Sunday

Apr. 9, 2000

Looking at Aging Faces

by Robert Bly

Broadcast Date: SUNDAY: April 9, 2000

Poem: "Looking at Aging Faces," by Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (Harper Flamingo).

It's the birthday of computer pioneer J. PRESPER ECKERT, in Philadelphia (1919). In February 1946, at the University of Philadelphia, he demonstrated for the first time a machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer—nicknamed ENIAC—and the computer era was underway.

It's J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT'S birthday, born in Sumner, Missouri (1905). He was a Rhodes scholar and a lawyer, and came to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1942. In 1945 he joined the Senate, where he served for 30 years. Right after World War II, as a way to improve relationships with old enemies, he sponsored the Fulbright Act, which allocated money for international student and teacher exchanges.

THE CIVIL WAR ENDED ON THIS DAY in 1865 at 1:30 in the afternoon when General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, rode to the house of Wilmer McLean at the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and met General Ulysses S. Grant, Commander-in-chief of the Union Army.

THE FIRST PUBLIC LIBRARY was established on this day in 1883. The people of Peterborough, New Hampshire, decided to set aside a portion of the state bank tax to use for the purchase of books. Over the next couple decades small libraries that lent books out for free started popping up in little towns all over New England.

It was on this day in 1770 that Captain James Cook landed at BOTANY BAY, just south of Sydney, Australia—the second European to set foot on the continent after the Dutch briefly made landfall 130 years earlier. Botany Bay is a small inlet, not quite five miles wide. It was named by Joseph Banks, the botanist with Cook's expedition, and named Botany Bay because of the huge variety of flowering plants there.

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