Today in History, Leap Year’s Edition

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If it was not for our leap seconds—and, every four years, leap days—our clocks and calendars would slide and slip all over the place compared to what they are measuring; if not for leap days, eventually New Englanders would be confronted with a frigid July and the dog days of December, and vice versa for the Southern Hemisphere.
 
What our clocks and calendars are measuring is perfect: a year is X number of seconds, days, months, but not the same every year. The earth’s orbit is regular and perfect, but not 365 days every year. It is almost 365 days, and a day is almost exactly 24 hours in length, and we live with the compromise we call clocks and calendars. The ancients came as close to exactly right simply from observation as they could—to within seconds.—”Time’s Mulligan,” TGAT

Today is Leap Day. Every four years, Leap Day William (pictured above) travels from his home in the Mariana Trench to trade candy for children’s tears. It is a beloved national holiday honoring the taking of chances.

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Today in History, February 27

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Iraq President Saddam Hussein ordered his forces to retreat from Kuwait and U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared that nation liberated 25 years ago today.

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Five sections of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite “The Planets” were performed in public for the first time by the Royal Philharmonic Society conducted by Sir Adrian Boult on this date in 1919. The movements that were performed were Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter. This selection became a popular version of “The Planets,” even though Holst himself disdained performances that concluded with Jupiter. His daughter wrote that he “disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a ‘happy ending’, for, as he himself said, ‘in the real world the end is not happy at all.'”
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‘Hearing’ ‘Voices’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The poet and critic John Greening sums up the career of James Merrill, who conversed with the inhabitants of other planes of reality, in a 2010 essay, “Ouija”:

James Merrill made a point of breaking all the rules, of remaining recklessly formal when all about him were casting off their chains, of being incorrigibly discursive and elitist, shunning the rhythms of speech for something more refinedly musical, and unswerving in his determination to squeeze every last pun out of a line.—John Greening, “Ouija,” The Dark Horse, Summer 2010

Merrill was a rebel in his adherence to rules in a rule-breaking era. He wrote dazzling, perfect poems, and he employed almost every verse form available to him, as an actor might use accents. Greening quotes George Bradley: “Reading James Merrill is enough to make the rest of us suspect we’re not smart enough to write poetry.” Even at his smartest, he is engaging and not impenetrable. His pleasure in the sounds of words and the poetic effects he creates and his many puns are always evident. He compliments his readers in his implied assumption that we must know what he is writing about at least as well as he does.
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