🎶 Take a Walk on the Wild Side 🎶
This Week: The first of three shows on Henry David Thoreau and the transcendentalist Concord circle, with Laura Walls, Lewis Hyde, Susan Gallagher, Kevin Dunn and Ben Evett playing Thoreau himself:
Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website. And if you want to read a transcript of the show, thank the hardest working intern in show business, Kevin Doherty!
Mary McGrath: We’re thoroughly Thoreau for the next couple of weeks, folks, and what a treat it is to remove ourselves from the Summer of Crazy and the psycho news cycle and immerse in the life and words of a philosopher who still has something important to say to us today, if we’ll just listen. We’ve all been touched by the man in different ways and encouraged to reimagine the great experiment of life as he might.
We’ve been to the river
And to the pond
Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. -HDT
And we’ve been reading a lot.
And following Chris’ nose:
Henry David Thoreau at his 200th birthday is an American immortal who got there the hard way — against the grain of his town and his times. By now he’s the heroic non-conformist who modeled his brief life on religious convictions: that every human being has an original relation with divine spirit, and that on earth a man must become a majority of one. So he made a dissenting record living apart, and walking the woods more like a Native American, he felt, than a Yankee. Never to church, never married, never voted and didn’t pay his taxes. He talked to the trees as almost-people, and he caressed the fish in his stream like almost-children. Manly and able “but rarely tender,” he won Emerson’s obituary praise that flatters us, too: “no truer American existed,” Emerson said, than Henry Thoreau. -Chris Lydon’s billboard. June 29th, 2017
So come along with us and begin, as we did, with Laura Walls’ marvelous new biography of Thoreau. She says she wanted to bring Thoreau alive for our time — as world class writer, natural scientist, political activist, spiritual seeker and modern day freedom fighter.
Then listen to Lewis Hyde taking up Chris’ challenge to explain Thoreau as American Scripture. Lewis has collected and annotated Thoreau’s essays, and he’s written a beautiful introduction. Email us and we’ll send you a pdf.
Then discover the political Thoreau with Susan Gallagher and deal with the slavery issue that tormented him and formed his thinking. And take your own Thoreau journey at Susan’s wonderful website: Mapping Thoreau Country.
The piece de la resistance of our show this week, though, came from the magical Kevin Dann, who brought it the house down. Kevin is hard to categorize; he’s an author, a naturalist, and a modern day troubedor. He walked from New York City to Concord, Massachusetts, this spring, covering 235 miles in 13 days, hosting a roving huckleberry party to honor Henry’s 200th birthday.
Chris asked Kevin for a living example of a modern day Thoreau; his answer is almost not worth giving away, but here’s a hint:
So, Chris ends the show asking if anyone can top that. In comes an email and a recorded phone message from a new friend in Jamaica Plain with two nominees: the bon vivant, man of the world alto sax player, Paul Desmond, who composed Dave Brubeck’s classic tune Take 5 and gave his royalties away to the Red Cross.
And another: Pittsburgh Pirates baseball god, Roberto Clemente, who was killed in a plane crash in 1972, trying to deliver relief supplies to victims of the earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua.
Top those friends!
We’re Reading:
We’re about a third of the way through Moby Dick, friends, and looking towards a meeting in a proper setting — that would be a certain type of saloon, what my brother would call a bucket of blood — someplace this side of New Bedford. Let us know if you can come along.
More from the reality based community….
Buzz Bissinger is among the best sportswriters out there, even if he makes you crazy (drink up girls); his Vanity Fair profile of Serena Williams accompanied by Annie Liebovitz’s photos is fun.
Jon Schwarz interviews Ralph Nader in the latest Intercept. Pure political wisdom. Per usual. More good sense from Steve Brill: Nine Ways to Really Fix Obamacare. Smart. And Chris dug this one up from the archives: some more political wisdom from the man who brought you Dilbert. All we really need to know about Uno Hoo….
Happy Birthday America!
Till next week,
Mary, Zach, Chris, Conor, Zach, Frank, Becca and Susan.
