Howelings

What’s On Up Here

BY MARK HOWELL

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

In last week’s column we took a look, out of simple curiosity, at cultural tourism in the state of Nevada, from its museum of thermonuclear bomb testing to the history of burlesque.

This week, we take a look at the cultural scene here in southeastern Connecticut, which is where we now are, to check out how it compares with Key West.

Topping the announcements in a “regional events” column of publisher Brian Conklin’s excellent monthly Post Road Review — motto: “Thanks to our advertisers, this magazine is FREE” — is the following item:

“Full Speed into the Nuclear Age” (can there be no end to that?) presented at the Groton Public Library and subsidized by a grant from Connecticut Humanities to record and tell the stories of employees who were at the Electric Boat Company as the Cold War escalated in the 1960s. More than 20 Electric Boat employees, tradespeople, draftsmen, engineers and managers have been interviewed so far, including Jane Manly of New London, only the second woman draftsman to be hired by Electric Boat, and Michael W. Toner, who joined EB as a test engineer in 1965 and rose through the ranks to become president.

At Old Lyme’s Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library this month is “An Education in the Grotesque: The Gargoyles of Yale University,” a talk on the artistic, historic, architectural and, yes, humorous significance of those gargoyles in communicating the identity of Yale as a place of learning and enlightenment.

Continuing a “Connecticut at Work” film series at the Groton library is a 1956 movie, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, based on the Sloan Wilson novel about a Westport businessman’s search for identity in the postwar American Dream.

And for Thanksgiving here in the southeastern Connecticut communities there is “The Pilgrim’s First Year in America,” an author talk with Glenn Cheney at the Niantic Library. His book is not about a holiday but a year of suffering, struggle, courage and death that a few dozen surviving pilgrims endured for which they would ultimately bow their heads in thanks. It all began with102 women and children packed into a dim, wet space below the main deck of the Mayflower as it set out on a terrifying 66-day crossing of the Atlantic.

Moving right along, another first-class freebie publication in this part of the Constitution State is editor/designer David L. Pottie’s monthly Sound Waves, which covers local music events. Its interactive web site can be viewed on Android and IOS apps, on PCs, Macs, Netbooks, tablets, iPads, iPhones, Kindles and other e-readers, while sharing pages on Facebook and Twitter that average more than 3,000 hits per day — and includes its advertisers for free on such outlets.

Meanwhile, right now, the very top name in arts and entertainment as a whole in this corner of Connecticut (state motto: “Still revolutionary”) just has to be writer Wally Lamb, 64, author of the hilarious and deeply sympathetic novel “She’s Come Undone” that’s told in the voice of young Dolores Price as she rolls into adulthood at 257 pounds still determined to really go belly up. In the late 1990s, Lamb was director of the Writing Center at Norwich Free Academy in these parts and then taught creative writing in the English Department at the University of Connecticut.

His follow-up hit happens to be called “I Know This Much Is True” (no relation to “All is True,” our serial novel currently appearing in Konk Life).

******

 

Quote for the Week:

Toward dawn we shared with you

Your hour of desolation,

The huge lingering passion

Of your unearthly outcry,

As you swung your blind head

Toward us and laboriously opened

A bloodshot, glistening eye,

In which we swam with terror and recognition.

 

  • from the “Wellfleet Whale” by Stanley Kunitz (quoted in “She’s Come Undone” by Wally Lamb)
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