Category: birthdays

Birthdays

Karen3 Comments

It’s the sixth “birthday” of this blog today, which took me by surprise. (I have big plans in the works to give the blog a facelift and get a new portfolio site up, and I wanted to have it done by the blog birthday. Obviously, I thought it was later in the month.) But 1,565 posts, 3 jobs, several relationships, and one cat later, here we are.

It’s also the birthday of my oldest friend, who I think has been reading for all six years and has helped with the technical end of things for the same amount of time. Happy birthday, Amber!

Happy Birthday, Edna

Karen

It’s the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay today. You have to love a woman who wrote sonnets and built an artists’ colony.

IV

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,–
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

(From from A Few Figs from Thistles (1922).

Hooray For Winter Birthdays

Karen


Happy birthday to my sister-in-law today! Not only does she win the bread for the family, she finds time to make homemade baby food–and she’s put up with her crazy in-laws for nearly a decade. I hope she has a fantastic birthday!

Big Day

Karen

Some big historical events happening today, courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:

1. The 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
2. Willa Cather’s birthday.
3. The anniversary of the first fully clear photograph of the Earth from space, taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, and known as “The Blue Marble.”

I Declare It Carl Sagan Day

Karen

Happy birthday to Carl Sagan today! To celebrate Carl Sagan Day, you could watch the introduction to the Cosmos series, which is still the most popular science program ever produced for television*:

Or you could read this from Ann Druyan, which is simultaneously heartbreaking and joyful:

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again…But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is…We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. That pure chance could be so generous and so kind; that we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, “in the vastness of space and the immensity of time”; that we could be together for twenty years; that is something which sustains me…That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Happy birthday, Carl. I like to picture you somewhere in that “ship of the imagination” from Cosmos.

*You’ve all heard that a sequel to Cosmos is in the works for 2013, right? Ann Druyan is helping to write/produce and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will host. I can’t wait.

Happy Birthday, Beryl

Karen1 Comment

It’s the birthday of Beryl Markham today. She was a horse trainer, pilot, and author (probably) of the memoir West With the Night, which I should read again and you should read too, if you haven’t. (It impressed the hell out of Hemingway.)

She was friends with Karen Blixen, lovers with Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and was the first woman to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic. Beryl was fierce! Let’s all be more like her.

Look, A Poem

Karen

Happy birthday to English poet Denise Levertov. I don’t know a lot of her work but what I do know, I like. Like this one:

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

(The opening lines play on Wordsworth’s poem, “The World is Too Much with Us.”)

33,661,440 Minutes!

Karen2 Comments

Happy birthday to my father, the best dad–and now, grandpa!–we could ask for. He is actually 64 today, so you know I had to celebrate with “When I’m 64.”

And yes, we still need him. And still feed him.

Happy Birthday, Mark Doty

Karen

It’s Mark Doty‘s birthday today, but looking back through the archives I haven’t really quoted from him–maybe because a lot of his work is long and/or or particularly heartbreaking. But here’s the first half of a happy poem about clothes and fabric.

Couture

1.

Peony silks,

in wax-light:

that petal-sheen,

gold or apricot or rose

candled into-

what to call it,

lumina, aurora, aureole?

About gowns,

the Old Masters,

were they ever wrong?

This penitent Magdalen’s

wrapped in a yellow

so voluptuous

she seems to wear

all she’s renounced;

this boy angel

isn’t touching the ground,

but his billow

of yardage refers

not to heaven

but to pleasure’s

textures, the tactile

sheers and voiles

and tulles

which weren’t made

to adorn the soul.

Eternity’s plainly nude;

the naked here and now

longs for a little

dressing up. And though

they seem to prefer

the invisible, every saint

in the gallery

flaunts an improbable

tumble of drapery,

a nearly audible liquidity

(bright brass embroidery,

satin’s violin-sheen)

raveled around the body’s

plain prose; exquisite

(dis?)guises; poetry,

music, clothes.