Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.   Whan that aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour. . . .   Oh, how I loved learning how to recite these opening lines to “The Prologue” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While I was by no means a scholar of medieval literature (modern literature being far more to my taste, as you know if you are a devoted StoryWeb listener), I reveled in learning about the language, the religious pilgrimage Chaucer’s narrators were on, loved delving into their various voices.   What a magical storytelling device! Imagine thirty travelers walking from London to Canterbury to worship at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. How would they while away their time? By holding a storytelling competition, of course, and regaling each other with one tale after another. Storytelling was an immensely popular form of entertainment in England at that time,

This week on StoryWeb: Dolly Parton’s song “Coat of Many Colors.” Call it maudlin or sentimental, but Dolly Parton’s song “Coat of Many Colors” is undeniably an American classic, so much so that it was adapted to a made-for-television movie in 2015 and to a sequel, “Christmas of Many Colors,” in 2016. The song is not particularly innovative artistically speaking. It doesn’t push the envelope in any way. And yet . . . it tells the story of the Parton family so honestly, vividly, and memorably – and does so in a neat, three-minute package. The song tells of the Parton family’s poverty, so profound that the only way Avie Lee Parton can provide a winter coat for her daughter is to stitch together one from old rags given to the family. As she sews the coat for young Dolly, she tells her the Biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. Dolly can’t wait to wear the new coat to school. The joy and pride she feels in wearing the rainbow-colored coat are dashed when the other children at school make fun of her

This week on StoryWeb: Alex Haley’s book Roots. In January 1977 when I was sixteen, I joined 130 million Americans to watch the television miniseries based on Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It was broadcast eight consecutive nights, and like countless other viewers, I was glued to the TV set every night. I was there, front row, center, for every episode. The concluding episode still ranks as having the third largest audience in television history. Who can forget Kunta Kinte, his daughter Kizzy, or her son Chicken George? The story Haley recounted in Roots was nothing short of miraculous. After years of genealogical sleuthing, he made his way back to the African village of his ancestors. And there, in tiny country known as The Gambia, a griot – part storyteller, part genealogist, part priest – told of the capture of Haley’s great-great-great-great-grandfather Kunta Kinte. The story Haley told went like this. Based on the griot’s revelations about Kunta Kinte and on the many tales pass

This week on StoryWeb: Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room.” I’ve featured Elizabeth Bishop previously on StoryWeb. “The Moose” – set in Bishop’s home province of Nova Scotia – is one of my favorite poems, as it tells so powerfully the ordinary – but extraordinary – experience we all have from time to time: an encounter with wild life, with the “wild life.” Set in 1918 and written in 1976, “In the Waiting Room” – set in another of Bishop’s childhood locales, Worcester, Massachusetts – also tells a tale of an experience that is common to everyone: coming into conscious awareness of oneself as a separate person, a being who can feel pain, alone in a large and often alienating world. What is not at all common is young Elizabeth’s awareness of this moment of coming into consciousness. Is the young Elizabeth aware of this as it is happening? Or is it the older adult Elizabeth who looks back and recognizes what this moment was? Or is the young Elizabeth perhaps in a kind of conversation with her adult self

This week on StoryWeb: Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest.   Really, has there ever been a play funnier than Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?   No matter how you experience it – by reading the play, seeing it performed live, or watching one of the film adaptations – you’re sure to be splitting your sides with laughter in no time. Even if you’ve seen the play or one of the films before, you’ll laugh just as hard – maybe even harder – than you did the first time you saw it. Knowing all the uproariously funny jokes to come, all the farcical plot twists and turns Wilde has up his sleeve just adds to the fun.   Who is your favorite character in the play? Like many viewers, I am partial to Lady Bracknell, the forerunner to Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, played so consummately by Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey. Lady Bracknell’s arch observations – complete with eyebrows lifted and eyes peering down her aristocratic nose – are droll and on point every single time.   “To lose on

This week on StoryWeb: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah. Nigerian Chinua Achebe was the first African writer to publish a major novel in English – a novel in the colonial master’s language. Published in 1958, Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo and his traditional Igbo village and the devastating transformation it undergoes with the arrival of British colonialists. But the novel is every bit as much about Okonkwo as a tragic hero – his story regardless of time and place – as it is about the damage wrought by Europeans. Things Fall Apart demanded that the Igbo be taken on their own terms. Now almost sixty years later, Nigerian literature has expanded considerably. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah, the main characters live in Nigeria, the United States, and England. If not completely comfortable in all of these worlds – or indeed maybe not comfortable in any of these worlds – they nevertheless figure out how to move in these worlds. The two main characters – Ifemelu and O

This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s poem “Theme for English B.” Oh, how I love this poem! It packs so much into a short space. Published on its own in 1949, it was included in Langston Hughes’s 1951 collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. Though it gains more resonance when taken with the entire collection of Hughes’s bebop poetry, it also stands successfully on its own. In “Theme for English B,” Hughes imagines a 22-year-old black student—a transplant from North Carolina – living at the Harlem Y and going to college. He is the only “colored” student in his class at Columbia University, where Hughes himself had been a less-than-satisfied student in the 1920s. In the poem, Hughes plays with the idea of using writing – words on paper – as a tool to bridge racial, social, class, and educational differences. Through the “theme” the young man is writing, his professor – white and well educated – has the opportunity to learn from his black, yet-to-be-fully-“educated” student. Like so many other writing teache

This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s book of poems Montage of a Dream Deferred. I play it cool And dig all jive That’s the reason I stay alive. My motto As I live and learn Is dig and be dug in return. So goes the poem “Motto” in Langston Hughes’s 1951 jazz collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The list of my favorite Langston Hughes poems would be long indeed, but no volume of his poetry makes my heart sing like Montage of a Dream Deferred. Not only does it include justly famous poems like “Harlem” and “Theme for English B” and lesser known poems like “Motto.” But it also – taken as a whole volume as Hughes intended – provides a marvelous portrait of the African American community in post-World War II Harlem. The story goes that Hughes wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred in a creative outburst in one week in September 1948. Hughes had just moved into his own home after being a renter his entire adult life. Writing to a friend, Hughes described Montage as “a full book-length poem in five sections,” “a pr

This week on StoryWeb: Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor. While “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Moby-Dick get a lot of attention (and are taught frequently in high school and college classes), fans of Herman Melville’s work think a lot about a piece he was writing at the end of his life. Though Melville had been working on the novella Billy Budd, Sailor for the last five years of his life, it appears that he may not have finished it when he died in 1891. It’s surprising that Melville had been working on the novella for such a long time. Earlier in his life, he was known for the extremely rapid pace at which he wrote. For example, he wrote the mammoth Moby-Dick in just eighteen months – an epic novel that was about six times longer than Billy Budd. So it’s odd that Melville would spend so much time on one piece – and still leave it unfinished. Also puzzling is Melville’s motivation in writing Billy Budd at all. After he published Moby-Dick in 1851, he went on to write three other novels – Pierre; or,

This week on StoryWeb: Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California.” In so many ways – both in his poetry and in his interviews – Allen Ginsberg made clear that he owed a great debt to Walt Whitman. Indeed, Ginsberg’s most famous poem, “Howl,” stands as a nearly direct response to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” published in 1855, a century before “Howl.” But perhaps nowhere does Ginsberg make their kinship clearer than in his 1955 poem “A Supermarket in California.” In what seems at first a light-hearted, whimsical poem, Ginsberg imagines walking the aisles of a grocery store with the famed poet, the American bard. Ginsberg addresses Whitman directly in the poem’s opening line: “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman.” The reader doesn’t need to guess or infer that Ginsberg has Whitman in mind. Of course, Ginsberg often acknowledged his poetic debt to Whitman. Both here and in “Howl” (and in many other poems), Ginsberg builds on Whitman’s explosion of the poetic line. Where Whitman sounded

This week on StoryWeb: Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “I Had To Go Down.” Gloria Anzaldúa was a groundbreaking, perhaps even groundclaiming theorist and poet. She is by far best known for her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera. It is much easier to identify it as her most influential and enduring work than it is to place it into a genre. Is it theory? History? Poetry? Memoir? It is all this – and more. Anzaldúa’s work can be challenging. It is a dense text with complex concepts, and some readers find it hard to understand. And it can be unsettling, especially to white (male) readers who might find their notions of privilege and status being called into question. This difficulty – this textual, psychological, social difficulty – is quite deliberate on Anzaldúa’s part. She confronts her readers as she upends dominant views of race, language, white privilege, gender and sexuality, and “ownership” of contested land between the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. In short, Borderlands/La Frontera is not an easy read nor is it inte

This week on StoryWeb: E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. When I was a senior in high school, my favorite English teacher, Mr. Alwood, agreed to do an independent study with me. He selected four challenging novels he thought I was up to understanding and studying. I think back to those novels now and can’t imagine how a 17-year-old could really have been equipped – intellectually or emotionally – to appreciate them. But in my way, limited by life experience though I was, I did appreciate them. One of those novels was E.M. Forster’s 1924 book, A Passage to India. The novel hinges on an accusation of rape. One of the main characters is Mrs. Moore, a refined British lady who has come to visit India, still a British colony. Mrs. Moore is sensitive to the cultures and religions of others, and when she visits and enters a Muslim mosque reverently, she forms an unlikely but heartfelt friendship with Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim doctor in the town of Chandrapore. At first it seems that a bridge can be built betwe

This week on StoryWeb: Derek Bowman’s book Tam: The Life and Death of a Dog. For Mom, in honor of her birthday Chanonry Point. The very name of this tiny peninsula in northern Scotland evokes fond memories and takes me back – almost physically, it seems – to the little cottage I shared with my mother and sister for one week in Summer 2006. I can recall the peculiar washer and dryer (which try as we might we never could get to work), Julia’s bedroom at the top of extremely narrow, very steep, almost ladder-like stairs, and Mom’s makeshift bedroom in the living room. I certainly recall walking outside on Chanonry Point, which is a sightseeing destination for locals and tourists alike, our tiny cottage the only structure other than the lighthouse on the point. People would gather at all hours of the day to watch the dolphins that gathered in the Moray Firth just off the point, the largest “traffic intersection” of dolphins in Scotland, perhaps the world. I also well remember the many dogs that traveled with thei

This week on StoryWeb: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton. Like many, many Americans, I am entirely and utterly swept up in the cultural phenomenon of our time – meaning I can’t get enough of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton. Wow. That is really all there is to say. Introducing the cast for a performance at the White House, Michelle Obama said that Hamilton is the greatest work of art in any genre that she has ever encountered. And numerous theater directors and scholars compare Miranda to Shakespeare in his ability to bring history to life through colloquial verse. The show won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for a record-setting sixteen Tony Awards, winning eleven. Miranda not only wrote the lyrics and music for the show – but also starred as Hamilton, receiving the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. In 2015, the same year Hamilton debuted on Broadway, Miranda was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship – known by many as the MacArthur genius award. What’s all this fuss a

This week on StoryWeb: John Hiatt’s songs “Feels Like Rain” and “Drive South.” For Jim, in celebration of our years together Later this week, Jim and I will celebrate twelve years together, ten years married. American singer-songwriter John Hiatt was a part of our early courtship, and two of his songs became our particular favorites – “Feels Like Rain” and “Drive South.” Both appear on Hiatt’s 1988 album, Slow Turning. A true American troubadour, Hiatt has recorded more than 20 albums, beginning with Hangin’ Around the Observatory in 1974 and most recently with Terms of My Surrender in 2014. He’s known for great songs like “Have a Little Faith in Me,” “Perfectly Good Guitar,” and “Thing Called Love” (which became a hit for Bonnie Raitt). His songs have been covered by a wide range of outstanding musicians, from Aaron Neville, B.B. King, and Bob Dylan to Iggy Pop, Linda Ronstadt, and Rosanne Cash. “Feels Like Rain” was the title track of a 1993 album by Buddy Guy, and Suzy Bogguss recorded “Drive South” in 199

This week on StoryWeb: Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. I want to close out my multi-week focus on the Gilded Age with a consideration of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Where Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser look at the grimier side of this famed period in New York City history, at the underbelly that the working class and poor, the immigrants, and the homeless faced as they made their way through daily life, Edith Wharton focuses her attention on the world she knew best: that of the privileged, moneyed class. It seems odd in a way to say I “love” The House of Mirth. After all, the main character, Lily Bart, endures such a difficult downward spiral amid the harsh, judgmental upper-class echelons of New York City. The young, flirtatious, life-loving, aptly named Lily doesn’t stand a chance against high Manhattan society, whether it is those with old money, such as her Aunt Peniston, or those with new money, such as the Trenors and Dorsets. Lily’s story – as

This week on StoryWeb: Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie. In 1899, as the soon-to-be-novelist Theodore Dreiser was starting work on Sister Carrie, he was also working on two articles about America’s up-and-coming photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Impressed by Stieglitz’s realistic photography, Dreiser used similar techniques in Sister Carrie, creating “word pictures” to describe city scenes in both Chicago and New York. Relying on photographic elements in these passages, Dreiser emphasized the weather, qualities of light and darkness, and the spectacle aspect of the scenes, thus underlining the stark reality being presented. Born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser worked until 1899 as a newspaper reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and New York and then moved on to magazine work. The amount of work he produced for magazines was phenomenal, with 120 pieces appearing in a three-year period. Much of this journalistic work was not of high quality, later earning Dreiser the reputation of be

This week on StoryWeb: Stephen Crane’s article “An Experiment in Misery.” Many Americans know Stephen Crane as the author of the Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which made Crane famous at the age of 23 when it was serialized in 1894. It was published as a full-length book in 1895. Some know his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, or even the harrowing short story “The Open Boat,” based on a real-life experience when Crane was en route to Cuba and spent 30 hours adrift with others in a lifeboat. Less well-known to most readers is Crane’s work as a journalist. Born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, Crane floundered around from college (which he didn’t finish) to one vocational pursuit after another. When he found himself drawn to New York City in the 1890s and took work as a newspaper writer, he appeared to have found his calling. Crane would make a peripatetic living for the rest of his short life as a fiction writer and correspondent from various locations throughout the western hemisphere. He

This week on StoryWeb: Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs The Terminal and Winter, Fifth Avenue. In the 1890s, as Alfred Stieglitz was beginning his career, photographers were fighting for artistic recognition. Photographers who wanted to go beyond “mere” journalism or documentary photography had to show their critics the value of their “mechanistic” art. Photographers like Stieglitz were trying to prove to skeptics that the camera could be used not only as a journalistic tool (as Jacob Riis used it in How the Other Half Lives) but that photographs could also have value as art. Stieglitz was unquestionably the leader of the movement to gain artistic recognition for photography. A pioneer in subject matter, technique, and treatment, Stieglitz shot many “firsts,” among them the first snow photograph, Winter, Fifth Avenue (shot in 1893), the first rain photo, A Wet Day on the Boulevard [Paris] (taken in 1894), and the first night shot, Reflections – Night [New York] (created in 1896). In 1897, Stieglitz published Pi

This week on StoryWeb: Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives. Photojournalism can be an extraordinarily powerful way to raise the public’s concern about extreme situations. An early pioneer in this realm was Jacob Riis, whose 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, exposed the underbelly of life in New York City during the Gilded Age, with a particular focus on the Lower East Side. Though Riis has been occasionally criticized for asking some of his subjects to pose for the photographs, the truth of their surroundings and the veracity of the degradation they faced on a daily basis cannot be denied. Along with the photographs is Riis’s text – chapters about the various ethnic groups that lived together on the mean, intensely crowded streets of Manhattan. The book achieved its purpose as it successfully provoked a public outcry about living and working conditions in the slums of New York. Most notably, Theodore Roosevelt, then the city’s police commissioner, answered Riis’s call to address the dire situations