Word: jolson
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...Speaking of dogs, it seems that animals are a pretty pervasive theme in your work—you refer to a chimp who knows sign language in “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” and you even published “Unleashed: Poems By Writers’ Dogs”—an anthology of poems written from the point of view of dogs...
...Well, I love animals. I have to have them in my life, dogs in particular. I just find them endlessly interesting and funny and moving. In the Al Jolson story, the first story I wrote, I had followed ape language experiments for many years—I just was interested in them. And I got to meet Coco in California many years ago, the gorilla who was taught sign language and that was a truly life-changing experience, sitting down with this gorilla who could communicate with me. Yeah, it was extraordinary. So, I’d heard about this...
...mentioned, your first short story was “In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried.” How did the idea for this story come about...
10.FM: Wow. Speaking of this short story, it’s one of the most anthologized works in the last quarter century. Al Jolson was considered to be one of the world’s greatest entertainers. He sang a lot of jazz and blues and influenced a bunch of famous musicians and performers, including Judy Garland and Bob Dylan, who once referred to him as “somebody whose life I can feel...
...movies. Putting on glasses, even the Ray-Ban type now handed out in theaters, does not remove barriers to the appreciation of movies (as director Peter Jackson insists); it is a barrier. Imagine the popular resistance to the first talkies if audiences had to don headsets to hear Al Jolson sing "Swanee." What would the odds on the success of three-strip Technicolor have been if people had to wear specs to see Gone With the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, or the 99% of movies now shown in color? The history of mass entertainment is to make consumption...