The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of journalist and social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, (books by this author) born in Croydon, Surrey, England (1903). In 1953 he became the editor of the British humor magazine Punch. Muggeridge eventually left after he got tired of his staff; he said they were "all anguished men, trying to discover what, if anything, was funny." He said, "It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh." He also said, "Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it."

It's the birthday of journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald, (books by this author) born in New York City (1906). He was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years, and he wrote a political memoir, Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1957).

It's the birthday of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (books by this author) born in Yonkers, New York (1919). He's a painter, a poet, and the owner of City Lights Bookstore, which he founded in San Francisco in 1953. The bookstore is on Columbus Avenue at Broadway, in the North Beach neighborhood. He's written about North Beach, describing the churches and parks and old Italians "with gnarled hands and wild eyebrows/ the ones with the baggy pants with both belt & suspenders/ the grappa drinkers with teeth like corn."

Two years after he opened City Lights bookstore, he began a publishing company of the same name. He published Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Ferlinghetti was tried for obscenity. He was defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ferlinghetti was acquitted, and the decision became an important First Amendment precedent.

In 1998, he was named San Francisco's first poet laureate. He said that the items on his agenda included tilting the Coit Tower so that it leaned like the Tower of Pisa and painting the Golden Gate Bridge gold, instead of a reddish color.

He wrote:

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making.