Almanac of Story Tellers: John Lennon

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Oct. 9th

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     It is the 282nd day of the year, leaving 83 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1940, the Beatle John Lennon was born.

    He told his stories with a backbeat, a nasal, often frantic, and sometimes high-pitched singing voice, and with hit songs he always co-wrote with Paul McCarney.

    As a musician and song-writer, he is one of the most influential rock-and-rollers of all time. The Beatles, a pop boy-band that grew into a psychedelic, irreverent and genre-changing quartet, is among the greatest bands of the second half of the 2oth Century.

    He was the band's rhythm guitarist, and he and McCartney switched being the lead and backup singers, along with being the main songwriters. 

    In 1956, Lennon formed the Quarrymen, the band that grew into the Beatles.

    After the Beatles, Lennon found additional fame and artistry with his wife, Yoko Ono. Her influence on him and his activism -- for peace and equality and love -- is enormous. It was during this time Lennon reached ever greater fame with his political songs, such as Give Peace a Chance and Imagine.

    Lennon was shot to death outside his New York City apartment on Dec. 8, 1980.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Faith Ringgold

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Oct. 8th

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     It is the 281st day of the year, leaving 84 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1930, the educator, author and artist, Faith Ringgold, was born in New York City.   

    She tells her stories in a variety of media.

    She painted about the ongoing civil-rights movement, often from a feminist perspective, inspired by the Impressionist and Cubist movements, by African art, and by writers like James Baldwin. The best known of these, American People #20: Die, shows a tangle of black and white bodies, bloodied, with their eyes wide in terror. 

    She sculptures soft textures, such as masks, to represent real and fictional characters.

    She writes children's books, often adapted from her own artistic works. She addressed issues of racism, combining reality and fantasy to create uplifting messages. 

    But perhaps Ringgold's greatest artistry comes from her narrative quilts, which she started creating in the 1980s. She combines painted images with words to convey open-ended narratives. Her first one, in 1983, was Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? It turned the caricature of a black mammy into a savvy business woman.

    Ringgold is an activist and educator. She taught in New York's public schools in the 1950s and '60s. From 1987 to 2002, she was a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

    As part of the prison abolitionist movement, in 1972 she painted murals that were displayed in the women's wing of Rikers Island, the city's jail on an island in the East River.

    Throughout her life, she has agitated for better representation for woman, particularly Black women, in arts and in museums.

    In 2022, the New Museum in New York held a retrospective of her work, Faith Ringgold: American People.

    She currently lives and works in Englewood, N.J.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Sherman Alexie

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Oct. 7th

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     It is the 280th day of the year, leaving 85 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1968, the novelist, short-story writer, and poet, Sherman Alexie, was born.

    He tells his stories about American Indians (the term he prefers) with wit and dark humor. He bases his tales on his experiences growing up and living on a reservation, and on his immediate family, particularly his maternal grandmother.

    He attempts to explain Indian life to the non-Indian, and relates the struggles of poverty, alcoholism, and despair that sometimes is epidemic on the reservations.

    Perhaps his most popular book is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of 22 interconnected short stories. Originally released in 1993, it tells of two friends, Victor Joseph and Thomas-Builds-The-Fire, and their experiences growing up on a reservation. Starting with the title of the book, Alexie attempts to show how popular culture -- depicted by whites and Indians alike -- has come to represent how society views Indians. 

    He was born and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. His father was a member of the Coeur d'Alene tribe, and his mother had several tribal ancestors: Colville, Choctaw, and Spokane.

    He wrote about his early life, including leaving the reservation to attend a white high school, in a young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It was published in 2007 and won a National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

    Alexie's first book, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, was published in 1992. His first novel, Reservation Blues, came three years later, and it expands on a short story he had written about a group of Indians who formed a rock 'n' roll band. The novel received mixed reviews, but won several awards, including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

    Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Settimia Caccini

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Oct. 6th

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    It is the 279th day of the year, leaving 86 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1591, the singer and composer Settimia Caccini was born in Florence, Italy.

    She told her stories, in song and arias, to the elite of cities across the Italian peninsula. Contemporaries praised her accomplished soprano voice, along with her expressive and technical skills.

     She came from a musical family, and likely started singing in operas that her father, Giulio Caccini wrote. She was among the first female singers to enjoy a successful career in music. 

    Like her father and siblings, Caccini often sang at the court of Medici. She also found work in Parma, Lucca, and with the Gonzaga family in Mantua. 

    Although Caccini composed music, she rarely published her own works in her lifetime; instead, she likely wrote them for her own use. Her compositions were not as well known as the works of her older sister, Francesca.

    However, a number of her compositions have survived and been published posthumously. All are strophic arias, common at the time, in which the music is repeated at every stanzas. They use dance rhythms and have a fluid melodic style, often accompanied by basso continuo. 

    Cassini died in 1638.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Oct. 5th

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    It is the 278th day of the year, leaving 87 days remaining in 2022.

    On this date in 1958, the astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson was born.

   

    He tells his stories about science and the universe with with and humor, and a determination to inform and entertain people about space and the world around us. He is a preeminent science communicator who regularly writes articles for magazines, newspapers, and websites,  appears on television and radio programs, and has written several books.

    He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.

    His is, perhaps, best known -- or at least has taken the heat for -- "killing" Pluto as a planet. It was not as a purposeful effort to knock Pluto out of the nine known planets in our solar system, but as part of the multi-million dollar renovation at the Hayden.

    What he wanted to do was to reorganize the various bodies in the solar system in a more definitive way -- the terrestrial planets became a group of four (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars). The gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), also became a foursome. Pluto fit into neither of those categories, so it became grouped with similar bodies (Ceres in the asteroid belt, and Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and others in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune), which were later called dwarf planets.

    Tyson good-naturedly took the heat and defended and explained his views.

    He said he was a young boy growing up in the Bronx when Carl Sagan's stories and shows inspired him to become a scientist, educator, and communicator. He attended Harvard University, where he received a bachelor's degree, and later earned his doctorate from Columbia.

    He published his first book in 1989. Merlin's Tour of the Universe was a collection of columns he wrote for StarDate magazine answering questions under the pen name, Merlin. Two other collections were published in 1998, one under the title Just Visiting This Planet. 

    Other titles over the years include The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist (2004), Death by Black Hole (2007, a collection of columns from Natural History magazine), and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (2009).

    Tyson still is director of the Hayden Planetarium and lives in New York.