Monday

May 17, 1999

Elegy #5

by Ovid

Broadcast Date: MONDAY: May 17, 1999

Poem: "Elegy #5," by Ovid, translated by Christopher Marlowe (1564-93).

It's SYTTENDE MAI, NORWEGIAN CONSTITUTION DAY, when Norwegians celebrate their independence from Sweden in 1814.

It's the anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court decision known as BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION, in which the judges overturned an 1896 decision that had allowed "separate but equal" public facilities. They ruled unanimously that it was unconstitutional for the public schools of Topeka to be segregated by race, and this eventually led to public facilities of all kinds being integrated.

It's the birthday in 1936, in the eastern-Sweden city of Västerås, of LARS GUSTAFSSON, the novelist and playwright best known in the U.S. for his poems that appear in the New Yorker.

It's the birthday in Madison, Wisconsin, 1908, of novelist and poet FREDERIC PROKOSCH, best known for a series of four books he called "journey-novels," part-travelogue, part-fiction, that came out in the 1930s and '40s, like The Asiatics, The Seven Who Fled, and Night of the Poor.

It's the birthday in Berkshire, England, 1873, of writer DOROTHY RICHARDSON, famous in her day for being the first to write a novel in a "stream-of-consciousness" style.

It's the birthday in 1749, Gloucestershire, of the physician who found a cure for smallpox, EDWARD JENNER. In the mid-1790s Jenner discovered that a mild inoculation of cowpox warded off the smallpox virus.

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