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#FridayReads, Aug. 30, Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist”

Weekend Update: I’m glad to see that Andrew Sullivan’s site The Dish also eulogized Seamus Heaney in a post sharing the same video I posted below, with the reading of “Digging.” Author of the guest post, poetry editor Alice Quinn, has lovely things to say about Heaney’s affection for other poets–George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, etc.

Heaney cover#FridayReads, Aug. 30, Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist, his debut poetry collection published in 1966, a copy of which I bought at a reading he gave in New York in the late 1980s, and which I’m dipping in to tonight. Heaney was a warm and personable reader who embodied his poems with great solidity and clear voice. The news of his death at age 74 was announced earlier today, with eulogies and obituaries appearing in many publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, and the Boston Globe, where I found the video I’ve posted below of Heaney reading his poem “Digging,” which I recall he read at the event almost 25 years ago.Heaney back

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

An Obit to Love–Louisa Jo Killen (1934-2013), Irish Folk Musician, Lived till Age 76 as Louis Killen

A truly fascinating NYTimes obituary announces the end of an amazing life–Louisa Jo Killen, tenor, member of the Clancy Brothers, song collector, performer on the important UK label, Topic Records, and charter member of the crew that took Pete Seeger’s Clearwater sloop on her maiden voyage, from Maine to Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. Known as Louis, Killen joined the Clancys after Tommy Makem left the quartet, appearing on the 1968 album “Songs of the Sea.” Times reporter Paul Vitello adds, “Folk archivists still consider the dozen recordings made by…Killen in the late 1950s and early ’60s for the British folk label Topic Records to be the definitive versions of traditional English songs like ‘The Shoals of Herring,’ ‘Black Leg Miners,’ ‘Pleasant and Delightful,’ ‘The Flying Cloud’ and ‘The Ship in Distress.’” At age 76, Killen took the step of becoming Louisa; Vitello reports other details of this change: “In 2010…Mr. Killen surprised his fans and many of his friends by resolving to give voice to another sort of lost life. He began living openly as a woman, performing in women’s clothing and a wig. In 2012, he underwent a sex-change operation.”

Here are some shots of Topic Records LPs I own, the sort to which Killen contributed. Topic Songs of WorkingmenTopic Records Child BalladsTopic Songs of Field and Fowl

As alluded to in my first tweet, this scenario from a real life folksinger put me in mind of the musician character Harry Shearer plays in A Mighty Wind, the 2003 faux folk scene documentary directed by Christopher Guest. Shearer’s character, Mark Shubb, is dressed like a woman and speaks of his gender switch in one of the movie’s final scenes. The obit has a photo of Louis from sometime in the 1960s or ’70s (courtesy of Brian Sheul/Redferns, via Getty Images) and of Louisa from 2010 (courtesy of Debra Cowan), both posted below.Louisa Killen photo:Debra CowanLouis Killen Brian Sheul:Redferns/Getty Images

How is the NFL like Big Tobacco?

 

I find the NFL’s conduct in this matter more and more like that of the Big Tobacco executives who in the 1990s lied to Congress and denied there had long been knowledge within their companies that nicotine in cigarettes was addictive. Among several issues that league execs should answer for is whether they have for many years known that injured players risked longterm disability and shortened life expectancy from competing too soon after having suffered concussions. I find their behavior obnoxious but unsurprising. But for ESPN, I have I think even more scorn. They’re happy to be thought of as an influential media player, committing journalism and keeping an eye on organized sports’ tendency toward corruption and malpractice when it serves their reputation-building purposes, but then they readily revert to being a commercial player, with Disney corporatism holding the whip hand once the league turns on the heat full blast.

Maybe the lesson is we should not show trust for the journalism put out by ESPN. A pity, because I know there are many capable reporters and correspondents working for the network, including the brother reporting team of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, authors of the forthcoming  League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, the book accompanying “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis,” the PBS Frontline documentary that the NY Times article suggests Disney forced ESPN to back out of sharing in ownership of and credit for, even after the network and the authors had spent months working on it alongside producers at Frontline.

Below is the trailer for the program that according to the Times became a major point of contention at the recent midtown Manhattan lunch meeting between NFL and ESPN execs. The book, with nearly the same title as the program, will go on sale a few days before it is first broadcast. Another item of interest is the online statement Frontline producers put out, regretting ESPN’s decision and promising their viewers “The two-hour documentary and accompanying digital reporting will honor FRONTLINE’s rigorous standards of fairness, accuracy, transparency and depth.”

Watch “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

#FridayReads, Aug. 23, John W. Pilley’s “Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows 1000 Words”


#FridayReads, Aug. 23, John W. Pilley’s Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words I’m really enjoying dog owner and psychologist Pilley’s engaging book on his remarkable Border collie, Chaser. It could have also been subtitled, “Unlocking the Genius of a Dog Who Knows 1000 Words,” so smart is this dog. I’m reading a galley I got at Book Expo last June. The book will be published October 29th, according to the promotional copy on the back of the advance reader’Chaser back covers copy.

Fun Friday in Coney Island


RosettesKyle and I had a great time in Coney Island today. In addition to the photo I sent out with the above tweet, here are more highlights from my camera roll with about 20 shots of this supremely photogenic New York City attraction.

Summer Fun Cruising up the Hudson and Dining in Harlem

As I learned earlier in the summer when a painting of my wife’s was part of the Motown to Def Jam exhibit in Harlem, there’s a lot of exciting cultural activity and economic development taking place in upper Manhattan. The latest venture, which I discovered during a bike ride yesterday, is the West Harlem Gastro Cruise, in which a sunset cruise up the Hudson may be combined with a later stop-off and stroll to any one of ten Harlem-area restaurants. The cruises have been taking place each Monday in August, with one more left this month, on August 26. I learned about all this from two friendly local businesswomen I met, seated under a tent in the West Harlem Piers park at 125th Street.

Branded with the logo of Amalgamated Bank, under the red canopy were Bethlehem B. Belatchew–an Amalgamated VP and manager of their 564 W. 125th Street branch–and Savona Bailey-McClain, Curator of the West Harlem Food & Beverage Association, and former chair of Community Board 9’s Economic Development Committee. She explained to me that the association is a trade group focused on food, beverage, and nightlife in West Harlem. The cruises actually begin downtown at the World Financial Center Ferry Terminal, on the ship, Marco Polo, making a stop at the West Harlem Piers and then sailing up to the George Washington Bridge, aka the Great Gray Bridge, the namesake of this blog. Prices are quite reasonable: a $45 package price for the cruise and dinner at any of the participating restaurants; $20 per person for the cruise alone. Both options have reduced prices for children. More pricing info and sailing times are in the scanned brochure below with web link here, too.

Though I wasn’t able to join the cruise last night, I’m hoping I will have the chance next Monday night. It would be a great send-off to August! Here also are links to their Facebook and Twitter pages. Hudson cruise 1Hudson Cruise insideHudson Cruise back

“In Search of Blind Joe Death,” New Documentary on John Fahey

After hearing filmmaker James Cullingham interviewed on WNYC last Friday I was glad I could make it to Cinema Village that night for the first Gotham screening of “In Search of Blind Joe Death,” Cullingham’s new film on John Fahey, the idiosyncratic instrumental musician, fabulist, record label founder, album hunter, turtle venerator, musicologist, and writer who pioneered a genre dubbed around 1960 as “American primitive guitar.” John Fahey docuAlong with the poster for the film, also shown here is a shot (courtesy of docnorthfestival.ca) showing Cullingham (r.) with Pete Townsend of The Who. Ever a literary-minded sort, Townsend, a former book editor, says in “Joe Death” that for him Fahey occupied a role like that played by William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski in modern American literature.jamesandpete

As suggested by Townsend’s reference to the Beats, Fahey drank and over-used prescription meds. Sadly, he also suffered with diabetes and other chronic ailments. His life journey was at times lugubrious and he was living quite squalidly when died at age 61, but the film does a very good job of spotlighting his considerable talents and singular accomplishments for which we should be grateful. He developed a prodigiously creative vernacular guitar and compositional style that reflected blues, folk, and traditional American sources while also drawing on Charles Ives, Bela Bartok, Gregorian chant, and world music, before that term had any currency. As a facilitator and label owner, he would do things like send a postcard cold to a black bluesmen c/o General Delivery at a Mississippi delta town post office where he hoped the man still lived, asking: “Would you like to record for the Takoma Records label?”; thus, did he bring to public awareness the music of Booker (later known as ‘Bukka’) White. He was also involved in rediscovering Charley Patton, Skip James and more guys with “Blind” as part of their name than I’d ever known of.

Before his death in 2001, Fahey would himself be rediscovered by grunge bands, including Sonic Youth and Cul de Sac. Along with Townsend, Cullingham also interviewed Chris Funk of The Decemberists and Joey Burns of Calexico, both of whom testify to Fahey’s influence on their music. I met the filmmaker briefly before the screening and I learned he worked for a time at the CBC. He lives in Toronto, and is associated with Seneca College there. In his interview on the Leonard Lopate Show  he said that he met Fahey three or four times when he performed in Toronto. Although the guitarist had a deserved reputation for making up stories about himself and his origins, with flights of fancy that were expressed in colorful titling of his compositions and prolific self-mythologizing, the director said he always found Fahey straightforward and direct. Blind Joe Death, borrowed by Cullingham for his title, was one of Fahey’s album names and one of the aliases he adopted as a creative alter-ego, mordantly observing that if a musician had “blind” and “death” in his name he would surely be successful.

Lots of archival sequences of Fahey talking and playing are punctuated by the interview segments with a total of about eight music industry figures (including Townsend, et al). There’s also conspicuous use of animation in the film, with many of the graphics arriving on-screen in sequentially hand-lettered script. This was used to best effect when the filmmaker’s voiceover reads the contents of Fahey’s postcard to Booker White in Mississippi. The audience chuckled at that on-screen animation as it unfolded for all to read along with the voiceover. According to the wikipedia article on Fahey, the White album then released on Takoma became the label’s first non-Fahey release.

Takoma was far from a vanity enterprise. Among the artists and acts Fahey championed on the label were guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Canned Heat, both of whom I recently saw on-screen in the blues documentary “Born in Chicago“, and Leo Kottke, whose first album “6 and 12-String Guitar,” released in 1969, is still a treasured part of my record collection. It became Takoma’s single bestselling release. From the armadillo on the cover (not a turtle, but here you might say a hard-shelled repti-mammal stands in for the standard reptile), through Kottke’s liner notes and the song names on the back of the album below, you can see that he had fun borrowing Fahey’s grandiloquent style and self-mythologizing. (“All that is left to be said is that Kottke’s voice does not appear on this album. His guitar does.”)

Though Fahey’s life took downward turns in later decades, he nonetheless managed to start a second label, Revenant Records; in 2003 their Charley Patton CD collection won three Grammys. The name revenant could not have been accidentally chosen, suggesting an unkillable being who returns from beyond to seek revenge against his tormentors; perhaps Fahey saw himself in pitched battle against dumbing-down influences and the homogenization of indigenous cultures. There is no readily distilled or uplifting message in Fahey’s life, yet I recommend the film for showing how a determinedly idiosyncratic and protean artist may make a musical mark and leave behind a rich legacy of inspired experimentation and curation. To learn more about “In Search of Blind of Joe Death,” I suggest you listen to Leonard Lopate’s interview with James Cullingham from August 16 and visit the film’s website to learn about future opportunities to see it.

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#FridayReads, August 16–Mike Sowell’s “The Pitch That Killed” & Jayne Anne Phillips’ “Quiet Dell”

Sowell-front-cover-69x100#FridayReads, August 16–Mike Sowell’s The Pitch That Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920 is one of the best baseball books I’ve ever read, or been involved with publishing. It chronicles the only fatality ever caused by injury to a player during a pro baseball game. Ray Chapman was a terrific Cleveland Indians shortstop who died after being struck in the head with a pitch thrown by NY Yankee Carl Mays. The tragedy occurred in the same season that the Tribe won their first World Series, somehow overcoming the mid-season loss of one of their most valuable players. I’m glad that Cleveland Plain Dealer sports writer Bill Livingston, @LivyPDchose to write about it recently, reminding me of the time I worked at Macmillan Publishing when an editorial colleague and friend, Rick Wolff, brought out the book. Livingston reports that a film based on the book, “Deadball,” is in the works.

Sowell-back-cover-67x100 Today is the 93rd anniversary of the day of the day of the beaning. Chapman never regained consciousness, lingering in a coma and dying two days later. I have read the book several times and feel privileged to make it part of my #FridayReads today.

Quiet Dell coverI am also happy to say that I am continuing to read and savor Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell, a mesmerizing novel drawn from the annals of a notorious true crime. It’s set in 1931, when a West Virginia killer who operated under several aliases lured a Chicago-area widow and her three children in to his fatal embrace. He tried to dispose of his victims but failed at that; his crimes were discovered and he was arrested by authorities in the hamlet of Quiet Dell, WV, near the city of Clarksburg. Into this true-life set-up, Jayne Anne Phillips has found it necessary to insert only four fictional characters, alongside the more numerous figures filling the narrative from the historical record. Fictional or once among the living, she renders the actions and motivations of her characters with vivid and imaginative power. One of her fictional characters is female journalist, Emily Thornhill, who becomes the readers’ eyes and ears on the case, which she’s covering for the Chicago Tribune. Emily has had thrust upon her the adoption of the dead family’s orphaned dog–a real-life bull terrier with the Victorian-tinged name of Duty–earlier the target of a vicious kick by the malefactor, now playing a valuable canine role in the investigation with his compelling identification of the killer. Phillips grew up in West Virginia and on her website she includes an Author’s Note that chronicles her personal connections to the story. I urge you to watch for the book which will be published October 15, and which has already received a starred review from Kirkus: “Phillips’ prose is as haunting as the questions she raises about the natures of sin, evil and grace.” I am deliberately not rushing through Quiet Dell and will write more on the book when I’ve finished reading it.Quiet Dell back

Mike Sowell’s fine book is still in print today, in a trade paperback edition from Ivan R. Dee, independent publisher in Chicago. It can be purchased from Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon via this link: The Pitch That Killed. You may also pre-order Quiet Dell from Powell’s. They are the bookselling partner for this site, returning a percentage of your purchase price to aid me in its upkeep.