Today is the birthday of the man who said, “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion” and “War does not decide who is right, but who is left”: playwright and founder of the London School of Economics George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin in 1856. He moved to London with his mother in 1876, determined to be a writer. His fi…

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“Jazz You’ll Never Know” by Margaret Hasse from Earth’s Appetite. © Nodin Press, 2013.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of English author Aldous Huxley, born in Godalming, Surrey, in 1894. He was born into a family of intellectuals, writers, and scientists: his father was a poet and biographer; two of his brothers became respected biologists; and his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a famous biologist and naturalist who received the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his defense of the theory of evolution. On his mother’s side, Huxley was related to the novelist Mary Humphry Ward, the poet Matthew Arnold, and famous educator Thomas Arnold. Even among these luminaries, Huxley was gifted, alert, and intelligent.

Huxley lost his mother to cancer when he was 14 years old. Two years later, when he was a student at Eton, he suffered an illness that left him almost completely blind. A blind man couldn’t be a scientist. A blind man couldn’t be a soldier, either, so Huxley stayed home while many of his peers went off to fight in World War I. Huxley had to rethink his career aspirations. He turned instead to literature, and studied at Oxford, where he met and befriended D.H. Lawrence. In 1916, Huxley published his first book — a collection of poems.

He married Maria Nys in 1919, and the couple traveled a lot during the early years of their marriage. In his book Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday (1926), Huxley wrote about the people and cultures they encountered on their travels. He liked the vitality and energy of the Americans they met, but he thought that energy was wasted on mindless pursuits. “Nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation [...] It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of the bath — down the waste. Yes, down the waste.”

Huxley published four novels in the 1920s, including Crome Yellow (1921) and Point Counter Point (1928), as well as numerous essays, poems, plays, and six books of stories. And in 1931, he began work on a novel that he intended to be a light look at what the future might hold — a satiric response to the utopian novels of H.G. Wells. He wrote the book in four months. It was Brave New World (1932), and it ended up being a darker book than he’d planned. The book is set in London in the year 2540, a future where society functions like one of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. People are genetically engineered and mass-produced in hatcheries. They’re fed a steady diet of antidepressants, amusements, and sex to keep them complacent. When George Orwell’s dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four came out in 1948, people liked to compare the two and argue about which bleak future was more likely to happen. Huxley defended his vision, saying it would be easier to control people through pleasure than through fear.

It’s the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin (1856). He’s the author of dozens of plays, including Man and Superman (1905), Pygmalion (1912), and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938 for his contribution to the film Pygmalion. He’s the only person in history to receive both the Nobel and an Oscar.

He’s considered to be the greatest English-language dramatist after Shakespeare. Even before he had written a masterpiece, Shaw was announcing this very comparison to people, and adding that he did some things in playwriting even better than Shakespeare did. Shaw knew all of the plays he had written by memory. He was also a prolific music critic and literary critic, and he’s highly quotable.

He said: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That’s the essence of inhumanity.”

It’s the birthday of humorist Jean Shepherd, born in Chicago, Illinois (1925). He’s remembered for the autobiographical stories he told on the radio about a boy named Ralph Parker growing up in Hohman, Indiana. One of his stories was made into the movie A Christmas Story (1983), which Shepherd narrated. It’s about a boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas, even though every adult in his life says that he’ll shoot his eye out. The stories he told on-air were always improvised, but he later wrote them down and published them in collections like In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash (1967) and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters (1972).

It’s the birthday of movie director Stanley Kubrick, born in New York City in 1928. His first big film was Spartacus in 1960. After that, Kubrick vowed never to make another film unless he had total artistic freedom — and he managed to keep that vow. His best-known films are Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; 2001: A Space Odyssey; A Clockwork Orange; and The Shining.

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

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ENGLISH MAJORS CD SET

Scripts and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of people who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills. (You know who you are.) Selections include “The Six-Minute Hamlet,” a tribute to Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an MFA scam, a riveting “Lives of the English Majors” drama, and literary guests Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Roy Blount Jr. and Calvin Trillin. 2 1/2 hours on 2 discs.

“The Blues” by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room. © Random House, 2002.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1952, the archipelago of Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States. It had been attacked by the Dutch and the French, pillaged by Ponce de León and various pirates, and, much to the surprise of the indigenous Taíno tribe, “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1493 and handed over to Spain.

One year after Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth, one of the largest migrations in the world occurred: more than 70,000 Puerto Ricans emigrated to the Unites States, settling mostly in New York, New Jersey, and Florida.

On this day in 1897, American writer Jack London set out to join the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon, a remote and unforgiving region in northwest Canada and Alaska. His cabin was situated at a busy crossroads and was a popular stop for other miners and adventurers, who regaled London with stories. The Yukon wasn’t kind to London in terms of health or wealth: he never found gold and he lost four teeth to scurvy. But he wrote down what the prospectors, miners, and adventurers told him, and when he returned to California, he set about writing a series of stories. They became The Son of the Wolf (1900). In a few short years, London was the most successful writer in America.

It was on this day in 1814 that a man named George Stephenson made the first successful demonstration of the steam locomotive in Northern England. His engine pulled eight loaded wagons of 30 tons’ weight about four miles an hour up a hill.

It’s the birthday of writer Eric Hoffer, born in New York City (1902). He spent most of his life working on the docks as a longshoreman, and he wrote philosophy in his spare time, including The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). Eric Hoffer said, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”

It was on this day in 1788 that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered into his catalog the completion of one of his most beloved works, Symphony Number 40 in G Minor (sometimes called “The Great G Minor Symphony”). It was written in the final years of Mozart’s life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.

It’s the birthday of Elias Canetti, born in Ruse, Bulgaria (1905). He’s best known for his novel The Tower of Babel (1935). He grew up in an area of Bulgaria that was so ethnically diverse that his grandfather had to speak 17 languages in order to succeed as a grocer. In 1927, he was caught up in a street riot in Vienna, which became the formative experience of his life. He started researching crowds and their importance in history and published Crowds and Power in 1960. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1981.

And it’s the birthday of saxophonist Johnny Hodges, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1906. He took up the soprano sax when he was 14, and later specialized on the alto. Hodges joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1928, and he was a soloist and mainstay of the ensemble until his death in 1970. Among his best-known solos are those on “Warm Valley” and “Passion Flower.” His nickname, “Rabbit,” came from his love of lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. As he grew older, Hodges used fewer and fewer notes in his solos, preferring to stay closer to the melody.

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

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“Marin-An” by Gary Snyder from No Nature: New and Selected Poems. © Pantheon, 1993.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of French novelist Alexandre Dumas, born in Villers-Cotterêts, France (1802). He wrote swashbuckling adventure novels like The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844).

He was the son of a famous mulatto general in Napoleon’s army, but his father died when he was young. He and his mother lived in poverty above her tobacco shop. He loved the theater but he couldn’t afford to buy tickets, so people who had heard of his famous father let him in for free. He wasn’t a very good student, but he had great penmanship, so he got a job as a secretary for a duke. He constantly fought with his boss over his workload, which didn’t give him any time to write. His boss kept telling him that he was wasting his time with literary nonsense, until Dumas finally produced a play that was a great success.

He started writing fiction at a time when publishers used fiction to sell newspapers. When his first novel appeared in a newspaper, it generated 5,000 new subscriptions. As a successful author in his mid-40s, he settled on a large estate, and he had builders chisel the titles of all his novels into the stone of his house.

It’s the birthday of English poet and novelist Robert Graves, born in Wimbledon in 1895. He wrote more than 120 books, including historical fiction like I, Claudius (1934), about the Roman Empire; and The Golden Fleece (1944), about Hercules. His research of mythology for The Golden Fleece led him to write a controversial book, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948). In it, he argues for throwing off the old patriarchal gods and relying on a divine female deity for inspiration.

It’s the birthday of Anglican clergyman and hymn writer John Newton, born in London (1725). His father was a ship’s captain, and his pious mother died when he was seven years old, so he accompanied his father to sea. He once tried to desert the Royal Navy, and was publicly flogged and demoted. Later, another ship traded him as cargo, and he became the servant of an African slave dealer. He ended up a captain, and he carried cargo between Europe, the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and Africa’s slave coast.

In 1748, he had a spiritual conversion on a journey back to England. He almost drowned in a terrible storm, but he prayed to God, and the ship did not sink. After that, he stopped gambling and drinking, and he married a girl he had loved for many years.

Newton was ordained as a minister. He gave up the slave trade entirely, and later in his life he became an outspoken abolitionist. In his best-selling pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade (1788), he described the awful conditions of the slave ships he had captained. By this time, Newton was a well-known preacher and writer of hymns, and the public listened to him. In 1805, the 80-year-old Newton went completely blind, but he didn’t stop working. The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in March of 1807; Newton died that December.

Today, he is best remembered for his hymns, which include “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds,” and “Amazing Grace.”

It’s the birthday of mystery novelist John D. MacDonald, born in Sharon, Pennsylvania (1916). He’s famous for his novels featuring Travis McGee, a beach-bum detective who lives on a houseboat that he won in a poker game.

MacDonald started reading when he was a kid, after he almost died of scarlet fever. He spent a year in bed. He read all the books in the library. He served in the Army during World War II, and he entertained his wife by writing her little stories in his letters, one of which she liked so much that she typed it up and sent it to the magazine Story, where it was published.

John D. MacDonald had four months of severance pay when he came home from the Army, and he spent those four months writing seven days a week, 14 hours a day. By the end of the year, he was making a living selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines.

He used his mystery novels to criticize what he called American junk culture: fast food, bad TV, and suburban development. He said, “I am wary of a lot of things, such as [...] time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants [...] pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.”

The ancient Incan citadel of Machu Picchu was rediscovered by an American archaeologist on this day in 1911. Perched on the eastern slope of the Peruvian Andes, the complex was built about 500 years ago, at the height of the Inca Empire. The city is made up of about 200 buildings, including temples, houses, and baths, and it’s roughly divided into an agricultural sector and an urban sector. Its many levels are connected by 3,000 steps, and there are sophisticated irrigation channels and fountains to distribute water. The stone blocks that form the structures were shaped using hard river rocks alone, without the use of steel or iron chisels, and they fit so tightly together that a knife blade can’t be slipped between them.

One secret to the site’s preservation is its terrace system. The terraces provided ample places to grow crops, and they also helped the city cope with the heavy annual rainfall by providing a drainage system. The bottom layer of each terrace consisted of the stone bits that were chipped away during construction of the buildings. On top of that layer were smaller stone chips, and sand, and then topsoil. Excess water could drain down through these layers and be channeled away; without the terraces, mudslides would have carried Machu Picchu down the mountain long ago. The terraces also provide some protection against invasion, as their structure slows down any enemy’s progress toward the mountaintop.

It’s believed that Machu Picchu was built to be a resort or estate for Incan nobility, although it may also have been a religious site. It was abandoned after a hundred years, at the time of the Spanish conquest. It’s not clear why the Incans left, though, because there’s no evidence that Spanish conquerors ever found the site. It’s possible that an epidemic of smallpox, carried by the Spanish, wiped out the population.

Scholar Hiram Bingham was in Peru in search of the lost Incan capital, Vitcos. As he traveled down the Urubamba River valley, Bingham would ask locals if they knew of any ruins in the area. One day, a farmer told Bingham about a ruined city on top of one of the nearby mountains, and offered to serve as a guide. As Bingham and his party drew close to the site, they were surprised to see families living in the area and farming on some of the lower terraces of Machu Picchu. One of the children, an 11-year-old boy named Pablito, guided Bingham’s party the rest of the way to the top of the mountain. Eager to push on and find more ruins, Bingham didn’t take the time to get a really good look at it, but he returned the following year, and his team spent four months clearing away vegetation and beginning to restore the buildings. Bingham helped himself to several artifacts, which he took back to Yale with him, much to the displeasure of the Peruvian government and people. Finally, in 2010, the Peruvian government successfully petitioned President Obama for the return of the artifacts.

Near the end of his life, Bingham wrote an account of his discovery: Lost City of the Incas (1948). He embellished his tale in many ways, exaggerating how long it took him to get to the ruin, how treacherous the trails were, how thick the jungle was, and how remote the site was from any established settlements. Bingham’s son Alfred later cut his father’s tall tale down to a more manageable size: armed with letters that his father wrote to his mother in 1911, Alfred Bingham clarified that his father’s journey took about an hour and a half, on fairly modern and well-traveled roads through a populous farming community.

The so-called lost city was never lost to the locals, but Bingham was one of the first outsiders to see it. And it’s certainly no secret these days — hundreds of thousands of people visit Machu Picchu every year. It’s one of the largest tourist attractions in South America, and all the traffic and nearby construction is taking a toll on the site.

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

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“A Reward” by Denise Levertov from Evening Train. © New Directions, 1992.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men and began loading them into vans.

The riot that followed raged for five days. Thousands of soldiers from the Michigan National Guard were called in, along with tanks. The National Guardsmen fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of the riot.

Forty-three people were killed and whole blocks of the city went up in flames. After the riots, many of the white residents of the city moved to the suburbs. Thousands of homes were abandoned, and the city’s population plunged from 1.6 million to 992,000 in just a few years. By 1990, Detroit was one of the poorest cities in America, with one in every three residents living in poverty.

It was on this day in 1903 that the Ford Motor Company in Detroit sold its first car, a two-cylinder Model A. The Model A was painted red, with a seat that fit two people, and no roof. It reached 28 mph at top speed. The Ford Motor Company sold 2,000 Model As over the next two years, which was enough to make the company profitable. Five years later, Ford rolled out its Model T.

And it’s the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago (1888). He wrote seven novels featuring detective Philip Marlowe, including The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1954). He also wrote screenplays, including such film noir classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951).

Though he was born in Chicago, Chandler grew up in England and Ireland. His parents divorced, and he and his mother moved to London in 1895; her brother, a lawyer, supported them. Chandler went to a prestigious prep school and had dreams of becoming a lawyer, but his uncle couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for his education. So Chandler went to work to support the family, and in his spare time he wrote poetry, which he later described “B-grade.” He managed to publish 27 of his poems, though, as well as a short story called “The Rose-Leaf Romance.” He returned to the United States in 1912; one of his fellow passengers on the ship from England suggested he try California, so Chandler settled in Los Angeles, where he took a series of odd jobs like stringing tennis rackets, picking fruit, and keeping the books for a creamery. He joined the Canadian army during World War I and served on the front lines in France. After the war, he returned to California, married a woman 18 years his senior, and took a job as a bookkeeper for an oil company. Eventually, he worked his way up to vice president of the company.

The Great Depression, job stress, and his wife’s failing health all took a toll on Chandler. He started drinking heavily, and philandering. When he was fired from the oil company in 1932, he started writing again. He decided the best way to make a quick buck would be to write pulp fiction. He wasn’t great at coming up with plots, so he studied stories in detective magazines and tinkered with their plots to come up with his own. But his writing was top-notch; when he sold his first story — the 18,000-word “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” — it was so polished and flawless that editors congratulated themselves on their discovery of the next literary genius. He published 26 short stories in all, and with similar attention to detail. When he broke the rules of grammar, he did so consciously, as he wrote to the editor of Atlantic Monthly: “By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”

He wrote his first novel in three months. That was The Big Sleep (1939), and it was made into a classic of film noir, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in 1946. William Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay. The Big Sleep introduced readers to the gumshoe hero Philip Marlowe. Chandler described him as “a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and good enough for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.”

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

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“Snake” by Theodore Roethke from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. © Anchor Books, 1996.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this day in 1598 that Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice was entered on the Stationers’ Register. The entry read: “A book of The Merchant of Venice or otherwise called The Jew of Venice.” Printers were supposed to enter a work in the Stationers’ Register before printing it, but the rule was not enforced, so some works were never entered, and others were entered years after they had been written. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, the printer was probably trying to establish copyright — although copyright laws weren’t very well enforced, either.

The Merchant of Venice had probably been written around 1596. By the time the title page of the first quarto was published in 1600, there was a note saying: “It hath beene divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his servants.” But there is no official record of a performance of The Merchant of Venice until 1605, when it was performed by the King’s Men for the court of King James I. James was such a fan that he asked for another performance a week later.

One of the main characters in The Merchant of Venice is a villainous Jew named Shylock. In 1594, the queen’s personal physician — a Portuguese Jew named Roderigo López — was charged with high treason and executed. Around the same time, Shakespeare’s biggest rival, Christopher Marlowe, wrote The Jew of Malta, a wildly popular play featuring an evil Jewish protagonist. Shakespeare followed suit with Shylock. He was played with a red wig, red beard, and huge fake nose, and dressed in a big robe.

Shakespeare coined plenty of words, or changed their usage, and came up with many new phrases; The Merchant of Venice gives us the words laughable, scrubbed, and compromise, and the phrases bated breath, love is blind, and all that glitters is not gold.

Biochemist Selman Abraham Waksman, discoverer of streptomycin, the first effective treatment of tuberculosis, was born in Ukraine on this day in 1888.

It’s the birthday of the man who said: “All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” That’s painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing.

After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He tried to re-create it in his paintings.

He came back to New York and was employed as an illustrator at an ad agency, which he hated. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons.

Hopper had only sold one painting by the time he was 40 years old, but his first major exhibition — in 1933 at the Museum of Modern Art — made his reputation. His pieces in that show had titles like Houses by the Railroad, Manhattan Bridge Loop, Room in Brooklyn, Roofs of Washington Square, Cold Storage Plant, Lonely House, and Girl on Bridge.

It’s the birthday of Emma Lazarus, born in New York City (1849). She came from a wealthy Jewish family, and her father paid to have her first collection of poems published when she was 17. Her early work impressed Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they corresponded for many years. In the 1880s, she was horrified to hear of violent anti-Semitic attacks in Russia and Germany, and her work took on a new Zionist focus. She became concerned with the plight of the poor and the refugee, and organized relief efforts for immigrant Jewish families. The Statue of Liberty committee approached her in 1883 and asked her to write a poem that they could auction off to raise money for the monument. She responded with “The New Colossus,” which includes the famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

On this day in 1587, English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. This was the third foray by the English to the New World; Sir Walter Raleigh, with the backing of Queen Elizabeth I, had commissioned an exploratory expedition to scout out the land for the crown. The second expedition formed a military settlement, which was eventually abandoned when the men ran out of supplies. But this third group was the first to include women and children, and was intended to be a permanent settlement. Governor John White’s plan was to build up a self-sustaining economy, and to find a way to co-exist peacefully with the Native Americans. Things were going well enough for White to sail back to England four months later. Although it was supposed to be a brief trip, he was unable to find a ship to return to the colony. England was at war with Spain, and every seaworthy ship was claimed by the Crown to fight the Spanish Armada. White didn’t return to Roanoke Island for nearly three years; when he did, he found the settlement deserted, and all the buildings taken down. The only clues to the colonists’ fate were the letters CRO carved into a tree, and the word CROATOAN carved into a fence post. It is still not known for sure what caused the settlers to leave Roanoke, but there were no signs of sickness or violence.

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

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On this day in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to walk on the moon. It was actually July 20 in the United States, nearly 11 o’clock p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, but according to Greenwich Mean Time, it was already almost 3 a.m. on the 21st.

Apollo 11 left Earth on July 16, took about three days to reach the moon’s orbit, and the…

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“Turtle” by Kay Ryan from Flamingo Watching. © Copper Beech Press, 1994.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of writer Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). In July of 1925, he visited Pamplona, Spain, for the Festival of San Fermín, a weeklong celebration that included bullfighting and the famous Running of the Bulls. Hemingway and his wife arrived a few days early to get tickets, and he needed a way to spend the time; so on this day in 1925, on his 26th birthday, he began his first novel. He said, “Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.” He wrote in the days leading up to the celebration, he wrote in bed every morning during the week of the festival, and when it was over, he continued writing. He wrote in hotels and bars in Madrid and the French town of Hendaye, and in an apartment in Paris. He finished the first draft just two months after he had begun writing. He told a friend years later: “Toward the last it was like a fever. Toward the last I was sprinting, like in a bicycle race, and I did not want to lose my speed making love or anything else.”

He titled his novel Fiesta, then revised the title to The Lost Generation, and finally to The Sun Also Rises. He sent the manuscript to Scribner’s, where it was picked up by the editor Maxwell Perkins. Perkins wrote to Hemingway: “The Sun Also Rises seems to me a most extraordinary performance. No one could conceive a book with more life in it.” The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, and Perkins became Hemingway’s lifelong editor. The novel got a good review in The New York Times and other New York newspapers, but was generally disliked in the rest of the country, including in Hemingway’s hometown of Chicago. His own mother wrote to him: “It is a doubtful honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year. [...] Every page fills me with a sick loathing — if I should pick up a book by any other writer with such words in it, I should read no more — but pitch it in the fire.”

Perkins regularly defended Hemingway’s writing to his boss, Charles Scribner. For Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Perkins had a conference with Scribner to discuss Hemingway’s use of four-letter words. Perkins himself did not use obscene language — his strongest expression was “My God,” and even that was rare. Although he was defending Hemingway’s right to use four-letter words, Perkins was so uncomfortable saying them that he had to write them on a memo pad for Scribner. In the end, three words were not included in A Farewell to Arms, but replaced by dashes. Hemingway wrote those words back in by hand on a couple of copies, including one that he gave to James Joyce. A Farewell to Arms became a best-seller, selling 100,000 copies in its first year, and Hemingway was able to make a living writing fiction.

Born in the same year and on the same day as Hemmingway, it’s the birthday of Hart Crane, born Harold Hart Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio (1899). By the time Crane was a teenager, he knew that he was gay, and he was fascinated by the life and career of Oscar Wilde. When his parents’ marriage fell apart, Crane dropped out of school and took a train from Cleveland to New York to begin life as a poet. He loved being in New York, hanging out with poets like E.E. Cummings and Allen Tate. But he had trouble making a living there — couldn’t hold down a job. His drinking got worse and in 1932, at the age of 33, he killed himself by jumping overboard a steamship on his way from Mexico to New York. He left behind his masterpiece, The Bridge (1930).

It’s the birthday of poet Tess Gallagher, born in Port Angeles, Washington (1943). Her first volume of poetry, Stepping Outside, was published in 1974. Later collections include Instructions to the Double (1976), Moon Crossing Bridge (1992), and My Black Horse (1995). In 1984, she published Willingly, a collection of poems for and about her third husband, author Raymond Carver. She said, “If poems are deep-sea diving, writing fiction is foraging.”

It’s the birthday of novelist, poet, and teacher John Gardner, born in Batavia, New York (1933). He began writing fiction in 1966, with The Resurrection, but it wasn’t until his third novel, Grendel (1971), the retelling of Beowulf from the viewpoint of the monster, that he began to get recognition as a novelist. His other novels include Nickel Mountain (1973), October Light (1976), and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982). One of his best-known works, The Art of Fiction, was published in 1984, two years after his death. It is still a standard text for many would-be novelists.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the first Wild West showdown. It happened in the market square in Springfield, Missouri, in 1865. The parties involved were James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok — a professional gambler and former Union scout — and Davis Tutt, a cowboy and former Confederate soldier. The two men had a falling out over a woman and a gambling debt, and finally agreed to settle their differences in a duel. They faced off at a distance of about 75 paces and fired simultaneously. Tutt’s shot went wild, but Hickok’s hit Tutt through the heart.

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

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“The Blue Robe” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1869, Innocents Abroad was published, firmly establishing its author, Mark Twain, as a serious writer . The book, Twain’s second, was an outgrowth of an assignment from a California newspaper, which had sent him around the world to write travel sketches. It remained his best-selling book throughout his lifetime.

California opened its first freeway 75 years ago, on this date in 1940. Known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the Pasadena Freeway, or simply “the 110,” it was also the first freeway — a high-speed, divided, and limited-access thoroughfare — in the western United States. It runs for just over eight miles and connects Pasadena to Los Angeles.

Today, the Arroyo Seco Parkway remains much as it was in 1940, even though it wasn’t designed for the speeds that motorists travel today: There are no acceleration and deceleration lanes, and drivers must go from the on-ramp speed of five miles per hour up to the freeway speed of 55 in a short and hair-raising distance. It was intended to carry about 27,000 cars a day; today, it sees closer to 122,000. But it’s still the most direct route from Pasadena into downtown LA.

On this date in 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. It was the first manned moon landing. The lunar module, dubbed Eagle, was piloted by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. In order to land on the moon, the Eagle detached from the main spacecraft command module (called Columbia and piloted by Michael Collins). As the lunar module approached the moon’s surface, Armstrong noticed that the Eagle was going to overshoot the planned landing site and was headed for a patch of boulders. With only seconds’ worth of fuel remaining, Armstrong steered the landing craft to a better location and brought her down safely. Six hours after touching down, Armstrong stepped off the module’s ladder and became the first earthling to set foot on another celestial body. He had planned his speech carefully: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Because the transmission was cutting out, people thought he said “small step for man,” but he insisted that he said “a man.”

The Eagle left a crater a foot deep in the soft soil, which Armstrong later described as being like powdered charcoal. Armstrong and Aldrin got right to work, gathering soil and rock samples and taking photographs, in case the mission needed to be aborted. They also performed a series of exercises, and found that it was fairly easy to get around on the moon, even though the powdery soil was slippery. The astronauts left behind some scientific equipment, an American flag, and a plaque, which read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.”

It was on this day 140 years ago, in 1875, that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. It was a swarm about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas. North America was home to the most numerous species of locust on earth, the Rocky Mountain locust. At the height of their population, their total mass was equivalent to the 60 million bison that had inhabited the West. The Rocky Mountain locust is believed to have been the most common macroscopic creature of any kind ever to inhabit the planet.

Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging from river valleys in the Rockies, sweeping east across the country. The size of the swarms tended to grow when there was less rain — and the West had been going through a drought since 1873. Farmers just east of the Rockies began to see a cloud approaching from the west. It was glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the light of the sun.

People said the locusts descended like a driving snow in winter. They covered everything in their path. They sounded like thunder or a train and blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of them. They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path. They ate harnesses off horses and the bark of trees, curtains, clothing that was hung out on laundry lines. They chewed on the handles of farm tools and fence posts and railings. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.

Similar swarms occurred in the following years. The farmers became desperate. But by the mid-1880s, the rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Within a few decades, the Rocky Mountain locusts were believed to be extinct.

It’s the birthday of novelist Cormac McCarthy, born in Providence, Rhode Island (1933). He had no interest in literature until he was in the Air Force, stationed in Alaska, and had nothing to do but read. Soon after, he began to write. He said: “I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” For years he lived in poverty, often unable to pay rent. When he finished his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), he sent it to Random House because it was the only publisher he had ever heard of. Albert Erskine, who had edited Faulkner, liked the manuscript and agreed to publish it. McCarthy barely sold any books, but he won awards and grants, which gave him money to keep going. He turned down regular jobs and even speaking invitations. He moved to Texas. He said: “I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject.” He wrote a few more novels, but they continued to sell poorly. He mostly lived in run-down motels, which were so dimly lit that he carried around a good lightbulb so that he could see better to read and write.

Then Erskine retired, and McCarthy switched publishers. His new editor arranged to have 30 pages of McCarthy’s new manuscript published in Esquire, and suddenly everyone wanted to read it. All the Pretty Horses (1992) won the National Book Award and was a best-seller. His other novels include Blood Meridian (1985), The Crossing (1994), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road (2006).

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“Short-order Cook” by Jim Daniels from Places/Everyone. © The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this date in 1799, French soldiers in Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone at a port town on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. They were digging a foundation for a fort when they came upon a slab of rock about 4 feet high and 2 and half feet wide, 11 inches thick and weighing 1,700 pounds. What caught the soldiers’ attention was the writing on the stone, in three different scripts: ancient Greek, demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Scholars could read and understand the ancient Greek. The second script, demotic, was an Egyptian language that was spoken and written at the time that the Rosetta Stone was carved in 196 B.C., and contemporary scholars understood some bits and pieces of it. But Egyptian hieroglyphics had been a “dead” language for nearly 2,000 years. All around Egypt there abounded pyramids and temples with thousands of hieroglyphic characters carved into the walls, but no one could figure out what the inscriptions meant. When linguists realized that the three texts on the Rosetta Stone all said the same thing, they knew that they had a key to breaking the hieroglyphic “code” at last. A British scholar made good progress on figuring out the demotic text by 1814, and then the French scholar Jean-François Champollion worked out the hieroglyphics between 1822 and 1824.

The Rosetta Stone had been created in 196 B.C. on the orders of Ptolemy V, a Greek emperor who ruled Egypt during the Hellenistic period. It begins with a lofty address, where Ptolemy acknowledges by name some ancestors and gods. He goes on to praise his administration’s good deeds and himself at length, and then he announces tax breaks for the non-rebellious Egyptian temple priest class. He also gives instructions for the building of temples.

The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited at London’s British Museum since 1802 — with the exception of a two-year period near the end of World War I. The stone was moved to an underground railway station in Holborn to protect it from German bombs.

On this day in 1898, novelist Émile Zola fled France in the wake of what would become known as the “Dreyfus Affair.” Zola was one of France’s best-known writers and a leading intellectual. He had already completed his enormously successful 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart when he decided to write what would prove to be an inflammatory letter to the president of France, condemning the secret military court-martial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Jewish descent, who was accused of selling secrets to the German army and banished to Devil’s Island in South America. Evidence had surfaced of Dreyfus’ innocence, but the French military suppressed it.

Zola’s letter ran on the front page of the Parisian newspaper L’Aurore under the heading “J’Accuse!” (“I accuse!”) It read, in part: “I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.”

Zola’s letter provoked national outrage on both sides of the issue, among political parties, religious organizations, and others. Accused of libel and sentenced to one year in prison, he fled to England for a year. His letter forced the military to address the Dreyfus Affair in public. Dreyfus was released and exonerated. Zola died four years later. His letter prompted the 1902 law that separated church and state in France and ushered in the political liberalization of France.

Today is the birthday of firearms manufacturer Samuel Colt, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1814). When he was 21, he perfected a working version of a revolver with a multi-shot barrel, which he patented. He also designed a rifle and formed a company to manufacture both of the firearms. Colt produced most of the pistols used during the Civil War, and the company’s six-shot, single-action “Peacemaker” model, introduced in 1873, became the most famous sidearm of the West.

It’s the birthday of French Impressionist Edgar Degas, born in Paris (1834), best known for his paintings and pastels of ballet dancers and his bronze sculptures of ballerinas and racehorses. After he became completely blind in one eye, and nearly so in the other, he began to work in sculpture, which he called “a blind man’s art.” Degas remained a bachelor his entire life, saying, “There is love and there is work, and we only have one heart.”

It’s the anniversary of the first women’s rights conference in history, organized in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friend Lucretia Mott. They had been getting together frequently to talk about the abuses they suffered as women, and they finally decided to have a public meeting to discuss the status of women in society. At the meeting, on this day in 1848, they drew up a declaration, which said in part, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the declaration and then made a radical suggestion that the document should also demand a woman’s right to vote. At that time, no women were allowed to vote anywhere on the planet. And many of the other women there objected to the idea. They thought it was impossible.

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“Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze” by Theodore Roethke from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. © Anchor Books, 1996.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of Hunter S. Thompson, born in Louisville, Kentucky (1937). When he was in high school, his father died of myasthenia gravis, leaving the family impoverished. Thompson’s mother had to take a job as a librarian to support the family, and she turned to the bottle to cope with the loss of her husband. Thompson rebelled and embarked on a brief criminal career during his senior year. He spent a month in jail as accessory to a robbery. As soon as he was released, he got into trouble again. This time, the judge gave him a choice between prison and the military, so he joined the Air Force. He began writing articles for the base’s newspaper, and when he was discharged, he took any newspaper jobs he could get.

His break came in 1964, when The Nation hired him to write about a dangerous new motorcycle gang known as the Hell’s Angels. The short investigative piece he wrote turned into a book deal, and he used his advance to buy a motorcycle. He rode around the country, and wrote about the bikers he met and the adventures he had. Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs was the end result; it was published in 1967, and it became a best-seller.

Thompson was a pioneer of a journalistic style that came to be known as “gonzo journalism.” The journalist becomes part of the story he’s researching, and the story is told through his eyes. There’s usually profanity, sarcasm, and exaggeration so that the line between journalism and fiction becomes blurred — mostly for the protection of the journalist and his subjects. As Thompson told Rolling Stone, “Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” The style was born, Thompson said, when he was up against a deadline for a piece about the Kentucky Derby. He ended up writing a rambling account of watching the race. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” appeared in Scanlan’s Monthly in June 1970. People loved it, and Thompson started getting bags of fan mail.

His most famous book started as an assignment for Sports Illustrated. That book is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971). “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” the book begins. He published Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), a collection of his Rolling Stone articles about the 1972 presidential election. He considered Richard Nixon his nemesis, and after Nixon’s death, he wrote an obituary of sorts, titled “He Was a Crook,” for Rolling Stone. “I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him,” Thompson wrote. “I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it.” His final magazine feature article was “Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004,” reporting on a campaign trip he took with Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Thompson eventually ended up in Aspen, Colorado, where he took great delight in playing pranks on his neighbors. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2005, after a period of illness. Per his request, his ashes were shot from a cannon while Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” played.

It’s the birthday of author Elizabeth Gilbert, whose memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), a combination of travelogue, mysticism, self-help, and self-improvement, has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Intel was founded on this date in 1968, chiefly by Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce. The company was originally going to be named Moore Noyce, but since that sounded too much like “more noise” — something that electronics manufacturers try to avoid — they called themselves NM Electronics, and then settled on Integrated Electronics, or Intel.

It’s the birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray, born in Calcutta, India (1811). His best-known book is Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero. It was published in monthly installments, in 1847 and 1848, and it’s about two women: the well-born but passive Amelia Sedley and the ambitious adventuress Becky Sharp, who delivers one of the book’s most famous lines: “I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.”

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“The Strangers” by Patrick Hicks from Adoptable. © Salmon Poetry Ireland, 2014.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of American author Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of smooth-talking criminal lawyer Perry Mason, born in Malden, Massachusetts (1889). He became a typist at a law firm, soaking up legal terminology and trial tactics. With no formal training, he passed the California bar exam and joined a law firm. He found legal practice boring, though. He began writing stories about the people he represented and the things he saw at trial for pulp magazines. Gardner’s stories quickly became popular and he churned out more than 20,000 during his career, giving up his two-fingered typing and dictating to a series of secretaries.

When asked why his heroes always defeated villains with the last bullet in their guns, Gardner answered: “At three cents a word, every time I say ‘Bang’ in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has 15 cents’ worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.”

Early characters included Lester Leith, a parody of the “gentleman thief,” and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who became the template for Perry Mason. Gardner’s first novel to feature Mason was The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), which established Mason’s MO: he proved his client’s innocence by implicating another character, who soon confessed.

On this day 60 years ago, in 1955, the Disneyland theme park opened in Anaheim, California. More than 1 million people visited the park in its first seven weeks.

On this date in 1867, Harvard Dental School, the first university-based dental school in the United States, was founded. Before the school’s founding, aspiring dentists went to freestanding trade schools or learned by apprenticeship. The world’s first dental training program had been established in Baltimore in 1840, but dentistry wasn’t considered a branch of medicine, and programs were not included in curricula. Harvard Dental School represented a dramatic change in the way dentistry was viewed.

Prior to the 19th century, your treatment options were extremely limited: If you had a toothache, you went to the barber-surgeon — or even the blacksmith — to have the tooth pulled, with no anesthesia. The wealthy could afford to have the gap filled with a replacement tooth, which could be bought from someone who was willing to sell his or her own teeth. If you didn’t want to pay the premium price, you could buy the teeth of a cadaver. Sometimes these were collected from battlefields, and were called “Waterloo teeth.” A grave robber could get five guineas for a good set of corpse teeth. But buying replacement human teeth came with risks, too: You might contract tuberculosis or syphilis. Some people had dentures made from ivory, porcelain, or even gold. After Charles Goodyear invented the vulcanization of rubber, you could buy “Vulcanite” dentures made of hard rubber. By the middle of the 19th century, dentists were beginning to use nitrous oxide, chloroform, and ether to perform oral surgery painlessly.

It’s the birthday of editor Ernest Percival Rhys, born in London (1859). He worked as a mining engineer, and he set up a makeshift library with his own books and led book discussions for the coal miners. Then a publisher got him confused with a scholar named John Rhys and approached him about editing a series of books called Camelot Classics. Ernest Rhys turned out to be a good editor, and he moved on from Camelot Classics to work for the publishing house J.M. Dent and Company. Dent and Rhys conceived of a series of inexpensive works of classic literature, 1,000 titles in all. Rhys came up with the name: “Everyman’s Library,” from the medieval morality play Everyman. In the play, the character Knowledge says to Everyman: “Everyman, I will go with thee / and be thy guide, / In thy most need to go / by thy side.” When Rhys died in 1946, 952 volumes of the Everyman’s Library had been published.

It’s the birthday of Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître, born in Charleroi, Belgium, on this day in 1894. He proposed the big bang theory, maintaining that the universe originated with a gigantic explosion of what he called a small super-atom, and that the universe is constantly expanding.

It was on this day in 1936 that the Spanish Civil War began. It started with an attempted coup by right-wing forces, who called themselves Nationalists, against the government, or Republicans. General Franco was at the helm of the Nationalists, and the Spanish Civil War was the first major threat of fascism in Europe. Tens of thousands of international volunteers went to Spain to fight on the Republican side, including thousands from the United States.

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It’s the birthday of playwright Tony Kushner, born in Manhattan (1956). One of his friends became sick with AIDS in the mid-1980s, a time when the disease was only first beginning to be identified. Kushner had a dream about an angel coming through the roof of his friend’s bedroom, and he wrote a poem about it called “Angels in America.” A couple of year…

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“American Summer” by Edward Hirsch from On Love. © Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye was published on this date in 1951. It is Salinger’s only novel. It’s one of the most banned books in American history. It’s also one of the most frequently taught in high schools, even though Salinger didn’t intend the book for teenage readers. Holden Caulfield, the book’s protagonist, is a prep school boy from New York City, and he addresses the reader directly. The novel begins, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Salinger had thought about Holden Caulfield for years. He carried six Caulfield stories with him when he went off to fight in World War II. The stories were with Salinger on the beach at Normandy and in Nazi concentration camps. They were with him in the hours he spent with Ernest Hemingway in Paris. By the time Salinger began to assemble the novel The Catcher in the Rye, he had nine stories about Holden and his family.

When he finished the manuscript, Salinger sent it to publisher Robert Giroux at Harcourt, Brace. Giroux was impressed with the book, and was pleased to be its editor, but he never thought it would be a best-seller. Giroux sent the book to his boss, Eugene Reynal. Reynal didn’t really get it, and sent it to a textbook editor for his opinion, since it was about a prep-school boy. The textbook editor didn’t like it, so Harcourt, Brace would not publish it. Rival house Little, Brown picked it up right away, and Robert Giroux quit his job and went to work for Farrar, Strauss instead. Reviewers called the book “brilliant,” “funny,” and “meaningful.” Salinger couldn’t cope with the amount of publicity and celebrity the book gave him. He moved to a hilltop home in New Hampshire and lived the rest of his life in seclusion. Many directors approached Salinger over the years, hoping to obtain the movie rights, and Salinger turned them all down.

On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the first atom bomb was successfully detonated at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The assembled scientists wore welder’s goggles and shared suntan lotion. Enrico Fermi took bets on whether the atmosphere would ignite and destroy just the state of New Mexico, or the entire planet. The explosion lit up the sky. The desert sand, largely made of silica, melted and turned to a light green, radioactive glass. Ken Bainbridge, the Harvard physicist in charge of the whole enterprise, known as the Manhattan Project, turned to J. Robert Oppenheimer and said, “We are all sons of bitches now.” On August 6th and August 9th, the United States bombed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the only time nuclear weapons have been used in the history of warfare. Bainbridge dedicated his life to the eradication of nuclear weaponry.

Today is the birthday of St. Clare of Assisi, born 1194. As the eldest daughter of a wealthy family, she was expected by her parents to marry well, and they began trying to fix her up with eligible bachelors when she was only 12. She managed to convince them to wait until she was 18, but by that time she preferred to go and listen to the young and radical Francis of Assisi preaching the gospel. One Palm Sunday, she ran away in the middle of the night to give her vows to Francis. He cut her hair, dressed her in black, and brought her to a group of Benedictine nuns. Later, he moved her to the Church of San Damiano, where she embraced a life of extreme poverty, after the example set by Jesus. Clare’s sister Agnes eventually ran away to join her, and so did other women, and the order became known as the “Poor Ladies.” They spent their time in prayer and manual labor, and refused to own any property.

Clare defended her lifestyle of poverty and sacrifice by saying: “There are some who do not pray nor make sacrifices; there are many who live solely for the idolatry of their senses. There should be compensation. There should be someone who prays and makes sacrifices for those who do not do so. If this spiritual balance is not established, earth would be destroyed by the evil one.”

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Today’s poem is no longer available online.

“Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” by Robert Frost from Complete Poems of Robert Frost. © Henry Holt and Company, 1969.

ORIGINAL AUDIO - 2015

Today is Bastille Day in France, the annual commemoration of the storming of Paris’s Bastille Prison in 1789, an event that began the decade-long French Revolution. Frustrated by a severe food shortage, high taxation, and the frivolous spending of Queen Marie Antoinette, thousands of Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed the prison in search of gunpowder. The prison held only seven inmates: four forgers, two lunatics, and one deviant aristocrat. The prisoners were annoyed by the disturbance. The conflict escalated; the crowd grew to 10,000. There were beheadings and stabbings. Informed of the insurrection, the king asked his advisor, “Is it a revolt?” His advisor answered, “No, it’s not a revolt. It’s a revolution.” Bastille Day became an official holiday in France in 1880. There are military parades, speeches, fireworks, and public revelry, with chants of “Vive le 14 juillet!” (Long live the 14th of July!)

It’s the birthday of folk singer Woody Guthrie, born on this day in Okemah, Oklahoma (1912). Guthrie’s early life was difficult: his older sister died in a coal fire and his mother, Nora Belle, was institutionalized after setting a fire that severely burned Guthrie’s father. In 1920, oil was discovered in Okemah, which led to a boom for a few years. Then the oil dried up, and the people of Okemah were, Guthrie said, “busted, disgusted, and not to be trusted.” His father quit town for Texas, leaving 14-year-old Guthrie to play harmonica for sandwiches and coins on the streets of Okemah.

Woody landed in Pampa, Texas in 1931, formed the Corn Cob Trio, and enjoyed his first taste of public success before succumbing to the realities of the Great Depression. He hitchhiked and freight-trained his way across several states, soaking up the stories of “dustbowl refugees” and refining his songwriting skills. In Los Angeles, he joined up with a woman named “Lefty Lou” and became popular with the relocated Okies living in cardboard and tin shelters.

He wrote his most famous song, “This Land is Your Land,” in New York City while living in a building for transients called Hanover House, at the corner of 43^rd Street and Sixth Avenue, one block east of where the ball now falls on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. He was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” on the radio. He’d seen enough during his travels to know that for many Americans, there was nothing blessed about their lives. He wrote the song in 1940, but didn’t record it until 1944. It was published in 1945 in a mimeographed booklet with 10 other songs and some of Guthrie’s drawings. The booklet cost 25 cents.

It was on this day in 1881 that Henry McCarty, better known as Billy the Kid, was shot dead at the age of 21 by Sheriff Pat Garrett of Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Billy had escaped from the county jail and killed the two guards on duty. He headed for the home of his friend Pete Maxwell, but Garrett was waiting inside the door and shot him once above the heart.

The life and death of Billy the Kid inspired numerous books — the first of which was written by Sheriff Pat Garrett himself — as well as novels, poems, dozens of movies, and songs by artists like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Aaron Copland, and Marty Robbins.

Today is the birthday of Swedish director and writer Ingmar Bergman, born in Uppsala (1918). He studied theater in college, and made his way into the film business in 1941, rewriting screenplays. Over the next decade, he wrote and directed more than a dozen movies. His first big international success came in 1955, with Smiles of a Summer Night, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries followed in 1957.

Bergman became known for making films about mortality and isolation. In one interview, he admitted that he couldn’t watch his films anymore because he found them depressing.

And it’s the birthday of playwright Arthur Laurents, born in Brooklyn (1917). He said: “I always wanted to write musicals. When I was a kid, really a kid — seven or eight — I lived in Brooklyn and there was a stock company and my cousin and I would go Saturday afternoons. I remember two productions. One was No, No, Nanette. I still remember them twirling the parasols, thinking, ‘Oh, this is wonderful!’ The other one was Rain by Somerset Maugham and they had real rain!”

He went on to write West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and many more musicals and films, as well as three memoirs: Original Story By (2000), Mainly on Directing (2009), and The Rest of the Story (2012).

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“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth. Public Domain.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of English poet John Clare, born in Helpston, Northamptonshire (1793). The son of rural peasants, Clare published his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, when he was 27. He published it so that he could save his parents from eviction. The book was a great success, and he was welcomed into London literary circles. But Clare, with his humble background, never felt like he belonged there. And once he became known as a writer, he never felt welcome among the laborers in Northamptonshire, either. He wrote, “They hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.”

He wound up in a mental institution later in life, and he wrote some of his best poetry from the asylum. His work there bore no trace of his madness. One of the doctors wrote, “He has never been able to obtain in conversation, nor even in writing prose, the appearance of sanity for two minutes or two lines together, and yet there is no indication of insanity in any of his poetry.” Clare died in the asylum in 1864.

It was on this day in 1798 that the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, while on a walking tour of Wales with his sister, Dorothy, saw the ruins of Tintern Abbey, which inspired his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” Wordsworth claimed the 1,200 lines came to him with the greatest of ease, entirely in his head.

He said: “No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my notes. Not a line of it was altered, not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”

There was a blackout in New York City on this date in 1977. Lightning struck three times that night, hitting Con Edison substations and shutting down the power grid. The city went dark at about 9:30 p.m. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports had to be shut down for eight hours, tunnels in and out of the city were closed, and thousands of people had to be evacuated from the subways.

There had been a similar blackout in 1965, and people had faced it with good humor, but in 1977, New York was in the middle of an economic crisis, and unemployment rates were high. There was also a serial killer, who called himself “Son of Sam,” on the loose, and the city was in the grip of a brutal heat wave. It was the worst time for a catastrophic blackout; the city was a powder keg.

In the 25 hours before power was restored, more than 1,600 stores were looted, more than a thousand fires were set, and nearly 3,800 looters were arrested. It was an ugly day in New York City.

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It’s the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He got his first glimpse of Walden Pond as a young boy; he wrote later: “When I was five years old, I was brought from Boston to this pond, away in the country, — which was then but another name for the extended world for me. [...] That woodland vision for a long time made …

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“A republic of cats” by Marge Piercy from Made in Detroit. © Knopf, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of poet Pablo Neruda, born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile (1904). In 1923, when he was 19, he sold all his possessions in order to publish his first book, Crepusculario (Twilight). Because his father didn’t approve of his writing poetry, he published it under the pen name Pablo Neruda. In 1924, he published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, known in English as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which made him famous. Neruda always wrote in green ink, because he believed it was the color of hope.

It’s the birthday of American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, tax resister, and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). After graduating from Harvard, he worked in his father’s pencil factory. He taught for a time, but resigned because he didn’t want to administer corporal punishment. He opened a school with his brother, John, but John caught tetanus after cutting himself shaving and died in Thoreau’s arms.

He went to work for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and leader of the American transcendentalist movement. Thoreau moved into Emerson’s house and tutored his children. After he accidentally burned down 300 acres of woods near Concord, his friend Ellery Channing told him: “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau entered the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, built a small cabin, and spent two years, two months, and two days listening to whip-poor-wills singing, frogs croaking, and owls hooting. He cultivated beans, ate fish, salt pork, and woodchuck, and spent considerable time pondering which pond was more beautiful: Walden Pond, Flint’s Pond, or White Pond. He always left three chairs ready for visitors. It was a grand experiment: to see if simple self-sufficiency could lead to a greater, more objective understanding of society.

It took almost nine years for Thoreau to complete his book on his experience in the woods. He titled the book Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854). The book became the foundation for the future movements of ecology and environmentalism. Thoreau developed a penchant for yoga and Hinduism. He contracted tuberculosis, which set his health back, and after spending a rainy evening counting tree rings on a stump, he developed bronchitis and never recovered. On his deathbed, his Aunt Louise asked if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

In Walden, Thoreau writes: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

On this day in 1389, King Richard II appointed poet Geoffrey Chaucer to the position of Chief Clerk of the King’s Works in Westminster. Chaucer, the middle-class son of a wine merchant, spent his lifetime associated with aristocracy: as an adolescent, he served as a page for a wealthy household and later fought in France with Edward III, who paid the ransom when Chaucer was captured during a siege. The clerkship came with a significant salary — 30 pounds per year — but a heavy workload: Chaucer supervised the building and maintenance of several royal projects, including the Tower of London and Westminster Palace. Chaucer traveled widely as Clerk, which afforded him the opportunity to meet people across a spectrum of social classes: peasants, nobles, and clergy. Their voices are the narrative cornerstone of Chaucer’s greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, the story of group of pilgrims journeying to St. Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral.

It’s the birthday of (Gaius) Julius Caesar, born in Rome around 100 B.C. He was the great military leader who managed to capture for the Roman Empire most of what became France and Great Britain.

In a series of dispatches from the battlefield, Caesar became his own war correspondent. Unlike many of the Roman poets and historians of the era, Caesar wrote short descriptive prose that was easy for ordinary people to understand. His stories of military victories turned him into a national hero, but the Roman Senate increasingly saw him as a threat. It passed legislation requiring him to lay down his military command and return to Rome.

But Caesar realized that he had the largest and most battle-tested army in the empire under his command. And if he returned to Rome, his political opponents would end his career. And so, on January 10, 49 B.C., Caesar crossed the Rubicon River with his army, directly challenging the authority of the Senate. The result was a civil war. Though he was outnumbered in many of the major battles, Caesar won the war. And he was extremely merciful with captured military leaders, because he wanted them as his allies. That might have been his biggest mistake, since it was a group of those men he spared that began to conspire against him.

He was an absolute dictator of Rome, with ambitious plans to redistribute wealth and land. But a group of senators, led by Brutus and Cassius, wanted to bring back the old republic. So they organized an assassination on the steps of the Senate.

The Roman republic never returned. Instead, Rome would be ruled by a series of emperors for the rest of the empire’s existence.

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“Things to Watch While You Drive” by Joyce Sutphen from Modern Love & Other Myths. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of the literary critic Harold Bloom, born in New York City (1930). His parents were Jewish immigrants, and his first language was Yiddish, but he fell in love with English poetry and read it before he had ever heard English spoken aloud. He started reading Walt Whitman and Hart Crane when he was eight years old. He went on to become one of the most influential literary critics in the country. He is one of the last critics who argues that great literature is a product of genius, and that we shouldn’t read to understand history or politics or culture, but to understand the human condition.

It’s the birthday of Elwyn Brooks White, better known as E.B. White, born in Mount Vernon, New York (1899). He wrote for The New Yorker for nearly 60 years, and married its first fiction editor, Katharine Angell, in 1929. The couple left New York City for a farmhouse in Maine, but White kept writing essays, including a series on farming for Harper’s; these were collected in the book One Man’s Meat (1942). He wrote a piece called “Death of a Pig” for Atlantic Monthly, about his unsuccessful attempt to save a dying pig. “I discovered […] that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles.” Four years later, White published his best-known book, Charlotte’s Web (1952). Beloved by young and old alike, it’s the story of Wilbur the pig and his friend Charlotte, a clever spider who helps save him from slaughter.

White also gave his name to the standard English-language style manual, The Elements of Style. William Strunk Jr. wrote the first edition of the book in 1918. White revived, revised, and expanded the style guide in 1959; with his significant input, The Elements of Style became known informally as “Strunk and White.” In 2011, Time named the manual one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923. White himself once said: “It’s a funny little book, and it keeps going on. Occasionally I get irate letters from people who find a boo-boo in it, but many more from people who find it useful.” White includes a wealth of writing advice, including: “Do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite.”

It’s the birthday of Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri, born Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri in London (1967). Her father, a librarian, moved the family to Kingston, Rhode Island, when Lahiri was two. Growing up, Lahiri often felt conflicted between two worlds: that of her parents, who still listened to traditional Bengali songs on a reel-to-reel tape player, and that of her American friends, who watched television and went to the movies. A nervous child who was afraid of sports and public speaking, she found solace in reading. She says: “Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child.” She began writing stories at age seven with a school friend, stealing blank notebooks from the teacher’s supply closet. They wrote stories about orphaned girls, prairies, and girls with magical powers.

She moved to Boston after graduating from Barnard College and worked the cash register at a bookstore. She rented a room in a house and pecked out stories at night on her typewriter. It took eight years and several rejections until her first collection of stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, was published (1999). It became an instant best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize (2000).

It’s the birthday of the artist best known for a painting of his mother: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, born in Lowell, Massachusetts (1834). In 1885, Whistler gave his famous “Ten O’clock Lecture” to general acclaim. One reviewer wrote: “[T]he Prince’s Hall was crowded [...] There were lords and ladies, beauties and their attendant ‘beasts,’ painters and poets, all who know about Art, and all who thought that they did [...] all seemed delighted with ‘Jimmy.’” In the hour long lecture, Whistler talked about his philosophy of “art for art’s sake.” Unlike most Victorians, he didn’t believe art or artists had a responsibility to convey a moral message. His most famous painting was titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), but it’s more commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother.” It’s a portrait of Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler in a black dress, seated in profile against a gray wall. When Whistler’s scheduled model didn’t show up for a sitting, he decided to paint his mother instead.

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“The Sound of a Train” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of short-story writer Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She’s the author of many collections of short stories, including Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons of Jupiter (1982), and Open Secrets (1994). She studied journalism on scholarship at the University of Western Ontario and then struggled to support herself as a writer, but she finally gave up and became a housewife in the 1950s. She had four children, and stayed home to take care of them, but while they were napping, she began to read widely — many of the most important books of the 20th century. And she began to write, though she found it very difficult. She said: “I went through about a year ... when I couldn’t finish a sentence. It was a time of terrible depression, about what I could do measured against what I wanted to do.” Then, in 1959, her mother died, and Munro suddenly found that she was able to explore her personal life in her fiction in ways she’d never been able to do before. Nine years later she published her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).

Munro often writes about ordinary people in small-town Ontario, where she grew up. She said, “People’s lives, in [my home town] as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

Munro’s most recent collection of stories is Dear Life (2012).

It’s the birthday of French novelist Marcel Proust, born in Auteuil (1871). He published a collection of short stories called Pleasures and Days in 1896, and then worked for four years on an autobiographical novel that he never published. When his parents both died within a few years of each other, Proust inherited enough money to live securely while he began the work for which he is remembered: his seven-volume work, Remembrance of Things Past, whose title is also sometimes translated as In Search of Lost Time (1913–27).

The most famous scene in the book occurs early on, when the narrator dips a bit of a madeleine in some tea and experiences a profound sense-memory of his childhood. That really happened to Proust, although in his case it was a humble rusk — a dry biscuit — that triggered a childhood memory.

From the “Overture” in Swann’s Way (1913):

“When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

It’s the birthday of British writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley, born in London, England (1875). He first achieved fame for his 1913 mystery novel, Trent’s Last Case, which he wrote as a reaction against the prevailing conventions of detective fiction. Unlike the infallible Sherlock Holmes, Bentley’s detective, Philip Trent, bungles his cases and comes up with ingenious solutions that turn out to be completely wrong. Bentley also became known as the inventor of a new form of verse, the “clerihew,” which he introduced in his 1905 book, Biography for Beginners. A clerihew is made up of two rhyming couplets, the first rhyme provided by the name of a famous person. For example:

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

And it’s the birthday of John Calvin, born in Noyon, Picardy, France (1509). He experienced a religious epiphany sometime between 1528 and 1533, in his early 20s, when, he said, “God subdued my soul to docility by a sudden conversion.” Calvin embraced Protestantism at a time when that was a dangerous thing to do; in 1534, two dozen Protestants were burned at as heretics in France. He took up a nomadic lifestyle for the next several years, traveling throughout France, Italy, and Switzerland, finally settling in Geneva.

In 1536, Calvin published Institutes of the Christian Religion; it was intended for a general readership and laid out the foundations which came to be known as Calvinism, or five principles that spell out the word TULIP:

Total depravity: all people are born sinful.
Unconditional election: God has already chosen those people who will be saved.
Limited atonement: Jesus died to atone for the sins of the elect only.
Irresistible grace: If you are among the elect, you will inevitably repent and become Christian.
Perseverance of the saints: You can never lose your salvation.

Word got around, and he made a name for himself among religious reformers; when he passed through Geneva, the pastor of the city prevailed on him to stay around awhile and help with the new church. William Farel, the pastor, wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and even swore a curse on Calvin if he refused. Calvin stayed for a year and a half, and although Geneva was ripe for religious reform, there was still conflict between Calvin, who wanted to install a theocracy, and those who wanted less drastic reform. Calvin was driven out of the city and went to Strasbourg. He returned three years later, and he spent the rest of his life in Geneva. He wasn’t popular with everyone — some people set their dogs on him, or sent him death threats, or disrupted his sermons — but he persisted in spite of failing health, saying, “What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when He comes?”

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

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