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They Marched into Sunlight is Maraniss's sixth book, following critically acclaimed biographies of Vince Lombardi and Bill Clinton. Weaving the experiences of two hundred characters — including former Madison mayor Paul Soglin '66, JD'72 and current Vice President Dick Cheney PhDx'68 — the story at times reads “like a Russian novel,” Maraniss admits. But his extensive research, involving hundreds of interviews with students, professors, police officers, and soldiers on both sides of the conflict, allows him to get underneath the surface of history to the rich human dramas that played out at home and abroad. “The sixties are lost in stereotypes,” Maraniss says, “and I started in a sense to try to recover them from that, to make them real.” A native of Madison who covered anti-war protests as a young reporter for the Capital Times, Maraniss says the book also has given him plenty of excuses to come home. He'll return to old haunts again to participate in the Wisconsin Book Festival, which takes place in Madison October 22–26 (see story below). “I love books, I love book festivals, and I love Wisconsin,” he says. “So I'm delighted to be part of this one.” — Michael Penn Book It Madisonians buy more books than just about any other community in the nation. What better place, then, to celebrate the written word? The Wisconsin Book Festival was inaugurated last year to do just that. Organized by the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the festival brings to the state dozens of authors of national and regional prominence throughout the year. It all culminates in a Madison-based gala that the festival's associate director, Tilney Marsh MA'98, describes as “five days of book geek heaven.” During its first run, eight thousand people swarmed downtown bookstores, libraries, and theaters for a prolonged burst of creative energy, expressed through a multitude of readings, panels, workshops, and conversations with ink-stained wretches of all walks. Headlining this year's event, which runs October 22–26 at several Madison venues, is a twin bill of poets laureate — Wisconsin's Ellen Kort and the nation's top bard, Billy Collins. Novelists Elizabeth Berg, Colson Whitehead, and Tim O'Brien, National Public Radio correspondent Anne Garrels, and Wisconsin authors Jacquelyn Mitchard, Deborah Blum MA'82, and Patricia McConnell '81, MS'84, PhD'88 are on the schedule, which also includes musicians John Wesley Harding and John Santos and an exploration of Latino voices in print and film. “The cool thing about doing a festival around the idea of the book is that a book can be about anything,” says Alison Jones Chaim, the festival's director. The events celebrate the state's literary traditions in big fashion, she says, and also draw attention to the many other book-related activities that the council sponsors around the state during the rest of the year. The festival is sponsoring hotel deals for those who want to travel
to the happenings. — Michael Penn COLLECTION — To Cap It Off Cooper notes that nurses' caps were unusual in that not only did they serve as a badge of profession (they identified the wearer as either a registered nurse or a student who would become one), but they were also a mark of pedigree. Each cap's style was unique to the school that graduated the nurse. From the 1920s to the 1970s, for instance, UW-Madison had exactly one style of nurse's cap, given to each student. But today headgear is out of fashion in hospitals. “They're really not very practical,” Cooper says of the traditional caps. “They'd fall off any time nurses had to lean over patients.” The UW stopped giving out caps in the early 1970s, and Cooper, sensing the end of an era, began collecting in 1977. The collection is open to the public, but appointments are recommended. — John Allen Nintendo Concerto Violinists Ken Chang, Chase Moore, and Elise Meichels, along with cellist Koji Yabumoto are the UW-Madison seniors who make up Lucido Felice, which is Italian for “shiny happy.” All have been playing their stringed instruments since elementary school and share a love of music. But this quartet prefers an alternative to standard classical fare — their repertoire includes “Stairway to Heaven,” “Rubber Duckie,” and the theme to the television program The A-Team. “Our music appeals to the not-so-serious crowd,” says Yabumoto. “We really aim to do something different.” “There is a lot of music out there that slips through the cracks,” says Chang. “Our generation grew up on Nintendo, so people are blown away when they hear us play theme songs from their favorite games.” But the Lucido Felice Quartet does more than just entertain. It also raises money for charity — more than $2,500 during the past seven years. The quartet donates all profits from its first CD, Chamber Music Like Burning, to the United Cerebral Palsy Fund. The CD costs just $5 and is available on the Web at shinyhappy.org. “When I was in eighth grade, my girlfriend's sister, Bethany, had severe cerebral palsy,” says Chang. “Bethany was like a little sister to me, and I knew what her family went through to care for her. I wanted to help, so I played my violin.” The quartet got its start when Chang and Moore were in high school. Both performed in the state honors orchestra, and during a break, they arranged the theme song from a popular Nintendo game, The Legend of Zelda, for violin. Fate brought the two together again at UW-Madison, where they shared a music theory class, and they decided to form a quartet to play for fun. “We just like to make people smile,” says Moore. “Sometimes people walk by when we're playing and say, ‘Hey! I know that song! They're playing MacGyver!' “ Ever since, the four students have been performing regularly on State Street at Lisa Link Peace Park and near State Street Brats. During the holiday season, they fill the halls of Madison-area hospitals with the sounds of Christmas carols. “Just seeing the look of appreciation on people's faces makes us feel like we're making their day a little brighter,” says Meichels. The group also plays at occasional open mics and house parties, where few other quartets are willing to risk their expensive equipment. “We were worried about ruining our instruments, so we bought some cheap ones on eBay,” says Moore. “That way, it's no big deal if some beer spills on them.” Because all four members of the quartet are seniors, this year will be the last they will perform together. “When I look back on my life at the university, my time spent with the quartet on State Street is the best,” says Chang. “It has meaning.” — Erin Hueffner '00 Peace Movement It sounds like a campy recap of the 1961 Oscar-winning film West Side Story: in Madison, kids are using dance techniques to stop bullies dead in their tracks. But though the idea may have been artistic license for director Jerome Robbins, UW-Madison dance lecturer Rena Kornblum is making it work in the real world. She's developed a movement-based curriculum for teaching children how to deal with their own anger and with others' aggression toward them — peacefully. According to Kornblum, all violence entails an intrusion into someone else's space, and moving through space is the natural domain of dance. Since aggressive acts are basically a series of movements, it follows that one can prevent violence by making different, more socially acceptable movements to express or react to anger.
The principal invited Kornblum to do a teacher in-service, and later she was asked back to work with the students. The curriculum Kornblum developed through her years of working with the kids has now been published in her 2002 book, Disarming the Playground. Kornblum says one key to preventing violence is teaching children spatial awareness. They learn how close someone can get to them before they feel uncomfortable, and when they are making someone else feel unsafe by intruding upon that person's “space bubble.” Space, in fact, figures prominently in Kornblum's lessons in more ways than one. In a favorite activity, the “spaceship game,” Kornblum divides the kids into two groups: aliens and astronauts. The “aliens” don full-body sacks made of stretchy material. When they move their arms and legs inside the sacks, they outwardly take on otherworldly shapes. Their side of the room is their “planet.” The “astronaut” children take off in their cloth “spaceship” and land on the aliens' planet. They observe the aliens and try to determine by their movements if they're friendly or not. But, do body movements on this planet mean the same thing as they do on Earth? Does a wave mean “hello” here? If someone is pushed, could it just be a welcoming gesture? The creative activity initiates a discussion on how body movements can mean different things to different people, from the same or other cultures. “I'm amazed at the profoundness of the second-graders' questions after playing ‘spaceship,' “ says Kornblum. “It gets to the heart of having empathy for others who may not be exactly like them and helps them address prejudice.” — Candice Gaukel Andrews '77 Artifacts
Science and literature intersect in the writings of Dava
Sobel, author of such popular, true-life tales as Galileo's
Daughter and Longitude. This November, UW-Madison's
Center for the Humanities and the Wisconsin Initiative for Science
Literacy will bring Sobel to campus for a public lecture —
her first in Madison — and a three-day residency.
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Arts & Culture
Fall 2003 Features
Alumni News Regulars
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On
October 18, 1967, David Maraniss x'71 stood
on the fringe of a gathering crowd near the old Commerce building
and witnessed history. The student sit-in that erupted into a violent
clash with police that day didn't involve him, a freshman at
the time. But it certainly affected him.
Tucked
away within the Clinical Science Center is a history of the nursing
profession, told in folds of poplin. Among the School of Nursing's
administrative offices, emerita professor Signe Cooper GNC'43,
'48 keeps a historical collection of nursing memorabilia.
The prize of her mini museum, lined up on shelves and topping the
heads of mannequins, are more than a hundred nurses' caps
from schools around the world.
String
quartets love the classics — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Super
Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda. The last two may be classics
only to members of the Nintendo generation, but that's the
tradition Madison's Lucido Felice Quartet fits into.
Three
fields of art — musical, verbal, and visual — collide
in a new book out from UW Press. Winterreise:
A Winter Journey in Poetry, Image, and Song combines a CD of
Franz Schubert's winter song cycle (as performed by UW professors
Paul Rowe and Martha Fischer) enclosed within a book of lyrics (by
nineteenth-century poet Wilhelm Müller, translated into English
by Louise McClelland Urban) and illustrated with photos by Madisonian
Katrin Talbot MS'85.
For
those whose musical taste runs more to the modern, there's
Decked Out by Brittany Shane '99.
Shane got her start playing such Madison venues as the Memorial
Union Terrace, Café Assisi, and Mother Fool's Coffeehouse.