Frank Farnum coaching Pauline Starke in the Charleston for a film role.

My recent trip to Charleston, South Carolina was incredible.  I have wanted to visit the city for years and I was delighted to partake in historical tours, hearing tales of the American Revolution and the Civil War, leisurely strolls and an abundance of incredible food and drink. The week-long getaway was exactly what the doctor ordered to cure the stresses, anxieties, and routine of day-to-day life.

But despite the feeling of freedom and blissful contentment at having no responsibilities, I found myself falling victim to that same sneaky trap that so many American travelers fall into: I was preoccupied with work.

Now let me say, for the record, that I love working with Literary Traveler. It’s a great company with great people and often when I’m working there it doesn’t feel like work at all.  This preoccupation may have been due, in part, to the knowledge that our Kickstarter was going live while I was away. It was weighing on my mind that if we were successful in meeting our funding goal we would be shooting our TV pilot and, that if we weren’t, we would be back to square one. The pilot episode and the Kickstarter campaign were just too big to put out of my mind.

Now, Charleston is a city rich with history and old-world elegance. One of the most preserved cities in the U.S., it looks today much as it did one-hundred years ago (besides the paved streets, upscale shopping boutiques and foodie hotspots). Meandering past war monuments, hotels and houses dating back as far as the 1800s, it was easy to imagine a world long ago and far away. But my mind wasn’t on war and it wasn’t going back that far. What I kept finding myself thinking about was The Great Gatsby, Nick, Daisy and Jordan, and of the roaring twenties.

Specifically, what I was wondering was whether that flapper-essential dance, the Charleston, was in fact named for my destination city. After digging up a little research, I found that the light and carefree dance had some dark history behind it.

Yes, the dance is named after the coastal landmark city. To be more precise, it is named for the show tune it was first danced to, “The Charleston,” by James P. Johnson, which premiered in the 1923 Broadway show Runnin’ Wild. The show was one of the most popular of the decade and created widespread love of the Charleston dance by women around the country who wanted to kick up their heels, flap their arms and let loose.

But long before the glamorized show-dance ever made its Broadway debut, it was being performed, though in a far less choreographed fashion, by African and African-American slaves. The Charleston, you see, is said to be based on the “Juba” dance, which originated in West Africa and was brought to America during one of our most shameful times in history.

The city of Charleston was a hub in the slave trade, housing an abundance of plantations for which slave labor was used and Ryan’s Mart, one of the most well-known slave auction centers ever to exist. Enslaved Africans and African-Americans have passed a number of our cultural treasures along including gospel, blues, and jazz music and the dancing to go with them. The Juba, sometimes called the “Hambone” or “Pattin’ Juba,” was usually danced in groups and consisted of slapping, clapping, and stomping in rhythm while rotating in a counterclockwise circle. The slaves were not allowed to use drums or other rhythmic instruments for fear that they were communicating with each other through the music, so they made their own rhythm using their bodies. This may not sound like the Charleston you have seen, but much of what has become jazz and tap dance originated from these steps.

Similarly, the women of the 1920s were using dance to express ideals that had once been forbidden and taboo: freedom, fun, carelessness and independence. As a matter of fact, the Charleston was outlawed in many places during the 20s because it was seen as crude and scandalous. It is interesting to see how these two groups of people, the slaves in the direst of circumstances and American flappers, many of whom were privileged monetarily and lived seemingly happy and easy lives, do relate to one another. Their environments were so ostensibly different, and yet, the feeling of being stifled, caged, confined, existed inside them all.  The dances of the day, the Juba and the Charleston, helped each group to cope with their circumstances and feelings and enabled genuine creative expression.

I wonder if Daisy ever thought about this.

We want to get inside the novel, explore the places important to the novel and important to Fitzgerald.  From Long Island to Louisville, New York City and Minnesota, we want to pay homage to Fitzgerald and take viewers on a tour of the places that influenced him both personally and professionally.  We will talk to experts, do our own investigating, and explore the highlights of each destination so that others can ultimately emulate our experience, or tailor-make their own.

The Great Gatsby serves as an entryway into this literary travel experience, but once the door is open it will provide an unending amount of possibilities. Each episode of Literary Traveler will be unique, taking viewers to different locations, viewing destinations through the lens of different authors and texts.  View the California coast from Jack Kerouac’s rearview mirror one week, see New Orleans from Tennessee William’s streetcar the next, and round out your month by exploring Maine through the work of Stephen King. The possibilities are endless and exciting.

Literary Traveler has been telling these fascinating stories online since 1998 and, with your help, we look forward to bringing our passion for literary travel to television.

We have done small-scale video projects in the past, exploring a variety of literary locals, from Thoreau’s Walden Pond to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West.  Check out these past excursions on our YouTube channel and please support us on Kickstarter.

We are so grateful and thankful to all of our generous backers during our first week. We appreciate every contribution and all of the efforts made by our supporters to spread awareness for our project. This week we are making a push to get some more press and additional visibility for the project, but we could use your help.

If you are interested in this project, but are unable to donate, there are plenty of ways to get involved.  Please help create visibility for this project by sharing it through personal connections or social media.  We are also looking for any press opportunities that could help us get the word out there to others as excited by literature and travel as we are.

So how do we feel about an adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby, that makes the transition backward – to an older medium, from the page to the live action world of the stage? And how does a composer map out Gatsby’s world in the static setting of a theatre, without special effects, while mediating the characters’ sentences through the flowing notes of a score?

First performed in 1999, John Harbison was originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to write an operatic adaptation of Fitzgerald’s literary masterpiece in 1997.  A daunting task, but Harbison was up for the challenge.  In tandem with the release of the latest film adaptation, Harbison’s opera recently came to Boston, with a performance by the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Music.

One of the first things Harbison did when writing his opera was to take note of when everything was happening in Gatsby. He had to build the novel’s timeline in order to deconstruct it, and this was more difficult than you’d imagine, because, as Nick Carraway himself puts it, Gatsby is basically the contracted story of “the events of three nights,” big, dramatic parties that got snagged away from the stream of ordinary happenings.

It’s one of those things peculiar to youth, to remember long stretches of time in terms of dramatic parties and social events, celebrations and disasters.  Gatsby, the opera, may have sacrificed the fluid, romantic garden and water scenes for a closed-in stage, but it had the advantage of opera’s gripping musical crescendos to represent the heightened emotional drama of these scenes.

And perhaps in some ways, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby adaptation is as much an opera as it is a movie. Luhrmann, like Harbison, has previously reworked a classic (Romeo and Juliet), and his movies have been heavily dependent on spectacle and song. Perhaps the only way you can approach the classics is with bravado – and the whole brass section of an orchestra.

Harbison, for his part, ignored advice heard at Princeton that “you don’t set Shakespeare,” and wrote an opera for A Winter’s Tale anyway.  He ignored the traditional path of getting someone else to write the libretto – Gatsby’s libretto is his own, based in large part on scenes from the book.

At the pre-concert talk with Emmanuel Music, Harbison explains that his librettist editors told him: “You blew The Plaza scene. It was a complete disaster. I’m going to have to rewrite it for you.”

The scene was not rewritten, and The Plaza scene was riveting.  Alex Richardson’s Tom lashed out at Myrtle for mentioning Daisy’s name and, while you knew it was coming, it was still a shock. The opera setting provided the fireworks to incite that shock  – Richardson’s Tom was a barrel-chested guy with a deep booming baritone, and his outbursts were underlined heavily by the restive, melodrama of the score.

“People who remember everything and remember nothing have the best time,” said Harbison, of his opera, at his pre-concert talk. Like memory, a classic like Gatsby becomes a container and receptacle for associations that are personal and subjective – so Harbison explains that scholars with an objective viewpoint, or people who know nothing about the book, enjoy the opera. “I went into this piece thinking this was this little novel that I slipped into my pocket”, said one of Harbison’s librettists, with mystification at the expandable nature of Gatsby. Likewise, with the character of Gatsby himself, who Harbison describes as “transparent and opaque at the same time,” a man who could make people feel important, while he himself disappeared.

I have to admit that it was tough going watching the mobile, youthful characters of the book confined to the stage. But the opera’s ingenious score and 1920s-style faux pop songs (written by Murray Horwitz) went a long way to producing the sense of atmosphere that pervades the book.

The Great Gatsby, it seems, has given the ‘green-light’ for many interpretations of its nature. You get the sense that the difficulty of setting it for opera encouraged Harbison rather than put him off. For new artists adapting this work, if you can’t change the past, then the message is, don’t look back!

Luckily, at Literary Traveler, it’s not our job to worry about changing Gatsby. We will be looking back though, as we research Gatsby’s origins for our upcoming pilot –  Stay tuned and be sure to check out our Kickstarter page for more on Gatsby and our exciting project.

For the video, we hoped to capture a day in the LT office, where we often have collaborative brainstorming sessions and discuss future projects.  You may not be able to tell what we are talking about during some of the shots, but we are deep in conversation about our vision for the pilot episode of our literary travel series. There is something about travel that meshes so well with literature and I can’t believe that there is not already a show like ours on mainstream television.

I have been a long-time fan of the Travel Channel. I will watch almost anything, from Samantha Brown to Ghost Adventures.  Whatever the hook, I enjoy travel shows because they take you on a journey to someplace you haven’t been, allow you to experience the sites, smells and tastes of a place very different from where you are.

Travel inspires, sparks new ideas, surrounds us in new experiences — literature does the same.  Literature can have such an amazing sense of place, with settings chosen purposefully by an author who found inspiration there.  How interesting is it to consider how location impacts writers, how their own personal journeys influence their work and, ultimately, how we can traverse the same journey on a unique trip of our own.

I’ve had the travel bug for as long as I can remember.  As a child, I never played house or planned fake weddings.  Instead,  I played travel agent.  I would fill out the postcard inserts from my parents’ travel magazines, check off all the boxes, and send away for travel brochures for everywhere in the continental United States.  My parents were often confused why they received multiple mailings for Mississippi river boat cruises, but I just smuggled them into my bedroom and hoarded them away in a desk drawer that almost didn’t close.

As an adult, I travel every chance I can and when I am not traveling I still enjoy watching travel shows on television, constantly planning dream adventures, most of which I will someday take.  In the meantime, I’ve been known to pass an afternoon living vicariously through the Travel Channel. But, as much as I enjoy watching Adam Richman go up against the world’s biggest burger, or watching historic haunted locations through night vision, I think there is a place for literary travelers in the genre as well.  There are so many amazing literary journeys to take and Literary Traveler has the passion, the drive and the wanderlust to be your guide.

We are very excited to announce that we are officially LIVE on Kickstarter! Check out our Kickstarter page and be sure to watch our video for more information on this project.  It is sure to be an exciting month for us and we are so happy to have our loyal readers involved in the process.  We urge you to share the project with friends, family and anyone that you think might be interested in learning more about us!

Please check back here for updates on the project.  Throughout the next month, this blog will be Kickstarter central — a place for us to share our progress, ideas, project news and information on the future of the Literary Traveler series.

We are offering some incredible rewards to backers, including Literary Traveler t-shirts and an original art print by our own contributor, Jessica Monk.  We are also offering advanced access to the finished episode, before it becomes available to the general public.  Also, if you have your own blog or social media account, we are offering backers a special opportunity to be featured on LiteraryTraveler.com.  Check out the Kickstarter page for more on these rewards and other amazing incentives.

Literary Traveler, the series, will be a new thirty-minute program that follows in the footsteps of classic and modern writers, to explore the inspiring places connected to literature’s most popular and acclaimed works, and to make meaning of the lives, struggles and triumphs of famous authors.

These unique stories are presented by visiting places important to the writer, and by taking unique journeys related to that writer’s life, revealing their experiences and inspirations. Each episode will include interviews with experts, popular writers and academic scholars on the writers profiled. We’ll highlight what the journey and places meant for each writer and discuss how viewers can visit locations featured in the program. We’ll also stop to explore interesting places along the way, immersing ourselves in the culture of a particular time and place, as we traverse the challenges the writers faced on their varied paths to success.

Currently we are producing a pilot episode.  We will go in search of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. An iconic novel of the Jazz Age, with settings that range from Louisville, to Long Island, to NYC, we believe that Gatsby provides the perfect entry point for our literary series.

In order to get this venture off the ground, we are taking the project to Kickstarter and asking our fellow literary travelers to help us finance this project. We are excited to launch our Kickstarter project this May, coincidentally corresponding with Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of Fitzgerald’s classic. We want to take a deeper look behind this work and others, and at the places and experiences that contribute to each author’s journey.

Stay tuned for more on our Kickstarter and Literary Traveler, the series. Please join our mailing list to stay apprised of updates. And, as always, thank you for your support!

“Givers” are volunteers, picked to cover a wide range of geographic locations and a variety of community environments. This year 6,200 towns will be represented on World Book Night, up 400 from last year’s event! Givers run the gamut from teachers to authors… to Literary Travelers!

Yes, that’s right. This year, Literary Traveler feels incredibly fortunate to be World Book Night givers! We feel doubly lucky because we will be spreading the love for one of our favorite early twentieth-century authors, Willa Cather, by giving away copies of her celebrated 1918 novel, My Antonia.

We feel a particular affinity for Cather because of her inspiring connection to Place. Many of her novels paint a remarkably vivid picture of early pioneer life on the expanding frontier of the Great Plains. We also feel that Cather’s novel is incredibly accessible and a great way to begin a long lasting love affair with the classics.

Please stay tuned over the next couple months for more on Willa Cather and World Book Night 2013.  In the meantime, check out the Literary Traveler article, ”Red Cloud, Nebraska: Willa Cather’s Lifelong Muse.”

Yet, some Kerouac fans are rallying to raise the money to restore the Florida home where he lived towards the end of his life.  Kerouac resided in St. Petersburg in the 1960s with his mother and his third wife, Stella.  The small brick house, at 5169 10th Ave. N., is still owned by the author’s brother-in-law, John Sampas.  It has been mostly vacant since the 1970s, although it is still home to some Kerouac memorabilia, including his desk, which is adorned with a 1969 telephone directory for Lowell, Massachusetts.  An announcement still hangs on the wall announcing Lowell’s celebration of “Jack Kerouac Day.”

Pat Barmore, one of the Kerouac aficionados behind the fundraising endeavor, graduated from a Florida high school in 1969 and set off on a Kerouac-inspired road trip.  Upon returning home he found the author had passed away.  Barmore and others are working together to start “Friends of Jack Kerouac,” a non-profit organization with a goal to raise money for the restoration of Kerouac’s home.  They hope to someday soon restore the house to its former state and possibly open it up for the public.

With this goal in mind, they hold concerts at a St. Petersburg bar, the Flamingo, where Kerouac was a frequent patron.  The bar is an unassuming local joint and, apart from some technological upgrades, a couple flat-screen TVs and some Kerouac memorabilia, not much has changed since Kerouac stepped inside. It is often referred to as the bar where Kerouac had his last drink on October 21^st, 1969.  Of course, this cannot be verified, but it’s a romantic notion for the Kerouac fans that stop in the Flamingo for “a shot and a wash” – a Kerouac special that gets you a shot of whiskey and a beer to chase it with.

The Friends of Kerouac also sell t-shirts at the Flamingo to raise money for their cause.  The shirts feature Kerouac’s visage on one side and a passage from On the Road on the other.

Although, at the present time, Kerouac’s St. Petersburg residence is rundown, its mailbox remains a popular destination for fans, who still send mail to the long-deceased writer.  One letter thanks Kerouac for inspiration, stating “Your work is why I write,” while another hand-delivered message is a bit more vague.  ”Hey Jack, We came by to say hello. Sorry we missed you.”

If the Friends of Jack Kerouac are successful, the doors to the author’s abode may be open once more.

By Literary Traveler staff and interns

Jessica Ellen Monk, one of our amazing contributors, came up with the idea to do a staff wishlist about literary places in  Ireland we’d like to visit in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Let us know where in Ireland you’d like to visit…comment here or post on our FB and Twitter pages!

Jess: 

Growing up in Ireland there were as many ways for a kid to be bored as anywhere else. For one thing, instead of Hemingway and Whitman, at school we were forced to imbibe the fanciful mysticism of Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival. With our parents and with school we often had to go on ‘educational’ trips up the country which, along with the literature, we had no instinct to appreciate at the time. I was travelling with my family up the west coast as a child, when I remember finally ‘getting it’. The sweep of the bay under Ben Bulben in Sligo was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. Yeats’ famous poem “Under Bare Ben Bulben’s Head” contains the inscription that was carved on his tombstone in Drumcliffe churchyard: “Cast a cold eye on life and death /  horsemen pass by”. I can’t remember if we ever made it to Yeats’ graveside, but if I were to take a trip anywhere in Ireland, free of the need to visit anyone, I’d visit Ben Bulben again.

Francis:

Born of Irish decent, I just want to go anywhere in Ireland.

Carly:

Reading Ulysses for the first time is like getting to know  your Irish neighbor who recently emigrated–you know, the one who usually keeps to himself–in intimate detail, and also–thank goodness–Dublin, Ireland. The beauty of the seaside, the green of the rolling hills, and the breath of the rollicking people are captured in the inane details of Leopold Bloom’s anti-majesty, his daily observational. Dublin, to me, is a city of confession and merriment; I would like to take a stroll along the water, take in the commute and the conversation.

Amanda:

I have absolutely no Irish blood in my lineage and therefore my celebration of St. Patrick’s Day consists of wearing an offensive amount of kelly green and and drinking a few too many pints.  I am a big fan of modernist fiction — so when choosing an Irish author I would definitely say James Joyce.  Because reading him can be intense, I have usually gravitated towards his shorter fiction.  I think I would very much like to visit Dublin per his aptly-titled Dubliners.  His short story “Araby” was always a favorite. It features a young boy in Dublin travelling to an Irish bazaar where be becomes disenchanted by the things he sees there.  While that sounds a bit depressing, it’s really a beautiful story about growing up.

*Related Articles*

Apps for the Adventurous: Dublin Ireland’s “Storymap”

James Joyce and the Golden Gate of Pula

Homesick and Happy in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

Winter is coming to New York City, and no, I don’t mean another snowstorm (thank goodness!). Stopping in five international cities, NYC will be the only city in the United States to host the Game of Thrones Exhibition — a display of costumes, weapons, and props from the Emmy-award winning HBO series. Imagine transporting to the beautiful country of Westeros and immersing yourself in the five houses of Stark, Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, and Greyjoy. If you live in the Northeast, or are game for a road trip, this could be a possibility for you. The traveling display, following the likes of the Harry Potter exhibition, will give fans an up close and personal experience with more than 70 original artifacts from Season 1 and 2. However, unlike the Harry Potter price tag of $26, this exhibition is free to the public. The Game of Thrones Exhibit will open in NYC on March 28th and stay until April 3rd. Other cities hosting the exhibition are Toronto, Sao Paolo, Amsterdam and Belfast.  Check out the HBO website for more information as it becomes available.

If you can’t make it, don’t fret! Season 3 of Game of Thrones  premieres March 31st on HBO.  In the meantime, continue watching the extended trailer (like me) to judge how it will compare with A Storm of Swords, the third novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, upon which the show is based.

Who is everyone excited to see come back? How far will Dany go on her quest for revenge? And will Tyrion finally make things right with his family? I know one thing is for sure — season 3 will be full of jarring twists and heartaches for the characters and the audience. However, only one king (or queen) can survive. So whose side are you on?

Season 3 Extended Trailer

#GOTExhibition