Saturday

Mar. 4, 2000

May I Have This Dance

by Diana Der-Hovanessian

Broadcast Date: SATURDAY: March 4, 2000

Poem: "May I Have This Dance?" by Diana Der-Hovanessian from The Circle Dancers (The Sheep Meadow Press).

This day used to be INAUGURATION DAY; until 1933, most presidents were sworn in on March 4. But there were exceptions, such as when the 4th fell on a Sunday. The Continental Congress scheduled the first inauguration for March 4, 1789, but they couldn't count the ballots as quickly as they assumed they would. By the time they notified General George Washington he had won, and he made the trip from his home in Virginia north to the new capitol in New York City to be sworn in, it was April 30. His inaugural address was 137 words long.

After his inauguration on March 4, 1829, President Andrew Jackson invited the entire crowd at the Capitol to come celebrate at the White House. They stampeded the place, ruining the furniture; Jackson fled through a window while the butlers moved tubs of liquor onto the south lawn to draw the crowd outside.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was first inaugurated, on this day in 1861, seven Southern states had just seceded from the union, in opposition to Lincoln's refusal to allow slavery to expand in the West. With sharpshooters watching the crowd in front of the Capitol, he said he would not use force to maintain the Union or interfere with slavery where it already existed. Calling for compromise, he said: "We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." But he went on to say that he would retain federal property, and a month later, when he refused to surrender Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Confederates launched the first attack of the Civil War.

It's the birthday of British writer ALAN SILLITOE, born in Nottingham (1928). In 1958 he came out with his first and best-known book, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

On this day in 1887, 23-year-old William Randolph Hearst bought a struggling penny-newspaper called the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER, and started to build the Hearst newspaper empire.

On this day in 1519, HE RNANDO CORTEZ LANDED IN MEXICO to begin his conquest of the Aztec Indians and claim Mexico for Spain.

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