| I saw a peacock with a fiery tail...
by Anonymous
I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud wrapped with ivy round
I saw an oak creep upon the ground
I saw a pismire swallow up a whale
I saw the sea brimful of ale
I saw a Venice glass full fifteen feet deep
I saw a well full of men's tears that weep
I saw red eyes all of a flaming fire
I saw a house bigger than the moon and higher
I saw the sun at twelve o'clock at night
I saw the man that saw this wondrous sight.
"I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail" by Anonymous. Public Domain.
The first segment of the Washington Metro opened on this date in 1976. There had been talk of establishing a subway in the rapidly expanding capital since the end of World War II, but it took 20 years before any progress was made. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority was created in February 1967, and construction began almost three years later. Before tackling construction hurdles, bureaucratic hurdles had to be cleared: Matching legislation had to be approved on Capitol Hill and in Annapolis and Richmond, the capitals of the two neighboring states (Maryland and Virginia) through which the Metro would run. The Metro’s first general manager was Major General Jackson Graham, formerly of the Army Corps of Engineers. Graham always wore a brown suit, and he carried over his love of earth tones to the decor of many of the Metro stations to come. The project managers then had to negotiate with environmental groups, disability advocates, and freeway lobbyists; the original budget of $2.5 billion had grown to $6 billion even before the first paying customer stepped on board. Graham pushed construction to start as soon as possible, saying, “If we get a big enough hole in the ground, they can’t stop us.” The first segment opened on a warm, cloudy Saturday, and some 50,000 people stood in line for hours to take a free ride on the Red Line, which ran from Rhode Island Avenue to the Farragut North underground station. The first segment ran for about four and a half miles, and the trip lasted less than 10 minutes. So many people tried to cram into the cars that the doors wouldn’t shut, and the trains stalled. Today, there are 91 Metro stations in the Washington, D.C., area, covering 118 miles and serving a population of 5 million passengers on six different lines. The Silver Line was the last line added in July of 2014. Additional track segments are expected to open this spring and next year.
It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Julia Alvarez (books by this author), born in New York City (1950). She grew up in the Dominican Republic and returned to New York when she was 10 years old. “All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children. I had gone to an American school and spent most of the day speaking and reading English. At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow. [...] All my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival. And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last.” Instead of finding a fantasy land, she said, she “lost almost everything: a homeland, a language, family connections, a way of understanding, and a warmth.” She often writes about the experience of being caught between two cultures. Her first book was a collection of poetry, called Homecoming (1984), and her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), was based on the experiences Alvarez and her sisters had upon coming to New York. She also wrote a nonfiction book, Once Upon a Quinceañera (2007), about the tradition of throwing elaborate 15th birthday parties for young Latinas. “Imagine,” she said, “a whole community spends three months, six, a year, preparing and focusing on its young girls. Quite an investment of time and energy, and it makes the girls feel supported, loved, encouraged to be the new up and coming leaders in the community. Positive things happen at a time in life when young girls are especially vulnerable.” Her latest book is Afterlife (2020). In 2013, Alvarez received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
It’s the birthday of poet Louis Simpson (books by this author), born in Kingston, Jamaica (1923). He moved to New York City as a teenager. He loved writing and studied at Columbia University, but while he was still a student he was drafted into the Army during World War II. He served as a combat infantryman in some of the most intense fighting of the war — at Normandy, Arnhem, and the Battle of the Bulge. When he returned home, he had two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, and he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He spent six months in a psychiatric hospital. He said, “I did not intend to be a poet. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to use words that would bring other people under a spell and win their admiration.” But he could no longer hold an entire novel, or even stories, in his head — poetry was the only format that felt possible. He went back to Columbia, and a year after he graduated he published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes (1949). He worked as an editor and a professor and published 18 more books of poems, including Adventures of the Letter I (1971), People Live Here (1983), The Owner of the House (2003), and Voices in the Distance (2010), and two autobiographies, North of Jamaica (1972) and The King My Father’s Wreck (1995). He also published poetry criticism. He said, “Descriptions of poetry written by men who are not poets are usually ridiculous, for they describe rational thought processes.”
It's the birthday of the French novelist and poet Henri Murger (books by this author), born in Paris (1822). He's most famous for his book Scènes de la vie bohème (1851), a fictionalized version of his experiences as an impoverished writer living in the Latin Quarter of Paris's Left Bank. It's an area filled with universities and cafés and known for its intellectual life, and Murger playfully romanticized his starving-artist-living-in-a-Paris-attic bohemian lifestyle, and he also wrote about his friends, who called themselves "the water drinkers" because they could not afford to buy wine. At first, he published these sketches of his bohemian life in literary magazines, but they didn't really attract that much attention. But then a young ambitious French playwright named Théodore Barrière asked Murger if he could do a play based on his work. Murger agreed and worked on it with him, and the play was a huge hit in Paris. People wanted to hear more of Murger's life. So he compiled those short stories he'd published earlier in literary magazines, added an introductory chapter and some closing ones, wrote up a few segue passages to make the tale flow better, and also a little treatise on what it means to be "bohemian" — and he called it a novel, which he published in 1851. It became the basis for Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896), one of the most famous operas of all time. The character of Rudolphe (or Rudolfo in Puccini's opera) is based on Murger himself. Besides Puccini's opera, there are a number of other works that take up Murger's theme, including another opera called La Bohème (1897) by an Italian opera composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo, a number of films, and even the musicals Rent (1996) and Moulin Rouge (2001).
On this date in 1915, the woman known as "Typhoid Mary" was put into quarantine in a cottage in the Bronx. Her name was Mary Mallon, and she worked as a cook in various wealthy households around New York City. Every household she worked in seemed to suffer an outbreak of typhoid fever. A doctor named George Soper noticed this strange pattern of outbreaks among the wealthy. He figured out they had all hired the same cook, finally tracked her down, and questioned her. She didn't take it well; she swore at him and threatened him with a meat cleaver when he asked her to provide a stool sample. He finally called in the police and had her arrested. They took urine and stool samples by force and discovered that she was a healthy carrier of typhoid. They released her on the condition that she would give up working as a cook, but once she was free, she changed her name and went back to cooking. Five years later, they finally tracked her down on Long Island, and she was put in quarantine for the rest of her life. She died of pneumonia in 1938. Throughout her life, Mallon was asymptomatic. Mary Mallon's case became the first in which an asymptomatic carrier was discovered and forcibly isolated. The ethical and legal issues raised by her case are still discussed. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
