A Postcard from the Volcano
by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.


"A Postcard From the Volcano" by Wallace Stevens, from Collected Poems. Public domain.  (buy now)

California’s Redwood National Park was established on this day in 1968. Redwoods are the tallest trees on Earth, with the greatest reaching nearly 400 feet. They can live 2,000 years, and they store more carbon than any other ecosystem. They were heavily logged during the Gold Rush, and today only 5 percent of the original coastal redwood range still exists.

Conservationists saw the destruction and lobbied Congress, which established the national park in 1968 — quote, “for the inspiration and wonder of future generations.” The tallest tree, named Hyperion, stands 379 feet tall — five stories taller than the Statue of Liberty. The coastal redwoods were not affected by the 2021 fires ravaging California, but the 2020 Castle blaze in the southern Sierra Nevada destroyed about 10 percent of the world’s giant sequoias, a type of redwood, in Sequoia National Park.

On this day in 1950 the comic strip Peanuts, written and illustrated by Twin Cities native Charles M. Schulz (books by this author), was first published.

Schulz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1922 and grew up next door in St. Paul. His kindergarten teacher had told him, "Some day, Charles, you are going to be an artist," and when he got to first grade and discovered that he had a knack for drawing Popeye he decided that he would become a cartoonist. Young Charles, or "Sparky" as he was then known, skipped two and a half grades of grammar school and so always found himself the youngest and smallest in the room, rebuffed and ignored by his schoolmates in much the same way that his protagonist, Charlie Brown, would later be. He became a shy, timid teenager, failing at least one subject every year of high school, saying later that he was sustained only by the desire to draw. Utterly discouraged, Schulz abandoned the idea of college and enrolled in Art Instruction, Inc., of Minneapolis as a correspondence student to avoid having to face any of his instructors in person.

Following a brief period as an Army draftee and machine gunner in Europe at the end of World War II, Schulz took a job as an art teacher with Art Instruction, Inc., and began producing some early comic strips. In 1950 he approached a large U.S. syndication service with the best of his work, and was given a syndication of eight local papers in a variety of U.S. cities, his strip under its new name, Peanuts.

The strip was an almost immediate success that expanded from its original eight newspapers to more than 2,600 papers in 75 countries at its peak. Peanuts grew into dozens of original books and collections, Emmy Award-winning television specials, full-length feature films, Broadway musicals, and record albums. Schulz's 1963 book, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, sold more that year than any other hardcover book for children or adults, and in 1969 NASA named the lunar and command modules of its Apollo 10 mission Snoopy and Charlie Brown.

The series and its creator won award after award and Peanuts was lauded for its deft social commentary, wry wisdom, and the satirical eye that Schulz would train on any subject from the Vietnam War to school dress codes to the New Math movement of the 1960s. Schulz would not address issues like equality explicitly but rather assumed that both gender and racial equality were self-evident — that Charlie Brown's baseball team was co-ed was at least a decade ahead of its time.

Schulz began every morning with a jelly doughnut, sitting down to think of an idea that might come after minutes or hours. He would produce all aspects of Peanuts by himself, from the original script to the final art and lettering, refusing to hire an inker saying, "It would be equivalent to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts for him." During the life of the strip, Schulz took only one vacation — five weeks off to celebrate his 75th birthday.

On the evening of February 12th, 2000, Charles Schulz died at home in his sleep. The following day, the final Peanuts strip of all time ran in the papers, showing Snoopy atop his red doghouse, his typewriter in front of him, musing over a farewell letter from Schulz, who had written to say:

"I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost fifty years ... Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip. My family does not wish "Peanuts" to be continued by anyone else, therefore I am announcing my retirement ... Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy ... how can I ever forget them."

Today is the birthday of poet Wallace Stevens (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). After going to law school he took a job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and he worked there for the rest of his life. He walked two miles to and from work every day, and that's when he wrote his poems, scribbling notes on slips of paper and then giving them to his secretary to type up when he got to the office. Some people thought it was odd for an insurance man to write poetry. Stevens did not. He said, "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job."

He published his first collection, Harmonium (1923), when he was 43. Many of the poems in the collection have become classics, including "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

It's the birthday of novelist Graham Greene (books by this author), born in Hertfordshire, England (1904). He's the author of such novels as The Power and the Glory (1940), The End of the Affair (1951), and Our Man in Havana (1958).

The End of the Affair was inspired in part by Greene's own extramarital affairs. His London home was bombed one night during the Blitz. Greene would surely have been killed — except that he was spending the night with his mistress. As his wife later remarked, "His life was saved because of his infidelity."

The Twilight Zone  premiered on this date in 1959. The show's creator, Rod Serling, had been a successful TV writer for several years, penning hard-hitting dramas that often ran afoul of the censors. He wrote about controversial issues like lynching, racism, and political corruption, and the networks almost always heavily revised his scripts before they aired. Sick of censorship, Serling walked away from realistic drama and began to explore science fiction instead. He soon realized that he could explore the same issues, but if he called it sci-fi no one seemed bothered by his commentary on nuclear war or McCarthyism.

The Twilight Zone was a tough sell at first. Many critics dismissed science fiction as empty escapism, and journalist Mike Wallace asked Serling whether he'd "given up on writing anything important for television."

The show ran for five seasons, and it gave audiences an early glimpse at many future stars, including Robert Redford, William Shatner, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, and Carol Burnett. It also featured Hollywood legends like Buster Keaton and Mickey Rooney.

Recently The Twilight Zone was rebooted for CBS All Access for a season that aired 2019-2020. It was hosted by Jordan Peele, director of the horror movies Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and, most recently, Candyman which came out in August of this year.

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

^