Good Morning!

The sun is hitting the 4th floor porch of the yellow brick tenement and 10 pieces of clothing are hanging, catching the morning light. Black, blue, magenta, gray and cyan, plaid, and paisley. Almost the spectrum of the printer's inks.

I am watching the light crawl over the sleeping windows while I sip black coffee. Leonard Bernstein's music on the radio. My cat is sniffing my ankle and my dog is waiting for her morning run.

Today is Tennessee Williams birthday. When the TN Williams stamp was issues I bought 85 dollars worth.

It’s the birthday of Tennessee Williams (books by this author), born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi (1911). He had a fairly happy, carefree childhood in Mississippi, but that all changed when the family moved to St. Louis. The family was not used to an urban environment, and his mother was obsessed with finding a suitable neighborhood to live in, so the family moved a lot. That’s when Williams first started writing. He published some of his short stories when he was in high school, and won a few prizes. As a young man, he often turned to writing as an escape from an unsatisfactory daily life. He was especially close to his sister, Rose, who suffered from schizophrenia and, later, from the effects of a lobotomy. After he became a successful playwright, he made sure that a portion of his royalties went to help pay for Rose’s care. Many elements of Williams’ life made it into his work, which prompted filmmaker Elia Kazan to remark, “Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.”

In 1943, Williams wrote a short story called “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.” The next year, he turned that story into a play about a disabled girl named Laura, her brother Tom, and their domineering mother. He called the play The Glass Menagerie, and it opened in Chicago to good reviews. The play went to Broadway, where it became a smash hit. It was just the first in a string of successes for Williams, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), both of which were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Williams was prone to deep depression and, in later years, abused alcohol and drugs. But he once said, “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
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It’s the birthday of English poet and scholar A.E. Housman (books by this author), born in Worcestershire, England (1859). Housman is remembered for his two collections of poems — A Shropshire Lad (1896), about life in the pastoral English countryside, and Last Poems (1922).

A.E. Housman on The Name and Nature of Poetry

The Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge University, May 9, 1933

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act...The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. Houseman's test for great poetry.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out … and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
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Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvelous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.

John Berryman, The Paris Review, Winter 1972.