Saturday

Jul. 31, 1999

Beethoven: The Late Sonatas

by William Bronk

The Word

by William Bronk

Broadcast Date: SATURDAY: July 31, 1999

Poems: "The Word," "Beethoven: The Late Sonatas," and "Exploration," by William Bronk, from Living Instead and Manifest and Furthermore (North Point Press).

It's the feast day of ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA, who, in the 1530s founded the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits.

The MONTANA STATE FAIR begins today in Great Falls, and runs through August eighth.

The Annual MELVILLE MARATHON is today and tomorrow, in Mystic, Connecticut: a 24-hour reading of Melville's novel Moby Dick; the reading takes place on the deck of the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, moored in Mystic. Moby Dick, the story narrated by Ishmael, who says, "As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." Tomorrow is the 180th anniversary of Melville's birth in 1819.

It's mystery writer STEVEN WOMACK's birthday, 1952, Nashville; the author of two detective series, both set in the South. The Jack Lynch books began coming out in the early '90s and feature a public relations man who doubles as a crime solver in New Orleans. Womack's more recent series is about a newspaper reporter named Harry James Denton who becomes a private eye in Nashville.

It's writer SUSAN CHEEVER's birthday, in 1943, New York City. Though she's written novels and short stories, Cheever is best known for her Home before Dark, nominated for the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. The book is a memoir of her father, the writer John Cheever, who died of cancer in 1982. For extra material she began going through his private journals, 30 volumes written over several decades. She said, "I learned a lot of things I hadn't known before, how different life was for my father than we had imagined, how the humor he used was just transmuted pain."

It's the birthday in Turin, 1919, of the Italian chemist and writer, PRIMO LEVI, author of If This Is a Man, his first-person account of surviving Auschwitz.

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