All in green went my love riding
by E.E. Cummings

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams

the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.

Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.

Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.

Four tall stags at the green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.

"All in green went my love riding" by E.E. Cummings. Public domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist and columnist John Gould (books by this author), born in Brighton, Massachusetts (1908). Gould and his wife settled in Lisbon Falls, Maine, on the farm where his great-grandfather had homesteaded. In the 1960s, Gould was working as the editor of the Lisbon Enterprise, and one day the local high school called him up and said they were sending over a student who had gotten in trouble; the student was supposed to be the editor of the school paper, but he was so bored by the job that he had written and published a satirical version called The Village Vomit, mocking all his teachers. As punishment, the school ordered him to go work at the Enterprise and find out what real newspaper work was like. The first day, Gould taught the young man how to shape up his writing and get rid of unnecessary words. That high schooler was Stephen King. King wrote later: "This editor was the man who taught me everything I know about writing in 10 minutes."

In 1942, Gould wrote his first weekly column for The Christian Science Monitor, and he continued that column for more than 60 years, until his death in 2003. He wrote about baseball, nighttime sleigh rides, fly fishing, a 100-year-old woman riding on a fire truck for the first time, his mother's homeland of Prince Edward Island, molasses cookies, and how you should never forget to tell your bees if there has been a birth, wedding, or death in your family.

One of his earliest books, Farmer Takes a Wife (1945), was a big best-seller.

It's the birthday of novelist Doris Lessing (books by this author), born in Kermanshah in what is now Iran (1919). Her father had lost a leg in the British army and was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia. When Lessing was five years old, she moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father was convinced he would strike it rich farming maize. Lessing said: "I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched…it was full of books.”

Lessing's mother sent her to an all-girls convent school in the capital city, but she dropped out after one year and never went back to school. She was married at age 19, had two children, divorced, married a second time, had another child, and divorced again. When she was 30 years old, she moved to London. A year after she moved to London, she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), set in the Rhodesia of her youth. She wrote more than 40 books, including the novels Martha Quest (1952), The Golden Notebook (1962), Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Good Terrorist (1985), and Alfred and Emily (2008). In 2007, she won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Doris Lessing said, "A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away. A critic looks at the finished product and ignores the rush of a river that went into the writing, which has nothing to do with the kind of temperate thoughts you have about it. If you can imagine the sheer bloody pleasure of having an idea and taking it! It's one of the great pleasures in my life."

She died in 2013 in London.

On this date in 1938, Chester Carlson produced the first electrophotographic image, paving the way for the invention of the Xerox machine. The most efficient copying system available at the time was to retype the documents using carbon paper.

The inefficiency of the copying process prompted Carlson to find a better way. He worked on his project in his kitchen, then in a makeshift lab behind his mother-in-law's beauty parlor, and finally in a rented room above a bar in Astoria, Queens. He hired Otto Kornei, an unemployed physicist, as his assistant. After four years, he finally produced the first electrophotographic image.

Early copiers might have been better than copying everything out longhand, but they were slow, complicated, and extremely limited by today's standards. You had to follow 14 steps, it took nearly a minute to make a single copy, and you could only make about a dozen copies from one exposure. The first Xerox machine (xerography came from the Greek root words for "dry" and "writing") came out in 1959.

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