Sarah Wrote That

NPR Three Minute Fiction, Round Three

I’m not usually keen on writing from prompts, but this one I like.  The deadline is midnight Sunday Feb 28 (submit stories here).  Three minutes=600 words or less—slightly shorter than Amy Hempel’s “Beach Town.” The contest judge is Alan Cheuse (who’s quoted on the dust jacket of Hempel’s Collected Stories as saying that her story “San Francisco” is “arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer”).  Here’s the prompt:

Who’s in?

We Have Always Been At War With East Asia

Listening to Garry Wills talk with Terry Gross about his new book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, it occurred to me how quaint the words “mobilize” and “demobilize” have come to sound—dusty, steam-powered, telegraphed to generals on horseback from pre-autobahn Berlin and Paris before the first Coco cut the first little black dress.  Quaint because here in the U.S. we have never truly demobilized from World War Two (the National Guard is called up, but the security apparatus never stands down).  This is of course not news, and as Wills says, it’s largely a settled affair.  It still unnerves me to see it reflected in our language.

"I like a president willing to talk about ‘is-ness’ and ‘ought-ness’"

E.J. Dionne

However satisfying it was to hear Dionne and Brooks one-up each other’s approval of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize response, Gary Sick’s analysis sounds a lot closer to my reaction (except that mine sounded more like “huh?”)

Local Heroes

Northampton gets a shout-out in Brian Kitely’s new novel The River-Gods, which NPR’s Alan Cheuse digs.

Over on Salon, Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners makes Laura Miller’s (odd) list of the decade’s best books.

The Pioneer Valley—“arguably the most author-saturated, book-cherishing, literature-celebrating place in the nation.”

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It hadn’t quite registered with me that the decade ends in three weeks, until articles evaluating it started to drop.  This is it?  Have we even settled whether to call it the oughts or the naught[ie]s?  I’m as delighted as the next first-worlder by the digital marvels it’s let us take for granted, but culturally I feel we’ve barely caught up to where we were before the hanging chads (tea partiers would doubtless have a different interpretation).

Sunday Music I: Military Brass

Our local NPR affiliate plays more classical music and jazz than news, which I’ve come to really enjoy.  Today’s classical program had a couple of particular gems.

The U.S. Air Force Band CD Evolution features Holst’s “Second Suite in F major for military band, Op.28, No. 2” (which sounds like Copeland must have listened to it a lot).  As the commenter on the album’s Amazon.com page notes, Air Force Band recordings are “paid for by our tax dollars and not for sale,” but I was unable to find this piece for download on the Band’s site, which does, however, have a wonderful collection of other mp3s: free, searchable, and downloadable—classical, jazz, folk, choral, holiday, marches and more.

Those of you in Northampton/Amherst: this suite is on the program of the Symphony Band & Percussion Ensemble concert at UMass this Thursday at 8 pm at the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall.

“Some Of These Experiments Are Quite Dangerous And Should Not Be Repeated”

Britain’s Royal Society celebrates three hundred fifty years by posting online sixty of the most notable scientific papers it has published, with images of the original manuscripts.

Changes in scientific knowledge have changed our very notion of what constitutes science.  In 1666 Robert Boyle published his “Tryals Proposed by Mr. Boyle to Dr. Lower, to be Made by Him, for the Improvement of Transfusing Blood out of One Live Animal into Another”:

NPR’s Guy Raz talks with curator Michael Thompson, introduces some dramatic readings from papers by Isaac Newton, Boyle, and Benjamin Franklin… and fesses up that the reader has been faking his British accent.

“La Perra Mora,” Rolf Lislevand

Avast, The White Whale!

WNYC’s Studio 360 reprizes its Peabody Award-winning exploration of Meville’s epic and its influence on writers and artists including Led Zeppelin, Tony Kushner and Laurie Anderson, whose opera Songs And Stories From Moby-Dick contains this brilliance:

The Pequod vs. The Enterprise

(Tumblrers, click on the post; the audio player doesn’t show up in the Tumblr dashboard)

Catch the whole episode here.

"It was kind of a ‘you stuck your chocolate in my peanut butter!’ moment…"

John Bemelmans Marciano

The origin of ‘frisbee,’ and other linguistic fortuities.

Who Did Tear Down That Wall?

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, talks with NPR’s Melissa Block about secret documents concerning the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the months leading up and just after it.

Amazing stuff.  Margaret Thatcher pleads with Gorbachev off the record to assist in keeping Germany divided—“You’ve got all those soldiers.”  Brent Scowcroft muses that it might be better to keep two Germanys.  Meanwhile Gorbachev was talking, apparently sincerely, about “our one European home,” and Shevardnadze said in a Politburo meeting that the Soviets should just tear down the wall themselves (he was ignored).

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