The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, June 8, 2013
The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, June 8, 2013
"Full Moon, Key West" by Elizabeth Bishop, from Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
It's the birthday of the world's first professor of agricultural physics, Franklin Hiram King, born on a farm near Whitewater, Wisconsin (1848). In 1888, King was hired by the University of Wisconsin in Madison to start a department of agricultural physics.
His most famous legacy from his years at Madison was the invention of the cylindrical silo. He was always looking for ways to reduce waste in farming, and he was struck by how much silage rotted in the corners of traditional rectangular silos. So he invented a cylindrical silo, which quickly became the standard for farmers across the country, transforming the rural landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright is said to have based his design for the Guggenheim Museum on King's idea.
Mark Twain took a famous ride on this day in 1867. He boarded the side-wheel steamer "The Quaker City" and set off on a five-month trip to Europe and the Mediterranean. This had never been done before — a transatlantic pleasure cruise on a steamship — and when Twain heard about the idea, he asked the San Francisco newspaper the Alta-California if they wanted to send him as their correspondent. They did, for $1,200 passage money and $20 for each letter he sent home. Those letters made him famous, and in 1868, he published them in a book called Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress, the most popular travel book of his time.
In Innocents Abroad, he wrote: "We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can 'show off' and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
A Prairie Home Companion is going to Minot, North Dakota!
September 28, 2024 – 5:00PM
Norsk Høstfest, Minot, N
A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour
with Garrison Keillor with Guests including CHRISTINE DIGIALLONARDO, RICHARD DWORSKY with HOWARD LEVY, CHRIS SIEBOLD, LARRY KOHUT, and our Radio Actors, TIM RUSSELL & FRED NEWMAN.
"The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad." Perhaps, but this can be accomplished by staying home too!
The Bishop poem should be titled "The Idea of Disorder at Key West."