| Mammogram
by Jo McDougall "They're benign," the radiologist says,
pointing to specks on the x ray
that look like dust motes
stopped cold in their dance.
His words take my spine like flame.
I suddenly love
the radiologist, the nurse, my paper gown,
the vapid print on the dressing room wall.
I pull on my radiant clothes.
I step out into the Hanging Gardens, the Taj Mahal,
the Niagara Falls of the parking lot. Jo McDougall, "Mammogram" from In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems. © 2004 by Jo McDougall. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (books by this author), born today in Alexandria, Egypt (1863). Cavafy spent his youth in England studying the works of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Though he is considered to be the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century, he worked in unpublished obscurity during his own lifetime. He was gay and wrote highly personal erotic poems that he chose to circulate only among friends.
Today is the birthday of American composer, pianist, and bandleader Duke Ellington, born on this day in Washington, D.C. (1899). Both of Ellington’s parents were pianists and, though he hoped as a child to become a baseball player, Ellington was destined to follow in their footsteps. He led his orchestra from 1923 to his death in 1974. Ellington thought of his band as a musical laboratory, and he experimented with many different styles, everything from swing to bop. He said, “Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.” He went on to compose jazz standards like “Mood Indigo” (1930). In his later career, he composed longer works such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943), a musical portrayal of African-American history. In 1965, when he was 66 years old, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for music, but he was passed over. When reporters asked him if he was disappointed, he said, “Fate’s been kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young.” He liked to tell his band, “Let’s not pout, gentlemen. It makes bad notes.”
It’s the birthday of the comedian whose television sitcom spawned such quirky pop culture catchphrases as “Yada yada yada” and “No soup for you!” That’s Jerry Seinfeld (books by this author), born on this day in Brooklyn, New York (1954). Seinfeld is best known for his long-running television sitcom Seinfeld (1989–1998), in which he played a thinly veiled version of himself, a stand-up comedian living in New York City surrounded by anxious and conniving friends, like his pal George Costanza, who once made up a fake charity called “The Human Fund,” convinced his coworkers to donate, and kept the money for himself. Jerry Seinfeld grew up loving the comedy of Robert Klein and the Abbott and Costello movies. His father was an aficionado of jokes. While he was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, he’d write down the best jokes he heard and store them in a box for safekeeping. Jerry Seinfeld started performing stand-up while still in college, honing his skills at clubs like Budd Friedman’s Improv and Catch A Rising Star. He wasn’t a fan of vulgar comedy, and his show was clean and popular, with his observational humor about everyday life catching the audience off guard. One popular joke was, “Why does moisture ruin leather? Aren’t cows outside a lot of the time?” Another was, “A two-year-old is like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.” When Jerry Seinfeld was invited to perform on The Tonight Show in 1981 he was so nervous he jogged around Manhattan listening to his five-minute routine more than 200 times on his Walkman. His acting career began with a recurring bit part on the television sitcom Benson in 1979. He played a mail delivery boy. He was fired abruptly, but no one bothered to tell him; he just showed up for taping one day and learned he had no part in the script. Seinfeld and his friend, comedian Larry David, were either in a grocery store or a diner, no one can quite get the story straight, joking about everyday things, when they came up with the idea for a show about a comedian and his everyday life. The show would be called The Seinfeld Chronicles and would feature humor based on real things that happened to David and Seinfeld. Seinfeld played himself and the character of George Costanza was a loose version of Larry David. When Seinfeld first hit the air it took a few years to become a hit, but when it did, it became the most popular sitcom in America. The characters of Jerry and George even pitched a show, just like the one audiences were watching, to fictional television executives over the course of several episodes in which George describes the show as “about nothing.” The phrase caught on, though Seinfeld wasn’t sure why. He said: “The pitch for the show, the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us, it’s the opposite of that.” Seinfeld writes all his jokes longhand with a Bic pen on yellow legal pads, and says doing live comedy is like “standing against a wall blindfolded, with a cigarette in your mouth, and they’re about to fire.”
On this day in 1946, The Portable Faulkner by William Faulkner was published by Viking (books by this author). Faulkner is best known today as the author of the novels The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, and the screenwriter for films like The Big Sleep and The Long, Hot Summer. Faulkner’s fiction painted a full, chaotic picture of the American South, but by the time of The Portable Faulkner he had fallen into near-obscurity — his work | 
