Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
If only there were evil people
If
only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it
were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But
the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.“ ―
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Carl Orff – Carmina Burana: O Fortuna
"O Fortuna" is a
medieval Latin Goliardic poem written early in the 13th century, part of the
collection known as the Carmina Burana. It is a complaint about Fortuna, the
inexorable fate that rules both gods and mortals in Roman and Greek mythology.
In 1935–36, "O Fortuna"
was set to music by German composer Carl Orff as a part of "Fortuna
Imperatrix Mundi", the opening and closing movement of his cantata Carmina
Burana. It was first staged by the Frankfurt Opera on 8 June 1937.
It opens at a slow pace with
thumping drums and choir that drops quickly into a whisper, building slowly in
a steady crescendo of drums and short string and horn notes peaking on one last
long powerful note and ending abruptly. The tone is modal, until the last nine
bars. A performance takes a little over two and a half minutes.
Orff's setting of the poem has
influenced and been used in many other works and has been performed by
countless classical music ensembles and popular artists. It can be heard in
numerous films and television commercials, and has become a staple in popular
culture, setting the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations. "O Fortuna"
topped a 2009 list of the most-played classical music of the previous 75 years
in the United Kingdom.
Carmina Burana is a cantata
composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff, based on 24 poems from the medieval
collection Carmina Burana. Its full Latin title is Carmina Burana: Cantiones
profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque
imaginibus magicis ("Songs of Beuern:
Secular songs for singers and
choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images"). It was
first performed by the Oper Frankfurt on 8 June 1937.
It is part of Trionfi, a musical
triptych that also includes Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. The first
and last section of the piece are called "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi"
("Fortune, Empress of the World") and start with the very well known
"O Fortuna".
American Folk: John Prine
John Prine is often hailed as one
of the best narrative songwriters of his generation and has been compared to
fellow great songwriters Paul Simon, Loudon Wainwright, and James Taylor.
The basics
about this learning experience
John Prine (October 10, 1946 –
April 7, 2020) was an American country folk singer-songwriter. He was active as
a composer, recording artist, and live performer from the early 1970s until his
death, and was known for an often humorous style of original music that has
elements of protest and social commentary.
Born and raised in Maywood,
Illinois, Prine learned to play the guitar at the age of 14. He attended
classes at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music.
After serving in West Germany
with the U.S. Army, he returned to Chicago in the late 1960s, where he worked
as a mailman, writing and singing songs first as a hobby, and then becoming a
club performer.
A member of Chicago's folk
revival, Prine credited film critic Roger Ebert and singer-songwriter Kris
Kristofferson with discovering him, resulting in the production of Prine's
eponymous debut album with Atlantic Records in 1971.
The acclaim earned by this LP led Prine to
focus on his musical career, and he recorded three more albums for Atlantic. He
then signed with Asylum Records, where he recorded an additional three albums.
In 1981, he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent record label with which
he would release most of his subsequent albums.
Widely cited as one of the most
influential songwriters of his generation, Prine was known for humorous lyrics
about love, life, and current events, as well as serious songs with social
commentary and songs that recollect melancholy tales from his life. In 2020, he
received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Prine was the son of William
Mason Prine, a tool-and-die maker, and Verna Valentine (Hamm), a homemaker,
both from Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. He was born and raised in the Maywood
suburb of Chicago.
In summers, they would go back to
visit family near Paradise, Kentucky.[4] Prine started playing guitar at age
14, taught by his brother, David. He attended classes at Chicago's Old Town
School of Folk Music, and Proviso Township High School (later called Proviso
East) in Maywood, Illinois. He was a U.S. Postal Service mailman for five years
and was drafted into the United States Army during the Vietnam War era, serving
in Germany, before beginning his musical career in Chicago.
In the late 1960s, while Prine
was delivering mail, he began to sing his songs (often first written in his
head on the mail route) at open-microphone evenings at the Fifth Peg on
Armitage Avenue in Chicago. The bar was a gathering spot for nearby Old Town
School of Folk Music teachers and students. Prine was initially a spectator,
reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a "You think
you can do better?" comment made to him by another performer. After his
first open mic, he was offered paying gigs. In 1970, Chicago Sun-Times movie
critic Roger Ebert heard him by chance at the Fifth Peg and wrote the first
review Prine ever received, calling him a great songwriter:
He appears on stage with such
modesty he almost seems to be backing into the spotlight. He sings rather
quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn't show off. He starts slow.
But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his
lyrics. And then he has you.
After the review was published,
Prine's popularity grew.] Prine became a central figure in the Chicago folk
revival, which also included such singer-songwriters as Steve Goodman, Michael
Peter Smith, Bonnie Koloc, Jim Post, Tom Dundee, Anne Hills, and Fred Holstein.
Joined by such established musicians as Jethro Burns and Bob Gibson, Prine
performed frequently at a variety of Chicago clubs. He was offered a one-album
deal of covers and with a few of his original songs, by Bob Koester from
Delmark Records, but decided the project was not right for him.
In 1971, Prine was playing
regularly at the Earl of Old Town. Steve Goodman, who was performing with Kris
Kristofferson at another Chicago club, persuaded Kristofferson to go see Prine
late one night.] Kristofferson later recalled, "By the end of the first
line we knew we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling
onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene."
Prine's self-titled debut album
was released in 1971. Kristofferson (who once remarked that Prine wrote songs
so good that "we'll have to break his thumbs", invited Prine and
Goodman to open for him at The Bitter End club in New York City. In the
audience was Jerry Wexler, who signed Prine to Atlantic Records the next day.
The album included Prine's signature songs
"Illegal Smile" and "Sam Stone", and songs that became folk
and country standards, "Angel from Montgomery" and
"Paradise." The album also featured "Hello in There", a
song about aging that was later covered by numerous artists, and "Far From
Me", a lonely waltz about lost love for a waitress, about which Prine
later said was his favorite of all his songs. The album received many positive
reviews, and some hailed Prine as "the next Dylan." Bob Dylan himself
appeared unannounced at one of Prine's first New York City club appearances,
anonymously backing him on harmonica.
Prine's second album, Diamonds in
the Rough (1972), was a surprise for many after the critical success of his first
LP; it was an uncommercial, stripped-down affair that reflected Prine's
fondness for bluegrass music and features songs reminiscent of Hank Williams.
Highlights of the compilation include the allegorical "The Great
Compromise", which includes a recitation and addresses the Vietnam War,
and the ballad "Souvenirs", which Prine later recorded with Goodman.
His subsequent albums from the
nineteen seventies include Sweet Revenge (1973), containing such fan favorites
as "Dear Abby", "Grandpa Was a Carpenter", and
"Christmas in Prison", and Common Sense (1975), with "Come Back
to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard." The latter album was Prine's
first to chart on the U.S Top 100 by Billboard and reflected his growing
commercial success. It was produced by Steve Cropper. Bruised Orange from 1978
is a Steve Goodman-produced album that gave listeners songs such as
"That's The Way That The World Goes 'Round", "Sabu Visits the
Twin Cities Alone", "Fish and Whistle", and the title track.
In 1974, singer David Allan Coe
achieved considerable success on the country charts with "You Never Even
Called Me by My Name", co-written by Prine and Goodman. The song
good-naturedly spoofs stereotypical country music lyrics to create what it
self-describes as "the perfect country and western song." Prine
refused to take a songwriter's credit (stating he was too drunk when the song
was written to remember what he had contributed) and Goodman received sole
credit. Goodman bought Prine a jukebox as a gift from his publishing royalties.
In 1975, Prine toured the U.S.
and Canada with a full band featuring guitarist Arlen Roth.
The 1979 album Pink Cadillac
features two songs produced by Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who by this
time rarely did any studio work. The song "Saigon" is about a Vietnam
veteran traumatized by the war ("The static in my attic's gettin' ready to
blow"). During the recording, one of the guitar amplifiers blew up (which
is evident on the album) The other song Phillips produced is "How Lucky",
about Prine's hometown.
Prine was married three times.
His first marriage was to high-school sweetheart Ann Carole in 1966. The
marriage lasted until the late 1970s. Prine was married to bassist Rachel Peer
from 1984 to 1988. Prine met Fiona Whelan, who later became his manager, in
1988. Prine and Whelan had two sons together, Jack and Tommy, and Prine adopted
Whelan's son, Jody, from a previous relationship. Prine had a home, and spent
part of the year, in Galway, Ireland.
In early 1998, Prine was
diagnosed with squamous-cell cancer on the right side of his neck. He had major
surgery to remove a substantial amount of diseased tissue, followed by six
weeks of radiation therapy. The surgery removed a piece of his neck and severed
a few nerves in his tongue, while the radiation damaged some salivary glands. A
year of recuperation and speech therapy were necessary before he could perform
again. The operation altered his vocals and added a gravelly tone to his voice.
In 2013, Prine underwent surgery
to remove cancer in his left lung. After the surgery, a physical therapist put
him through an unusual workout to build stamina; Prine was required to run up
and down his house stairs, grab his guitar while still out of breath, and sing
two songs. Six months later, he was touring again
Death
On March 19, 2020, amid the
coronavirus pandemic in the United States, Prine's wife Fiona revealed that she
had tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 and had been quarantined in their home
apart from him. He was hospitalized on March 26 after experiencing COVID-19
symptoms. On March 30, Fiona tweeted that she had recovered and that John was
in stable condition but not improving.[50][51][52] Prine died on April 7, 2020,
of complications caused by COVID-19 at the age of 73.[53]
In accordance with Prine's wishes
as expressed in his song "Paradise", half of his ashes were spread in
Kentucky's Green River. The other half were buried next to his parents in
A short story
STRAWBERRY SPRING
By Stephen King
Springheel Jack.
I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how
they take me back. All that was eight years ago, almost to the day. Once, while
it was going on, I saw myself on nationwide TV - the Walter Cronkite Report.
Just a hurrying face in the general background behind the reporter, but my
folks picked me out right away. They called long-distance. My dad wanted my
analysis of the situation; he was all bluff and hearty and man-to-man. My
mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn't want to come home. I was
enchanted.
Enchanted by that dark and mist-blown strawberry spring, and by
the shadow of violent death that walked through it on those nights eight years
ago. The shadow of Springheel Jack.
In New England they call it a strawberry spring. No one knows why;
it's just a phrase the old-timers use. They say it happens once every eight or
ten years. What happened at New Sharon Teachers' College that particular
strawberry spring. . . there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has
figured it out, they've never said.
At New Sharon, the strawberry spring began on 16 March 1968. The
coldest winter in twenty years broke on that day. It rained and you could smell
the sea twenty miles west of the beaches. The snow, which had been thirty-five
inches deep in places, began to melt and the campus walks ran with slush. The
Winter Carnival snow sculptures, which had been kept sharp and clear-cut for
two months by the sub-zero temperatures, at last began to sag and slouch. The
caricature of Lyndon Johnson in front of the Tep fraternity house cried melted
tears. The dove in front of Prashner Hall lost its frozen feathers and its
plywood skeleton showed sadly through in places.
And when night came the fog came with it, moving silent and white
along the narrow college avenues and thoroughfares. The pines on the wall poked
through it like counting fingers and it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, under
the little bridge down by the Civil War cannons. It made things seem out of
joint, strange, magical. The unwary traveller would step out of the
juke-thumping, brightly lit confusion of the Grinder, expecting the hard clear
starriness of winter to clutch him . . . and instead he would suddenly find
himself in a silent, muffled world of white drifting fog, the only sound his
own footsteps and the soft drip of water from the ancient gutters. You half
expected to see Gollum or Frodo and Sam go hurrying past, or to turn and see
that the Grinder was gone, vanished, replaced by a foggy panorama of moors and
yew trees and perhaps a Druid-circle or a sparkling fairy ring.
The jukebox played 'Love Is Blue' that year. It played 'Hey, Jude'
endlessly, endlessly. It played 'Scarborough Fair.
And at ten minutes after eleven on that night a junior named John
Dancey on his way back to his dormitory began screaming into the fog, dropping
books on and between the sprawled legs of the dead girl lying in a shadowy
corner of the Animal Sciences parking lot, her throat cut from ear to ear but
her eyes open and almost seeming to sparkle as if she had just successfully
pulled off the funniest joke of her young life - Dancey, an education major and
a speech minor, screamed and screamed and screamed.
The next day was overcast and sullen, and we went to classes with
questions eager in our mouths - who? why? when do you think they'll get him?
And always the final thrilled question: Did you know her? Did you know her?
Yes, I had an art class with her.
Yes, one of my room-mate 's friends dated her last term.
Yes, she asked me for a light once in the Grinder. She was at the
next table.
Yes, Yes, I
Yes. . . yes. . . oh yes, I
We all knew her. Her name was Gale Cerman (pronounced Kerr-man),
and she was an art major. She wore granny glasses and had a good figure. She
was well liked but her room-mates had hated her. She had never gone out much
even though she was one of the most promiscuous girls on campus. She was ugly
but cute. She had been a vivacious girl who talked little and smiled seldom.
She had been pregnant and she had had leukemia. She was a lesbian who had been
murdered by her boy-friend. It was strawberry spring, and on the morning of 17
March we all knew Gale Cerman.
Half a dozen State Police cars crawled on to the campus, most of
them parked in front of Judith Franklin Hall, where the Cerman girl had lived.
On my way past there to my ten o clock class I was asked to show my student ID.
I was clever. I showed him the one without the fangs.
'Do you carry a knife?' the policeman asked cunningly.
'Is it about Gale Cerman?' I asked, after I told him that the most
lethal thing on my person was a rabbit's-foot key chain.
'What makes you ask?' He pounced.
I was five minutes late to class.
It was strawberry spring and no one walked by themselves through
the half-academical, half-fantastical campus that night. The fog had come
again, smelling of the sea, quiet and deep.
Around nine o'clock my room-mate burst into our room, where I had
been busting my brains on a Milton essay since seven. 'They caught him,' he
said. 'I heard it over at the Grinder.'
'From who?'
'I don't know. Some guy. Her boy4riend did it. His name is Carl
Amalara.'
I settled back, relieved and disappointed. With a name like that
it had to be true. A lethal and sordid little crime of passion.
'Okay,' I said. 'That's good.'
He left the room to spread the news down the hall. I reread my
Milton essay, couldn't figure out what I had been trying to say, tore it up and
started again.
It was in the papers the next day. There was an incongruously neat
picture of Amalara - probably a high-school graduation picture - and it showed
a rather sad-looking boy with an olive complexion and dark eyes and pockmarks
on his nose. The boy had not confessed yet, but the evidence against him was
strong. He and Gale Cerman had argued a great deal in the last month or so, and
had broken up the week before. Amalara's roomie said he had been 'despondent'.
In a footlocker under his bed, police had found a seven-inch hunting knife from
L. L. Bean's and a picture of the girl that had apparently been cut up with a
pair of shears.
Beside Amalara's picture was one of Gale Cerman. It blurrily
showed a dog, a peeling lawn flamingo, and a rather mousy blonde girl wearing
spectacles. An uncomfortable smile had turned her lips up and her eyes were
squinted. One hand was on the dog's head. It was true then. It had to be true.
The fog came again that night, not on little cat's feet but in an
improper silent sprawl. I walked that night. I had a headache and I walked for
air, smelling the wet, misty smell of the spring that was slowly wiping away
the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches of last year's grass bare and
uncovered, like the head of a sighing old grandmother.
For me, that was one of the most beautiful nights I can remember.
The people I passed under the haloed streetlights were murmuring shadows, and
all of them seemed to be lovers, walking with hands and eyes linked. The
melting snow dripped and ran, dripped and ran, and from every dark storm drain
the sound of the sea drifted up, a dark winter sea now strongly ebbing.
I walked until nearly midnight, until I was thoroughly mildewed,
and I passed many shadows, heard many footfalls clicking dreamily off down the
winding paths. Who is to say that one of those shadows was not the man or the
thing that came to be known as Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many
shadows but in the fog I saw no faces.
The next morning the clamour in the hall woke me. I blundered out
to see who had been drafted, combing my hair with both hands and running the
fuzzy caterpillar that had craftily replaced my tongue across the dry roof of
my mouth.
'He got another one,' someone said to me, his face pallid with
excitement. 'They had to let him go.'
'Who go?'
'Amalara!' someone else said gleefully. 'He was sitting in jail
when it happened.
When what happened?' I asked patiently. Sooner or later I would
get it. I was sure of that.
'The guy killed somebody else last night. And now they're hunting
all over for it.'
'For what?'
The pallid face wavered in front of me again. 'Her head. Whoever
killed her took her head with him.'
New Sharon isn't a big school now, and was even smaller then - the
kind of institution the public relations people chummily refer to as a
'community college'. And it really was like a small community, at least in
those days; between you and your friends, you probably had at least a nodding
acquaintance with everybody else and their friends. Gale
Cerman had been the type of girl you just nodded to, thinking
vaguely that you had seen her around.
We all knew Ann Bray. She had been the first runner-up in the Miss
New England pageant the year before, her talent performance consisting of
twirling a flaming baton to the tune of 'Hey, Look Me Over'. She was brainy,
too; until the time of her death she had been editor of the school newspaper (a
once-weekly rag with a lot of political cartoons and bombastic letters), a member
of the student dramatics society, and president of the National Service
Sorority, New Sharon Branch. In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth
I had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date - turned down
on both counts.
And now she was dead. . . worse than dead.
I walked to my afternoon classes like everyone else, nodding to
people I knew and saying hi with a little more force than usual, as if that
would make up for the close way I studied their faces. Which was the same way
they were studying mine. There was someone dark among us, as dark as the paths
which twisted across the mall or wound among the hundred-year-old oaks on the
quad in back of the gymnasium. As dark as the hulking Civil War cannons seen
through a drifting membrane of fog. We looked into each other's faces and tried
to read the darkness behind one of them.
This time the police arrested no one. The blue beetles patrolled
the campus ceaselessly on the foggy spring nights of the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth, and spotlights stabbed in to dark nooks and crannies
with erratic eagerness. The administration imposed a mandatory nine o'clock
curfew. A foolhardy couple discovered necking in the landscaped bushes north of
the Tate Alumni Building were taken to the New Sharon police station and
grilled unmercifully for three hours.
There was a hysterical false alarm on the twentieth when a boy was
found unconscious in the same parking lot where the body of Gale Cerman had
been found. A gibbering campus cop loaded him into the back of his cruiser and
put a map of the county over his face without bothering to hunt for a pulse and
started towards the local hospital, siren wailing across the deserted campus
like a seminar of banshees.
Halfway there the corpse in the back seat had risen and asked
hollowly, 'Where the hell am I?' The cop shrieked and ran off the road. The
corpse turned out to be an undergrad named Donald Morris who had been in bed
the last two days with a pretty lively case of flu - was it Asian last year? I
can't remember. Anyway, he fainted in the parking lot on his way to the Grinder
for a bowl of soup and some toast.
The days continued warm and overcast. People clustered in small
groups that had a tendency to break up and re-form with surprising speed.
Looking at the same set of faces for too long gave you funny ideas about some
of them. And the speed with which rumours swept from one end of the campus to
the other began to approach the speed of light; a well-liked history professor
had been overheard laughing and weeping down by the small bridge; Gale Cerman
had left a cryptic two-word message written in her own blood on the blacktop of
the Animal Sciences parking lot; both murders were actually political crimes,
ritual murders that had been performed by an offshoot of the SDS to protest the
war. This was really laughable. The New Sharon SDS had seven members. One
fair-sized offshoot would have bankrupted the whole organization. This fact
brought an even more sinister embellishment from the campus rightwingers:
outside agitators. So during those queer, warm days we all kept our eyes peeled
for them.
The press, always fickle, ignored the strong resemblance our
murderer bore to Jack the Ripper and dug further back - all the way to 1819.
Ann Bray had been found on a soggy path of ground some twelve feet from the
nearest sidewalk, and yet there were no footprints, not even her own. An
enterprising New Hampshire newsman with a passion for the arcane christened the
killer Springheel Jack, after the infamous Dr John Hawkins of Bristol, who did
five of his wives to death with odd pharmaceutical knick-knacks. And the name,
probably because of that soggy yet unmarked ground, stuck.
On the twenty-first it rained again, and the mall and quadrangle
became quagmires. The police announced that they were salting plainclothes
detectives, men and women, about, and took half the police cars off duty.
The campus newspaper published a strongly indignant, if slightly
incoherent, editorial protesting this. The upshot of it seemed to be that, with
all sorts of cops masquerading as students, it would be impossible to tell a
real outside agitator from a false one.
Twilight came and the fog with it, drifting up the tree-lined
avenues slowly, almost thoughtfully, blotting out the buildings one by one. It
was soft, insubstantial stuff, but somehow implacable and frightening.
Springheel Jack was a man, no one seemed to doubt that, but the fog was his
accomplice and it was female. . . or so it seemed to me. If was as if our
little school was caught between them, squeezed in some crazy lover's embrace,
part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood. I sat and smoked and
watched the lights come on in the growing darkness and wondered if it was all
over. My room-mate came in and shut the door quietly behind him.
'It's going to snow soon,' he said.
I turned around and looked at him. 'Does the radio say that?'
'No,' he said. 'Who needs a weatherman? Have you ever heard of
strawberry spring?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'A long time ago. Something grandmothers talk
about, isn't it?'
He stood beside me, looking out at the creeping dark.
'Strawberry spring is like Indian summer,' he said, 'only much
more rare. You get a good Indian summer in this part of the country once every
two or three years. A spell of weather like we've been having is supposed to
come only every eight or ten. It's a false spring, a lying spring, like Indian
summer is a false summer. My own grandmother used to say strawberry spring
means the worst norther of the winter is still on the way - and the longer this
lasts, the harder the storm.
'Folk tales,' I said. 'Never believe a word.' I looked at him. But
I'm nervous. Are you?'
He smiled benevolently and stole one of my cigarettes from the
open pack on the window ledge. 'I suspect everyone but me. and thee,' he said,
and then the smile faded a little. 'And sometimes I wonder about thee. Want to
go over to the Union and shoot some eight-ball? I'll spot you ten.'
'Trig prelim next week. I'm going to settle down with a magic
marker and a hot pile of notes.'
For a long time after he was gone, I could only look out the
window. And even after I had opened my book and started in, part of me was
still out there, walking in the shadows where something dark was now in charge.
That night Adelle Parkins was killed. Six police cars and
seventeen collegiate-looking plain clothes men (eight of them were women
imported all the way from Boston) patrolled the campus. But Springheel Jack
killed her just the same, going unerringly for one of our own. The false
spring, the lying spring, aided and abetted him - he killed her and left her
propped behind the wheel of her 1964 Dodge to be found the next morning and
they found part of her in the back seat and part of her in the trunk. And
written in blood on the windshield - this time fact instead of rumour - were
two words: HA! HA!
The campus went slightly mad after that; all of us and none of us
had known Adelle Parkins. She was one of those nameless, harried women who
worked the break-back shift in the Grinder from six to eleven at night, facing
hordes of hamburger-happy students on study break from the library across the
way. She must have had it relatively easy those last three foggy nights of her
life; the curfew was 'being rigidly observed, and after nine the Grinder's only
patrons were hungry cops and happy janitors - the empty buildings had improved
their habitual bad temper considerably.
There is little left to tell. The police, as prone to hysteria as
any of us and driven against the wall, arrested an innocuous homosexual
sociology graduate student named Hanson Gray, who claimed he 'could not
remember' where he had spent several of the lethal evenings. They charged him,
arraigned him, and let him go to scamper hurriedly back to his native New
Hampshire town after the last unspeakable night of strawberry spring when
Marsha Curran was slaughtered on the mall.
Why she had been out and alone is forever beyond knowing - she was
a fat, sadly pretty thing who lived in an apartment in town with three other
girls. She had slipped on campus as silently and as easily as Springheel Jack
himself. What brought her? Perhaps her need was as deep and as ungovernable as
her killer's, and just as far beyond understanding. Maybe a need for one
desperate and passionate romance with the warm night, the warm fog, the smell
of the sea, and the cold knife.
That was on the twenty-third. On the twenty-fourth the president
of the college announced that spring break would be moved up a week, and we
scattered, not joyfully but like frightened sheep before a storm, leaving the
campus empty and haunted by the police and one dark spectre.
I had my own car on campus, and I took six people downstate with
me, their luggage crammed in helter-skelter. It wasn't a pleasant ride. For all
any of us knew, Springheel Jack might have been in the car with us.
That night the thermometer dropped fifteen degrees, and the whole
northern New England area was belted by a shrieking norther that began in sleet
and ended in a foot of snow. The usual number of old duffers had heart attacks
shovelling it away - and then, like magic, it was April. Clean showers and
starry nights.
They called it strawberry spring, God knows why, and it's an evil,
lying time that only comes once every eight or ten years. Springheel Jack left
with the fog, and by early June, campus conversation had turned to a series of
draft protests and a sit-in at the building where a well-known napalm
manufacturer was holding job interviews. By June, the subject of Springheel
Jack was almost unanimously avoided - at least aloud. I suspect there were many
who turned it over and over privately, looking for the one crack in the
seemless egg of madness that would make sense of it all.
That was the year I graduated, and the next year was the year I
married. A good job in a local publishing house. In 1971 we had a child, and
now he's almost school age. A fine and questing boy with my eyes and her mouth.
Then, today's paper.
Of course I knew it was here. I knew it yesterday morning when I
got up and heard the mysterious sound of snowmelt running down the gutters, and
smelled the salt tang of the ocean from our front porch, nine miles from the
nearest beach. I knew strawberry spring had come again when I started home from
work last night and had to turn on my headlights against the mist that was
already beginning to creep out of the fields and hollows, blurring the lines of
the buildings and putting fairy haloes around the street lamps.
This morning's paper says a girl was killed on the New Sharon
campus near the Civil War cannons. She was killed last night and found in a
melting snowbank. She was not she was not all there.
My wife is upset. She wants to know where I was last night. I
can't tell her because I don't remember. I remember starting home from work,
and I remember putting my headlights on to search my way through the lovely
creeping fog, but that's all I remember.
I've been thinking about that foggy night when I had a headache
and walked for air and passed all the lovely shadows without shape or
substance. And I've been thinking about the trunk of my car - such an ugly
word, trunk -and wondering why in the world I should be afraid to
open it.
I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She
thinks I was with another woman last night.
And oh dear God, I think so too.
Words
It's easy to recognize the cogni-
in cognizable and in other English words that have to do with knowing:
cognitive, incognito, precognition, and recognition, for example. They're all
from Latin cognōscere ("to get to know" or "to acquire knowledge
of"). Cognizable was formed in the 17th century from the root of
cognizance, which in English means "knowledge" or
"awareness." Cognizance traces to cognōscere via Anglo-French
conoisance and conoissant, meaning "aware" or "mindful."
Cognizable was used in its legal sense almost from its introduction, and that
meaning continues to be most common today.
Greetings NYCPlaywrights
***
CONGRATULATIONS KATHERINE GLEASON ***
Congratulations
to Katherine Gleason who has just won the Christopher Hewitt Award for Drama
for her short play THE TOE INCIDENT.
Her piece is in
the August issue of A&U Magazine here:
https://aumag.org/2020/08/03/the-toe-incident-drama-by-katherine-gleason/
She wrote us to
say: "I have found lots of great opportunities on NYCPlaywrights! One of
my short plays just won an award. Wow. I never would have known about it if it
wasn’t for NYCPlaywrights! I love your work!”
Thanks to
Katherine for her kind words of encouragement - NYCPlaywrights is happy to be
helpful. You can learn more about Katherine Gleason’s work at her web site at
www.katherinegleason.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @KGleasonWriter
If you have
found good opportunities through NYCPlaywrights, let us know at
info@nycplaywrights.org - we will share your story and links to your site(s)
& work (with your permission of course.)
*** FREE
THEATER ONLINE ***
NYTimes Event
Tuesday, August
18
7:00pm E.T.
4:00pm P.T.
RSVP
https://timesevents.nytimes.com/finishthefight/dnl2?utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=suffrage&utm_content=finishthefight0812
Unfinished Work
Finish the
Fight
A virtual play,
celebrating the unsung heroes of suffrage.
They were
tireless organizers. Tenacious fighters. And political geniuses. They were
Black and Latinx. Indigenous and immigrant. Together, they won women the right
to vote and laid the cornerstone for gender equality in the United States. Yet
their stories have rarely been told. Until now.
This August, we
give voice to these heroes of the suffrage movement. Join us for the premiere
of this innovative new performance. Learn why their fight is far from over.
https://timesevents.nytimes.com/finishthefight
***
OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
The Robert J.
Pickering / J.R. Colbeck Award for Playwriting Excellence
This annual
award was established to honor past member and playwright, Bob Pickering, and
to provide a vehicle for playwrights to see their works produced. Over 30 plays
have been produced over since 1984. In 2020, the award was renamed to also
honor longtime BCCT member and Pickering director, J.R. Colbeck. $200 is
awarded for first place, $50 for second place and $25 for third place.
***
We are
currently accepting submissions for the 2021-22 Reva Shiner Comedy Award. The
winner will be announced by June 2021. "Full-length” plays should have a
complete running time of between 1 hour 15 minutes (75 minutes) to 2 hours 15
minutes (135 minutes)
***
The Trans
[Plays] of Remembrance Festival at Ohio University is now accepting submissions
of 10 minute plays to be performed digitally as part of our Trans Awareness
week. The Festival will take place over three nights during Ohio University's
Trans Week of Awareness with performances November 16th, 17th and 20th.
Playwrights/poets/performers will be notified which day(s) their play(s) will
be performed.
*** FOR MORE
INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org
***
*** SIGNED,
SEALED, DELIVERED ***
THE POST OFFICE
In the spring
of 1913, Yeats directed the Irish Players to perform Tagore’s play The Post
Office, then unpublished, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, and then again in London
in July 1913. On November 14, 1913, Tagore was informed that he had won the
Prize via telegram at home in Bengal, then on December 10, 1913, was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first non-European to do so.
More...
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2020/02/16/yeats-w-b-india-and-rabindranath-tagore/
Script:
https://archive.org/details/postoffice00yeatgoog/page/n6/mode/2up
***
THE POSTMAN AND
THE POET
Isla Negra, a
fishing village on the Chilean coast, 1970-73. Mario, inarticulate and wildly
romantic, gets a job as postman to the poet Pablo Neruda. Learning from Neruda,
Mario woos the beautiful Beatriz in a way that is unusual to her: in words. The
pair fall in love, and after being caught in a delicate situation are forced by
Beatriz's mother, Rosa, to marry. She puts the couple to work in her taverna.
More...
http://www.thepostmanandthepoet.com/the%20story.htm
***
LOVE LETTERS
New York City
is falling head over heels for A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, the story of a
50-year correspondence between Melissa Gardner and her
childhood-friend-turned-love-interest, Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. Thanks to its
simple staging, Gurney’s play, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has been performed in
theater spaces all over the world, from the New York Public Library to Broadway
to Carnegie Hall and back again. Put away your iPhone (at least for a minute!)
to find out how a touching romance through old-fashioned pen and paper will
officially blossom on Broadway beginning September 17, 2014.
More...
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/177509/signed-sealed-delivered-the-story-of-ar-gurneys-love-letters-from-the-library-to-the-great-white-way/
***
OLD LOVE
LETTERS: A COMEDY IN ONE ACT
Old Love
Letters is short one act comedy by Bronson Howard from 1878. In this cute relic, the charm of youthful
courtship amidst the strain of Victorian societal mores is considered with the
passage of time.
Mrs. Florence
Brownlee is rereading old love letters “like faded rose leaves in a book”
before casually tossing them into a fire.
She has been recently widowed at age 32.
A former suitor, Edward Warburton’s wife died four years ago and he is
now forty years old. “Even the warm
skies of southern Italy failed to restore her.”
He is reading old love letters from Florence which were never destroyed
despite his marriage to another. “It
isn’t wicked for me to keep them now.”
More...
https://www.theaterreviewsfrommyseat.com/seclusion-smorgasbord-viii/
Script:
https://archive.org/details/oldlovelettersa00howagoog/page/n10/mode/2up
***
A LETTER TO
HARVEY MILK
It's 1986 and
Harry has decided to take Barbara's class after seeing a sign about it at the
JCC. He insists that he doesn't have much to write about, but a moving letter
he composes to Milk, a former customer and friend, proves otherwise.
More...
https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/a-letter-to-harvey-milk-is-a-musical-with-a-secret_84323.html
***
DEAR ELIZABETH
“I seem to
spend my life missing you,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, many years
after the long and intimate friendship between these two great American poets
began. In another letter he sadly observed, “We seem attached to each other by
some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in
another direction.”
The
geographical distance between them, breached only rarely during their sometimes
tumultuous lives, was a deeply felt burden to both — if perhaps occasionally a
blessing, too. But it left behind a great literary treasure: more than 400
letters that they exchanged as their careers and lives blossomed, faltered,
foundered, almost fell apart, then blossomed anew. The playwright Sarah Ruhl
has distilled from their voluminous correspondence a concise selection to
create “Dear Elizabeth,” an epistolary play that is having its premiere at the
Yale Repertory Theater here.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/theater/reviews/dear-elizabeth-a-sarah-ruhl-play.html
***
DEAR LIAR
Just how much
will be lost when the art of writing letters is completely vanquished by more
transitory forms of communication — like, say, the exchange of idiotic e-mail
jokes — is tenderly conveyed in “Dear Liar,” Jerome Kilty’s 1958 play adapted
from the correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.
In a diverting and often poignant new revival at the Irish Repertory Theater,
Marian Seldes and Donal Donnelly ably spar and flirt in the guise of these
towering theatrical figures, bringing to life an immortally lively relationship
and in the process giving a commanding view onto a vanished era.
More...
https://variety.com/1999/legit/reviews/dear-liar-1200458320/
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The World is a Beautiful Place – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"The world is a beautiful place"
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half so bad
if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs of having
inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
‘living it up’
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
Marjorie Rawlings
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August
8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an author who lived in rural Florida and wrote
novels with rural themes and settings.
Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy
who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was
later made into a movie of the same name. The book was written long before the
concept of young adult fiction but is now commonly included in teen-reading
lists.
In 1928, with a small inheritance
from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72-acre orange grove near
Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between
Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake.
She was fascinated with the
remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her "Florida
cracker" neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the
region and the land.
Wary at first, the local
residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her.
Marjorie actually made many visits to meet with Calvin and Mary Long to observe
their family relationships. This relationship ended up being used as a model
for the family in her most successful novel, The Yearling. The Longs lived in a
clearing named Pat's Island, but Marjorie renamed the clearing "Baxter's
Island." Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the
animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in
her writings.
Her first novel, South Moon
Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of Cross Creek and
its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support
himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do
when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject
of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several
weeks near Ocala to prepare for writing the book. South Moon Under was included
in the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
She found immense success in 1938
with The Yearling, a story about a Florida boy and his pet deer and his
relationship with his father, which she originally intended as a story for
young readers. It was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it won the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. MGM purchased the rights to the film
version, which was released in 1946, and it made her famous. In 1942, Rawlings
published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with
her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks. Again it was chosen by the
Book-of-the-Month Club, and it was even released in a special armed forces
edition, sent to servicemen during World War II.
Rawlings' final novel, The
Sojourner, published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about the life
of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mother who favors her
other, first-born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. To
absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse
in Van Hornesville, New York and spent part of each year there until her death.
The novel was less well-received
critically than her Florida writings and did little to enhance her literary
reputation. She published 33 short stories from 1912–49. As many of Rawling's
works were centered in the North and Central Florida area, she was often
considered a regional writer. Rawlings herself rejected this label saying,
"I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't hold with the
regional novel as such … don't make a novel about them unless they have a
larger meaning than just quaintness."
In her memoir Cross Creek first
published in 1942, Rawlings described how she owned 72 acres of land and also
hired a number of people over the years to help her with day-to-day chores and
activities. An entire chapter of the book is dedicated to one woman she hired,
whose name was Beatrice, but who was affectionately known as
"GeeChee", because the woman was ethnically part of the GeeChee
people. In the book Rawlings said GeeChee's mother lived in nearby Hawthorne,
Florida and that GeeChee was blind in one eye from a fight in which she had
been involved. GeeChee was employed by Rawlings on and off for nearly two years
in which GeeChee dutifully made life easier for Rawlings. GeeChee revealed to
Rawlings that her boyfriend named Leroy was serving time in prison for
manslaughter, and asked Rawlings for help in gaining his release. She arranged
for Leroy to be paroled to her and come work for her farm and had a wedding on
the grounds for Beatrice and Leroy. After a few weeks, Leroy aggressively
demanded more earnings from Rawlings and threatened her. She decided he had to
leave, which caused her distress because she did not want GeeChee to go with
him, which she was sure she would. GeeChee eventually decided to stay with
Rawlings, but then began to drink heavily and abandoned her. Weeks later,
Rawlings searched for GeeChee, found her, and drove her back to the farm,
describing GeeChee as a "Black Florence Nightingale". GeeChee was
unable to stop herself from drinking, which led a heartbroken Rawlings to
dismiss her. Rawlings stated in her autobiography "No maid of perfection —
and now I have one — can fill the strange emptiness she left in a remote corner
of my heart. I think of her often, and I know she does of me, for she comes
once a year to see me".
When Cross Creek was turned into
a 1983 film, actress Alfre Woodard was nominated for the Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress for her performance as GeeChee.
In 1943, Rawlings faced a libel
suit for Cross Creek, filed by her neighbor Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings had met
the first day she moved to Florida. Cason had helped to soothe the mother made
upset by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder".
Cason claimed Rawlings made her
out to be a "hussy". Rawlings had assumed their friendship was intact
and spoke with her immediately. Cason went ahead with the lawsuit seeking
$100,000 US for invasion of privacy (as the courts found libel too ambiguous).
It was a cause of action that had never been argued in a Florida court.
Rawlings used Cason's forename in
the book, but described her in this passage:
Zelma is an ageless spinster
resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as
much of the village and county as needs management or will submit to it. I
cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother. She combines the
more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her
ministrations think nothing at being cursed loudly at the very instant of being
tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles.
Cason was represented by one of
the first female lawyers in Florida, Kate Walton. Cason was reportedly profane
indeed (one of her neighbors reported her swearing could be heard for a quarter
of a mile), wore pants, had a fascination with guns, and was just as extraordinarily
independent as Rawlings herself.
Rawlings won the case and enjoyed
a brief vindication, but the verdict was overturned in appellate court and
Rawlings was ordered to pay damages in the amount of $1. The toll the case took
on Rawlings was great, in both time and emotion. Reportedly, Rawlings had been
shocked to learn of Cason's reaction to the book and felt betrayed. After the
case was over, she spent less time in Cross Creek and never wrote another book
about Florida, though she had been considering doing a sequel to Cross Creek.
The books illustrations were done
by Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945), known as N. C.
Wyeth. During his lifetime, Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and
illustrated 112 books, 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which
is the work for which he is best known. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the
camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as
melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth,
who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said
in 1908, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from
one into the other." In October 1945, Wyeth and his grandson (Nathaniel C.
Wyeth's son) were killed when the automobile they were riding in was struck by
a freight train at a railway crossing
near his Chadds Ford home
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