Thursday

Oct. 16, 1997

Sunday Afternoon

by Timothy Steele

THURSDAY 10/16

Today's Reading: "Sunday Afternoon" by Timothy Steele from SAPPHICS AND UNCERTAINTIES, published by University of Arkansas Press (1995).

The New York Mets stunned the baseball world in 1969 by winning the World Series four games to one over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles.

Israeli poet Dan Pagis, who was forced into a German work camp when he was eleven years old, was born in Raduz, Romania, in 1930.

German novelist, poet, playwright, painter, and sculptor Gunter Grass, best known for his first novel THE TIN DRUM, was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927.

Writer Kathleen Winsor, author of FOREVER AMBER (1944), was born in Olivia, Minnesota, in 1919.

Writer, educator Cleanth Brooks, who in the 1930s helped found the New Criticism movement, was born in Murray, Kentucky, in 1906.

Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was born in Maine, Minnesota, in 1898.

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill (ANNA CHRISTIE, A LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, THE ICEMAN COMETH), was born in New York City in 1888.

The father of modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion, was born in Plonsk, Poland, in 1886.

Playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, best known for his plays THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST, LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN and his novel A PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, was born in Dublin in 1854. An experience in prison inspired "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", where he wrote: Each man kills the thing he loves, / By each let his be heard, / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word. / The coward does it with a kiss, / the brave man with a sword!

Historian, clergyman, and politician George Washington Williams, who wrote what's considered the first objective history of black people in the United States, was born in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, in 1849.

The dethroned Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was executed on a Paris guillotine in 1793, at the height of the French Revolution.

Lexicographer Noah Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758.

Yale University was founded on this day in 1701 as The Collegiate School of Killingworth, Connecticut, by Congregationalists who considered Harvard too liberal.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

«

»

  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
  • “Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.” —Shelby Foote
  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
  • “Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.” —Anthony Powell
  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
Current Faves - Learn more about poets featured frequently on the show