"Alexandria, 1953" by Gregory Djanikian, from Falling Deeply into America. © Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
You could think of sunlight
Glancing off the minarets,
You could think of guavas and figs
And the whole marketplace filled
With the sumptuous din of haggling,
But you could not think of Alexandria
Without the sea, or the sea,
Turquoise and shimmering, without
The white city rising before it.
Even on the back streets
You could feel it on your skin,
You could smell it in the aroma
Of dark coffee, spiced meat.
You looked at the sea and you heard
The wail of an Arab woman singing or praying.
If, as I can now, you could point
To the North Atlantic, swollen
And dark as it often is, you might say,
"Here lies Wrath," or "Truly God is great."
You could season a Puritan soul by it.
But you could fall into the Mediterranean
As though you were falling into a blue dream,
Gauzy, half unreal for its loveliness.
It was deceptively calm and luxurious.
At Stanley Bay, you could float
On your back and watch the evening sun
Color the city a faint rose.
You could drown, it was said,
Almost without knowing it.
It was on this day in 1940 that the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky (books by this author) was mortally wounded when his assassin lodged an ice pick into his skull in Mexico City.
Stalin had exiled Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929, and he went to Turkey, then France, then Norway, all the while writing books, including a three-volume History of the Russian Revolution (1932). Mexico offered him asylum, in part thanks to the support of painter Diego Rivera. While he was in Mexico City, Trotsky had an affair with Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, and he continued to write.
The assassin made it into Trotsky's heavily guarded home and asked Trotsky to read something he had written. Then he pulled the ice pick out of his coat and attacked Trotsky, who died the next day.
Trotsky's murder is a central event in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Lacuna (2009), and in David Ives' one-act play Variations on the Death of Trotsky (1993).
On this date in 1975, NASA launched the Viking 1 mission to Mars. Its sister, Viking 2, was launched about three weeks later. Each Viking mission consisted of a matching lander and orbiter, which separated upon reaching Mars' orbit. The Viking project made history as the first United States mission to land a spacecraft safely on the surface of the red planet. Viking gathered samples, took pictures, and conducted experiments designed to look for signs of life; while the experiments yielded some interesting results, there was no definitive proof of life as we know it. Scientists believe that Mars may be "self-cleaning": Solar radiation and the extremely dry and chemically inhospitable soil would make it very difficult for organisms to survive.
Viking 1 was designed to carry out its mission for 90 days, but it actually continued sending data far beyond that period. Orbiter 1 operated for four years; Lander 1, for more than seven years.
On this date in 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft. They timed the launch to coincide with a rare planetary alignment that allowed the craft to make use of each planet's gravity to boost it on its way. The original purpose of the mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn; it's since passed Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and is now considered an "interstellar mission" because it still has enough velocity to leave the solar system. It's currently flying through the heliopause: the area where the solar wind is opposed by hydrogen and helium gases from interstellar space, forming a kind of bubble around the solar system. Scientists believe it will be able to continue sending back signals until at least 2025.
Voyager 1 and 2 also carry golden records, with pictographic instructions on how to play them. The records contain sounds, images, and welcome messages from Earth, as well as a map to our location. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that decided what should go on the record. He said: "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet." President Jimmy Carter included his own message on the record: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."
It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill delivered a speech to the House of Commons with the famous line: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." The Battle of Britain was raging, and he was referring to the small group of the Royal Air Force who had successfully held off the much larger Luftwaffe, the German air force.
Churchill wrote all of his own speeches, and he was a gifted orator, but people thought that his vocabulary and style of speaking were old-fashioned. But after the beginning of World War II, Churchill's dramatic rhetoric fit the mood of the country.
His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, served in the Parliament and was a talented debater, famous for making spontaneous speeches. Winston, on the other hand, labored over every speech. He brainstormed, researched, planned out the speech in his head, then dictated it aloud to his secretary. From there, he revised it several times and typed it up in what he called "psalm form." His speeches looked like blank verse poetry on the page, so that the rhythm and pauses were laid out just how he wanted them. Before Churchill delivered a speech, he would practice over and over, sometimes in the bathtub.
It's the birthday of poet Heather McHugh (books by this author), born in San Diego, California (1948). She said: "I have always lived on waterfronts. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it's harder to think of yourself as being so important. That seems useful to me, spiritually." She went to Harvard when she was 16 and sold her first poem to The New Yorker a year later. Her books of poetry include Dangers (1977), A World of Difference (1981), Hinge & Sign (1994), and Upgraded to Serious (2009).
It's the birthday of H.P. Lovecraft (books by this author), born Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island (1890). He wrote science fiction, fantasy, and horror, a genre that during his life was called "weird fiction." He was an only child, and when he was three years old, his father had a nervous breakdown and spent five years in a hospital before he died; he probably had a psychotic disease caused by syphilis. So Lovecraft was raised by his mother, two aunts, and his grandfather, who all lived together.
Lovecraft wrote hundreds of poems and short stories, but they were scattered throughout various pulp magazines and publications. It was only after his death that some of the people he had corresponded with in letters were determined to share his work with the public, so they formed a press called Arkham House specifically as a way to publish Lovecraft's work. They issued The Outsider and Others in 1939, and his books are still widely available — books like The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (1932). Fantasy and horror writers like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman consider Lovecraft one of their major influences, and Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story, "There Are More Things," in memory of Lovecraft.
Lovecraft said: "I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams."
