Mixed Media

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.

Vivaldi: A Man For All Seasons

   Known as the "red priest" because of his hair color and his membership in the clergy, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was the most original and influential Italian composer of his generation. He wrote more than 500 concertos, which make up the bulk of his output, and the techniques he used to keep these works interesting and lively — deftly varying the texture and figuration, and favoring angular, energetic rhythms that packed extra punch — were adopted by composers all over the continent.

The concertos of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, published in 1725, demonstrate a wealth of effect using nothing more than string instruments. Their imagery — of birds in the spring, storms in summer, huntsmen in autumn and icy landscapes in winter — remains as vivid today as on the day the notes were penned.

Vivaldi wrote an illustrative sonnet as a guide to each of the concertos. Accordingly, "Spring," in the bright key of E major, celebrates the sounds of "joyful bird song," briefly interrupted as "gentle breezes give way to a passing storm." In the slow movement, a shepherd sleeps in the "pleasant flowering meadow," while a dog (the solo viola) barks. Nymphs dance a graceful gigue through the finale as the sun emerges from behind the clouds. It's all there in the sonnet Vivaldi wrote, and it's there in the music as well.

Read the full article by Ted Libbey here.

Blues legend Koko Taylor died at 80

by Cheryl Corley, Morning Edition

Her name is synonymous with Chicago blues, and her voice was growling, thunderous and full of soul.  Grammy Award-winning blues artist Koko Taylor died Wednesday at the age of 80.

Born in 1928 on a sharecropper's farm near Memphis, she was called "the Queen of the Blues." Her given name was Cora Walton, but she acquired the name Koko due to a love of chocolate. During an interview with NPR in 2000, Taylor said she and her five siblings would sing gospel music on Sundays, but on Mondays it was the blues.

"My younger brother made himself a harmonica out of a corncob, and I didn't need no microphone," she said. "And we'd be back there singing and playing."

Later, Taylor would move to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband. She worked as a cleaning woman, but says she and her husband would frequent nightclubs on nights and weekends. She told NPR in 1991 that musicians would invite her to join them on the bandstand.

"One Sunday, I was sitting in," she said. "And Willie Dixon happened to be in the audience. And when I finished, he says to me, he says, 'My God, I ain't never heard a woman sing the blues like you sing the blues before in my life. Where did you come from?' I said, 'Memphis.' "

Dixon, already a celebrated bluesman, helped Taylor sign with Chicago's Chess Records and wrote a song for her that became her signature. Sales of "Wang Dang Doodle" would reach a million, and Taylor hit the road to blues and jazz festivals around the country and abroad. When Chess Records went out of business, Taylor signed with Alligator Records.

Alligator president Bruce Iglauer was Taylor's manager for more than 30 years. He says the Queen of the Blues didn't fit the traditional image of a blues singer.

"She didn't party. She didn't live a wild life at all," he says. "What she did do, that was so much the essence of the blues, is that she sang directly from the soul."

Taylor also appeared in film and on television, and she more than held her own in the male-dominated blues industry, sharing the stage with other major blues stars such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy. Iglauer says Taylor knew she had to be tough, and she absolutely ruled her band.

"She would stomp out the beat with her right foot and, boy, the drummer better play Koko's beat," Iglauer says. "When she told them to bring it down, they better bring it down to a whisper. Because she was determined that she was going to make it and that nobody was going to say, 'Well, she's good — for a woman.' "

During her 40-plus-year career, the woman who could blast songs like a hurricane from her lungs won a plethora of awards, including a Grammy in 1984. She was inducted into the Blues' Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1997. Last month, Taylor was named Traditional Blues Artist of the Year at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis.

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.

Listen Again: Music of Monks and Drunks

by Ted Libbey

(Click here to listen to the audio story and excerpts from Carmina Burana)

Carmina Burana was the title of a collection of medieval Latin and German lyrics published in 1847,   taken from a 13th century manuscript then in the possession of a Benedictine abbey near Munich.

To this day, the original manuscript remains the richest source of secular poetry by the goliards — itinerant scholars and monks active in Europe from the late 10th century to the early 1200s. In 1935, the German composer Carl Orff (1895-1982) encountered the collection and was immediately seized by the earthy, unbridled imagery of its material. He made use of some two dozen texts (though none of the melodies in the manuscript) to fashion one of the 20th century's most popular works for chorus and orchestra. The score, completed in 1936, received its premiere in Frankfurt on June 8, 1937.

Orff's Carmina Burana invites the performer and listener alike to participate in the hedonistic enjoyment of rhythmically catchy and frequently repeated tunes, as well as equally simple forms, consonant harmony, powerful singing and colorful scoring marked by unstinting use of percussion.

'Burana' With A Bang

German conductor Eugen Jochum's picturesque recording has a Germanness that is exactly on the mark. The orchestral playing sounds clean, characterful and suggestive; the choral singing suitably lusty. No one has ever done the Bavarian beer hall bit any better, and the whole performance is fun from start to finish. Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau brings the nuance of a Lieder artist to his solos, while tenor Gerhard Stolze, in spite of some liberties with phrasing, proves unerringly comical.

This article is from NPR's Classical 50 series, a weekly guide to essential classics. For the full archive of NPR's Classical 50, click 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.

Listen Again: A Journalist's 'Ordinary Day' in Iraq

Iranian-American journalist Farnaz Fassihi was stationed in the Middle East from 2002 until 2006, where she covered the Iraq war and the daily struggles of the Iraqi people. A Shiite Muslim, Fassihi established close personal ties to many Iraqi citizens, who invited her into their homes. She recounts their stories — and their suffering — in her memoir, Waiting for an Ordinary Day.

Now The Wall Street Journal's deputy bureau chief for the Middle East and Africa, Fassihi grew up in Tehran and Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. in English from Tehran University and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Listen to the interview of Farnaz Fassihi originally broadcast on October 27, 2008 on Fresh Air.

Listen Again: From page to stage, The Bonesetter's Daughter bursts into song

Novelist Amy Tan has turned The Bonesetter's Daughter into an opera, which premiered at the San Francisco Opera on Saturday. Transforming the book into a libretto wasn't easy for Tan, nor was resurfacing the painful stories of her family's past.

When composer Stewart Wallace began to travel to rural China with Tan a few years ago, they were in search of an answer to a question that had been haunting them: "What does it sound like for a ghost to talk to a living person?"

The question of how a ghost sounds, feels, moves and is brought back to life is essential to the opera, which Wallace and Tan created over the course of many trips to China.

Tan is known for novels that delve into Chinese-American life. Here, the pair was on a quest to bring the novel — and elements of Tan's own life — to the stage. Wallace would write the music, Tan the libretto. But she'd never written one before, and it wasn't easy.

"You know, the key was really to cut out the words and let the music stand for the emotions, because that's what opera is," Tan says. "It's music, it's performance, it's great voices. And the story was a framework in a way."

The Bonesetter's Daughter begins with three characters emerging from a mist. One is a Chinese-American daughter, like Tan; the second is a mother, like hers, born in China. The third is a haunted and haunting ghost named Precious Auntie. The three entities make their way through a fog and sing about the things they know to be true.

Listen to the full story here.

Listen Again: YouTube Monks Storm European Pop Charts

The monks of Heiligenkreuz Abbey in Austria sing ancient Gregorian chants in their 12th-century church — and then post them to YouTube. Their technological savvy landed them a record deal, and now their album is storming the European charts and arriving in America. Father Karl Wallner talks to host Andrea Seabrook about balancing pop stardom with the religious life.

Listen to the piece.

And here's one of the many YouTube videos of the monks performing.

Listen Again: A remembrance of 60s artist Alton Kelley

If the Summer of Love had a visual, it probably came from the drawing pad of artist Alton Kelley. Kelley's work graced album covers and concert posters, and has been described as art that defined a generation. The 67-year-old artist died this week in California from complications of osteoporosis.

Alton Kelley arrived in Haight Ashbury in 1964 with a sketchbook full of hot-rod drawings. He'd raced cars and bikes back home in Connecticut. But when Kelley met a fellow hot-rod artist from Detroit named Stanley Miller a few years later, cars and motorcycles gave way to skeletons and roses.

The two started making posters for dance concerts featuring up-and-coming groups such as The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Miller, who goes by the name "Mouse," says the work — and good times — rolled like a freight train.

At their peak, Kelley and Mouse were cranking out their elaborate posters once a week, and later expanded their portfolio to include album covers.

The Grateful Dead liked the skeleton-and-roses image the pair created for a concert poster so much that the musicians adopted it as their logo.

Some call the art a visual extension of the music. Others call it the visual for a psychedelic experience. Mouse says it was both, and that the joke between the two of them was that you had to be under the influence to understand it. But ideas, Mouse says, came from trips to libraries and art galleries. Kelley and Mouse pored over books of Gustav Klimt, Japanese poster art, and art nouveau.

Mouse says he and Kelley developed a work style that allowed them to stand side-by-side at the same art table. The pair worked together for more than four decades, and Mouse says that his work routine with Kelley never changed.

Just five months ago, Alton Kelley and Stanley "Mouse" Miller completed their last work together, a poster for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Click here to listen to the piece that aired on All Things Considered.