Back when twitter was fun—and I mean way back, not just pre-Musk—I had three or four tweets that “did numbers”. Nothing you would call viral, but in the hundreds of retweets. And one of them was something like:
It’s a shame we’ll never get a Terry Gross interview of Terry Gross.
I wrote this, not really expecting any response, late one night when I was feeling things. And I meant it. Apparently a lot of people felt the same way.
Terry Gross is on my short-list of people who are singularly good at the thing they do. And she is so good.
What really gets me is she’s been doing it so well and so consistently my entire life. My very earliest radio memories are Terry Gross on the radio while I rode in the “back back” of my Mom’s station wagon picking my sisters up from school. I listened to her regularly (passively) as a child. Then a little more attentively as a teen. And then religiously in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now going into my 50s.
I can’t think of anything else like that. Can you?
And so one night I found myself listening to Terry Gross as I drove somewhere. This time it happened to be one of my all time favorite interviews. It was the very famous final Maurice Sendak interview — an interview so unfathombly good I’ve re-listened to it a dozen times in the intervening years.
And after I finished, and after I caught my breath, and after I let my thoughts settle, I opened my twitter app and tapped out that tweet and meant every word. One thing that’s so fascinating about Terry Gross (I can’t bring myself to shorten her name; she is entirely Terry Gross) is that her interviews somehow have a compelling and very distinct voice—a brand even—but she herself is a blank slate. Terry Gross the brand is something precise and immediately recognizable. Terry Gross the person is something diffuse. Interesting yes. Insightful. Probing. But voiceless. And that night, still recovering from Sendak’s “Live your life, live your life, live your life…” I thought for the first time how I wished there was some way Terry Gross could herself be revealed in that very special way she helps reveal her subjects.
I say all this because the other day I pulled out my Podcasts app again to listen to Terry Gross and was met with this:
Terry Gross on 50 Years of Fresh Air Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso This month marks 50 years of Terry Gross as the host of Fresh Air. What began in 1975 as a local experiment at
WHYY in Philadelphia has since grown into a national institution—one that not only transformed public radio, but
laid the groundwork for the world of podcasting. To commemorate a half-century on the air, Terry Gross joins us
for a rare appearance in the interview seat. (Apple Podcasts Link)
This interview of Terry Gross, by Sam Fragoso on his Talk Easy podcast, is an absolute gift. I listened to it straight through twice. I was honestly a little nervous at first. It felt somehow voyeuristic after all these years to hear Terry Gross answering the questions. But that feeling quickly passed. This interview is open, honest, insightful, and emotionally powerful.
I think what I liked best was this: It reinforces what I already knew, but never really thought about, which is that Terry Gross knows exactly what she’s doing and why. There is an intentionality to her process and her style that is reasoned and crafted. I love that. We have a tendency to think these singular artists (I will call her that) are simply born with a gift spilling out of them. Of course they are gifted. But art is a discipline, and craft is a handiwork. I loved hearing, in her own words, how Terry Gross thinks about her craft.
I loved this book so much I read it twice in succession. As is typical with Powers, there’s a lot going on here. His usual themes, surrounding technology, art, and the natural world, are in full form, coming together in a multi-threaded and highly rewarding character driven plot. This story is especially current and relevant to me as he grapples with things that cut deep in my own life.
Like Powers, I have a background in technology. I’ve been programming computers since I was 10 years old. And most of that long life has been a sort of love affair with what Steve Jobs called “a bicycle for the mind” — the ability for computers to empower and extend human potential across a broad spectrum of fields. And it is only more recently, in the last ten years or so, that I’ve begun to doubt that vision. Or at least grapple with very difficult questions around how that kind of power can be used, at the same time, to undermine human expression. I could go on all day about this but I’ll just say Playground captures this intricate and almost inscrutable question through story and narrative device in a way I found deeply moving, concerning, and honest.
Spoilers ahead…
In Playground, Powers takes the idea of the unreliable narrator to some kind of meta-level. The narrator is entirely reliable, and while he is clear about what he is doing from the start, it is a little hard to grasp until late in the story. I was gobsmacked by this. We have in this fictional universe both fictional-fact and fictional-fiction, each serving a purpose, and each calling into question the idea of story as a means of understanding the world. We know the story we just read is “untrue” even within its own fictional universe, and we’re not quite sure how to tease out the factual. We’re not even sure if the meta-fiction is a net good or a net bad. Rafi planted an idea in our minds in the early chapters and it is only in the end, long after he is dead—long after we have supposed he is not—that we realize we have become unwitting participants in the game he imagined. We have been manipulated (or graced?) by Keane’s deceit (or gift?). It is a remarkable work of storytelling, and one that only really works in the current moment of early “AI”. An absolutely genius approach to dealing with “large language models” narratively.
In some sense what Powers is doing here is probing his own role as a storyteller—a person who tells big Truths through little lies and hopes along the way for somethig like purpose. And he’s probing his role as a collator, refiner, and mixer of other people’s ideas and discoveries. In a very real and rewarding way, the acknowledgments after the “conclusion” of the novel become a part of the novel itself, and I think they were positioned this way intentionally.
Playground is a true work of genius. I’m reminded of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, perhaps the last book I read that genuinely shocked me structurally.
Richard Powers proves himself once again a master craftsman and an absolute gift to the literary universe.
When I was around 14 years old, casting around for new things to listen to, I found The Nylons 1984 album Seamless in my dad’s record collection. I loved the whole album right away, but I especially loved The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The strange tightrope it walks between haunting and soothing, the melodic howling, the fairytale feel, the plotlessness, the seemingly-nonsense chorus—these things really drew me in. I can’t say for sure that this was the first time I’d heard the song, but it was certainly the first time I’d listened to it. At the time I was so curious how this song came to be, what it was about.
I don’t think younger people can ever really understand this, but of course in the late 80s, we could not satisfy our curiosity about things with a tap on a screen. Tumbling down the Wikipedia hole would not become a thing for 20 more years. So while I was enthralled by this song, I didn’t really know anything about it. I suppose I could have scoured our little hometown library for something, but even if the right book had been housed there (doubtful)—the idea never crossed my mind. So, like so many brief passions throughout my life, I moved on without satisfying my curiosity.
We forget all about these things and then, years later, something triggers the memory, and we realize we now have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. In this case it was a brief mention of the song in the book But Will You Love Me Tomorrow. I probably thought The Lion Sleeps Tonight was a folksong with a foggy history, attributed to the prolific Unknown. It turns out the origin is well known, and fascinating. It’s a story of transnational folk styles, cultural appropriation, genre-bending, and musical exchange and evolution.
Best of all, since the evolution of the song tracks with modern recorded music history, we can literally hear as the song we know develops over 30 years, passing voice to voice, right before our ears.
1939. The song originates with a South African musician named Solomon Linda. His 1939 improvisational recording Mbube (Zulu for “Lion”) was a hit in South Africa. While this is not The Lion Sleeps Tonight that we know, it is clearly in there. This is apparent throughout, but especially at around the 2:20 mark when we hear the clear germ of the famous melody in the improvised high part. LISTEN.
1949. Pete Seeger (something of a hero of mine) heard the song, and, just like I did, mis-attributed it as traditional. He riffed on it, as he does so well, giving us a 1949 American folk version clearly inspired by the original, and inching closer to the modern classic. He called his version Wimoweh and performed it with The Weavers. In this version we hear the main melody line more clearly, and repeated. And the nonsense phrase “A-wemoweh” is here. But we still have no sleeping lions. LISTEN.
(It’s an aside, but such a great example of the kind of person Pete Seeger was: when he learned the original was not a traditional song, but was actually an original composition, he sent Solomon Linda a check for $1,000 and directed all his future royalties to Linda. Alas, the rest of the American music industry was not so decent, and Linda’s estate didn’t receive its due until 2006, after suing Disney and the American music publisher who held the rights on paper.)
1961. The Lion Sleeps Tonight achieved its modern form in the 1961 recording by The Tokens, which hit #1 on the charts. This version has borrowed the “wimoweh” line and the melody, with added lyrics we all know by American songwriter George David Weiss. LISTEN.
From there it was covered many times, including my beloved version by The Nylons. The Wikipedia article on the song lists around 80 versions through the years, with everybody from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to Chet Atkins and Yma Sumac to ‘N Sync and R.E.M. What a satisfying answer to my childhood curiosity.
