The following blog comes to us from this semester's Librarian on Location, Karen J. Rupp-Serrano, who is in the Writing Center Thursdays from 1-3pm. After reading her words, we invite you to share your own cultural touchstones in the comments.
I recently read an excellent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Entitled “Tea, Shortbread, and 3 Things Worth Knowing,” the article outlines one professor’s weekly session—open to all—to learn about three items of cultural interest. The professor, Shawkat M. Toorawa of Cornell, found himself amazed by the number cultural touchstones of which students were unaware.
I work regularly with students; sometimes they come to me with questions, sometimes I come to their classroom to provide library instruction, and sometimes they are students employed in the University Libraries. I have on occasion found myself trying to do what Dr. Toorawa does as I find students have never heard of things I grew up knowing.
In the spirit of Dr. Toorawa, I offer you three cultural touchstones. Please don’t assume I am so old as to actually have been alive for the heyday of any of these items! They are all, literally, before my time.
Jack Benny was a comedian; for over 20 years he had a weekly radio show, and after that he had a TV show for another 15 years. He was famous for steadfastly insisting he was never older than 39, for playing the violin (badly), and for being the ultimate tightwad. No one could get a laugh with a well-timed pause like Jack Benny. The clip I’ve provided illustrates his miserly persona and features Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny and many other Looney Tunes characters) as the taxi driver.
Film Noir
French for “black film”, film noir movies were primarily produced in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. Generally black and white crime dramas, they frequently involve a hard-boiled detective, voiceover narration, and a shady dame. One of my favorite from this genre is fairly modern, Body Heat. Kathleen Turner made her film debut in this movie and you’ll also see a fairly young Mickey Rourke, before he got just plain weird.
Penrod
Penrod Scholfield is a worthy successor to Tom Sawyer. The Penrod stories, written by Booth Tarkington, are set in the American Midwest prior to World War I. A century later, I can still see much of Penrod in my own 12 year old son—the mortification of being on stage, trying to figure out the opposite sex, and the indignations of being constantly misunderstood by adults. Here’s a taste:
“A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has learned this…”
(From Penrod, by Booth Tarkington, available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/402/402-h/402-h.htm#2HCH0001)
Karen Rupp-Serrano
University Libraries
No comments:
Post a Comment