Almanac Videos

Wednesday’s Poem: “Vanishing Point” by Freya Manfred, from Swimming with a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle, also known as T. Coraghessan Boyle, born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York (1948). He got a couple of stories published, and he got accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he went on to write novels and books of short stories, including The Tortilla Curtain (1995), After the Plague…

Thursday’s Poem: “Stars” by Freya Manfred, from Swimming with a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the man who wrote: “It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone.” That’s the Polish writer Joseph Conrad, born in Berdichev, Ukraine (1857)…

Monday’s Poem: Excerpt from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Monday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1900 that Oscar Wilde died at age 46, after declaring his famous last words: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” He had spent two years in prison under the official crime of “acts of gross indecency,” meaning that he had male lovers. His health deteriorated, and he had a severe ear infection that the prison doctor would not treat. When he got out of prison, he moved to Paris, but…

Tuesday’s Poem: “Scrub Dreams of Taking the Last Shot” by Jack Ridl, from Losing Season. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen, born on this day in Brooklyn in 1935. His films include Bananas (1971), Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and most recently, Whatever Works (2009). He said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”..

Sunday’s Poem: “A November Sunrise” by Anne Porter, from An Altogether Different Language. Sunday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday Madeleine L’Engle, born in New York City (1918), who struggled to find any success as a writer with novels about ordinary families and ordinary situations, but after reading about the ideas of Albert Einstein, she wrote a science fiction novel called A Wrinkle in Time (1962), about a group of children who have to rescue their father from a planet where…

Saturday’s Poem: “Bouquet” by Jerry Roscoe, from The Unexamined Life. Saturday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of William Blake, born in London (1757). He wrote Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). He lived in poverty, ignorant of the rest of the literary world of London, scraping out a living from his trade as an engraver and writing and drawing under inspiration he considered divine…

Friday’s Poem: “The Surgeon” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from The Book of Seventy. Friday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1978 that San Francisco mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by Dan White, a former supervisor who’d resigned but then wanted his job back. White snuck into the San Francisco City Hall through a window in order to bypass metal detectors, then he walked to the mayor’s office and shot him. Then he found Milk in a hallway and shot him,…

Wednesday’s Poem: “Two Girls” by Jim Harrison, from Saving Daylight. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of Leonard Woolf, born in London (1880). He was an incredibly prolific writer, though his literary achievements were overshadowed by his famous wife, novelist Virginia Woolf, for whom he was first reader, major editor, and great encourager…

Thursday’s Poem: “In Sickness and Health” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from The Book of Seventy. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1922 that archaeologist Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon became the first people in more than 3,000 years to enter the tomb of Egypt’s child pharaoh, Tutankhamun…

Monday’s Poem: “Where They Were and What They Were Doing” by Matt Cook, from In the Small of My Backyard. Monday’s Literary Notes: Today, the winner of the 2005 National Spelling Bee turns 18. Anurag Kashyap, who was born in India and grew up in San Diego County, California, was in eighth grade when he correctly spelled “appoggiatura” (a musical term that means, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, “an embellishing note or tone preceding an essential melodic note or tone and usually…

Tuesday’s Poem: “What the Dark-Eyed Angel Knows” by Eleanor Lerman, from The Mystery of Meteors. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the publisher and editor of The Little Review magazine, Margaret Anderson, born in Indianapolis (1886), who never fit in when she was growing up in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. She said, “I saw no reason why I should continue to live in Columbus, Indiana, and not breathe.” So she moved to Chicago and founded a magazine called The Little Review,…

Sunday’s Poem: “Head Cheerleader” by Jack Ridl, from Losing Season. Sunday’s Literary Notes: It was about 12:30 p.m. on this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. It was the first successful assassination of an American president since 1901, and the only presidential assassination ever caught on film. Almost every American alive at the time remembers where they were when they heard the news…

Saturday’s Poem: “XI.” by Wendell Berry, from Leavings. Saturday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of Christopher Reuel Tolkien (1924) born in Leeds, England. He’s the youngest son of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, and he drew the original maps that appeared in his father’s epic fantasy novel. In addition to synthesizing all that complicated information about the imaginary Middle Earth to draw up the illuminating maps, he was also his famous father’s test audience. Since his…

Friday’s Poem: “Farley, Iowa” by Christopher Wiseman, from the longer poem “Standing by Stones” from Crossing the Salt Flats. Friday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, South Africa (1923). She’s the author of more than a dozen short-story collections and more than a dozen novels, most of which explore the issue of race in her homeland of South Africa. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, and has served as a member of…

Thursday’s Poem: “Diagnosis” by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln got up in front of about 15,000 people seated at a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, pulled his speech from his coat pocket and delivered the Gettysburg Address. It consisted of 10 sentences, a total of 272 words and lasted just over two minutes…

Tuesday’s Poem: “Alexandria, 1953” by Gregory Djanikian, from Falling Deeply into America. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the man who created Saturday Night Live — Lorne Michaels, born in Toronto, Canada (1944). He majored in English at the University of Toronto, and then moved to Britain in the 1960s to pursue a career selling cars. His friends and acquaintances in England, who loved his sense of humor and recognized his leadership potential, quickly realized it’d be a huge waste of talent for him to sell cars all of his life. Michaels recruited talent from all sorts of places. Dan Aykroyd was a fellow Canadian, and Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner had worked on the National Lampoon show. Muppet creator Jim Henson created sketches for the show, and recent Harvard grad Al Franken was signed on as a writer. Michaels put together the first season, 1975–1976, and won an Emmy for it…

Wednesday’s Poem: “My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing” by William Kloefkorn, from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). Her father was an entomologist who spent every year from spring to fall studying insects at a forestry research station in northern Quebec. Atwood said, “At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this…

Sunday’s Poem: “Manners” by Howard Nemerov, from The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov. Sunday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of artist Georgia O’Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). In 1923, she said, “One day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself — I can’t live where I want to — I can’t go where I want to go — I can’t do what I want to — I can’t even say what I want to … I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.”..

Monday’s Poem: “Middle School Band Concert” by Christine Rhein, from Wild Flight. Monday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the novelist Andrea Barrett, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1954). She is known for writing fiction about botanists, oceanographers, and geologists. In order to finish her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), about a group of British scientists exploring the Arctic, Barrett traveled to the Arctic herself. Andrea Barrett said: “I think science and writing are utterly…