Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

February 9

1879 ...Exasperated and fascinited by his brother's improvident restlessness—Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at news-papering, chicken farming, lawyering, and cross-country lecturing as "Mark Twain's Brother," and now asked for a raise in the $500 annual pension Clements was giving him—Clemens professed to Orion his "ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness,"

February 8

1936 Fiction doesn't get more speculative than "How Much Shall We bBet?", a tale in Cosmiccomics, Italo Calvino
s collection of scientific fables, in which two prototypes-beings, Qfwfq and his old friend ()k)yK, gamble idly on the universe as it develops. From the most basic of wagers—will matter condense into atoms?—Qfwfq progresses, out of boredom and curiosity, toward recklessly arcane predictions..

February 7

1584 ...after which "worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." The records of his interrogations and of the trial fifteen years later that resulted in his execution provided Carlo Ginzburg a rare chance, in his influential and entertaining micro history The Cheese and the Worms, to piece together one of the lower-class lives that were often unrecorded and largely untouched by the Renaissance.

Sonnet

Elizabeth Bishop
(February 8th 1911 — October 6th 1979)

...She was later uprooted and sent to live in the emotionally stifling and unhappy atmosphere of her paternal grandparents' house. it was not until Bishop moved once again to live with her aunt, herself a lover of literature, that she began to write.

February 6

Mayes planned the book as a spoof, but he kept quiet as it was taken seriously by reviewers and became the authoritative source on the life of the once-popular master of juvenile uplift stories. Only fifty years later did he confess, as Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales detailed in their own Alger biography, that he had invented almost everything in what he called a "miserable, maudlin pied of claptrap."

February 5

1917 Dr. kFranz Kafka, after seven years as a law clerk at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, requested a promotion and a raise to the "fourth bracket of the third salary classification."

February 4

1882 Oscar Wilde's cheeky tour of America set the good people of Boston against each other. Colonel T. W. Higginson, reformer, soldier, and Emily Dickinson's patient patron, criticized the local ladies who had welcomed into their homes this author of "mediocre" poems whose "nudities do not suggest the sacred whiteness of an antique statue, but rather the forcible inveiling of some insulting innocence,"

February 3

1898 .., and now it "sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late)." Pain shared this birthday slippage with his creator, Vladimir Nabokov, who born on April 10, 1898, in the old calendar, celebrated his modernized birthday on both April 22 and 23, since the gap between the Justinian and Gregorian calendars had increased from twelve to thirteen days in 1900.

February 2

1922... Many sections of the book had already appeared in the Little Review and the Egoist (and caused a stir, both aesthetically and legally, leading the book to be banned as obscene in the U.K. and U.S. until the '30s). But dates, like many details, were obsessively important to Joyce, an so it was crucial to him that the book be published on this day, his fortieth birthday.

February 1

NO YEAR At ten o'clock sharp outside the factory gates five children appear with their grown-up chaperones: Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregard, Mike Tease, and Charle Bucket, one day after he found a dollar in the snow (fifty pence in the original British edition) and the final Golden Ticket inside his second Whonka's Whipple-Scrumptous Fudgemallow Delight.

January 31

1903 John Masefield, in the Speaker, on Joseph Conrad's Youth and Two Other stories (including "Heart of Darkness"): "His narrative is not vigorous, direct, effective, like that of Mr. Kipling. It is not clear and fresh like that of Stevenson, nor simple, delicate, and beautiful like that of Mr. Yeats. It reminds one rather of a cobweb abounding in gold threads."

January 30

1890 ...With few academic jobs open to a woman, Debo worked mainly as a freelance historian, digging through bureaucratic archives to write a series of books including And Sill the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, which pointed enough fingers at prominent, living Oklahomans hat the University of Oklahoma Press dropped its contract of the book, which had to be published out of state.

January 29

1888 ... series of two hundred illustrations of his great friend Tennyson's poems. And though the funeral after his death on this day was a lonely affair, too sudden and distant for any of his English friends to make it, he also left a wall covered with the photographs of his loved ones, as he described in his last letter to the Tennysons: "There! it ain't everybody as has such friends! Goodbye, E. L. "

January 28

1728... generally trust Swift's assertions of their celibacy, but the passion between them was unmistakable: as Swift wrote to a friend, "Believe me that violent Swift confessed in "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson" that he was too heartsick to attend her funeral, and indeed had to move away from a window through which he could see the light from the church where it was being held.

January 27

1837 ...the duel by insulting d'Anthès after he flirted with Natalya at a ball, managed only to break two of his rival's ribs. Two days later, ending a short career that later saw him acclaimed as Russia's greatest poet, he succumbed in his library at home; it is sad that when a doctor suggested he see his friends before he died, he looked at the books surrounding him and replied, "Farewell, m friends,"

January 26

1931 On a winter's evening, Charles Fort, who would much rather have. even sitting in the New York Public Library or at his kitchen table in the Bronx adding to the tens of thousands of tiny slips of paper he had filled with notes about phenomena unexplained by science, was induced to make his way down to the Savoy Plaza Hotel., where he was surprised by the first meeting to the Fortean Society, ...

January 25

1533 ... Cromwell exchanges threats with his fellow courtier William Brereton, who three years later will be executed, at Cromwell's bidding, along with the new queen. As often as their tale has been told, Mantel gives it new life—with a surprisingly sympathetic Cromwell, one of history's villains, at its center—in the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and its Booker-winning sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

January 24

1934 T. H. Mathews, in the New Republic, on Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man: a "first-rate murder story," but by writing a more conventional detective tale outside his "master-political" milieu, "perhaps Mr, Hammett is coasting."

Love After Love

Derek Walcott
(January 23rd 1930 — )

...Since then he has written more than twenty collections of poems an plays, including the acclaimed epic poem Omeros and, most recently, The Bounty. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. Walcott is widely recognized as one of the finest poets writing in English, and the foremost Caribbean poet of his (and any other) generation.

January 23

1759 ..."embellished, augmented, and shockingly obvious," and by summer the project was officially banned. But work continued, for the Encyclopéde had important friends as well as enemies. When police searched the house of its editor, Denis Diderot, they found nothing, because the tens of thousands of pages of manuscript had been hidden by the king's chief censor in his own office,

January 22

19048 Despite his success in placing his early stories in national magazines, J. D. Salinger still hadn't been embraced by the one he wanted most, The New Yorker, which had accepted his first Holden Caufield story but kept it on the shelf for five years. Finally New Yorker editor William Maxwell wrote to Salinger's agent to say, "We like parts of ' The Bananafish' by J. D. Salinger very much,...

January 26

1849 "Do you know Sarah Helen Whitman?" Horace Greeley wrote his fellow editor Rufus Griswold about a poet of their acquaintance. "Of Cours, you have heard it rumoured that she is to marry Poe. Well, she has seemed to me a good girl, and—you know what Poe is...Has Mirs. Whitman no friend within your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe to her?"

January 20

1006 ...,"the twenty-ninth of the twelfth month," the last day of the year in the imperial Japanese calendar and the equivalent in the West, as some scholars measure it, of January 20, 1006. By that point, it is thought, she had already written much of The Tale of the Gene, its early episodes, meant to entertain the aristocracy, may have been what won their author her place in the empress's entourage.

January 19

1921 "So long." 'See you tomorrow." For a short time one winter, two boys played together in the unfinished house the father of one of them was building and, when evening came each day, parted with those words, until one day one boy didn't come back. William Maxwell built his short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow from two events over a half-century old that still caused hime a vertigo...

January 18

1939 With E. M. Forster and a young friend of Isherwood's to see them off on the boat train from London, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left England for America. Well traveled, this time they were leaving for good, each for his own reasons—Auden to escape the cage of his celebrity and Isherwood out of a general restlessness; "I couldn't stop traveling."

January 17

1925 "I'm trying to train you for the big market," Rose wrote. "You must understand that what sold was your article, edited...So that next time you can do the editing yourself." Seven years later Rose edited her mother's childhood stories into a book called Little House in the Big Woods, the beginning of a series who's true authorship—by mother or daughter or, most likely, both—has been debated ever since

January 16

1632 ...(Descartes had made his own animal dissections in search of the sources of memory and emotion). The mere possibility they were there was enough for W.G. Seabed, who in the midst of a meditation on Browne in the early pages of The Rings of Saturn claims that Rembrandt, unlike Descartes, was drawn not to the mechanics of the body but to the grotesque, open mouth horror of the cadaver...

January 15

1895 Poor Hurstwood: his decline in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie matches the rise of Carrie, his former protégée, but he's inspired to make one last, ill-fated grab toward his old vitality by a notice in the papers that the Brooklyn streetcar lines, facing a strike by their motormen, are hiring replacements, His day out on the lines, though, is a nightmare: mobs of stickers assault him as a scab...

January 14

1939 "When I read through this book I'm appalled at myself!" Tennessee Williams rote in his journal just after moving to New Orleans. "It is valuable as a record of one man's incredible idiocy!...Am I all animal, all willful, blind, stupid beast?"

January 13

1848 ... Zola defended Major Dreyfus, the Jewish officer who had spent four years on Devil's Island after a trumped-up conviction for treason, and courted arrest for libel by naming those he thought responsible. He was indeed twice convicted, but the force of his essay an the evidence brought out in his libel trials transformed public opinion and led to Dreyfus's exoneration in 1906.