To Pain
by Dan Gerber

You begin the moment I wake up,
and even the moment before,
abiding companion, herald of my life,
though a little too strident at times.

I have little white pills to calm,
and even still, you. Sometimes
I think you've finally walked out,
but a little neglect is all it takes to win you back.

When you've stayed too long, I might
demand to know why you've chosen me.
What I may have done to summon you.
What retribution you represent.

But you tell me nothing more,
only that you are part of what a body feels,
only that you're part of what a heart endures
and what a mind transforms.

You are, after all,
like the fog this morning,
obscuring almost everything, till a tree emerges just beyond
               our yard,

and then, again, a fence corner
coming almost imperceptibly
back into view,
halfway up the next hill.

Dan Gerber, “To Pain” from Particles: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2017 Dan Gerber. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)

Today is All Saints' Day. In the Western Catholic tradition, it's a time to honor Christian saints and martyrs. Pope Boniface IV originated the holy day in around 609, in the process of consecrating the Pantheon of Rome to the Virgin Mary. At that time, All Saints' Day was celebrated on May 13. Pope Gregory III changed it to November 1 in the mid-700s, probably to coincide with, and incorporate, the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain, a time when the border between the dead and the living was especially porous and ghosts were believed to walk among the living.

All Saints' Day is a national holiday in Catholic countries, and it's followed by the Feast of All Souls on November 2, which honors the non-saintly Christian dead. In Mexico, it marks the first day of the Día de los muertos, or Day of the Dead, festival. Day of the Dead traditions include building altars at the graves of deceased family members and leaving offerings of gifts, favorite foods, marigolds, and elaborately decorated sugar skulls.

The first medical school for women opened in Boston, Massachusetts, on this date in 1848. It was started by Samuel Gregory, who named it the Boston Female Medical College. The first class — 12 women in all — graduated just two years later, in 1850. Gregory's own formal medical training consisted of a summer lecture course that he had taken in anatomy and physiology. He wasn't remotely a supporter of women's rights, but he believed it was unseemly for male doctors to assist women in childbirth, so the college was mostly intended to serve as a school for midwives at first. In 1856, the school's name was changed to the New England Female Medical College; it named among its graduates Rebecca Lee Crumper, the first African-American to earn a medical degree, which she did in 1864.

It was on this day, seven years apart, that two of Shakespeare's plays (books by this author)were performed for the first time: Othello in 1604, and The Tempest in 1611.

 Othello was performed for the court of James I. In the "Accounts of the Revels at Court" from 1604, there is an entry that says: "By the Kings Maiesties plaiers. Hallamas Day being the first of Nouembar, A play in the Banketinge house att Whithall called The Moor of Venis. Shaxberd." Othello, the Moor of Venice was performed several more times before Shakespeare died in 1616, but it wasn't printed until 1622.

Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's friend and the leading man in his acting company, probably played the first Othello, just as he played Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard III. He definitely played him in later productions, and a poet described Othello as Burbage's "chiefest part, / Wherein beyond the rest he moved the heart." King James was a scholar himself and a serious patron of the arts — he gave his name to the King James Bible, and he and his wife particularly enjoyed theater, and so many of Shakespeare's plays were performed before the royal court. Macbeth was written specifically for James, who was fascinated by witchcraft. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who preceded James, an average of six or seven plays were performed each year in the royal court. The court of James I averaged more than 20 each year.

And it was on this day in1611 that The Tempest was first performed, once again for the court of James I. The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, a powerful magician and the former Duke of Milan who is exiled to a remote island with his daughter. He conjures up a storm to shipwreck his brother, who stole his throne.

Because The Tempest is Shakespeare's last major play, a lot of people think that Prospero is meant to stand for Shakespeare himself, and that his last speech, when he gives up his powers, is Shakespeare's own comment about the end of his career: "To the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak / With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory / Have I made shake and by the spurs plucked up / The pine and cedar: graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth / By my so potent art. But this rough magic / I here abjure; and, when I have required / Some heavenly music — which even now I do, — / To work mine end upon their senses, that / This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book."

The theater scene at James' court must have gone downhill after Shakespeare's day, because a few years later, in 1614, a courtier wrote to his friend complaining of the constant plays: "We have Plays at Court every night, — wherein they shew great patience, being, for the most part, such poor stuff that, instead of delight, they send the auditory away with discontent. Indeed our Poets' brains and inventions are grown very dry, insomuch that of five new Plays there is not one that pleases, and therefore they are driven to furbish over their old; which stand them in best stead and bring them most profit."

It's the birthday of novelist Susanna Clarke, (books by this author) born in Nottingham, England (1959). She worked in publishing, then went to Italy to teach English, and while she was there she said: "I had a kind of waking dream about a man in 18th-century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt strongly that he had some sort of magical background — he'd been dabbling in magic, and something had gone badly wrong."

She decided to write a novel about this character, even though, as she said, "I really like magicians, but there was no reason to suppose anyone else would." She took a five-day science-fiction and fantasy class, and one of her teachers was so impressed with a short story she wrote in the workshop that he sent it to his friend Neil Gaiman, who showed it to an editor, who called her up and offered to publish it. So she started publishing short fiction, but her novel was slow-going. She was working as a cookbook editor for Simon & Schuster, and for years she got up and started writing at 5:30 in the morning, wrote for about three hours, and then went off to her day job. The novel took her 10 years to write, but finally, she was done with the manuscript, called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It's the story of two wizards, one a handsome and charismatic young man named Jonathan Strange and one an uptight scholar named Gilbert Norrell. It isn't a book of high fantasy as much as a comedy of manners and a history of early 19th-century England during the Napoleonic Wars — with a lot of magic thrown in. When it was finally published, Susanna Clarke got as many comparisons to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens as to any fantasy writer.

But publishing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell wasn't easy — it was 800 pages long, and the first few publishers turned it down, saying that it would be impossible to market such a book. But then Bloomsbury picked it up and was so sure it would be a success that they offered her a huge advance. Sure enough, the book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for about three months.

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