Episode 4: Sand Still in My Shoes
Then, on Labor Day, the fulcrum of the year, we teeter, nostalgic about summer, excited by, or frightened of, the fall. Labor Day is the real New Year, and, like that time, bittersweet.
On Labor Day, 2008, Liner Notes captures the mood, as we reluctantly let go of our summer selves and shift toward the regular rhythms of work, school, and home.
Host Paul Holdengräber, author/illustrator Maira Kalman, "Principles of Uncertainty", and investigative humorist Henry Alford, "The Big Kiss", offer their take on summer and its inevitable end.
Henry teaches us how to put sunscreen on our backs solo. This involves a doorframe. Maira marvels at being praised in summer, condemned in winter, for the same thing: spending the whole day in a hammock, reading.
In a portrait of the swanky Hamptons, Manhattan's summer playland, flamboyant ad-man and restaurateur Jerry della Femina, recounts how he and Martha Stewart were both crowded out of his own restaurant and wound up cooking a better dinner at home.
Famed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, reveals why he must swim; author Roger Bennett, Camp Camp, describes summer camp as Lord of the Flies meets Fantasy Island and reflects on his own golden summers; Diane Ackerman, author of The Natural History of the Senses, reveals our heightened summer senses, as well as summer mating habits and the evolution of kissing; and the world's most distinguished travel writer, Jan Morris, explains "The Trieste Effect."
Paul Holdengräber and Jan Albert, Film Blogger and Host of Behind the Screen, explore summer movies such as The Summer of 42, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Do the Right Thing.
Host on Episode 4 | |
 | Paul Holdengräber, the cultural wunderkind whose noted claim to fame as the Director of Public Programs at the prestigious New York Public Library, is making the library an after-dark hot spot for many New Yorkers. Previously, Holdengräber was the founder and director of the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. |
Guests on Episode 4 | |
 | Maria Kalman is an illustrator, author, and designer whose artwork is featured in a new edition of Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style. She has created many covers for The New Yorker, including the famous map of Newyorkistan, a collaboration with Rick Meyerowitz. She has created 12 children’s books including Max Makes a Million, Stay Up Late, Swami on Rye, and What Pete Ate. Kalman has also designed fabric for Isaac Mizrahi, accessories for Kate Spade, sets for the Mark Morris Dance Company, and, with her late husband, Tibor Kalman, under the M&Co. label, clocks, umbrellas, and other accessories for the Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Kalman's work is shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan. |
 | Henry Alford bears the grand title of "investigative humorist", writing books about his gleeful one-man exploits in a number of arenas. His "antic minidramas" have taken him to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Alford's books include Municipal Bondage: One Man's Anxiety-Producing Adventures in the Big City, Big Kiss: One Actor's Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Middle, and Out There: One Man's Search for the Funniest Person on the Internet. Alford has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and Vanity Fair and a staff writer at Spy. He has also written for The New Yorker, GQ, New York, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Travel & Leisure, The Village Voice and Paris Review. |
 | Jerry Della Femina is a legendary advertising executive, restaurateur, and best-selling author of From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. During his career in advertising, Della Femina co-founded Della Femina Travisano & Partners and Jerry Inc. His accounts included powerhouse clients such as Newsweek, Marvel Comics, The New York Mets, Financial Security Assurance, Isuzu, Meow Mix, and Pan Am, among others. Della Femina currently writes an award-winning weekly humor column for the East Hampton Independent. |
 | Dr. Oliver Sacks is a world-renowned neurologist and author who often writes about his patients’ experiences. Sacks is perhaps best known for his book, Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and the Oscar-nominated feature film of the same title with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Awakenings is based on his experience at a chronic care hospital in the Bronx where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927 and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. Sacks is well-known in the scientific community for his case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, Parkinson’s, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's. |
 | Francis "Frank" McCourt was born in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents. Unable to find work in the depths of the Depression, the McCourts returned to Ireland, where they sank deeper into the poverty McCourt describes so movingly in his memoir, Angela's Ashes. Angela's Ashes has sold over 4 million copies, has been published in 27 countries and translated into 17 languages. It won McCourt the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the ABBY Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His second book, Tis, picks up the story of his life where Angela's Ashes left off, with his arrival in America at age 19. It shot to the top of the best-seller lists as soon as it was published. His 2005 memoir, Teacher Man, chronicles his 27-year career in the New York City school system. Like its predecessor, it was an instant bestseller. McCourt also wrote a children’s book entitled Angela and the Baby Jesus. |
 | Roger Bennett is the Vice President at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies in New York where he has spent time looking at generational changes in identity and community. |
 | Diane Ackerman is the Orion Book Award winning author, poet, and naturalist known best for her work, A Natural History of the Senses. Her writing style, referring to her best-selling natural history books, can best be described as a blend of poetry, colloquial history, and easy-reading science. She has taught at various universities, including Columbia and Cornell, and her essays regularly appear in distinguished popular and literary journals. Ackerman's awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Burroughs Nature Award, and the Lavan Poetry Prize. She was named a "Literary Lion" by the New York Public Library, and has a molecule named after her, the “dianackerman.” Diane's latest book, The Zookeeper's Wife, is now available in paperback. You can find out more about Ackerman and her work at: www.dianeackerman.com. |
 | Jan Albert is a film producer, writer, and critic. Albert has written and produced television news stories and documentaries for CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, A&E, Lifetime, The Learning Channel, History, TVLAND, KING WORLD, the Hallmark Channel, and Discovery. Her television and radio work has been recognized with two Emmy Awards, a Cable Ace Award and the Armstrong and CPB Awards. From 1981-1995, she hosted Behind the Scenes, a public radio series featuring interviews with film directors, actors, writers and producers. |
 | Jan Morris is considered by many to be the most influential and famous travel writer of her generation. Morris began covering travel in 1953 when she accompanied the first successful ascent of Mount Everest by the British-led expedition of Hillary and Tenzing, and then sent a coded message to The Times reporting about it. Since then, Morris has authored over 30 books, numerous essays, and has been the subject of a BBC Biography. |
Production of Liner Notes is made possible through the generous support of Cunard.
