Here are some of the audio and paperback projects I've produced, relevant to the Nineteenth Century. I hope you may take some pleasure from them.
THE BEECHERS. This is the story of a remarkable American family (including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher), and the sweeping changes of the American nation from 1800 through the War Between the States, originally produced in 1985 as a radio serial. The Beechers homepage shows the Beecher family tree, and summaries of the episodes. Hmm, which one should I choose?
MARGARET FULLER, editor of The Dial (the major publication of the Transcendentalists), conversationalist, author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, met and mingled as one with the best minds of the times. Friend of Emerson, writer for Horace Greeley, participated in the Italian Risorgamento, friend of the Brownings, died too young. The Margaret Fuller page gives the script and the hour-long audio.
ZACHARY TAYLOR, a war hero, was a short-term President at a turning point of history, as the United States acquired half of Mexico. The Zachary Taylor script shows the tumultuous election and competing tensions within the growing nation. (audio missing)
JOHN MUIR discovered his future role investigating the dramatic wilderness of the West. The John Muir page offers the radio script (podcast gone).
THE BROWNINGS, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, begin a relationship through poetry. The Brownings script shows these two soulmates coming together.
SOUND ART SOUND TEXT was a radio program on KCSB, the campus station of the University of California, Santa Barbara, running in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Programs delving into the 19th Century are listed below. These are simply audiofiles; no scripts are available.
For the modern programs, visit the 20th Century. In general, we expanded the usual DJ shtick to include readings and music from other times, other places. One major influence was the German experimentalists who at that time were raising radio to an artform. The hosts were Sasha Newborn and James Forman.
WALT WHITMAN marked a new beginning, a really new idea of America. He threw overboard all the ideas of poetry as it stood in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Rhyme—out the window. Thumpety-thump rhythm, iambs, dactyls, trochaic—out, out, out. Pastorals, Classical references, odes, didactic poems—banished. Stanzas—piffle. High-flown praise, lofty rhetoric, edifying verse—nah. What was left turned out to be quite significant, building on the uniquely American capacity called ingenuity, to make do, to think anew, to make a fresh break so as to discover—oneself, and one's own inhabited country. The Original Leaves of Grass had no poem titles, no author listed, but it sparked a sea change in literature.
EDGAR ALLAN POE was a restless mind, inventing genres that survive today: detective stories, poetry to a purpose, fascination with the morbid. Poe was a pioneer of psychological fiction. The First Detective: Three Stories by Edgar Allan Poe are the three stories he wrote featuring a dilettante detective, his bumbling sidekick, and by-the-book police official. Sound familiar? It's a formula used over and over again, most famously by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who himself declared that Poe was his source for the Sherlock Holmes stories.
GHALIB was the son of a mercenary chieftain in the years before the British East India Company created the Raj — in fact, he lived through the Sepoy Mutiny, and addressed Queen Victoria as a court poet might, to ask for her financial support. His witty and personally revealing poetry won him friends, and enemies. He wrote in Persian and Urdu; the Ghazals of Ghalib are translated from Urdu.
LEO TOLSTOY was a Count in Imperial Russia, but his mind was modern. Besides being a world-famous author of epic novels, Tolstoy was instrumental in saving a whole sect, the Doukhobors, from persecution by sending them to Canada. His writings after the novels investigated Christianity with a fresh, a novelist's master eye, resulting in The Little Gospel, a synoptic story woven from the three Biblical gospel stories that share most of the elements. However, Tolstoy understood that the editorial additions, the "crust" that had grown over the real story, included miracles, the fake genealogy (which was Joseph's ancestors, not Jesus'), the resurrection, all elements that had nothing to do with the message of Jesus. Digging through the layers of churchly hypocrisy, Tolstoy insisted upon non-violence as a central tenet of Jesus' teaching. Tolstoyan Christianity hearkened back to early pre-Nicean, even pre-Luke, practices: brotherly love, the Kingdom of God on earth. Gandhi took the message to heart, and turned it into a political movement that eventually won independence for India.
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Copyright © 2010 Bandanna Books
PAPERBACK
Apology & Crito
Areopagitica
Leaves of Grass
Sappho: Poems
Dante & His Circle
Detective, Poe
Ghazals of Ghalib
Merchant of Venice
Gandhi on the Gita
Painless Grammar
Don't Panic: Guide to Term Papers
Myths & Legends of Mexico (Eng/Sp)
AUDIO FILES
The Beechers
Margaret Fuller
MacDowell, Bray
Bastille Day
Federal music
AUDIO SCRIPTS (no audio)
John Muir
The Brownings
Zachary Taylor
20TH CENTURY
Al Drake
Count Basie
Delta blues
Robert Cole
Dreamscapes
Elocution/Art song
Mitch Cohen
Farley Mowat
Ken Nordine
Charles Olson
Octavio Paz
Ezra Pound
The Shadow
Sissel & Blake
Edith Sitwell
