Archives for May 4, 2010

A reader writes:

I went this weekend to Trinity College in Hartford to see my daughter in the musical Nine. She is double majoring in music and theatre/dance. I thought you would be interested in knowing that your book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is one of her required textbooks in a course she is taking this semester, “American Popular Music.” In fact, she has a paper due on it soon.

I’ve been in textbooks before, but I’ve never been one. Cool.

Readers of Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor will recall that he describes in the first chapter a 1932 Pathé newsreel in which the five-year-old O’Connor showed off a chicken that she had taught to walk backwards. The experience, she recalled years later in an essay called “King of the Birds,” “marked me for life.”
Sad to say, this newsreel has yet to make it to YouTube, but you can view it online by going here.
You will notice, incidentally, that the anonymous author of the program note for this clip, which is available on British Pathé’s Web site, clearly doesn’t know that the “Mary O’Connor” portrayed in the newsreel is the same person who grew up to be one of America’s greatest writers. O tempora!

“Is Porky Pig, a cartoon, a movie ‘persona’? Of course he is. If Cary Grant is a ‘person’ in the movies, then so is Porky. Grant is an entity who appears only in the movies and doesn’t exist in real life. He was drawn up and created by a system that used Archibald Leach as its material. Porky Pig is similarly drawn up–it’s just that the raw material was pen and ink, not a guy from Bristol, England.”
Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine