Yesterday was the birthday of Jack Kerouac. I didn't forget it; I just put it off one day (which Kerouac would surely understand). A few years ago I drove up to see the famous scroll of On the Road in Orlando - the first city to show it, as Kerouac was living there, with his mother in a back porch apartment, when the book made its splash. Rereading it before the trip, I was struck again by his boyish enthusiasm for life, and his ability to capture, in a way that hadn't been done before, the glorious intoxication of travel.
Today is the birthday of Janet Flanner, longtime Paris correspondent for the New Yorker. I can still remember picking up the magazine and seeing "Letter from Paris" in the table of contents, and under it a name so fittingly similar to flaneur, the urban animal who strolls the boulevards taking in and feeding on the carnival all around.
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