Monday

Mar. 6, 2000

Believe It or Not

by Jean Monahan

Broadcast Date: MONDAY: March 6, 2000

Poem: "Believe It Or Not" by Jean Monahan from Believe It Or Not (Orchises Press).

It's the birthday of journalist and novelist GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ, born in Aracataca, Colombia (1928). He's the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), a story, based on his own parents, of two old lovers reuniting after 50 years. Marquez' novels are rooted in Colombian fable and history, and are usually set in towns modeled after his boyhood home on the Colombian coast. In 1982 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

On this day in 1857, in the DRED SCOTT CASE, the Supreme Court declared that "Negroes, whether slaves or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution" in effect making slavery legal in all the territories. This decision only added to tensions that led to the Civil War four years later.

Guiseppe Verdi's opera LA TRAVIATA premiered on this date in Venice, 1853. The beautiful heroine, Violetta, despite having terminal consumption, sings beautifully throughout the entire opera, only to die at the final curtain.

On this day in 1836, Texan insurgents — fighting for independence from Mexico — were defeated at the old ALAMO mission in San Antonio. Texas had been in a war for independence for about a year, when a band of 187 Texans, holed up in the mission, refused General Sam Houston's orders to abandon it for safer ground. Several thousand Mexican troops bombarded the Alamo for 12 days. On March 6, they swarmed over the wall and killed everyone inside — including Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett.

It's the birthday of poet ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, born near Durham, England (1806). She became her father's favorite among his 11 children, and he declared that she must never marry. But the poet Robert Browning fell in love with her and her poems, and two years later, when she was 40, they eloped and settled in Italy. There she wrote her best-known poems, love poems to Robert called Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).

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