Topics of interest
Fact: Did you know that singer Carly Simon's father Dick was one of the two founders of the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster, back in the 1920s?
In the year 2006, I resolved to get out of my easy chair in our family room, and start exercising. I felt I was putting on pounds that I didn't need, and they wouldn't come off if I did nothing but wish them off. I knew I didn't have the self-discipline to get out of my chair, get down on the carpeted floor, and start doing push-ups by myself. At least not for more than a day or two. About this time, wife Ginny suggested I go to the free exercise class held at the Neal-Vernon County Senior Center. I did, Thursday, Jan. 24, and was introduced to a warm, small group of seniors, led in their non-impact exercises, by Nancy Oldham, from the YMCA. The exercises run Tuesday and Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Nancy is receptive to any senior's special needs or desires. It's a good bet you'll benefit from them, too. I promise.
Join me there, why dontcha?
Omens of Life Everlasting
I remember when, as an English professor at Cottey College, I asked Head Librarian Larry Bradley of the Nevada Public Library if he could get me the film "The Grapes of Wrath" so I could show it one evening to my American literature class. Bless his heart, Larry got it, all right, and it was about as cumbersome as a sailor's trunk, two large reels packed in two, heavy-as-lead containers, one for each reel.
The trend toward miniaturization has come a long way in the past few years.
First, of course, there were the video cassettes. Now there are the small disks that can hold whole movies. Larry Bradley could have brought "The Grapes of Wrath" to me on. one small wafer-thin disk that he could have slipped into his coat pocket.
Moreover, those disks are said to be more durable than any material that has yet to be used in sound reproduction. These disks will live well into the 22nd century. But wait a second. Why should that concern me? Here I am 66 years old, and some of my disks will probably be played a maximum of three more times.
Ah, Vanity, oh, Vanity!!
Did you know that the musical accompaniment for the great, black-and-white 1953 film "On the Waterfront" was composed by the late, great American composer Leonard Bernstein?
Yesterday, I read an article in a Hastings remainder-book titled "Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past." (Hey, is that a crowd-pleaser? No wonder it was lying on the remainders table). The article, by Russell Banks, the novel's author, discusses how he chose the mid-19th-century narrator for his story of Capt. John Smith and his stormy life on the frontier. The questions Banks had to answer are the questions any writer of historical fiction has to confront. Who, for example, is his narrator?
First, he assumed an omniscient, (all-knowing) narrator. "There is a wonderful but intimidating authority, an extraordinarily high degree of entitlement, informing that omniscient point of view, and I have never felt comfortable assuming it. I'll do almost anything to avoid taking on its mantle. Thus, for most of a year, I took that old writer's dodge -- research, research, research" that eventually led him to the rare book room at Columbia, and to the notes and drafts of Oswald Garrison Villard's 1909 "magistreial biography" of Brown.
In the trove of notes, there were interviews taken by one of Brown's sons, Salmon, and as Banks handled and read Salmon Brown's notes, he found himself transported back to the mid-19th century, Kansas. "We are only two long generations away from the living memory of Harpers Ferry, and they spoke to a young twentieth-century listener."
For one thing, even though he was going to write an essentially fictional narrative, he wanted to make sure it was set in an historically believable locale. He combed through library after library, including the Columbia University Library , in New York, until he had an amazingly thorough understanding of and familiarity with all the historical characters, major and minor, that surrounded John Brown and his sons‚ depradations in Kansas and Missouri.
"As I began to read, I became that mute listener. It was like hearing a ghost. Here was the voice of an old man, Salmon Brown, who as a mere boy had fought alongside his father, in the guerilla wars of Bloody Kansas, who had ridden at Osawatomie, who had participated in the Potawotamie Massacre, and who had refused to follow his father into certain death at Harper's Ferry, and who had brooded on those terrible events afterward for nearly half a century . . . When interviewed by Miss Mayo (a valued transcriber of Brown's biography), these actors in Brown's story were elderly people. They were not well-educated but were by our standards today extremely literate."
Read notes and letters written by our grandfather's generation. The writing is masterfully shaped, the ideas and events logically plotted. It was indeed a different generation, from whose heights we have seriously, and unfortunately, fallen.