food source — were killed or maimed by the “cow catchers” on the front of the locomotives. Once the railroad was complete, passengers would often shoot the bison from train windows just for fun. And since the railroad made it easy to transport large loads of buffalo hides to markets in the east, professional hunters slaughtered and skinned thousands of the animals, leaving the carcasses to rot.

Finally, on May 10, 1869, the two companies met up at Promontory Point, Utah. California governor Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial “Golden Spike” from California, and two other ceremonial spikes — a silver one from Nevada, and one made of gold, silver, and iron from Arizona — were also placed with great fanfare. The last railroad tie was made of California laurel. Even though the railroad now ran all the way west to Sacramento, it didn’t go all the way to the East Coast in an unbroken line: it stopped outside Omaha, and rail service didn’t resume for about 150 miles. The true final connection between the coasts didn’t happen for more than a year, but when it was finally completed, the journey from New York to Sacramento took about a week — a considerable improvement over the previous travel time of nearly six months.

It’s the birthday of Fred Astaire, born Frederick Austerlitz, in Omaha, Nebraska (1899). He made dancing look effortless on screen and stage, and the writer John O’Hara called him the “living symbol of all that is the best of show business.”

He started dancing when he was four, and when he was six he formed an act with his sister, Adele, that became a popular vaudeville attraction on Broadway. When Adele retired in 1932, Astaire made a screen test. The movie executive wrote: “Can’t act, can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.” Still, Astaire got a part in Dancing Lady (1933). It starred Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and the Three Stooges.

He’s famous for the movies he made with his dancing partner Ginger Rogers: classics like The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), and Swing Time (1936). They rubbed off on each another. People said she gave him sex appeal, and he gave her class. Their only on-screen kiss came in the movie Carefree (1938), in a dream sequence.

He was a perfectionist who worked up to 18 hours a day. He said, “The only way I know to get a good show is to practice, sweat, rehearse, and worry.” He demanded the same of his partners. One scene in Swing Time took 47 takes to film, and by the end Ginger’s feet were bleeding. In the film, she says, “I’ve danced with you. I’m never going to dance again.”

In one routine, Astaire had to toss an umbrella across a room, into an umbrella stand. He said: “I did it 45 times, and it always hit the edge. So I said, ‘That’s it! Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m coming back, and I’m going to get [it].’ [...] I came back next morning fresh as a daisy, and that umbrella went into the stand on the first take.”

He kept dancing until late in his life. At age 50, he said: “How do I keep going? What do I do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don’t eat health foods. I never dance unless I have to. I don’t work out in a gym. Vitamin pills? Never! Who needs ’em?” He said: “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”

He said: “The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.”

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

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Garrison Keillor Brings

A Prairie Home Companion

“America the Beautiful Tour”

Celebrating America on its 250th Birthday, Garrison Keillor brings A Prairie Home Companion’s “America the Beautiful Tour” to the Fox Theater, delivering an evening of stories, sweet harmony with Heather Masse and Christine DiGiallonardo, SFX man Fred Newman, Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, The News from Lake Wobegon, an audience chorale, and more.

DOORS 6:30PM | SHOW 7:30PM

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“Hard rain and potent thunder” by Marge Piercy from Made in Detroit. © Knopf, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of poet and essayist Charles Simic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1938). His mother’s family and his father’s family didn’t get on well. He remembered: “My mother’s family was fearful, paranoid, and secretive. They had lost their wealth and were worried about keeping up appearances. They had no sense of humor. Nothing was ever funny to them. My father’s family, when they got going at a dinner table, they were like a dadaist cabaret, so you can imagine how my poor mother felt in their company.” His family survived the bombing of Belgrade during World War II and fled Eastern Europe after the war was over. At first they lived in New York, which Simic said “looked like painted sets at a sideshow in a carnival,” and then moved to Chicago: “like a coffee-table edition of the Communist Manifesto, with glossy pictures of lakefront mansions and inner-city slums.” Eventually, the family wound up in Oak Park, Illinois, and Simic went to the same high school Ernest Hemingway had gone to. His first ambition was to be a painter; he didn’t start writing poetry until his last year of high school, and even then, he wasn’t too serious about it.

He published his first poems in 1959, when he was 21, and since that time he has published nearly three dozen books of poetry, many translations and works of prose, and served as the poet laureate of the United States.

On this night in 1671, Thomas Blood tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Disguised as a priest, he managed to convince the Jewel House keeper to hand over his pistols. One of Blood’s accomplices shoved the Royal Orb down his breeches. Blood flattened the crown with a mallet and tried to run off with it, but they were caught in the act. King Charles was so impressed with Blood’s audacity that he pardoned him, restored his estates in Ireland, and gave him an annual pension of 500 pounds. Blood became a colorful celebrity all across the kingdom, and when he died in 1680, his body had to be exhumed in order to persuade the public that he was actually dead.

It’s the birthday of Richard Adams, born in Newbury, England (1920). He’s best known for his first novel, Watership Down (1972), in which he wrote about a band of rabbits and their epic journey to find a new den. It was one of the first works of fiction about animals that tried to realistically portray how they eat, mate, live, and die. The only exception to the realism was that the rabbits could think and talk like humans.

It’s the birthday of journalist, novelist, and playwright J(ames) M(atthew) Barrie, born in Angus, Scotland (1860). He was the seventh of eight children. When he was six years old, his older brother died in a skating accident. His mother fell into a deep depression, and Barrie tried to make her feel better by wearing his older brother’s clothes and doing things his older brother used to do. At some point, it occurred to Barrie that his dead brother would never grow up, and the idea stuck with him for the rest of his life.

As a young man, he became a very successful writer of sentimental novels and humorous plays. Then, after his marriage in 1894 didn’t produce any children, he started spending time with the children of one of his friends. He began to tell them stories about a boy who had run away to a place called Never Land, where he refused to grow up, and he named that boy Peter Pan.

Barrie first wrote about Peter Pan in a book of children’s stories called The Little White Bird (1902). Two years later, he produced the play Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), which included the well-known story about Peter and Wendy and Captain Hook. Even though he’d produced many successful plays before, Barrie became obsessed with the production of Peter Pan. He rewrote the script more than 20 times. It was one of the most expensive productions ever attempted at that time, since it required the construction of harnesses and wires so that the actors could appear to fly around the stage.

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

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This is a great country. It gave the world Broadway, rhythm & blues, lyric poetry about ordinary people, and humor — America without humor is unthinkable. It’s the land where talent beats privilege and the crowd cheers for the underdog, so let’s get our chins up and sing about the beauty of the land and the rainbow our people were looking for, the rivers they crossed, their high hopes for their kids. Enough about despair, let’s take a night at The Fox Theater in Spokane to have a great time with Garrison Keillor, Heather Masse, Christine DiGiallonardo, Fred Newman, Rich Dworsky and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band. CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS!

“Above Pate Valley” by Gary Snyder from Riprap and Cold Mountain. © Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, 2003.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of poet Gary Snyder, born in San Francisco (1930). When he was 15, he read Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, and he liked it so much that he went to the library to see what else Lawrence had written. He found a book called Birds, Beasts and Flowers. He said, “I was disappointed to find out that it wasn’t a sexy novel, but read the poems anyway, and it deeply shaped me for that moment in my life.” He began writing his own poetry, and continued to write during his years at Reed College, where he studied anthropology and literature. After graduating, he decided that the life of a poet wasn’t for him, and he went to work on a trail crew in the mountains.

In the mountains, he started writing again, poems about rocks and birds. He had never written anything like them before, and he realized that he must finally be writing in his own voice. He taught himself Chinese, and was particularly inspired by Chinese poetry. In 1955, at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, Snyder read his poem “A Berry Feast.” He spent many years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. In 1961, he published an essay about what he called “Buddhist anarchism,” a concept that excited many of his fellow Beat writers. He was the model for Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958). He lived with a counterculture group on a Japanese island, translated poetry, taught English at the University of California Davis, and became an environmental activist.

His books include Turtle Island (1974), No Nature (1992), New and Selected Poems (1992), and most recently, Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places (2014).

He said, “I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity.”

It’s the birthday of Edmund Wilson, born in Red Bank, New Jersey (1895). He is generally considered the greatest American man of letters of the 20th century, though he published almost all of his work in popular magazines. He never took a teaching position and rarely gave lectures.

He went to communist Russia and learned both Russian and German to write about the history of socialism in his book To the Finland Station (1940). He wrote about Russian poetry, Haitian literature, the Hebrew language, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the literature produced during the American Civil War.

Wilson introduced Americans to writers like James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov. He almost single-handedly resurrected the reputation of the novelist Henry James, who had been forgotten for years. He championed new writers like Ernest Hemingway, and it was Wilson who persuaded American readers that F. Scott Fitzgerald had been a genius, and that The Great Gatsby was an American classic.

It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon, born in the Long Island city of Glen Cove, New York (1937). He’s considered one of the 20th century’s most gifted writers, and certainly one of its most elusive. There are only a few photos of him in circulation, and most of those are from his high school days. Much of what we know — or think we know — about him comes to us by way of rumor or anecdote. In 1977, Playboy published a fairly revealing article about his personal history, written by his college friend Jules Siegel. According to Siegel, Pynchon was obsessive about his teeth, studied with Nabokov at Cornell but couldn’t understand what he was saying, and had an affair with Siegel’s wife. Pynchon has made a couple of appearances on The Simpsons, but his cartoon image is always portrayed with a paper bag over his head. He’s the author of several novels, including V. (1963), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Against the Day (2006). His most recent book is Bleeding Edge (2013).

He said, “Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”

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

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From the Archives: The News from Lake Wobegon - The Best of 1985 (3CDs)

With this three-disc set, Garrison Keillor captivates, charms, and catches us up on the News from Lake Wobegon, 1985. (Over 3 hours on 3 CDs)

On this date in 1952, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer first presented the concept of the integrated circuit, also known as the microchip, which is the basis for all modern electronic equipment.

Geoffrey Dummer was born in Yorkshire in 1909 and studied electrical engineering at Regent Polytechnic in London. He held a series of jobs in the 1930s, including a post wit…

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“A Thunderstorm in Town” by Thomas Hardy from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. © St. Martins Press, 1996.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of German composer Johannes Brahms, born in Hamburg in 1833. He began studying the piano at the age of seven, and he picked it up quickly. As a teenager, he would play in brothels and taverns to earn money for his family. He met composer and music critic Robert Schumann when he, Brahms, was 20 years old and the two became close friends. Schumann took the younger man under his wing and introduced him to musical society, calling him a “young eagle” and a genius. Brahms’ musical style was traditional, even conservative, and so he often found himself at odds with the more avant-garde “New German School” composers like Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

Brahms stepped in to help Schumann’s wife, Clara, with the running of the household when her husband attempted suicide and went into a mental institution. Brahms fell in love with Clara, who was 14 years Brahms’ elder. He wrote to Schumann in the sanatorium, saying, “How long the separation from your wife seemed to me! I had grown so used to her uplifting presence and had spent such a magnificent summer with her. I had grown to admire and love her so much that everything else seemed empty to me, and I could only long to see her again.” Brahms’ love for Clara was unrequited, though, even after Schumann’s death. Brahms never married.

Brahms’ Lullaby is one of the most recognizable melodies in the Western world. Brahms composed it in 1868 for an old friend, Bertha Faber, to commemorate the birth of her second child. The lyrics came from a German folk poem. The lullaby’s real title is “Guten Abend, gute Nacht,” — which means “Good evening, good night” — or the less eloquent Opus 49, Number 4. Clara Schumann played the piano for the piece’s first public performance in 1869.

It was on this day in 1932 that William Faulkner reported to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A year earlier, he had met several Hollywood people at a party in New York City, including the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who suggested that he come to Hollywood and write for the movies. Instead, Faulkner went back home to Oxford, Mississippi, to work on his novel Light in August. By March of 1932, he had completed the manuscript and sent it off to his agent.

Faulkner was in deep financial trouble. He had overdrawn his bank account by $500, and even local storekeepers weren’t accepting his checks. His publisher owed him $4,000 in royalties, and he went to the post office every day hoping a check would come. He asked his agent to try to sell Light in August to a magazine for serial publication, but he had one condition: that they didn’t change a single word. If not, he said, he would go work for the movies, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. His agent didn’t get any takers, but did get Faulkner a contract with MGM for $500 a week. When the publisher who owed him $4,000 officially went bankrupt, Faulkner had no choice but to take the contract. He didn’t even have enough money to send a telegram accepting the offer, so he had to ask his uncle for a five dollar loan. MGM sent him an advance and a train ticket to Culver City, California. Faulkner’s father was so surprised that when his son showed him the check, he asked if it was legal.

When Faulkner arrived at the studio, he was drunk and had a cut on his head. He left the studio and disappeared for nine days, apparently wandering around Death Valley. When he returned, he actually went to work, and became known for how quickly he could write. Before long the respected director Howard Hawks asked to work with Faulkner. The two men bonded over their love of hunting, drinking, and flying, and Faulkner worked on some of his best screenplays for Hawks’s movies, including To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). Although Faulkner worked on more than 50 films over the course of his years in Hollywood, he only got screenwriting credits for six.

It’s the birthday of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born in Votkinsk, Russia (1840). He wrote symphonies, operas, and three great ballets: Swan Lake (1876), The Nutcracker (1892), and The Sleeping Beauty (1889). He said, “I sit down to work each morning at 9 a.m., and the muse has learnt to be on time.”

And it’s the birthday of Victorian poet and playwright Robert Browning, born in Camberwell, England, in 1812. His mother was an accomplished pianist, and his father was a fairly well-off bank clerk whose personal library contained 6,000 books. Robert was educated at home, and was a voracious reader from an early age. He loved the Romantic poets, especially Shelley, and at 14 he became an atheist and a vegetarian, to be more like his hero. Browning entered the University of London when he was 16, but grew annoyed at the slow pace within the first year and dropped out, preferring to pursue his own studies. He picked up lots of random information, and his poetry was sometimes criticized for its obscure references.

His relationship with fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett is one of the most famous in English literature. They began a prolific correspondence — hundreds of letters during their 20-month courtship, which began when he sent her fan mail. They eventually eloped against her father’s wishes and moved to Italy. Browning’s poetry was largely overshadowed by his wife’s, at least during her lifetime. She was popular and successful, and a serious contender for the post of poet laureate in 1860, though that honor ultimately went to Tennyson. He generally received negative attention, if he received any attention at all. His long poem Paracelsus (1835) had been well-received, and gave him his entry into the London literary scene, but his follow-up, the experimental Sordello (1840), was ridiculed, and when he and Elizabeth moved to Italy, his critics beat him up for abandoning his homeland. Even his two-volume collection Men and Women — his most widely read work today — barely caused a ripple. He returned to London in 1861 after Elizabeth’s death, and in 1868 he published his first real critical and commercial success, The Ring and the Book.

Browning also wrote several plays, none of them successful. But writing for the stage taught him how to use the dramatic monologue to reveal character, and he adapted it to his poetry. It became a defining characteristic of his work, and his most important and lasting contribution to the art, inspiring the likes of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. He also inspired horror master Stephen King; Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) was the springing-off point for the long-lived Dark Tower series, which King describes as his magnum opus.

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

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“Morning in May” by Rosalind Brackenbury from Bonnard’s Dog. © Hanging Loose Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Sigmund Freud, born in Freiburg, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), in 1856. He’s usually associated with Vienna, where he lived from the age of four until the Germans occupied it in 1938. He then moved to London, where he died of throat cancer in 1939. Freud wrote several books, including The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

Freud started his professional life as a medical doctor, but as a Jew, he knew his prospects in medicine were probably limited. He became interested in psychology, especially in a mental illness called hysteria, which caused patients to suffer from tics, tremors, convulsions, paralysis, and hallucinations. Freud learned that some doctors were using hypnosis to treat hysteria, and he went to France to observe the use of hypnosis firsthand. Seeing that a patient could be talked out of his or her symptoms gave Freud the idea that the symptoms were a product of the mind and not the body. He learned the method of hypnosis himself and began to treat patients, but he had little success. Then one of Freud’s colleagues told him about a patient named Anna O., whose hysterical symptoms had improved when she told stories about her life. The woman herself named this process of storytelling “the talking cure.”

Over the next few years, he developed the idea that his patients were not conscious of all their desires and fears, that many of their own thoughts were hidden from them in their unconscious mind. He believed that their unconscious mind would reveal itself in various ways, through slips of the tongue, jokes, and especially dreams. What made his ideas so revolutionary and controversial was that he didn’t just apply them to mentally ill patients, but to all human beings, even himself.

People tend to hold very strong opinions about Freud, pro or con. He had many pupils in the early 20th century; notable among them were Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, but both of them eventually broke with Freud. Though some versions of talk therapy are still used, most psychologists and psychiatrists have rejected his theories: only about 1 per cent of people in therapy are being treated using Freudian methods. Though he’s fallen out of favor in the scientific community, many of his revolutionary concepts — like the idea of the unconscious, the interpretation of dreams, and the idea of repressed feelings causing harm — have entered our culture and our literature. And even though they haven’t read his books, most people are still familiar with his concepts, like the Oedipus complex, the ego, the phallic symbol, and the Freudian slip.

W.H. Auden wrote a long poem called “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” which captures how deeply Freud and his ideas have permeated culture. He wrote:

If some traces of the autocratic pose, the paternal strictness he distrusted, still clung to his utterance and features, it was a protective coloration for one who’d lived among enemies so long: if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a personnow but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives: Like weather he can only hinder or help.

It’s the birthday of French journalist and novelist Gaston Leroux, born in Paris in 1868. He started his career as a court reporter and theater critic, and then covered the Russian revolution as an international correspondent. He quit journalism to take up fiction in 1907.

He was fascinated with the Paris Opera House, which sits above a series of catacombs and jail cells, and in one of his news reports he had covered the death of a patron who had been struck by a falling chandelier. He studied the blueprints of the building and knew it inside and out, and when a skeleton was discovered in the cellars, he began a novel of obsession, murder, and music.

The result, Beauty and the Beast fable The Phantom of the Opera (1910), is his best-known work in the English-speaking world, and he maintained until his death that the Opera Ghost was real.

It’s the birthday of poet and critic Randall Jarrell, born in Nashville, Tennessee (1914). He wrote many collections of poetry in his lifetime, but he was also considered one of the greatest literary critics of his generation. In his critical essays, collected and published as Poetry and the Age (1953), he revitalized the reputations of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. He was also one of the first critics to notice the work of Elizabeth Bishop. In a review of her first book of poems, Jarrell wrote, “[Bishop understands that] morality, for the individual, is usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking or heartwarming affair of omissions and commissions, the greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath notice, to those who govern, rationalize, and deplore.”

Randall Jarrell said: “It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.”

It’s the birthday of Orson Welles, Kenosha, Wisconsin (1915). He made his Broadway debut in Romeo and Juliet at the age of 19. He founded the Mercury Theatre when he was 22. When he was 23, he came out with his famous broadcast of War of the Worlds, which caused great hysteria on the East Coast. And when he was 26, he made his masterpiece, the movie Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane didn’t make much at the box office, but is now considered one of the greatest films in history.

Welles said: “I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”

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“Natural Disasters” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is Cinco de Mayo, the Fifth of May. It commemorates the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862. In a David-and-Goliath confrontation, the 8,000-strong, well-armed French army was routed by 4,000 ill-equipped Mexican soldiers, and though it wasn’t a decisive battle in the course of the war, it became a symbol of Mexican pride. It’s also become a celebration of Mexican heritage and culture in the United States.

Cinco de Mayo isn’t widely celebrated in Mexico outside the state of Puebla, but it has been adopted by many Americans regardless of their heritage, much like St. Patrick’s Day and Oktoberfest. It’s been celebrated in California since 1863, and grew in prominence in the rest of the country along with the Chicano movement of the 1940s. It wasn’t until beer advertisers decided to promote the holiday heavily in the 1980s that American celebration of Cinco de Mayo became widespread.

It’s the birthday of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen (1813). He was the youngest of seven children, a sickly boy, and his father used to take him for imaginary walks indoors during bad weather, describing all kinds of wonderful and imaginary sights. Kierkegaard’s father was a wealthy wool merchant who had retired young, and when he died he left his son enough money to be financially independent for the rest of his life. Kierkegaard was a homebody, and rarely left Copenhagen. He enjoyed going to the theater, taking carriage rides out into the country, and chatting with people — even servants and laborers — that he met while strolling the streets. He wrote, “I had real Christian satisfaction in the thought that, if there were no other, there was definitely one man in Copenhagen whom every poor person could freely accost and converse with on the street.”

Kierkegaard is widely considered the father of existential philosophy. His work touched not only philosophy, but also theology, psychology, literary criticism, and fiction. He also came up with two concepts that are commonplace to us today: one is “subjectivity,” the idea that we all perceive the world — and “truth” — differently; and the other is the fact that faith is not possible without doubt. One must doubt the existence of God to have faith in the existence of God. Belief without doubt is just credulity. He published several books at his own expense, including Either/Or (1843), Works of Love (1847), and The Sickness Unto Death (1849). He published many works under a variety of aliases: Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Anti-Climacus, Hilarius Bookbinder, and Vigilius Haufniensis. He did so, he said, to disavow his own authority. He would adopt a “character” who wrote about a particular philosophical viewpoint, and then would adopt another persona to explore the opposing viewpoint.

Kierkegaard wrote: “It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.”

Today is the birthday of journalist Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania (1864). When she was 16, her family moved to Pittsburgh, where she read an editorial in The Pittsburgh Dispatch titled “What Girls Are Good For.” (The paper’s answer was “not much,” at least, not outside the home.) She wrote a furious reply and signed it “Little Orphan Girl.” The editor was so impressed that he invited her in and offered her a job. She took it, and borrowed the name “Nellie Bly” from a Stephen Foster song to use as her pen name.

Unlike most female journalists of the time, she didn’t write about fashion or gardening, though. She wrote about the poor, and the way women were exploited in factories, sometimes posing as a sweatshop worker to report from the inside, which made companies nervous. They threatened to pull their advertising, so she was demoted to a beat that was deemed more suitable for a lady. She turned in her letter of resignation along with her story. She went to New York in 1887, and after several months with no job prospects, she talked her way into an opportunity with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Her assignment was to cover the notorious Blackwell’s Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum, and she went undercover, convincing doctors and judges that she was mentally ill. She was committed to the asylum and lived there in appalling conditions for 10 days. She wrote: “I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.”

In 1914, she went to work for the New York Evening Journal as America’s first female war correspondent. She wrote from the front lines of World War I for almost five years. She returned Stateside in 1919 and died of pneumonia in 1922.

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“My Grandparents’ Generation” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of Agnes Fay Morgan, born in Peoria, Illinois (1884). She studied chemistry in college, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. But job prospects for female chemists were bleak, so she took a position in the Home Economics department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1915. She was an associate professor of “household science,” specifically nutrition. She made it her mission to bring the element of science into the program, which was typically dismissed as “women’s work.” When she was made chair of the department, she increased the rigor of the program and worked to have it taken seriously. While other home economics programs were little more than instruction on the art of gracious living, Morgan required all of her students to have a solid foundation in physical and biological science. In 1960 — six years after Morgan retired — the Home Economics Department was renamed the Nutritional Sciences Department, and a year after that, their building was renamed Agnes Fay Morgan Hall. Even after she officially retired, she never gave up her research, and continued to show up to her Berkeley office on a regular basis until her death in 1968.

Morgan, with her background in chemistry applied to the field of nutrition, wrote more than 250 scientific papers. She was responsible for much of what we know about the vitamins in food. She also proved the link between vitamin deficiencies and poor health conditions; showed certain vitamins’ effect on hormones; and analyzed the effects of heat and processing on the stability of vitamins and proteins.

Peter Minuit landed on the island of Manhattan on this date in 1626. Dutch fur traders had been living on nearby Governors Island for a couple of years, and had built a trading post there. In 1625, construction began on Manhattan Island in the form of a citadel, Fort Amsterdam. The Dutch West India Company appointed Minuit Director of the Colony of New Netherland. He arrived on Mannahatta, the “island of many hills,” to find a small village already in place, with more land being cleared. On the west side of the island there was a cemetery, a small farm, an orchard, and two wealthy estates. Most of the houses were built along the East River, since its shore was more protected from winds than the shore of the Hudson. The main street was built over an old Indian path running from the southern tip of the island north to what is now City Hall Park. First it was called Heere Straat, which meant Gentlemen’s Street, but it eventually came to be known as Breede Wegh — which became the name we know it by today, Broadway.

But outside the infant settlement near the island’s southern edge grew towering stands of hickory, oak, and chestnut trees. Minuit also would have found grasslands and salt marshes. What would eventually become Times Square was at that time a red maple swamp. A creek ran through Midtown. Where the best eateries now stand, wild game roamed freely: turkey, deer, and elk. The beaches and waterways were teeming with eels, brook trout, and shellfish. And Madison Square Garden was a marsh on the edge of a forest. The island’s population was every bit as diverse as it is today: lying at the convergence of two geographic zones, Mannahatta was home to northern spruce and southern magnolia, migratory birds and tropical fish, more than 1,800 different species in all.

It’s the birthday of Horace Mann, born in Franklin, Massachusetts (1796). He was the first great American advocate of public education. He believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal. He was fiercely opposed to slavery, and toward the end of his life, he was the president of Antioch College, a new institution committed to coeducation and equal opportunity for all students, black and white. Two months before he died, he said in a speech to the graduating class: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

It’s the birthday of Israeli writer Amos Oz, born in Amos Klausner in Jerusalem (1939). His uncle was killed by the Nazis, but his father managed to escape to Jerusalem in the late 1930s. His family spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, and English, but Amos was taught only Hebrew. As he grew up, he witnessed the founding of the Israeli nation. In 1948, he helped other schoolchildren fill sandbags to prepare for the siege of Jewish Jerusalem in the War of Independence. When they won the war, he saw hundreds of thousands Jewish refugees stream into Israel. He later said, “The Jerusalem of my childhood was a lunatic town flooded with conflicting dreams, a vague federation of communities, people, faiths, ideologies, and hopes.”

He left home when he was 14 to work and study at a kibbutz, and he changed his last name to Oz, which means “strength” in Hebrew. He began writing poems, and in 1966 he came out with his first novel, Elsewhere Perhaps. Since then, he’s published many more novels, including My Michael (1968) and The Same Sea (2002). His latest novel is called Judas (2014).

Many of his novels and essays have challenged traditional Zionism, and he’s become a controversial figure in Israel. He wrote: “Daytime Israel makes a tremendous effort to create the impression of the determined, tough, simple, uncomplicated society ready to fight back, ready to hit back twice as hard, courageous, and so on. Nocturnal Israel is a refugee camp with more nightmares per square mile […] than any other place in the world. Almost everyone has seen the devil.”

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“National Pastime” by Bill Mayer from Articulate Matter. © Paroikia Press, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote, “A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise”: Niccolò Machiavelli, born in Florence (1469). He had an early career in politics when Italy wasn’t a unified country, but rather a collection of allied city-states. It was an unstable time, and he lost his post when the government was overthrown by the Medici family. He wrote The Prince in 1513 as an instruction manual on obtaining and holding onto power, in hopes that he could impress the powerful Medicis and earn a political position. In his treatise, he wrote that morality was irrelevant when it came to running a state. He didn’t advocate evil for its own sake, and believed rulers should stick to the good whenever possible. But he also said they should be willing to perform evil acts when it became necessary to hold onto their power and maintain the security of the state.

Machiavelli’s attempt to impress the Medicis backfired, and they may never have even read The Prince until after his death. His name became associated with cutthroat tactics and violence, and he never held another government job.

Today is the birthday of the photojournalist Jacob Riis, born in Ribe, Denmark (1849). He moved to New York in 1870. He got a job as a police reporter, working the night shift among the crowded tenements of poor immigrants, and he set out to improve their conditions. When flash photography was invented in 1887, he took photographs of the slums of New York and wrote companion essays to form a book, How the Other Half Lives (1890), and it helped bring about housing reforms.

It’s the birthday of Israeli poet and novelist Yehuda Amichai, born Ludwig Pfeuffer in Würzburg, Germany, in 1924. He moved to Palestine in 1936 and later became an Israeli citizen. He was one of the first poets to write in colloquial Hebrew. He wrote: “A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love.”

It’s also the birthday of William Inge, born in 1913 in Independence, Kansas. He came to be known as the “Playwright of the Midwest,” and credits his keen understanding of human nature to growing up in a small town: “I’ve often wondered how people raised in our great cities ever develop any knowledge of humankind. People who grow up in small towns get to know each other so much more closely than they do in cities.”

While working as a drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times, Inge met Tennessee Williams, who invited him to a production of The Glass Menagerie. Inge was inspired to write a play of his own, Farther Off from Heaven (1947), which Williams recommended for production. He wrote a string of hits — Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1952), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) — all of which would later be turned into movies. He enjoyed less success and acclaim in the 1960s, however, with the sole exception being his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961). He won an Oscar for it, but his five final plays were box office flops, and he killed himself in 1973, convinced he could no longer write.

It’s the birthday of poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton, born Eleanor Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium, in 1912. Her father was a science historian, and her mother was an artist, and the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when May was three years old. She received a scholarship to Vassar, but by this time she had fallen in love with the theater and her dream was to act and direct, so she declined the offer. While studying acting and voice, she wrote poetry, and a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine in 1930, when she was 18 years old. By 1935, she had decided that writing, not acting, was her life’s work. She wrote more than 50 books: poetry, novels, memoirs, and journals. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) has been called “the watershed in women’s autobiography.”

In World of Light, a 1979 documentary about Sarton, she said, “I don’t write poems very often and when I do, they come in batches and they always seem to be connected to a woman, in my case, a muse who focuses the world for me and sometimes it’s a love affair and sometimes it’s not.” She wrote a novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, in 1965, which is often referred to as her “coming out” novel. She worried, with good reason, that writing about homosexuality would pigeonhole or even dismiss her as a “lesbian writer,” and for many years to come, that’s exactly what happened.

By 1990, she was unable to write anymore as a result of a stroke, but she produced three journals and a volume of verse over the last five years of her life, by dictating them into a tape recorder.

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“A Light exists in Spring...” by Emily Dickinson. Public Domain.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this date in 1536, Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was arrested for high treason, adultery, and incest. She was intelligent and outspoken, and had educated opinions about politics and religious reform and came to the court of Henry VIII when she was 20 years old, to serve as lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. She soon caught the eye of the king. For seven years he wooed her, and for seven years she put him off. He managed to get his first marriage annulled by breaking with the pope and declaring himself head of the Church of England and then Anne Boleyn consented to marry him.

Their early months of marriage were happy ones, and their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1533. Anne had several miscarriages after that, and she never gave Henry the son he so desperately wanted, so he accused her of every capital offense he could think of: numerous affairs, incest with her brother, plotting his murder, and witchcraft. She was convicted, and sentenced to death. The only mercy he showed her was in ordering that she be beheaded by a sword, rather than a common axe.

In her last letter to the King on May 6, 1536, Anne Boleyn wrote: “Your Grace’s displeasure, and my Imprisonment are Things so strange unto me, as what to Write, or what to Excuse, I am altogether ignorant [...]never a Prince had a Wife more Loyal in all Duty, and in all true Affection, than you have found in Anne Boleyn [...] But if you have already determined of me, and that not only my Death, but an Infamous Slander must bring you the enjoying of your desired Happiness; then I desire of God, that he will pardon your great Sin therein, and likewise mine Enemies, the Instruments thereof; that he will not call you to a strict Account for your unprincely and cruel usage of me, at his General Judgment-Seat, where both you and my self must shortly appear, and in whose Judgment, I doubt not, (whatsover the World may think of me) mine Innocence shall be openly known, and sufficiently cleared.”

Today is the birthday of Dr. Benjamin Spock, born in New Haven, Connecticut (1903). He wrote The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). It began, “You know more than you think you do,” and it became the parenting bible for all the post-war moms and dads raising the baby boomer generation. People like Spiro Agnew and Norman Vincent Peale blamed his permissive parenting philosophy for the ‘60s counterculture movement. Spock replied: “Maybe my book helped a generation not to be intimidated by adulthood. When I was young, I was always made to assume that I was wrong. Now young people think they might be right and stand up to authority.”

Today is the birthday of Jerome K. Jerome, born in Walsall, England (1859). It was he who said, “I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” He’s best known for his play Three Men in a Boat and his book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886).

Good Housekeeping magazine went on sale for the first time on this day in 1885, offering housekeeping tips, parenting advice, product reviews, and fiction.

In 1900, the magazine developed the Good Housekeeping Experiment Station to test and evaluate consumer goods and foods for the benefit of the magazine’s readers. Products that passed the magazine’s standards were given the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” and anyone who wasn’t satisfied by one of the approved and advertised products could obtain a full refund. In a time before any regulatory or consumer protection agencies, the Experiment Station performed an important public service, and its tests raised concerns about smoking, overeating, and preservatives before anyone else.

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And today is the birthday of astrophysicist and “ufologist” Josef Allen Hynek, born in Chicago in 1910. He’s best known for his work with a series of government projects to investigate reports of flying saucer sightings. The U.S. Air Force formed Project Sign in 1948, changing the name to Project Grudge and then, finally, Project Blue Book in 1952. Hyne…

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“the great escape” by Charles Bukowski from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way. © Ecco Press, 2004.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is May Day, the first of May, a date that may have more holidays than any other. It’s the date when many countries celebrate Labor Day, a tradition with its roots in the 19th-century labor movement in the United States. In 1886, unions around the country went on strike in support of an eight-hour workday. Since many of the organizers of the strikes were communists, socialists, and anarchists, May Day has also come to be associated with communism, and was a big national holiday in the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower tried to take back May Day during the Cold War by declaring it Law Day and Loyalty Day. It remains a day of rallies and protests in many parts of the world, and in 2006, protest returned to the United States on May 1st to call attention to immigrants’ rights.

Its roots as a holiday run much deeper than the labor movement, however. It’s been a celebration of spring and fertility in places like Egypt and India, and in pre-Christian Rome it was the time of the festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers. In medieval England, people gathered flowers to “bring in the May” and erected a maypole bedecked with garlands. It’s also the date of Beltane, a Celtic calendar festival celebrating the start of summer. Beltane was known for its bonfires, and has been revived by neo-pagans all over the world as a major religious holiday. In Germany, May 1st was the date of a pagan festival that was assimilated by the Christians and turned into the feast day of St. Walpurgis. The night before — Walpurgisnacht — is still celebrated in parts of rural Germany as a kind of Valentine’s Day, with the delivery of a tree, wrapped in streamers, to one’s beloved. It’s also a day to celebrate Hawaiian history and culture, and it’s known as Lei Day in Hawaii. One of the largest contemporary May Day celebrations in the United States takes place in Minneapolis, with a parade and pageant staged by the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre. It’s been going on since 1975 and attracts about 35,000 people every year.

It was on this day in 1786 that Mozart’s first great opera, The Marriage of Figaro, premiered in Vienna. It was based on a French play, and it tells the story of a single day in the palace of Count Almaviva. The count spends the day attempting to seduce Susanna, the young fiancée of the court valet, Figaro. Susanna and the Countess conspire to embarrass the count and expose his infidelity.

It was a light-hearted, comic opera, but the musicians and singers could hardly believe the quality of the music. One singer, an Irish tenor named Michael Kelly, later wrote: “I can still see Mozart, dressed in his red fur hat trimmed with gold, standing on the stage with the orchestra at the first rehearsal, beating time for the music. ... The players on the stage and in the orchestra were electrified. ... Had Mozart written nothing but this piece of music it alone would ... have stamped him as the greatest master of his art.”

On this date in 1840, the first official adhesive postage stamp was issued in Great Britain. Up until the late 1830s, the recipient of the letter was supposed to pay upon delivery. Rates were inconsistent: postage was calculated based on number of sheets of paper, and the distance from sender to recipient. The rules were complicated and postage was expensive, and people often refused to pay, costing the government a lot of money. A schoolmaster named Rowland Hill developed a new system that established uniform postal rates based on weight. The sender would pay with stamps that cost a penny each. The design of the first stamp was an engraved profile of Queen Victoria on a black background, called the Penny Black. Since Britain was the first country to use prepaid postage stamps, they have never printed the name of their country on their stamps, just a portrait of the reigning monarch.

On this date in 1707, the Acts of Union joined the Kingdoms of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain. They had shared a single monarch for a hundred years since Queen Elizabeth I died childless, and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The Acts of Union combined their two parliaments into one. Many Scots were unhappy with the union, but as historian Simon Schama said, “What began as a hostile merger, would end in a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world ... it was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history.”

All 102 stories of The Empire State Building opened to the public on this date in 1931, 45 days ahead of schedule and $5 million under budget, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street in New York City.

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“Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night” by Charles Wright from Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. ©Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was first published in serial form on this date in 1859. It appeared in the first issue of a new weekly journal, All the Year Round, which Dickens founded himself.

A Tale of Two Cities was on the front page of the first issue, and thanks to Dickens’ popularity, it sold 125,000 copies. At the end of the journal’s first quarter, Dickens wrote in a letter, “So well has All the Year Round gone that it was yesterday able to repay me, with five per cent. interest, all the money I advanced for its establishment (paper, print etc. all paid, down to the last number), and yet to leave a good £500 balance at the banker’s!” Dickens was so encouraged by its success that he also serialized Great Expectations in the journal, beginning in December of 1860.

Dickens published All the Year Round until his death in 1870. After that time, his son, Charles Dickens Jr., took up the reins, editing the journal until 1895. During its 36-year run, it featured the work of Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and several others.

A Tale of Two Cities begins, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way ...”

Today is the birthday of Annie Dillard, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). She began writing poetry in high school, and then studied English in college. After writing a master’s thesis on Thoreau’s Walden, she moved to a cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. There she wrote poetry and also kept a daily journal of her observations of nature and her thoughts about God and religion. She wrote in old notebooks and on four-by-six-inch index cards, and when she was ready to transform the journal into a book, she had 1,100 entries. “By the time I finished the book, I weighed about 98 pounds,” Dillard said. “I never went to bed. I would write all night until the sun was almost coming up.”

The result, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was published in 1974, and Annie Dillard received her first literary award the following year: the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She was only 29 years old. She has published collections of essays and of poetry, as well as an autobiography. Her most recent work is a novel, The Maytrees (2007). When it comes to writing, she says: “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”

On this day in 1803, the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from the French. More specifically, the United States bought France’s “claim” to the Louisiana Territory. The actual land belonged to the various Indian nations that lived on it, and the U.S. government acquired it gradually, through purchase and war, over the rest of the 19th century.

The Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million — less than three cents an acre — which we borrowed from European banks at 6 percent interest. It was a smoking deal, since Jefferson had been willing to pay $10 million for the port of New Orleans alone. The territory covered 828,000 square miles, stretching from present-day Louisiana north to Canada, and as far west as the border of Idaho, doubling the geographical area of the United States.

Today is the birthday of Alice B. (for Babette) Toklas (1877). Though she is best known as Gertrude Stein’s partner, she also wrote three books, none of which is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — that was the title Gertrude Stein gave her own autobiography, written from the point of view of her lover. And the term “lover” is unduly limiting: Toklas was also Stein’s typist, cook, secretary, editor, critic, housekeeper, and co-host of a series of salons that included such luminaries as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, and Matisse.

A love of Henry James inspired her to visit Europe, and that’s where she met Stein, who was living in Paris, in 1907. They were together until Stein’s death in 1946. Toklas published The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook in 1954; it was a collection of recipes gleaned from her friends, seasoned liberally with reminiscences of her life with Stein. Its most notorious recipe was donated by avant-garde artist and poet Brion Gysin, and in his introduction to the recipe he promises “euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better.” The recipe was for “Haschich Fudge,” and though Toklas claimed she never tested it, it led some readers to speculate about the role that cannabis had played in Stein’s more abstract verses.”

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And it’s the birthday of the man who once said, “Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with”: bandleader, pianist, and composer Edward Kennedy — better known as Duke — Ellington, born in Washington, D.C., in 1899. He composed more than 3,000 songs in his lifetime, enduring jazz classics like “Mood Indig…

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“What I Like and Don’t Like” by Philip Schultz from Failure. © Harcourt, 2007.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of publishing colossus William Randolph Hearst, who was born in San Francisco in 1863. He demanded the helm of his first paper, the San Francisco Examiner, when he was 23 and his father acquired the paper as payment for a gambling debt. It wasn’t long before his papers had a reputation for sensationalism, or as it came to be called, “yellow journalism” — one of his writers said “A Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” On the other hand, Hearst newspapers also employed some of the best writers in the business, like Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Jack London.

He and Joseph Pulitzer had an open rivalry in the New York market. Reporters from Hearst’s Morning Journal and Pulitzer’s World went beyond scooping each other to stealing stories outright from the competition. Hearst had the last laugh when he ran a story about the death of Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz — an anagram of “we pilfer the news” — and Pulitzer’s paper took the bait, even adding made-up dateline information. This prank was harmless enough, but when the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in 1898, the two papers both published a supposedly suppressed cablegram saying the explosion was not an accident. There was no such cable, but it boosted sales of both papers to record levels, and the public demanded that President McKinley declare war on Spain. As the famous story goes, artist Frederick Remington was sent to Cuba by Hearst to cover the war. He wrote home, “There is no war. Request to be recalled,” only to be told, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” And so he did.

And it’s the birthday of the man who once said, “Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with”: bandleader, pianist, and composer Edward Kennedy — better known as Duke Ellington, born in Washington, D.C., in 1899. He composed more than 3,000 songs in his lifetime, enduring jazz classics like “Mood Indigo” (1930), “It Don’t Mean a Thing (if it Ain’t Got That Swing)” (1932), and “Sophisticated Lady” (1933), and he led his big band from 1923 until his death in 1974. His nickname came from his dapper demeanor and easy grace: His mother, Daisy, had worked hard to teach him elegant manners, and he’d learned the lessons well, so his childhood friends took to calling him “Duke.”

He took piano lessons as a boy, but skipped more of these than he attended, and it wasn’t until he started hanging around a poolroom and hearing ragtime and stride piano, played by the likes of Turner Layton and Eubie Blake, that his passion was kindled. For what it’s worth, he also credited the kindling to more earthy causes, saying, “I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.”

It’s the birthday of poet C.P. Cavafy, born in Alexandria, Egypt (1863). His parents were Greek, and he wrote his poetry in modern Greek, but lived in Alexandria almost his entire life. In 1889, he got a job as an unpaid clerk at the city’s Irrigation Office, and he stayed there until he retired 30 years later. He lived with his mother until he was 36, in an apartment just above a brothel, and across the street from a church and a hospital. Cavafy once said, “Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters to the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.”

It’s the birthday of editor Robert Gottlieb, born in New York City (1931). In 1957, 26-year-old Gottlieb was a young editor at Simon & Schuster, when the company was in turmoil and nobody seemed to be in charge. That summer, he received a 75-page manuscript for a book called Catch-18, by Joseph Heller. Gottlieb thought it was brilliant and offered to publish it. Heller and Gottlieb worked on the book for years; Gottlieb would tape pieces of the manuscript and Heller’s handwritten notes all over his office walls and desk and then rearrange passages. Gottlieb was a tough editor, and he pored through every line, demanding that Heller rewrite whenever he thought it could be better.

One day, Gottlieb got the bad news that best-selling novelist Leon Uris was about to publish a book called Mila 18, and Gottlieb insisted that there could not be two books with the number “18” in the title during the same publishing season. They had a long brainstorming session and went through every possible number — they discarded “11” because it sounded too much like Ocean’s Eleven, and Heller wanted “14,” but Gottlieb didn’t think it was funny enough. Gottlieb was so worried about the title that he lay awake at night thinking about it, and the number “22” came to him. For whatever reason, he thought it was a funny number, and Heller agreed. Later that year, Catch-22 (1961) was published, and by spring of 1963, it had sold more than 1 million copies.

Gottlieb went on to work with writers Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, John Cheever, and many more. He was the editor of The New Yorker from 1987 to 1992.

He said, “I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.”

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

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“Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” by Dan Albergotti from The Boatloads. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of geologist and astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, born in Los Angeles in 1928. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology at the age of 19, and he earned his master’s degree a year later. He went to work for the United States Geological Survey, and studying the Earth sparked in him an interest in the moon. He tried to convince the USGS that he should do a geological map of its surface, and would have loved to go there himself, but he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease in 1963, which put an end to his astronaut aspirations.

He was particularly interested in the formation of meteor impact craters, and so, with the help of his wife, Carolyn, he studied asteroids that had the potential to crash into planets or moons. He discovered 32 comets, which now bear his name, and was thrilled when, in 1994, one of those comets, Shoemaker-Levy 9, crashed into Jupiter — the first collision of two solar system bodies ever observed.

Shoemaker was killed in a car accident in 1997, and at the suggestion of one of his students, his cremated remains were placed aboard the Lunar Prospector, an orbiter on a mission to map the moon. When its battery ran out at the end of its mission, the orbiter crashed onto the surface of the moon, and there his ashes remain, in a capsule engraved with a quote from Romeo and Juliet:

And, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

It’s the birthday of Lois Duncan (1934), an author known chiefly for her suspense novels for teen readers. She was born in Philadelphia, grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and submitted her first story to a magazine at the age of 10. By 13, she had made her first sale, and she wrote magazine articles for publications like Seventeen throughout high school. She’s best known for the books that were made into movies: Hotel for Dogs (1971) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973).

In 1992, she wrote a true crime book about the unsolved murder of her youngest child, 18-year-old Kaitlyn Arquette, in Albuquerque. Police called it a random shooting, but Kaitlyn’s boyfriend was involved in organized crime and Duncan believes the gang killed her daughter to keep her quiet. She told an interviewer: “My dream is to write a sequel to Who Killed My Daughter? to give our family’s true-life horror story a closure. Of course, for that to be possible, Kait’s case must be solved.”

And today is the birthday of poet Carolyn Forché, born in Detroit in 1950. A human rights activist as well as a poet, she’s committed to what she calls “the poetry of witness,” and this has opened her up to criticism, especially in the United States, from those who believe poetry and politics should be separate concerns. She says that, in other countries, “The poets are more expected to be intellectuals and to have an active interest in history and politics and everything going on. They’re not expected to be sequestered in a literary culture. They’re not expected to have no opinions about events in the world. They’re expected to have more seriously considered opinions because they’re poets — and not necessarily predictable opinions.” Her anthology, Against Forgetting (1993), collects the work of international poets who had suffered imprisonment, torture, and exile.

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

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The text of today’s poem is not available online.

“First Yoga Lesson” by Mary Oliver from Blue Horses. © Penguin, 2014.

ORIGINAL AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of playwright August Wilson, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). His father was a German baker and his mother was an African-American cleaning woman. His father was rarely around, and he grew up in the impoverished Hill district of Pittsburgh with his mother and five siblings. Five families rented the building — his family had two rooms with no hot water, and they all shared the dirt yard out back. His mother, Daisy Wilson, taught Freddy to read when he was four years old, and a year later, he got his first library card. He was a bright boy, but he suffered from racism in school. He dropped out of school altogether when he was 15 years old after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper about Napoleon because she didn’t think a black student could have written anything so good.

So he taught himself, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. He read Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison. He joined the Army and started writing poetry, influenced by Dylan Thomas and Amiri Baraka. When he was 20, his father died, and he changed his name from Frederick Kittel to August Wilson, taking his mother’s last name. Three years later, he and a friend started the Black Horizons Theater company in the Hill district where he grew up. He staged his first play, Recycling, in 1973.

In 1978, Wilson moved to Minnesota. He said: “I moved to St. Paul in 1978 and got a job at the Science Museum of Minnesota writing scripts — adapting tales from the Northwest Native Americans for a group of actors attached to the anthropology department. So I began to work in the script form without almost knowing it. In 1980 I sent a play, Jitney, to the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with 16 playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, which is absolutely critical to the work. It is important to claim it.” Wilson was homesick, and Jitney was set in the Hill district in the 1970s.

Wilson continued to write successful and popular plays: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), set in the 1920s; Fences (1983), set in the 1950s and 1960s; and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984), set in 1911. Wilson realized that he was setting his plays in different decades, and he decided to make that his life’s work: chronicling African-American experiences throughout the 20th century, decade by decade. He said: “I was doing an interview with a guy and he says, ‘Well, Mr. Wilson, now that you’ve written these four plays and exhausted the black experience, what are you going to write about next?’ I just told him I would continue to explore the black experience, whether he thought it was exhausted or not. And then my goal was to prove that it was inexhaustible, that there was no idea that couldn’t be contained by black life.” His final play in the 10-part Pittsburgh Cycle was Radio Golf, which is set in the 1990s, and premiered in 2005. Wilson died of liver cancer six months later.

August Wilson said, “My greatest influence has been the blues. And that’s a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have. [...] Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues. If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that. All the components of culture.”

It’s the birthday of the author of the “Madeline” books, Ludwig Bemelmans, born in Meran, Tyrol, Austria (1898). He came to New York when he was sixteen years old, working at a series of hotels, then starting his own restaurant, which was very successful. He didn’t think about becoming a writer until a friend in the publishing industry happened to see his childlike drawings on the walls of his apartment, and suggested that Bemelmans write and illustrate a children’s book—and that was Madeline (1939), which 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!”

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

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From the Archives: The News from Lake Wobegon - The Best of 1985 (3CDs)

With this three-disc set, Garrison Keillor captivates, charms, and catches us up on the News from Lake Wobegon, 1985. (Over 3 hours on 3 CDs)