“He entered into my limited world with enthusiasm just as he might have explored Mars. Blindness was an adventure that kindled his curiosity. He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties. There was something of divine apprehension in this so rare naturalness towards those who differ from others in external circumstances.”
Posted in Insidedness, Mark Twain | Tags: Helen Keller, Mark Twain
Sam Clemens worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River from 1857-1860. It was there:
I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history…When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before – met him on the river.
Posted in Insidedness, Mark Twain, Storytelling | Tags: characters, fiction, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain, met him on the river, Sam Clemens, Storytelling
With the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl and this, the centennial of Twain’s death, here is a description of the time when Sam Clemens first set foot in the “Big Easy”:
When the Crescent City docked at the New Orleans levee in late May 1857, Clemens was exhausted. But he had more than two weeks to practice something he was already quite good at – sightseeing. Two things particularly fascinated him, the market and the cemeteries. The bright colors, the variety of tropical fruits, the plethora of every kind of produce from the kitchen, the farm, and the sea, sent his senses reeling with delight. The market was as much a display of people as of products, their multi-toned voices, their variety of skin tones, their diversity of languages: ‘groups of Italians, French, Dutch, Irish, Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Americans, English, and the Lord knows how many more different kinds of people.’ To him the variety was an asset, the differences desirable, the community both tactilely sensual and raucously harmonious, his first experience with the American marketplace as a polyglot, multi-ethnic epitome of the national culture. His sheer pleasure in New Orleans was a step toward his gradual transcendence of Missouri slave culture provincialism and his increasing discomfort with xenophobia” (The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography, Fred Kaplan).
Twain would write to his sister Pam: “It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.”
Posted in Insidedness, Mark Twain, Traveling | Tags: American, Edinburgh, Fred Kaplan, Mardi Gras, Mark Twain, New Orleans, Scotchman, The Singular Mark Twain
The children and I have been watching American Idol together and I have pointed out to them how it is not just the song that sells the singer, but the story. That is, there are thousands of contestants across the country who can hit a wide range of notes, stay in tune and choose a good song for their voice. But Fox distinguishes their contestants by the back stories they feature. They are trying to sell us “likability”. And so it is, we have stories of what people have suffered and the challenges they face: “In our next episode, we’ll meet a divorced father of fifteen who had to get a tracheotomy after ingesting a chicken bone while performing CPR for a fellow diner at a Chinese buffet. You won’t want to miss this.”
This is not unexpected, of course. The advertising industry has been doing this for years. Alan Schwartz says in The Paradox of Choice:
The point of advertising is to sell brands. According to James Twitchell, the key insight that has shaped modern advertising came to cigarette manufacturers in the 1930s. In the course of market research, they discovered that smokers who taste-tested various cigarette brands without knowing which was which couldn’t tell them apart. So, if the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier. With that was born the practice of selling a product by associating with a glamorous lifestyle.”
Posted in Storytelling | Tags: advertising, American Idol, Storytelling, The Paradox of Choice
On Tuesday, February 9th at 7 pm. Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles will be speaking on “The Story of a Movement” as part of the President’s Lecture Series on the campus of William Woods University. The talk will be held in Cutlip Auditorium.
Reverend Kyles has been the pastor of Monumental Baptist Church since 1959. He was a close friend and associate of the late Martin Luther King and was with King during his final days. He was present for King’s famous “mountaintop sermon” and an eyewitness to King’s assassination the following day. Kyles’ story was recently the subject of an award-winning documentary that recently aired on HBO entitled The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306. Reverend Kyles will discuss the life and legacy of King and the story of a movement that centered on justice and freedom for all.
In commemoration of Martin Luther King Day – once referred to as “King Lutheran Day” by my then, six year old daughter – here is one of my favorite selections from King’s speeches. This is from the famous “mountaintop sermon” which he delivered in Memphis, Tennessee the night before his assassination. In it, you can hear echoes of Martin Buber and his classic work I and Thou.
It is also an example of what Mikhail Bahktin termed “insidedness” – the capacity to enter into someone else’s experience, authenticate their individuality, share their woes and listen to their voice.
In this selection from King’s sermon, he is retelling Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.”
Yesterday, Mark McGwire finally came clean and confessed to using steroids during the 90s. The return of McGwire to the news, after years of being out of the spotlight, has reminded me of the greatest game I ever saw.
In the summer of 1998, I was fortunate enough to watch McGwire hit home run #62, the line-drive shot that broke Roger Maris’ previous record for home runs in a season. As Tom Verducci wrote for Sports Illustrated that summer:
The home run is America—appealing to its roots of rugged individualism and its fascination with grand scale. Americans gape at McGwire’s blasts the same way they do at Mount Rushmore, Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building. "We have," Cubs manager Jim Riggelman said before Tuesday’s game, "a fascination with power."
That summer was magical. McGwire was on a torrid pace to break one of sports’ most coveted records and one of the longest standing ones. In the second half of the baseball season, we spent every summer night rushing to the television when McGwire came up to bat. If we were barbequing, we went inside. If out to dinner, we joined the rest of the patrons to catch what was going on. Regular scheduled programs were interrupted for a live look-in on the individual at-bats of McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
Tickets became increasingly harder to come by as fans were flocking to the stadium in the hopes of catching a piece of history.
My wife at the time, Kris, knew how much I wanted to see a game at Busch Stadium and one day she called me and said, “Hey, I want to do something for your birthday. Can you be free Sunday night or Tuesday night?”
I told her I wouldn’t likely be free on Sunday evening and then she said, “Well, I might as well just tell you, I’m here at Schnucks and I’m trying to get two tickets for us to see a Cardinals game.”
“Kris, that would be awesome but I’m pretty sure they’re all sold out.”
“Well, the lady here says she can get us two seats but the only catch is that she doesn’t have two seats side-by-side. She has individual seats but the seats are one row in front of the other.”
Through the phone, I could hear the Schnucks’ customer service representative say, “Now honey, I can’t promise you these tickets will be here in the next few minutes. They’re going fast.”
I told Kris, “By all means, grab them.” And so she did. We had tickets for a game the following week, on Tuesday, September 8, 1998 against the Chicago Cubs. Friends of ours had tickets the day before, a game in which Big Mac hit the record-tying home run in the first inning. I nervously watched the rest of the game hoping that he wouldn’t hit it number 62. Fortunately, he only got one that afternoon.
The following day Kris and I made our way to St. Louis. When we were on the Metro Rail, the conductor said, “Mark my word, folks, today Big Mac will hit #62”. The atmosphere outside the stadium was electric. We found out that tickets were selling for $400. Kris was tempted to sell hers and I told her if she did, I’d meet her after the game!
We got to our seats and we were near the left-field foul pole. There were nine-seats in our rows, and Kris and I had the middle seat in both. The guy next to me said, “Now, I don’t normally do this but if Big Mac breaks the record tonight don’t be surprised if I give you a hug. We’re all family tonight.”
There was a buzz in the air when the game started. The Cardinals were playing their hated rivals, the Cubbies from Chicago, with people all over the world watching the game. Roger Maris’ family was at the game, seated near the Cardinals dugout. Flash bulbs were going off every time McGwire came up to bat.
In the bottom of the 4th inning, McGwire turned on a first-pitch fastball from Steve Traschel and sent it just over the left field wall, right below where we were seated. The record home run was his shortest shot of the year, traveling 341 feet. Pandemonium ensued. While McGwire circled the bases, people were jumping up and down. Strangers hugged and high-fived each other. They stopped play for around ten minutes or so and I ran out to the concourse to snatch up a few souvenirs from the vendors. Baseballs marked, “I Was There” were selling for $20. After the game, Commissioner Bud Selig was on hand to honor the historic achievement. When we left the stadium, commemorative editions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were already for sale. (That night also happened to be the first major league game of J.D. Drew, who now plays for the Boston Red Sox. He came into left field and had his first two at-bats that evening.) We stayed in St. Louis late into the night to take in the celebration before eventually returning to Columbia.
I couldn’t imagine a better birthday present for a sports fan, especially one who had cheered for the Cardinals since childhood. I told Kris it would be equivalent to getting her much coveted tickets to see Mikhail Baryshnikov perform live in some fantastic venue.
It was an unforgettable night in the history of sports.
Posted in Family Matters, Fun Country, Sports, Stories Worth a Pint | Tags: 1998, 62, baseball, home run record, Mark McGwire, St. Louis Cardinals, steroids, Steve Traschel
A few years ago, I attended a conference where one of the speakers noted that someone living in 1905 would have more in common with Moses the patriarch than with someone living in our own time. There have been so many sweeping changes in such a relatively short time that the past seems too distant to yield any valuable contributions to the present day.
During my university studies, I would face this matter practically every day. On one side of College Avenue, I was involved in a campus ministry that emphasized returning to “New Testament Christianity”. In fact, the ministry grew out of the historic Restoration Movement which sought to return the Church to its simple, first-century character. The idea was that the farther we get away from the origins of this great thing, the more corrupt or distorted it becomes. When I crossed the street for my classes at Mizzou, the belief was reversed: the past was held suspect and the modern was privileged. The idea was that our expanding knowledge and our newer cosmologies required that we also outgrow antiquated worldviews and have a more modern notion of God, sex, the human person, fill in the blank.
Early in the Christmas break I finally got around to reading New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery by Anthony Grafton. It had been on my short list for the last two years. The author explores how intellectual history changed in the wake of the European discovery of the “new world”. Prior to that, people still held that authority principally resided in the ancient books. For example, to discern the pattern of the heavens, you read Aristotle. To make sense of the world that existed within the human body beneath the skin, you read the physician Galen. For centuries, the assumption for many, if not most, was that a “complete and accurate body of knowledge already existed.”
Grafton shows how with new world exploration and the rise of scientific inquiry, scholars had to revise inherited paradigms, if not abandon them altogether. In the new world after Columbus,
“the ancient texts continued to be read, translated, and admired, to provide the model genres for ambitious modern writers: epic, history, tragedy. And belief in progress would not become universal in the West for a very long time; not even in the Enlightenment would it find universal assent…Those who knew the ancient world best – the professional scholars – took the side of the Modern in the Battle, arguing that the ancients had in fact known far less than moderns about nature, the surface of the world, and much else. New standards of arguments – based, supposedly, on ‘facts’ rather than mere texts – played a larger and larger role in many fields.
The book is a tour de force as it relates to intellectual history, scholastic methodology, cartography and the nature of cultural encounter. And it provides a wonderful background to our current debates about curriculum (see the recent New York Times article on making college relevant) and how the past should resource the present in areas of religious belief, social values and new technologies. Highly recommended.
In the movie Reservoir Dogs, Holdaway (played by Randy Brooks who is pictured below) gives advice to Mr. Orange (played by Tim Roth) on how to go undercover as a cop and gain the trust of an organized crime cell. What follows is Quentin Tarantino’s tribute to the art of storytelling. Warning: explicit language follows. Though necessary to the character depictions and the plot of the movie, it contains offensive language.
Posted in Insidedness, Movie Moments, Storytelling | Tags: commode story, Quentin Tarantino, Randy Brooks, Reservoir Dogs, Tim Roth
In recent years, I have enjoyed reading Thomas Cahill’s Hinges of History series. Here is how he describes his task of researching and retelling the stories of the ancients:
My methods of approaching the past have scarcely changed since
childhood and adolescence. I assemble what piece there are, contrast and compare, and try to remain in their presence till I can begin to see and hear and love what living men and women once saw and heard and loved, till from these scraps and fragments living men and women begin to emerge and move and live again – and then I try to communicate these sensations to my reader. So you will find in this book no breakthrough discoveries, no cutting-edge scholarship, just, if I have succeeded, the feelings and perceptions of another age and insofar as possible, real and rounded men and women. For me, the historian’s principal task should be to raise the dead to life.
Thomas Cahill, Why the Greeks Matter, 8
Posted in Insidedness, Storytelling | Tags: historical scholarship, Storytelling, Thomas Cahill, Why the Greeks Matter
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