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I have no noteworthy insights to contribute on this day, when we as a nation celebrate the birth of a remarkable American. But this story was posted by maxfolger over the weekend. It’s a letter written by Dr. King from the Birmingham jail to his fellow clergymen in 1963. When posted, maxfolger’s story got very little attention, but you might want to read it today:
A Must-Read Between MLK's Birthday and The National Holiday www.dailykos.com/...
If you haven’t yet discovered the delights of reading Sarah Vowell, I’m happy to introduce you. Jon Stewart (how much I miss him!) “interviewed” her several times on the Daily Show, which is where my husband and I first saw her.
Her book titles alone won us over: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States; Unfamiliar Fishes; The Wordy Shipmates; Assassination Vacation; The Partly Cloudy Patriot; and Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World.
But she was also the voice of Violet, the insecure teen-aged daughter, whose superpowers were becoming invisible or putting up a force field bubble, in the hit animated movie The Incredibles.
A woman of many talents — and weirdnesses. Most of her books are a fabulous combination of observations on American history and her experiences during research expeditions. On one page, she makes me laugh loud enough to disturb my husband in another room, and the next page she breaks my heart.
Take the Cannoli is a series of autobiographical musings which also reflect her singular view of America. The first story, “Shooting Dad,” gives a glimpse of her growing-up years. Her father is a gunsmith, so as a child she “had to move revolvers out of my way to make room for a bowl of Rice Krispies on the kitchen table.”
Sarah Vowell was born in a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it place called Bragg in Oklahoma, but her family moved to Bozeman, Montana, when she was eleven. This was the first time they had lived “in town.”
It was inevitable that she played in the marching band in high school. Tico Tico was part of the band’s repertoire. She also had her own all-girl band then, but true-to-form, it was a recorder trio — she played early music with the wife of the dean of the Bozeman College of Arts and Architecture and a professor from the Physics Department, both older than her parents, at the library and at street fairs.
“You might look up from your music stand and notice one of your schoolmates staring on in horror. Andy Heap, for instance. But you know what? You don’t care. You might even smile at him. And this is the most important lesson of marching band, of public displays of recorder. To withstand embarrassment. Maybe even seek it out. To take nerdiness to its most dizzying “Willow Willow,”“Tico Tico” extremes, and stand before my peers with my head held high. To stick out my tongue at the Andy Heaps of the world, run back to the baritone horn of life, and blow mighty and proud.”
— from “Music Lessons” in Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World
My favorite story from Take the Cannoli is “Species-on-Species Abuse,” about travel with her “gay, Jewish Canadian resident of Manhattan” friend David. They were meeting up in Florida to see a NASA shuttle launch, but it was scrubbed, so they wound up at Disney World.
“…at the Orlando Airport, David informed me that because of all the screaming kids on his flight he could make a fortune setting up a tubal ligation and vasectomy clinic at the gate.”
Her Disney World commentary is dead on, especially the Hall of (animatronic) Presidents, but the best part is their ride on rented bicycles through the Disney-planned, obsessively perfect community of Celebration, “a town that might be described as Life: The Ride.”
“…in post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America, odds are that the more you shoot for Frank Capra, the more likely you are to end up with David Lynch.”
The bike path offers a split view: on the left, there’s a row of “immaculate houses and rectangular, Crayola green lawns” while on the right, in the wetlands preserve, she sees “herons, wild turkeys, turtles and a thick brushy primeval forest…”
David, on the verge of heat stroke, says, “It looks like a Norman Rockwell town, but it’s so hot he’d have to paint everybody with enormously enlarged pores.”
By now, I bet you think I’ve forgotten the cannoli.
The title story is about Vowell’s secret obsession with the movie The Godfather during a mid-college crisis when she no longer had any idea what she believed. “All those books, all that talk, and oh, the self-reflection.”
“Looking back, I wonder why a gangster movie kidnapped my life. The Godfather had nothing to do with me. I was a feminist, not Italian, and I went to school at Montana State. I had never set foot in New York, thought ravioli came only in a can, and wasn’t blind to the fact that all the women in the film were either virgins, mothers, whores or Diane Keaton.
I fell for those made-up, sexist, East Coast thugs anyway. Partly it was the clothes; fashionwise, there is nothing less glamorous than snow-blown backpacking college life in the Rocky Mountain states. But the thing that really attracted me to the film was that it offered a three-hour peep into a world with clear and definable moral guidelines: where you know where you stand and you know who you love; where honor was everything; and the greatest sin wasn’t murder but betrayal.”
Her favorite scene: Clemenza remembers he promised his wife he would bring dessert home, and tells his partner in crime, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” For an angst-ridden Vowell, it was “an entire moral manifesto in six little words.”
“I got sucked in by The Godfather’s moral certainty, never quite recognizing that the other side of moral certainty is staying at home and keeping your mouth shut. Given the choice, I prefer chaos and confusion.”
Given the choice, I prefer reading Sarah Vowell’s version of America.
Sources and Further Reading:
- Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World © 2000 by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster)
- The Partly Cloudy Patriot © 2001 by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster)
- Assassination Vacation © 2005 by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster)
- The Wordy Shipmates © 2008 by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster)
- Unfamiliar Fishes © 2011 by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster)
- Lafayette in the Somewhat United States © 2015 by Sarah Vowell (Simon & Schuster)
