Mixed Media

Off the Page celebrates the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street

The broadcasting industry has always been aware of its educational potential and is often idealistic about its service to children.  In the 1946 book "Here Is Television" author Thomas Hutchinson states, "Educational or informative programs on television open vistas that virtually stagger the imagination... No longer will low paid educators teach the three R's to small boys and girls in isolated rural districts.  Instead every country school in the world will have a large screen television receiver, in each classroom." 

Hutchinson believed that "there is nothing in the world that cannot be taught by television," but as the visual medium took over the nation's living rooms it seemed that the real potential of TV to instruct both children and adults remained undeveloped while children, as is their nature, were absorbing all manner of new knowledge from programs and commercials.

There were some good kidshows during those early days of television.  "The Small Fry Club" on the short-lived DuMont Network featured an avuncular Big Brother Bob Emery with a human cast of animal characters who taught about nature, music, health and shared daily delights (it was the first TV program to be aired five days a week). It even draw an appreciative adult audience -- orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini was one of its big fans. Over on NBC-TV, Howdy Doody premiered in 1947 with Buffalo Bob Smith and a cast of marionettes.  There was also a crazy clown named Clarabelle, played by actor Bob Keeshan, who left to create Captain Kangaroo.  Many of these programs had well-designed educational content -- Captain Kangaroo and Ding Dong School with Dr. Frances Horwich ("Miss Frances") on NBC were highly regarded by educators and parents.  But it took a whole new system of broadcasting, Public Television, to bring the nation's pre-schoolers a TV show that would systematically prepare them for further education, teaching letters, numbers and relationships while they were having  a wonderful time.

"Sesame Street" premiered on PBS on November 10, 1969 and is the longest-running children's program on American television.*  At age forty it is now being watched by some of the grandchildren of those who learned their ABCs and 1-2-3s from "Sesame Street". WSKG is joining in the Sesame 40 festival with art contests, an open house birthday party at our studios and a special OFF THE PAGE broadcast with Michael Davis, author of the new book "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street."

Sesame Street began as a flash of brilliance that struck like a bolt from the gods.  [Producer Joan Ganz] Cooney was its mother of invention, while Lloyd N. Morrisett, a well-connected vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, was its financial godfather.  Sesame's moment of conception occurred at a dinner party at Cooney's apartment, when Morrissett and his wife were discussing how their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, had become transfixed by television.  She would sit in front of a test pattern at 6:30 a.m., waiting for the cartoons to appear at 7:00.  It was the same thing millions of kids were doing all across the country that confounded Cooney.

-- from "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street"

Several veterans of Captain Kangaroo were in the "street gang" and Davis traces the lineage of the program as well as the institutional development of Children's Television Workshop (now called Sesame Workshop) and the planning and research that ensued.  "Sesame Street" was deliberately designed to be meaningful and recognizable to inner-city children, its content easily blended with Head Start and similar efforts for minority and underprivileged youngsters.  But Davis's book is primarily a story of people working together for a TV show that could teach and entertain and be accessible at many levels.  They are as rich a cast of characters as any novel and their fates are triumphant and tragic.  "Street Gang" opens with the scene at the funeral of brilliant puppeteer Jim Henson, as untimely a death as any.  His Muppets were and are the heart of "Sesame Street".  There was also the loss of actor Will Lee, who played Mr. Hooper, the candy store owner.  His passing was noted (and his life celebrated) in a tearful "Sesame Street" episode that broached the meaning of death in terms that small children could comprehend.  "Street Gang" prints the entire script of that moving scene.

Michael Davis is a former editor of TV Guide magazine and worked as a teacher in the Head Start program in Tompkins County and was a reporter for the Ithaca Journal.  He will be joined on OFF THE PAGE by Lonna McKeon Pierce, a professional storyteller, teacher/librarian at the MacArthur School in Binghamton and the mother of five children (now grown, but all who learned their ABCs watching channel 46).  We'll also be directly in touch with Sesame Street speaking with two of the stars who were there on day 1: Bob McGrath and Big Bird.

To join in the conversation about "Sesame Street" with host Bill Jaker and his guests, call during the live 1:00 PM broadcast to 888/359-9754 or post a message here to OffThePage@WSKG.ORG.

Nabakov lecture at Cornell on November 19th

Two days after Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumous novel The Original of Laura lands in the bookstores,   Brian Boyd, a world-class expert on the legendary author, presents his lecture, “Nabokov’s Literary Legacy,” on Nov. 19 at Cornell University.

Nabokov taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1959. During those years he wrote Lolita and Pnin and conceived Pale Fire; conducted research on Lepidoptera (an order of insects comprising butterflies and moths); wrote the English and Russian versions of his autobiography, Conclusive Evidence and Drugie Berega; and prepared annotated translations of two pieces of Russian literature: The Song of Igor's Campaign and Eugene Onegin.

With the publishing of The Original of Laura, readers will have a fresh view of Nabokov’s unparalleled brilliance. After Nabokov died in 1977, his heirs were instructed to the burn the incomplete manuscript of The Original of Laura – all written on index cards. The cards were never burned. Now the manuscript – arguably an oncoming, literary tidal wave – will be published and distributed to bookstores on Nov. 17.

Boyd is a noted expert on Nabokov. His major works include Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness; Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years; Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years; Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery; and Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings.

Boyd will give his lecture, "Nabokov's Literary Legacy," on Thursday, November 19th at 4:30 p.m. in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University.

Stories within stories; Paul Auster's Invisible is powerful

by Jane Ciabattari

Paul Auster's fans know that beginning with his earliest work — his 1985-86 New York Trilogy, which revolves around a detective named Max Work — he has drawn upon the fast pacing, structure and noirish sleights of hand common to detective stories. He starts off with a mystery, sprinkles his pages with clues and constructs numerous elaborate scenarios in which Auster-like narrators find themselves randomly drawn into moments of violence or sexual pleasure.

His latest novel, Invisible, continues this tradition. It begins during the Vietnam era, a time of political turmoil and sometimes violent intergenerational conflict, when espionage and skulduggery infiltrated intellectual circles and university campuses.

Like most Auster novels, Invisible nests stories within stories. The first of four sections is set in 1967 and narrated by Adam Walker, a young poet studying at Columbia (Auster's alma mater). After a chance meeting, Adam is lured into a sexual triangle by an older man, a charismatic French visiting professor, Rudolf Born, and his girlfriend Margot.

Adam is aglow with youthful ambition, lust and self righteousness. His instinctive reaction to the enigmatic Born is to find him repellent. Yet he agrees to edit a literary magazine Born has offered to fund. Their enmeshment is in place when a random act of street violence triggers Adam's outrage at Born. His search for truth bedevils Adam for decades.

This first section of Invisible, it turns out, is the beginning of a memoir Adam is writing about his disturbing relationship with Born. In 2007, dying from leukemia, he has contacted Jim, a college classmate who became a successful author, and has asked for advice. Jim agrees to read the forthcoming sections of the memoir and is drawn into Adam's struggle to decipher the riddle of Rudolph Born.

Throughout the novel, Auster makes sure we are complicit in that search. We're with him, sifting through conflicting information, wondering who is telling the truth. Adam? Or Rudolph? After 40 years, can anyone's memory be trusted?

Some of Auster's novels are so solipsistic as to be virtually unreadable. And, indeed, there are scrappable moments in Invisible, as when Jim offers writing advice to Adam: "By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible. ... I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself) ..."

But Invisible won me over. Underlying Auster's game-playing is a powerful moral imagination. And he is superb at illuminating the ongoing reinvention of the self, and the subtle ways in which we collaborate with those who would seduce, deceive and betray us.

Read an excerpt of Invisible here.

The Mighty Queens... on Off thePage

by Bill Jaker

Reading a biography, autobiography or personal memoir allows us to add someone else's life to our own.  We can follow them through the pages and share their struggles and pleasures, victories and defeats. Through autobiography we can get to know someone well, even strike up an intimate relationship with a great person, a Helen Keller, Ulysses Grant or Charlie Chaplin. 

Sometimes their cautionary tales will be so good that we learn to avoid similar mistakes. In her new memoir, "The Mighty Queens of Freeville," Amy Dickinson recounts the stresses and analyzes the forces that took her through marriage, divorce and raising a daughter as a single mother -- all experiences common in our society.  

During her marriage she lived in London, and later moved to Washington, DC with daughter Emily.  She also worked her way through several jobs (including, at one point, receptionist and then a commentator at NPR) and went through periods of unemployment. But Amy emerges steady and victorious.  Today she writes a nationally-syndicated advice column.  She's now a regular on NPR's news quiz "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" (heard on WSKG Radio Saturdays at 11 AM) and on "Talk of the Nation" (WSQX 91.5 FM, weekdays from 2 to 4 PM).  But it's clear that she might not have landed with her feet on the ground if that ground hadn't been in the village of Freeville, NY, about fifteen minutes up the road from Ithaca.

Amy's family has lived and farmed in upstate New York since the 1790s.  The family history has lately not been easy.  "In my family," she writes, "the women tend to do the heavy lifting while the men -- well, the men are nice and fine and they love us for a time.  Then at some point, it seems that they tire of their indeterminate role in our lives, so they wage a campaign of passive resistance, and then they leave."  Her father suddenly left the family, and then in another act of abandonment sold off their herd of Holsteins.  But the women pull together.

The women of my family taught me what family is about.  They helped me pick up the pieces when my life fell apart, and we reassembled them together into something new.  They celebrated my slow recovery, witnessed my daughter's growth and development, and championed my choices.  The women in my life showed Emily and me in large and small ways that they would love us, no matter what.  They abide. 
                                                                  --from The Mighty Queens of Freeville

The wisdom and support Amy feels from the women in her family shows through in her daily column "Ask Amy" , which replaced the late and legendary Ann Landers, now appears in over 200 newspapers nationwide through the Chicago Tribune syndicate (in this area in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, the Ithaca Journal and the Elmira Star-Gazette).

Amy Dickinson joined Bill Jaker on OFF THE PAGE to talk about coming home again, drawing on the strength of family and sharing that with the nation. Click here to listen to the program online.

Another potential future for books?

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signaling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

"This could change bookselling fundamentally," said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. "It's giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that's pretty compelling."

Read the full article here.

Listen Again: Why 'The 27s' Made Early Exits

Eric Segalstad has spent the past few years researching a group of musicians who have been dubbed "The 27s" — rockers who died at that age, either through tragedy, misadventure or excess. The club includes Kurt Cobain, who took his own life 15 years ago Sunday.

The king of grunge is just one of the more than 20 musicians featured in Segalstad's book, The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll. It includes artists across all genres — from Jim Morrison to Robert Johnson.

So, what is it about the number 27?

"It's a strange number," Segalstad tells NPR's Robert Smith. "It also happens right around that time in your life where most people go from the stage of youth to the stage of maturity."

Some of the subjects of The 27s — like Hole's Kristen Pfaff — didn't make that leap, turning instead to the cliché of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that led to early deaths.

"But they weren't all victims of rock 'n' roll stardom … living life fast and furious," he says. "There were also quite a few accidents and other tragic events that cut their lives short." Take, for example, the case of punk singer Mia Zapata, who was murdered in Seattle in 1993.

Others, says Segalstad, were victims of the business side of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle — like Pete Ham of Badfinger.

"I found him compelling because he did live life pretty purely," says Segalstad. "He didn't have any strong drug addictions, and he didn't live life any harder than you or I did at the time. But he was victim to crooked managers and record label quarrels that rendered him penniless and frustrated, and he ended his life by hanging himself in his studio garage."

In a way, the early deaths of so many of these stars have changed the way we look at performers.

"Janis Joplin said that, whether people know it or not, they like their blues singers miserable. And I think that's part of it," says Segalstad. "We need these musicians to be out there for us, to feel what we feel and to be what we want to be and can't. It is a dangerous profession."

But Segalstad says that, overall, The 27s is not a depressing book.

"It celebrates the lives and legacies of all these musicians," he says. "We want people to remember who they were and the music they created while they were here."

Listen to the full interview here.

Looking for something to read?

Check out You Must Read This, a series from NPR, which features authors talking about their very favorite books.

And if you're still catching up from last year, don't forget about Summer Books, which features picks by Susan Stamberg and Maureen Corrigan. And to catch up on all the latest book reviews from NPR, just visit the book section of their website.

New pop-up book celebrates bird songs

A new pop-up book by Miyoko Chu, director of communications at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, celebrates diverse bird sounds in contrasting landscapes through art (illustrations by Julia Hargreaves) and audio.

"Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound" delivers an immersion birding experience never before seen -- or heard -- in any book.

Opening the book triggers 45 seconds of rare stereo bird songs and calls of recordings recently acquired on expeditions by the lab's Macaulay Library.

The book's seven elaborately engineered, full-color pop-ups depict dozens of bird species in North American habitats, such as grasslands, the Sonoran desert, an eastern deciduous forest, a pacific seabird colony, the arctic tundra and a cypress swamp.

Chu, author of "Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds," includes text about various birds' fragile ecosystems. "We included the sounds of nocturnal Fork-tailed and Leach's storm-petrels recorded on Saint Lazaria Island near Sitka, Alaska, just last year. Our recordists lay in sleeping bags with microphones as the air and ground pulsated with the sounds of storm-petrels flying overhead and courting in the burrows below," Chu told Amazon.com.

"It was exciting to go from the ideas and bird lists for each soundscape to seeing and hearing this three-dimensional product as it emerged from the minds of the artists, editors and sound engineers," Chu said. "It was incredible to see the artists' sketches transform into complex and ingenious pop-up scenes, and to experience how precise recordings for each bird were blended to evoke the soundscape."

O magazine, published by Oprah Winfrey, called the book "a chirping, twittering, cawing, trilling love of a pop-up book."

(Source: Cornell Chronicle)

Book Review: Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture

How many trumpet players does it take to change a light bulb?

The answer is not to be found in Krin Gabbard's "Hotter Than That," which contains abundant, often fascinating details about the trumpet, its evolution and its role in jazz history.

Still, the punch line to that joke - "Five: One to hold the light bulb, and four to say how they could have done it better" - comes to mind. It captures the nature of the trumpet culture, which Gabbard also does well. But he could have done better.

For example, his emphasis on the trumpet as an extension of male sexuality quickly grows tiresome. His recounting of jazz history will sound familiar to anyone who has watched even an episode or two of Ken Burns' "Jazz."

And his deification of Buddy Bolden, the legendary "First Man of Jazz" who had a huge influence on early New Orleans players but left scant verifiable record, is so full of "may haves," "could haves" and "almost surelys" that instead of leaving readers illuminated will almost surely frustrate them.

Luckily, Gabbard eventually finds his groove. And his exploration of trumpet history will please anyone who ever picked up the "most difficult of all instruments."

Read the full review here.

When book clubs go bad

JOCELYN BOWIE was thrilled by the invitation to join a book group. She had just returned to her hometown, Bloomington, Ind., to take an administration job at Indiana University, and thought she had won a ticket to a top echelon. “I was hoping to network with all these women in upper-level jobs at I.U., then I found they were in the book group,” she said. “I thought, ‘Great! They’ll see how wonderful I am, and we’ll have these great conversations about books.’ ”

Ms. Bowie cannot pinpoint the precise moment when disillusion replaced delight. Maybe it was the evening she tried to persuade everyone to look beyond Oprah Winfrey’s picks, “and they all said ‘What’s wrong with Oprah?’ ” she said.

Or perhaps it was the meeting when she lobbied for literary classics like “Emma” and the rest of the group was abuzz about “The Secret Life of Bees,” a pop-lit best seller.

The last straw came when the group picked “The Da Vinci Code” and someone suggested the discussion would be enriched by delving into the author’s source material. “It was bad enough that they wanted to read ‘Da Vinci Code’ in the first place,” Ms. Bowie said, “but then they wanted to talk about it.” She quit shortly after, making up a polite excuse: “I told the organizer, ‘You’re reading fiction, and I’m reading history right now.’ ”

Yes, it’s a nice, high-minded idea to join a book group, a way to make friends and read books that might otherwise sit untouched. But what happens when you wind up hating all the literary selections — or the other members? Breaking up isn’t so hard to do when it means freedom from inane critical commentary, political maneuvering, hurt feelings, bad chick lit and even worse chardonnay.

Read the full article from the New York Times.

(Image: AJ Mast for The New York Times; Jocelyn Bowie of Indiana broke it off with her book club because of its selections.)