1891 -  Zora Neale Hurston, one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature and closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was born.  A quote and a short excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God follow.

“If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.”

“So Janie began to think of Death. Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. She was liable to find a feather from his wings lying in her yard any day now. She was sad and afraid too. Poor Jody! He ought not to have to wrassle in there by himself. She sen Sam in to suggest a cisit, but Jody said No. These medical doctors wuz all right with the Godly sick, but they didn’t know a thing about a case like his. He’d be all right just as soon as the two-headed man found what had been buried against him. He wasn’t going to die at all. That was what he thought. But Sam told her different, so she knew. And then if he hadn’t the next morning she was bound to know, for people began to gather in the big yard under the palm and china-berry trees. People who would not have dared to foot the place before crept in and did not come to the house. Just squatted under the trees and waited. Rumor, that wingless bird, had shadowed over the town.”  from Their Eyes Were Watching God

1896 - Fanny Farmer publishes her first cookbook, which is also the first to use standardized measurements.  The full text of this cookbook can be found online here.  Below is one of the recipes from it.  You will need, however, one calf’s head in order to make it.

Mock Turtle Soup.

1 calf’s head.
6 cloves.
1/2 teaspoon peppercorns.
6 allspice berries.
2 sprigs thyme.
1/3 cup sliced onion.
1/3 cup carrot, cut in dice.
2 cups brown stock.
1/4 cup butter.
1/2 cup flour.
1 cup stewed and strained tomatoes.
Juice 1/2 lemon.
Madeira wine.

Clean and wash calf’s head; soak one hour in cold water to cover. Cook until tender in three quarts boiling salted water (to which seasoning and vegetables have been added). Remove head; boil stock until reduced to one quart. Strain and cool. Melt and brown butter, add flour, and stir until well browned; then pour on slowly brown stock. Add head-stock, tomato, one cup face meat cut in dice, and lemon juice. Simmer five minutes; add Royal Custard cut in dice, and Egg Balls, or Force-meat Balls. Add Madeira wine, salt, and pepper to taste.

1948 – Kenny Loggins, American singer, was born.  Below is a song Loggins co-wrote.  Loggins and Jim Messina recorded it 1971, and it became a big hit when Anne Murray released her cover of it in 1972

1973 - James Merrill, American poet (1926 – 1995), won the Bollingen Prize for poetry.  The website Poetry Foundation says this about Merrill:

The late James Merrill was recognized as one of the master poets of his generation. Merrill’s work was praised for its elegance of style, its moral sensibilities, and its transformation of autobiographical moments into deep and complex poetry. Through a long and productive career, Merrill wrote plays, prose, and fiction, but the bulk of his artistic expression can be found in his poetry. His work won almost every important literary citation from the Pulitzer Prize to the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award, and he was, according to New York Times Book Review essayist Petet Stitt, “one of the most cunning, elusive, thoughtful, challenging and rewarding poets writing.”

The text of his poem “About the Phoenix” follows.  To purchase his books, click on the links at the end of this post.

About the Phoenix

But in the end one tires of the high-flown.
If it were simply a matter of life or death
We should by now welcome the darkening room,
Wrinkling of linen, window at last violet,
The rosy body lax in a chair of words,
And then the appearance of unsuspected lights.
We should walk wonderingly into that other world
With its red signs pulsing and long lit lanes.
But often at nightfall, ambiguous
As the city itself, a giant jeweled bird
Comes cawing to the sill, dispersing thought
Like a birdbath, and with such final barbarity
As to wear thin at once terror and novelty.
So that a sumptuous monotony
Sets in, a pendulum of amethysts
In the shape of a bird, keyed up for ever fiercer
Flights between ardor and ashes, back and forth;
Caught in whose talons any proof of grace,
Even your face, particularly your face
Fades, featureless in flame, or wan, a fading
Tintype of some cooling love, according
To the creature’s whim. And in the end, despite
Its pyrotechnic curiosity, the process
Palls. One night
Your body winces grayly from its chair,
Embarks, a tearful child, to rest
On the dark breast of the fulfilled past.
The first sleep here is the sleep fraught
As never before with densities, plume, oak,
Black water, a blind flapping. And you wake
Unburdened, look about for friends—but O
Could not even the underworld forego
The publishing of omens, naively?
Nothing requires you to make sense of them
And yet you shiver from the dim clay shore,
Gazing. There in the lake, four rows of stilts
Rise, a first trace of culture, shy at dawn
Though blackened as if forces long confined
Had smouldered and blazed forth. In the museum
You draw back lest the relics of those days
—A battered egg cup and a boat with feet—
Have lost their glamour. They have not. The guide
Fairly exudes his tale of godless hordes
Sweeping like clockwork over Switzerland,
Till what had been your very blood ticks out
Voluptuous homilies. Ah, how well one might,
If it were less than a matter of life or death,
Traffic in strong prescriptions, “live” and “die”!
But couldn’t the point about the phoenix
Be not agony or resurrection, rather
A mortal lull that followed either,
During which flames expired as they should,
And dawn, discovering ashes not yet stirred,
Buildings in rain, but set on rock,
Beggar and sparrow entertaining one another,
Showed me your face, for that moment neither
Alive nor dead, but turned in sleep
Away from whatever waited to be endured?

James Merrill, “About the Phoenix” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2001 by James Merrill.

Selected Poems: James Merrill, J. D. Mcclatchy, Stephen Yenser: Books ISBN: 037571166X ISBN-13: 9780375711664