Abraham Lincoln, Seeker Of Knowledge

As a lifelong reader and book lover, I can totally relate to young Abraham Lincoln's reading habits as cited in the following passage from Brian Kilmeade's The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul (Sentinel/Penguin Random House, 2021):

"Whenever and wherever he [Lincoln] could, he read. He read in bed. He read sitting astride a log by a stream. One friend spotted him reading in the woods, lying on the ground with his legs extended upward along a tree trunk. He read while walking, so absorbed in his text that he would sometimes stop, oblivious to anything but the words on the page, before continuing on, never having lifted his gaze."

Composer Billy Strayhorn Was Never In The Closet

A biopic about composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's friend and musical collaborator, is long overdue.

In the 1990s, director Irwin Winkler was set to turn David Hajdu's biography of Strayhorn, Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), into a movie. It never happened. I remember Winkler being quoted in a newspaper interview as saying that Strayhorn was not open about his homosexuality. Clearly Winkler hadn't read the book. I, who read a significant portion of the book, learned early on that Strayhorn was very much open about his sexuality.

"...Strayhorn," writes Hajdu (pronounced Hay-doo) on page 79, "made himself a triple minority: he was black, he was gay, and he was a minority among gay people in that he was open about his homosexuality in an era when social bias forced many men and women to keep their sexual identities secret."

Maybe it was a good thing that the movie was never made. Who knows what other inaccuracies would have crept into the script.

In the right hands a Strayhorn biopic could become a powerful and memorable cinematic experience. Someone like director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) might be that someone who could accurately bring Strayhorn's life and musical achievements to the big screen.

The big question then becomes this--who would be a good candidate to play Billy Strayhorn?

A Harlem Renaissance Novel Becomes A Musical

One of the many books from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that I need to read is George Schuyler's Black No More. It is described as a satirical novel in which, writes historian David Levering Lewis in When Harlem Was in Vogue (Vintage Books, 1982), "Dr. Junius Crookman, an Afro-American scientist, invents a process--'by electrical nutrition and glandular control'--which turns dark skin white and crinkly hair straight."

The book was recently adapted into an off-Broadway musical, complete with choreography by the renowned Bill T. Jones.

Schuyler, a black conservative, and his white wife, were the parents of a biracial child, Philippa, who became a piano prodigy. Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker magazine wrote two lengthy profiles of Philippa in the 1940s when she was still a child. In 1967, covering the Vietnam War as a photojournalist, she was killed in a helicopter crash.

For a time there was talk of turning her life story into a feature-length movie, with singer Alicia Keys, herself a piano prodigy, portraying Philippa.

Obscure Languages Are Important, Too

The National Enquirer published an article called "Unspeakable Tax Waste" (August 6, 1985) that complained that the Department of Education was wasting U. S. tax dollars providing colleges and universities with funding to teach students "obscure foreign languages" such as "Dinka, which is spoken in the Sudan" and "Telugu, a language of southern India."

To me, this attitude is shortsighted as well as downright ignorant. It might even be called racist.

Language is the gateway to understanding and appreciating other cultures. And since the United States has diplomatic as well as other ties to countries around the world, it makes sense to train people to speak a variety of languages, no matter how obscure. Certainly the people who speak these "obscure languages" don't think of them as unimportant.

The newspaper amNew York (now called amMetro New York) cited in a  November 24, 2014 article the work of Ellen Bialystok, a neuroscientist, on the benefits of bilingual education. She "found that people who are bilingual tend to maintain better cognitive functioning with age and, " continued the newspaper, "are even believed to have delayed onset in Alzheimer's symptoms after diagnosis."

Also the "obscure languages" that the National Enquirer writer disparaged could very well be the source of new words, useful words in English, a language that has adopted many words from other languages.

The Man Who Coined The Word "Gig"

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people nationwide were laid off their jobs and had to apply for unemployment benefits from the state and federal governments, there was talk of including people who were part of the gig economy. These individuals, called gig workers, ordinarily didn't qualify for unemployment, because they were not on anyone's payroll. They were freelancers, independent contractors. Due to the unusual circumstances brought on by the pandemic, they got to collect unemployment checks.

That brings me to the origin of the word "gig." While reading a book called Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by Caseen Gaines (Sourcebooks, 2021), I learned where the word came from. It's "a term," writes Gaines, an award-winning New Jersey-based author and journalist, "[African-American band leader James Reese] Europe coined [in the late nineteen-teens] to describe a one-night performance, which quickly caught on in the jazz community."

Now we know who should receive credit for creating "gig," a word that has become applicable to people both inside and outside of show business.

A TV Script About Aphra Behn, Britain's First Female Playwright

The first time I encountered the name Aphra Behn (1640-1689), Britain's first female playwright, was in a book one of my aunts gave me more than fifty years ago. The book is called English Literature: From the Beginnings to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Volume One by Bernard D. N. Grebanier (Barron's Educational Series, Revised Edition, 1959). (Grebanier was a professor of English Literature at Brooklyn College, in New York City.) I still have the book, although it's no longer in excellent condition, the result of numerous readings.

What brought the book to mind was an article I saw on the website Deadline.com about the unproduced film and TV scripts selected for the Brit List, a list, reported the website, "compiled each year from recommendations by British production companies, talent agencies, sales companies, financiers, distributors and broadcasters."

Out of nearly 300 scripts submitted, 18 were selected. Among those selected was the TV historical drama script Aphra by Jessica Lambert (it received eleven recommendations; a minimum of seven recommendations was needed to be included on the list). 

In the summary, Aphra Behn is described as "a bisexual libertine who lived an incredible double life as a 17th century spy." Professor Grebanier, with obvious distaste and disapproval, called Behn "the author of many novels, plays and poems, nearly all astoundingly indecent for a woman." 

I hope Aphra gets made into a television film real soon. From its description, it sounds like a fascinating script about a fascinating woman.

The New York Public Library Eliminates Overdue Fines

Better Late Than Never by Jenn McKinlay (Berkley Prime Crime, 2016), is part of her series called Library Lover's Mysteries, featuring Lindsey Norris, a young woman who is director of the public library in Briar Creek, a small town on the Connecticut shore.

The Briar Creek Public Library is holding its first annual fine amnesty day event, which brings a flood of overdue books, including one that's twenty years overdue and was checked out by a popular high school  English teacher around the time of her death. The book, after twenty years, is in pristine condition. Was the killer responsible for returning the book? Lindsey, who's also an amateur sleuth, intends to find out.

In the meantime, Ms. Cole, "an old-school librarian," who is "nicknamed 'the lemon' because of her puckered disposition," fervently disapproves of the fine amnesty day.

Ms. Cole comes across to Lindsey as "a punitive sort who enjoyed using fines and shushing to curb their patrons' naughty behavior."

I can only imagine how Ms. Cole, the "old-school librarian," would react to the New York Public Library's recent decision to follow other library systems by doing away with overdue fines altogether. The library felt the fines were burdensome to its low-income patrons and prevented them from adequately using the library and its many services.