Monday

Jun. 19, 2000

All You Who Sleep Tonight

by Vikram Seth

Broadcast Date: MONDAY: June 19, 2000

Poem: "All You Who Sleep Tonight," by Vikram Seth from All You Who Sleep Tonight.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted on this date in 1953, at 8 in the evening, at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. Both were born in New York City. Julius, an electrical engineer, was a longtime member of the Communist Party. They were given atomic secrets by Ethel's brother, Sergeant David Greenglass, who took part in the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He—Greenglass—saved himself by testifying for the government, and was sentenced to 15 years.

It's the birthday of novelist Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India (1947) to a Muslim family. After going to college in England he lived with his family in Pakistan, then went back to England and became a novelist. On Valentine's Day, 1989, he was condemned to death by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who judged him to have blasphemed Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie went into hiding and has stayed on the run, but his productivity has not diminished: in hiding he has written a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), volumes of essays and stories, and the novels The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999).

It's the birthday of writer Tobias Wolff, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1945). He became a member of the Special Forces, fought for a year in Vietnam, then went to Oxford. He was a reporter for a time, then switched to writing fiction. His memoir, This Boy's Life came out in 1989. His short story collections include In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981) and The Night in Question (1996).

It's the birthday of film critic Pauline Kael, born in Petaluma, California (1919). During the 1950s and early 1960s she ran twin art-film theaters in Berkeley the first in the nation to revive the work of W.C. Fields, Mae West, and Busby Berkeley. She wrote film reviews and broadcast them, without pay, on the Pacifica radio network. To feed herself she worked as seamstress, cook, and textbook ghostwriter. But in 1965 her fortunes changed when a collection of her reviews, I Lost It at the Movies, brought her national attention. She moved to New York and within 3 years settled in at The New Yorker as its chief film critic. Pauline Kael said, "The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself."

It's the birthday of writer Laura Z. Hobson, born in New York City (1900), whose best-known work was the novel Gentleman's Agreement (1947), the story of a gentile writer who poses as a Jew to learn about anti-Semitism firsthand for a magazine article. The book was a huge success, and within the year was made into a movie that won that year's Academy Award for Best Picture.

It's the birthday of typeface designer W(illiam) A(ddison) Dwiggins, born in Martinsville, Ohio (1880). Among the 11 type styles he designed were 4 of the most widely used Linotype faces in the United States and Britain: Electra, Caledonia, Eldorado and Metro.< /li>

The first baseball game was played on this day in 1846not in Cooperstown, as myth would have it, but in the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The New York Baseball Club took on the Knickerbocker Club; New York won, 23 to 1.

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