Saturday

Mar. 7, 1998

Ironing Their Clothes

by Julia Alvarez

SATURDAY 3/7

Today's Reading: "Ironing Their Clothes" by Julia Alvarez from HOMECOMING, published by Penguin (1996).

It was on this date in 1945 that American troops seized a crucial bridge over the Rhine river at REMAGEN and began pouring into Germany. With the Soviet army closing in on Berlin from the east, the war in Europe would be over in a few months.

Robert Frost's poem, "STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING," was published in the New Republic magazine on this date in 1923.

THE FIRST JAZZ RECORD went on sale on this day in 1917. The Victor Company released a tune called "The Dixieland Jazz Band One-Step" recorded by Nick La Rocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Jazz caught on fast and got exported across the Atlantic to cities like Paris, where black American musicians found lots of opportunities to play. It was on a Paris backstreet where composer MAURICE RAVEL first heard jazz, stopping by a club on one of his habitual midnight walks.

Ravel, who was born on this day in 1875, had insomnia nearly all his life, and would walk the streets in the middle of the night writing music in his head. He fell in love with the new American sound and came to the U.S. in the mid-20s to play concerts and tour jazz clubs in New York, Kansas City and Chicago. He went back home to Paris to write classical pieces (like the G major Piano Concerto) blended with jazz.

It's the birthday of HELEN PARKHURST, the founder of the Dalton Plan of Education, born in Durand, Wisconsin in 1887. She got her start teaching in a one-room Wisconsin school house crammed with 40 farm boys of all ages. She managed it by dividing the room up into four areas ÷ one for math, one for reading, and so on ÷ and having the older boys help the younger ones when she couldn't be in that area. This was the basis of the Dalton Plan that she went on to formulate and champion, in which children directed much of their own learning; and curriculum became secondary to working within a shared community.

It was on this day in 1876 that the U.S. Patent Office wrote out patent number 174,465 to Alexander Graham Bell. His new invention was THE TELEPHONE. Bell was 29 and had been working on the phone by himself for nearly 6 years, then another four with Watson who was a mechanic and model maker.

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