Wednesday

Mar. 11, 1998

Spiders

by Charles Harper Webb

WEDNESDAY 3/11

Today's Reading: "Spiders" by Charles Harper Webb from READING THE WATER, published by Northeastern University Press.

It's the birthday of DOUGLAS ADAMS, in Cambridge, England, 1952, author of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything, but best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...the novel about Arthur Dent who hitchhikes a ride off Earth just as it's about to blow up.

It's the birthday in 1903 of LAWRENCE WELK, in the little German-speaking village of Strasburg, in south-central North Dakota. He taught himself how to play accordion and hit the road with little bands he pulled together to play radio shows and small-town dances around the Midwest. He headed west to Los Angeles and started making TV appearances in 1951. In 1955 ABC hired him to do a weekly hour-long music show that became the longest running program in television.

The legendary BLIZZARD OF 1888 struck New York City on this day 110 years ago. There have been heavier snowfalls since, but the combination of 21 inches of snow, below-zero temperatures, and winds clocked at nearly 80 m.p.h. made it the city's deadliest winter storm. Over 400 people died as the wind drove the snow into 12-foot high drifts.

Mary Shelley published FRANKENSTEIN on this day in 1818, its full title: FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. Four years earlier the poet Percy Shelley, who was married, asked her to run off with him to France. She did and a year later they were in Geneva, Switzerland where she began to write the story of the young Swiss student, Victor Frankenstein, who builds a human from pieces of corpses. At its moment of creation he says: "I beheld the wretch ÷ the miserable monster whom I had created."

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