Inside WSKG

Nine Eleven Again

by Bill Jaker

Everyone remembers where they were.  I was driving to work on the 11th of September, 2001.  It was a bright and clear Tuesday morning and I was looking forward to an OFF THE PAGE broadcast that afternoon.  I’d stopped for a red light at the corner of Jensen Road and the Vestal Parkway.  NPR’s MORNING EDITION had just gone to a report by Susan Stamberg about some teachers when the program was interrupted by a bulletin, with an eyewitness account of an airliner flying into the World Trade Centerin Manhattan. 

The stoplight turned green. Everything had changed.

A few days later The New York Times invited readers to post comments on their website about the events of September 11th and I wrote an observation that seems to have not arrived or made it past the editor.  I mentioned this to a friend who tends a New York literary website and she invited me to send it to her for a special page she’d established for reflections on 9/11.  But once more it seemed to get lost in cyberspace.

So seven years later let’s post it again:

I never did like the design of the World Trade Center. Those towers were too cold and monolithic.  I did enjoy walking around on the roof – the highest outdoor observation platform in the world provided a wonderful view across New York City and its suburbs.  But it seemed to me that the buildings themselves broke into the Manhattan skyline.  From a distance they were a pair of verticals trying to dominate the island and its flowing rivers.  From street level they were just too blankly massive, hulking high into the sky from a undistinguished flat plaza.  You could never see the top.

But there was one thing about the Twin Towers that I enjoyed.  Looking at those skyscrapers from a distance I could imagine them being a gigantic tuning fork.  Each morning the first ray of sunrise would beam across ocean and harbor from the east and strike the giant tines.  A note would waft across Manhattan, silent to human ears but clear to the bricks and steel and glass of every other building, and the city would catch its tone and find its rhythm for the day.

In an hour, with an awful roar and a flash of fire the Towers were gone, descended into dust.

The great city may sing again, but its note will never be the same.

A Shakespearean Summer

by Bill Jaker

                                                    “Now am I dead.”
                                                                      -- Shakespeare
                                                                       A Midsummer Night’s Dream  V, i.

A friend once remarked to me that reading “Hamlet” was like coming home again.  I don’t think she was referring to the action of the play – it does contain a homecoming scene – as much as to the warm familiarity of Shakespeare in Western culture.  His words are an enduring gift to the English language and they frame our communication and comprehension.

This summer the Bard of Avon is enjoying a homecoming in upstate New York.  The Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown has dedicated their entire season to operas that were inspired by or somehow connected to Shakespeare.  In repertory are Bellini’s “Capuleti e Montecchi” (Romeo and Juliet), Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto”, Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate” (about a theatrical company presenting, and living, “The Taming of the Shrew”) and Wagner’s “Das Liebesverbot”. 

The latter opera is a reworking of “Measure for Measure”, which has been in production by the Franklin Stage Company in Franklin, NY.  It’s just a coincidence, but it did lead Glimmerglass and Franklin Stage to coordinate some of their publicity.

“Measure for Measure”, as staged in Franklin by David Bridel, is performed skillfully by a professional cast of four in multiple roles.  The story of a reformer whose crusade to stamp out vice leads him into his own temptations, critics have long felt that Shakespeare began “M for M” as a high-minded morality play but may have rushed it to conclusion in the guise of a melodrama.  It’s one of those works that makes some people suspicious about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, whose inconsistencies may be a sign of collaboration.

Also this season, the Endicott Performing Arts Center is presenting its fifth season of Shakespeare in the Park, staging “Othello” at the George W. Johnson Park in Endicott and at Binghamton City Stage and the Red Bull Players at Cornell Plantations in Ithaca are continuing a summer Shakespeare tradition with a production of “King Lear”.

Shakespeare isn’t heard much on the radio these days.  But back in the summer of 1937 audiences were treated to a season unparalleled in broadcast history.  The NBC and CBS networks found themselves in competition to see who could present the most and best of Shakespeare.  Some of the great Shakespearean actors of the time, including John Barrymore and Orson Welles, were in the cast of radio productions that included “The Tempest”, “Twelfth Night”, “Taming of the Shrew” and, of course, “Hamlet” (the final two in separate productions on both NBC and CBS). These had to be revised and shortened for broadcast – NBC called its series “Streamlined Shakespeare” – but that wouldn’t have been unusual even in a theater performance, though cut to thirty minutes was a bit drastic.  Since the Elizabethan stage didn’t use much scenery or special effects, Shakespeare had to write a lot of description.  That made him one of the most effective and flowing of radio writers:

NORTH.  How far is it to Berkeley?  And what stir keeps good old York there with his men of war?

H. PERCY.  There stands the castle, by yon tuft of trees, Manned with three hundred men, as I have heard, and in it are the Lords of York, Berkeley and Seymour – none else of name and noble estimate.

NORTH.  Here come the Lords of Ross and Willoughby, Bloody with spurring, fiery-red with haste.

BOLING.  Welcome, my lords…

                            -- Richard II, act II, sc. 3

There are those who believe that if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing soap operas and police procedurals.  That would have been a waste of genius, but might he have wanted to supplement his income as an occasional uncredited “script doctor”?  The practice of written-by-committee can cut both ways.

Wipe that transition off your face!

by Bill Jaker

In the late 19th century buildings with cast-iron facades were popular and a crowd always gathered at the site to observe the final stages of construction.  The story is told of a little boy watching the crane hoisting the ironwork who turned to his mother and said excitedly, “Look mommy, they’re putting on the architecture!”

Now as “virtual crowds” come together at their television screens there are many who would observe the visual clutter and remark, “Look, they’re putting on the content.”

Overloading the television screen with imagery seems to be a current sin of news programs, especially those covering business and economics, where the charts, graphs titles and boxes overflow and fall from the screen like so much peeling wallpaper.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Even a simple program can literally be chopped up by its own graphics.  I was watching a political discussion on a cable network during which the participants appeared on the screen in little boxes like the page of a comic book.  But the director could not simply cut from one person to another but had to slide the picture through what looked like a crumpled Wonder Bread wrapper.

What is called a “transitional wipe” has long been part of the basic visual language of television.  Once upon a time a dissolve meant a passage of time.  A wipe was a change of time and place. But now we see pictures sliding and shuffling, bouncing about the screen with no real meaning.  How often have you missed a pitch or the swing of a bat during a baseball game because the team’s logo had to finish its slide into home plate?  Most distracting is that these wipes are supposed to also make a noise: bafoom, shuuuppp, ztgwngg… Today’s TV technology allows sound effects to hook onto images and every switch becomes a crash.

Public Television has been a bit more restrained than our commercial brethren.  At WSKG-TV we believe we know what the viewers expect of us, and nobody really expects flying boxes of kerchunking heads talking at once.

There has been a tremendous advance in electronic technology in recent years.  We now have digital, high-definition TV sets, DVD recorders, Tivo and IPTV.  For us in the business the toolkit is bottomless.  For the viewer there are more choices and more flexibility than ever.  But has anyone yet come up with a way for the folks at home to shut off those logos, promos, bugs and snipes that crawl all over the picture?

The news ticker at the bottom of the screen can be especially distracting.  Someone asked me if there was a way to get rid of it.

“Just tape the program,” I suggested.

“You mean, record a VHS cassette?  Will that eliminate the ticker?”

“No.  I mean just take a length of masking tape and stick it over the bottom of the screen.  It works every time.”

Sumer Is Icumen In – blah!

by Bill Jaker

If you feel that winter is a welcome season of the year you probably have memories of crisp (not freezing) days, or huddling and cuddling by a warm fireplace.  It’s all cozy and cheery, a sign that you’ve got wintertime licked.

The summer is many ways different.  Long hazy days feel like they’ll stretch endlessly; there’s no brilliant quick-frozen sunset.  A cold drink beneath a maple tree or in front of an electric fan doesn’t provide the lasting human comfort of a warm mug of something.  Can you wrap your hands around a lemonade?

Summer suffering is upon us.  As I write this on the afternoon of Friday, the 6th of June the Natural Weather Service reports that the temperature outside is 84°, the dewpoint 71, the heat index (what was once called the “misery index”) is 89, the coefficient of ice cream melting is ŊÞ8 and the sweat proportion is 0013.6#*!(T%0.  The weekend is almost here and I’m afraid to leave the WSKG Broadcast Center, where the air conditioning purrs along because the equipment that keeps us on the cool air under all conditions has to function at about –50.

Just grinding out all these Farenheits makes for a brutal lethargy.  The role of air conditioning in global warming is seldom mentioned, but its blessings are balanced by the power consumption, refrigerant leakage and heat exchange that make it happen.

It is that sense of being caught in a climate trap that makes me start to feel miserable above 80 degrees and long for the wild winds of winter.

Taken Out to the Ball Game

by Bill Jaker

On May 13th OFF THE PAGE presented a program about baseball (which we don’t cover extensively on WSKG Public Radio) and about music (which we do).  It’s the 100th anniversary of the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and Tim Wiles of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown visited to speak about his new book “Baseball’s Greatest Hit”.  We even touched on the old question of why people already at the ballpark would sing “Take me out to the ball game…” when they’re already there.  Should there be a song “I Can’t Live on Peanuts and Cracker Jack / Take me out to dinner…?”

Going out to a major league baseball game can be an experience comparable to attending a symphonic concert by a world-class orchestra or a hit Broadway show.  That was certainly the case at Shea Stadium on the evening of 9 July 1969.  The New York Mets were playing the Chicago Cubs; Tom Seaver was pitching for the Mets.  There were 59,083 spectators in the stands, including my father and me.  Seated alongside us were a man and his young son who had come down from Toronto to see the game.  They told us that they were Cubs fans.

Ever since their founding in 1962 the Mets had been a cellar-dwelling joke in the National League, but in ’69 they were beginning to play pretty well and that night they were looking great.  Seaver was pitching flawlessly and by the top of the 9th it looked like we would see the first no-hitter in Mets history.

Then Cubs manager Leo Durocher (one-time manager of the departed Brooklyn Dodgers and one of those guys you loved to hate) sent up rookie outfielder Jim Qualls.  There was a conference on the pitcher’s mound – one of the Mets had once played against Qualls in the minor leagues but nobody knew for sure how Seaver should pitch against him.  Seaver was surely tired by then and when Qualls knocked a single into left-center field you could feel the agony go through the crowd.

Except that the kid sitting next to me stood up and cheered.  His father looked shocked and I was torn between protecting him from personal harm and tearing him apart myself.

A perfect game had been ruined.  There were two more outs, the Amazin’ Mets won 4-0 and would go on to win the World Series.  But that night we all left Shea Stadium a bit disappointed, still knowing that we’d been present for one more historic moment at the ol’ ball game.

Parlez-sie Proto, signor?

by Bill Jaker

The Voice of America is heard around the world in 45 languages. The Finnish public broadcaster YLE broadcasts the news in classical Latin. Across the USA radio stations’ search for a faithful “niche audience” means that languages from Korean to Navajo can sound from our speakers.

But a few weeks ago, WSKG may have had them all beat. We were broadcasting (albeit briefly) in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It was spoken about 6,000 years ago and is the root of many other languages across much of today's world, from Sanskrit to Icelandic. The “announcer” was Dr. David Anthony, professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, who was a guest on OFF THE PAGE along with his wife and fellow researcher Dorcas Brown. They came to tell about Dr. Anthony’s new book, “The Horse, the Wheel and Language”, which reveals how people in what is now the steppes of southern Russia gained power through their domestication of the horse, perfection of the wheel and of agriculture, and left their mark on today’s world and its languages.  The dominance of their husbandry, technology and poetic speech displaced many other tribal tongues.

Linguists were able to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European by applying known rules of language change and tracing back common words in known ancient languages. No one will deliberately let a tongue-twister become everyday speech. Every language has gone through modification (some would call it corruption) over the centuries, but a surprising number of words appear to have changed little since those Proto days: the wheel rotates on an axl. Nime is name, wete became water. Another PIE word that has been preserved in English is ghos-ti-. It is the root of both “guest” and “ghost”.

Ghos-ti-, however, is not necessarily related to the English word for the finny creatures that swim in the wete. Ghosti: gh, as in enough; o as in women; s as in corps; ti as in action. Fish. After 6,000 years you’d think we’d had enuf.

Go n-éirí do thuras leat!*

by Bill Jaker

*May your trip succeed with you = Have a successful trip!
   (or as we say in English, “bon voyage”)

I spotted a misspelled word the other day, one I’d expected sooner or later to see. Writing about individuals who leave their own country to live abroad, somebody turned an expatriate into an “ex-patriot”. In fact, and in fairness, a person living abroad may continue to harbor warm and loyal feelings about the old homeland, but chooses to do so from a distant harbor.

This came to mind during the April 1st OFF THE PAGE visit from Mary Pat Hyland, who dropped by to speak about her new novel “The Cyber Miracles”, but also to speak (partly in fluent Gaelic) about Irish culture and her family’s ancestral homeland. At several times in its history conditions in Ireland had become intolerable and emigration was the most reasonable choice. But there was also a sense that Irish men and women really couldn’t be free to develop their talents while remaining on the auld sod.

On a visit to Ireland a few years ago I discovered a delightful nation going through an economic and cultural transformation. New industries were starting up, high-tech companies were running help wanted spots on the radio, Dublin’s fair city surpassed half a million in population and, for the first time in a long while, people were coming back to Ireland to stay. There were still stone castles and thatched cottages, but Ireland is now integrated into the European Community. The fiber-optic cables that connect Europe and North America all pass through Ireland and that country has become one of the most wired in the world. At the same time the road network remains largely two lanes squeezed between hedgerows. “We’ll never widen our roads,” one Irish woman proudly told me. “It’s part of our heritage.”

Often it is the ex-expatriates expecting their country to be unchanged who strive the hardest to preserve the heritage, though they are also at the forefront of the changes taking place. Mary Pat Hyland is working on a sequel to “The Cyber Miracles” in which her protagonist Maeve Kenny may make her first journey to Ireland. We look forward to sharing her impressions.

winter memory

by Bill Jaker

The end of summer can be a melancholy time.  But winter's passing also takes sweet days with it.  I wrote this poem, then forgot that I'd written it and began it again, then rediscovered the original.  That may be the best way to write and rewrite.

Winter is washing away.  March backwards.
There are outcroppings of ice on the north side
    of cold rocks that will melt slowly,
    the very last trickle of winter’s heavy water – snow and ice working away.

All season long we bundled against the cold
   when we had to be outside
And stepped carefully onto and into the piles and drifts
   settling deeper, then covered over
   revising but not erasing every step of the way.
Escorting the dog, deliveries to the bird feeder,
   just walking somewhere to spend a moment in the cold looking into the woods, sensing a smooth world.
Each step pressed down toward the frozen earth.
Maybe it will all be covered
   in a final shroud, but then
The snow settles,
   and as it melts into the soil beneath
   it also brings back footsteps planted a season ago
   brave strolls in zero and below
   a step that slipped and stayed in ice.
The snow remembers its walks
   the way the grass never will
                  once it reappears.

Penny's Picture and Civil Rights

by Bill Jaker

The March 18^th OFF THE PAGE interview with Gurdon Brewster about “No Turning Back” and his experience with Reverends Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta brought back memories of the 1950s and 60s “civil rights era” (that time and the drive for racial justice and equality has never really had a simple name). The resistance and controversy coming around centennial of the Civil War was framed as another conflict between North and South – although the nation would soon learn that racial equality wasn’t really a regional matter. But the segregated South, with its complicated social codes, could be shocking to those who didn’t grow up there, as it was to Gurdon Brewster. I spent some years in the South during that time and regularly felt consternation and the corrupting privilege of being on the “whites only” side of the color line.

While the immersion into a segregated society would be painful and humiliating to an African-American from the North who had never confronted it directly (the case of Emmett Till being the most infamous example), it could also be a shock to a white person. That’s how a college classmate of mine I’ll call Penny became an emblem of the nation’s racial conflict.

Penny and her friends from Long Island were on their high school senior class trip to Washington, DC – an excursion that was once as much a part of completing the high school years as the prom and the class ring – when a side trip was arranged to Richmond, Virginia. Their bus didn’t have bathroom facilities on board, so by the time Penny and her classmates arrived in the Capital of the Confederacy he first stop had to be the ladies’ room. She ran into the terminal and thought she had found the rest room when she noticed a sign beside the door: COLORED LADIES.

Penny stopped and looked around, her face revealing a pain that wasn’t simply physical. Just at that moment a photographer from Life Magazine working on a story about segregation snapped her picture and the following week she appeared in million of copies as an image of America’s discomfort.

Getting on Off the Page

by Bill Jaker

Whenever anyone asks about an appearance on OFF THE PAGE one of my first questions is, “Do you [or the author you’re representing] have a phone number starting with 607?”  I’m not necessarily looking for contact information at that point but it’s the quickest way to determine who is a “regional author”.  WSKG Radio’s primary coverage area fairly duplicates the 607 area code, albeit with some spillover into 315, 845, 585 and – not limiting ourselves to New York State – Pennsylvania’s five-seventy.

Occasionally I’ll go beyond the Southern Tier and adjacent lands if a book or author is of special regional interest, but otherwise I’m simply looking for well-written fiction and non-fiction, poetry and history and anything else created by a writer from our region.  Sometimes the most important activity going on in a community is happening in solitude and in one person’s mind.  We’ve discovered an abundance of good writing here in these hills.

One question I regularly receive is, “Do you read the entire book for an OFF THE PAGE interview?”  I certainly do, usually with a speedy re-read just before the broadcast.  There are some people who think you can get the idea of both style and substance by reading only the first and last chapters, but that seems to me like simply eating the crackers without the cheese in the middle.

A book can be itself an object of beauty, but there’s an old saying about not judging a book by its cover and it is literally true.  Some of the best books I’ve seen lately were cheaply printed and bound, perhaps by the author himself.  That should not detract from interest in the writing within.

An increasing number of authors choose to self-publish, often because they simply don’t want to take the time to hassle with agents and publishers.  Especially at the beginning of a writing career DIY publishing is a sure way to get into print.  But it may be more difficult to get into the bookstores, or even on-line sellers, especially if someone has written an especially personal book or one that deals with their own community.  That should make such a book all the more relevant to the WSKG audience, for it means that on OFF THE PAGE you’re regularly learning about a first edition right from the person who wrote it, and possibly published it.

These days even well-established publishing houses are turning to print-on-demand and the invention of the e-book has made it possible for anyone to get their words into distribution.  OFF THE PAGE will continue to concentrate on the content and quality of books by authors in our part of the country, how their mind and spirit was conveyed to us, with less concern about the system that made it happen.