Category: Arts & Culture

June 10th Birthday Love: Saul Bellow

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” -Saul Bellow

May 20th Birthday Love: Zbigniew Preisner

Film score composer Zbigniew Preisner, best known for his music for the Krzysztof Kieślowski Three Colours trilogy, was born on this day May 20, 1955 in Bielsko-Biała, Poland. Here is his “Song for the Unification of Europe.”

maggie and milly and molly and may

              10 maggie and milly and molly and maywent down to the beach(to play one day) and maggie discovered a shell that sangso sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and milly befriended a stranded starwhose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thingwhich raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and may came home with …

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“The Spring” by Thomas Carew

The Spring Now that the winter’s gone, the earth hath lostHer snow-white robes, and now no more the frostCandies the grass, or casts an icy creamUpon the silver lake or crystal stream;But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,And makes it tender; gives a sacred birthTo the dead swallow; wakes in hollow treeThe drowsy cuckoo, …

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February 25th Birthday Love: George Harrison

Happy birthday to “the quiet Beatle,” George Harrison, born February 25, 1943 at 12 Arnold Grove in Liverpool, England. Here is Harrison’s 1970 hit “My Sweet Lord” from the triple album All Things Must Pass. “‘My Sweet Lord’ has got a mantra in there and mantras are – well, they call it a mystical sound vibration encased in …

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February 20th Birthday Love: Sidney Poitier

Happy birthday to the wonderful Sidney Poitier, born on this day February 20, 1927 in Miami, Florida. Some of his most loved film performances include his roles in Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, A Raisin in the Sun, To Sir, with Love, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of …

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“Flirtation” by Rita Dove

Flirtation After all, there’s no needto say anything at first. An orange, peeledand quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgewood plateAnything can happen. Outside the sunhas rolled up her rugs and night strewn saltacross the sky. My heart is humming a tuneI haven’t heard in years! Quiet’s cool flesh—let’s sniff and eat it. There …

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January 23rd Birthday Love: Derek Walcott

Here is “Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott, born on this day January 23, 1930 in Castries, the capital of Saint Lucia located in the Caribbean. Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Bleecker Street, Summer Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,for rare flutes …

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“Amores (III)” by e e cummings

Amores (III) there is a moon sole in the blue night amorous of waters tremulous, blinded with silence the undulous heaven yearns where in tense starlessness anoint with ardor the yellow lover stands in the dumb dark svelte and urgent (again love i slowly gather of thy languorous mouth the thrilling flower)

January 3rd Birthday Love: Charles Yu

Happy birthday to American writer Charles Yu, born on this day January 3, 1976 in Los Angeles, California. Yu’s works span from fiction to science fiction to experimental fiction to non-fiction, and his most well-known books include How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010) and Interior Chinatown (2020). “Everyone has a time machine. Everyone *is* …

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