The most positive part of my retirement has been the freedom to read what I will beyond the demands of the classroom. Since mid-May, the effective beginning of my semi-retirement, I’ve read the following books (plus a few more that I can’t recall right now), roughly in the order I read them (which is random):
Terry Eachout, Pops
Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. . . .
John Heilemann and Mark Helperin, Game Change
Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Eula Bliss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays
Dave Barry, I’ll Mature When I’m Dead
Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking
Simon Winchester, ed., The Best American Travel Writing 2009
Stefan Klein, Leonardo’s Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Best American Essays 2010
Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates
Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir
Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing
Keith Richards, Life
Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne
Holly Hughes, The Best Food Writing 2010
It’s no surprise that all of these books are nonfiction. That’s been my primary professional interest for 30 years. Plus I have a hard time getting into the imagined characters and worlds of fiction when there are just as engaging and enlightening characters and worlds in nonfiction. I suppose I’d be a more rounded reader if I were to spend at least a little time with fiction (not to mention poetry or drama), and perhaps I should make a New Year’s resolution to do so. But I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. And that’s another positive of retirement, the freedom to go where whim demands.
How I remember that night.-- Friday October 24, 1969
ReplyDeleteKansas cools down by the end of October-- even after a hot summer and the summer of 1969 was one of those. The round building (the 'round house' ) at the edge of the WSU campus had just been renamed the Henry Levitt Arena. It is 286 feet around and 76 feet high housing a basketball court and 10,000 seats.
I have no idea how many seats were filled the night that Janis Joplin took the stage. There may have been seating on the the basketball court in front of the stage, but the place was filled with fans. She was playing with her band Kozmic Blues and she was one of the hottest performers anywhere.
Everyone wanted a piece of Janis. In July of 1969 she was live on the Dick Cavitt Show. From June through the end of the year she appeared at nearly every music festival that there was including, Atlanta, Newport, New Orleans, the Hollywood Bowl, and Woodstock. Yeah, everyone wanted a piece of Janis... and even Wichita got its share.
What I remember about the concert that night in Wichita, was arriving part way through the opening band and working my way to the edge of the stage getting higher and higher with each step. When she took the stage it was pure driving energy as she belted out, and I mean belted out, her songs. The sound that became her signature filled that enormous round building and for just a moment, Wichita was a part of the energy that was transforming our
entire society.
Sadly the concert was interrupted when Janis realized that her feathered boa had been stolen from her while she was performing. She stopped the show and literally begged the crowd for its return. That simple feathered boa became the most important thing ... it stopped time.
At that moment she became the lonely little girl that was also Janis Joplin. I remember seeing the toll that the road had taken on her. When she performed you felt her pain and her joy. That night she gave a glimpse of the loneliness that follows anyone traveling under its spotlight just to provide entertainment for $4 a ticket.
Wichita has always been a stop for the bands... a few hours by bus from Kansas City, and on the route to Oklahoma City, to Dallas and beyond. Small three hour bites. Wichita has never been the destination... only a stop along the road. Those that stay get caught in its vortex.
How do I remember the night Janis Joplin came to town? To be honest, it was like watching for the joker as a deck of cards is shuffled. If you remember that night clearly, you probably weren't really there.