By Marc Stengel

Power of the Voice

By any measure, Rebecca Bain is the leading lady of local literati. Although she has worn many hats at Nashville Public Radio in a career now entering its third decade, she is best known to book buffs in connection with a series of interview programs that she has produced and hosted. Her latest such broadcast is The Fine Print, which airs on WPLN-FM90.3 noon Saturdays and 9 a.m. Sundays.

An admitted obsessive-compulsive about reading, Bain nevertheless sees no contradiction in the use of radio—technically a non-literate medium—to promote the cause of literature. “Radio and books are about words—the power of words—and where those words can take you and what they can make you think about and the places they can make you visit and the emotions that they can elicit.

“When you’re reading an author interview on paper, it can be interesting; but you’re still hearing it in your voice. There is no sense of that person outside of the words. But when you’re hearing a radio interview, there’s their voice, and you get to hear the nuances of the feeling. It’s a very compelling thing. You are hearing the writer talk about what he does. And that’s not just the power of the word but the power of the voice.

“Authors make the best interviews—writers, I should say—because they’re so used to plumbing their emotional depths for their art that there are very few questions that a writer feels are intrusive. As a matter of fact, they’ll generally tell you more than you were asking to begin with.”

Bain can wax positively exultant about the Nashville book scene. “God, it’s a wonderful book town,” she declares while reminiscing about the literary chats she’s helped package for public consumption, first on Coffee Break, then on Authors Talk, and now on The Fine Print, which began airing on WPLN in January.

Bain doesn’t doubt that the city’s affection for books was influenced by—and perhaps even originated from—the denominational publishers who first cranked their presses here in the early 19th century. But it hasn’t stopped there. “I think the religious publishing aspect has enhanced secular reading. It promoted reading, and once you let The Word out of the bag, a lot of things get said—a lot of things get said. It transcends just religion and becomes political and historical. Any time you’ve got someone pushing literacy, for whatever reason, this is going to be good for books in general.”

As much as the books, however, it is the writers themselves who claim Bain’s deepest fascination...and respect. “You know, there are 1.3 million titles in print today. I think your chances of winning the lottery are better than your chances of getting your book published. But people who are writing literature—who are writing good books—without exception, they do it because they have to. They have got something they have to say, something they need to share. I’ve heard so many of them say, ‘I often wish I didn’t have this compulsion to write.’

“Writing...is not a career you pick. And I can appreciate that. I’m in exactly the same boat. I keep thinking, ‘Well, maybe I should do something else.’ And I can’t. My need to connect with the audience drives me. I love sharing things with people, and sharing writers is just the best.”

Signs and events

♦ 6:30 p.m. April 24 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers: “Plants and Their Needs,” a gardening seminar moderated by Walter Glenn and Lark Foster, coauthors of The Tennessee Gardener.

♦ 6 p.m. April 29 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers: John M. Barry will discuss and sign copies of Rising Tide.

♦ 2 p.m. May 3 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers: Peggy Harris will sign copies of Painting Baby Animals and demonstrate examples of her technique.

♦ 7 p.m. May 14 at Bookstar: “Raising a Reader,” led by a representative of the Ben West Public Library. A discussion on how, what, and why to read as a family.

♦ 2 p.m. May 24 at Bookstar: George Hetzell Jr. will read from and sign copies of Coaches’ Little Playbook.

Gift of days

Darwin’s Orchestra by Michael Sims (Henry Holt & Co., $30.00)

Now I understand how it works: You flick to a page and scan through until another topic steals your interest; then you jump over to a new location by means of a thoughtfully provided link, only to find yourself careening in a new, unexpected direction. Although you may have started at the first page with every intention of proceeding straight ahead, it’s not long before you’re skipping through strands of anecdote and discovery that have been woven together elegantly into a wide web of knowledge.

In defiance of the prevailing fascination with all things electronic, however, this particular web isn’t strung together from a complex tangle of phone lines, computers, and databases. Rather, it spins its charms between the covers of Michael Sims’ new book, Darwin’s Orchestra. This Nashville writer has orchestrated disparate fact and random tale into an intellectual cavort, apparently by converting his private curiosities into a public meditation upon the natural world.

Darwin’s Orchestra defies synopsis, being in effect a florilegium of synopses itself. In this case, use of the florid Renaissance synonym for “anthology” is certainly apt: The term literally means a “collection of flowers,” and leafing through the cuttings that Sims has gathered is like skipping from petal to petal among luxuriant blooms in a vast, rambling Garden of Knowledge—a garden that Darwin and his sympathizers still share uneasily with the Original Inhabitants.

“This is a book of days,” Sims declares by way of introduction. “The calendar dictates its format.” For each day, there is a relevant essay commemorating an event either obvious or arcane. Columbus, of course, commands Oct. 12 for his first sighting of a New World; and Neil Armstrong plants his flag into July 20 for having been the first to accomplish an old dream. When Sims points out that the Titanic plummeted to the depths on April 15, 1912, it is tempting to credit the U.S. Congress with a nasty sense of humor for floating the idea of a national tax day two years later.

With a temporal legerdemain, Sims accomplishes some magical symmetries. For example, Gary Larson, that caricaturist of weird science, is the subject of Sims’ essay for Jan. 1 because the cartoonist’s popular strip, The Far Side, began national syndication that very day in 1980. Then, 366 essays later, Sims writes poignantly about a 6-year-old boy and “his possibly imaginary tiger” who concluded 10 years of cartoon companionship when Calvin & Hobbes ceased publication on Dec. 31, 1995.

In between these unlikely bookends unfolds a series of concise, nattily written essays united by the common theme of natural history. March 14 acknowledges the scourge of the gypsy moth, while March 16 commemorates Edward Jenner’s experimental, 18th-century inoculations against smallpox.

All manner of creatures wise and wonderful inhabit Sims’ pages. There are tone-deaf earthworms (Oct. 10) who dismiss the musical entreaties of Charles Darwin and his family (thereby inspiring the book’s title). There are Neanderthals (June 2), Peking Man (Dec. 2), and “Lucy” (Nov. 30), whose importance as the evolutionists’ “Eve” stands in inverse proportion to the banal origin of her name. Sims ponders the natural world’s influence upon our most sacred observances, from Easter to Groundhog Day; and he skips with a time-traveler’s ease from 1933’s screen premiere of King Kong to the primordial screams of T. Rex.

Sims invites the reader to skip along with him by providing, at the end of many essays, occasional cross-references and suggestions for further reading. These give the book its serendipitous, interactive quality by suggesting a will-o’-the-wisp itinerary through the book’s channels and byways. Curiously, some cross-references between essays aren’t reciprocal, and the index doesn’t always provide every—or even the best—citation for the topic being consulted. Therefore, despite its classification as a “Henry Holt Reference Book,” Darwin’s Orchestra is better suited for treasure hunting than for formal research.

But surely it was never Sims’ intention to write an encyclopedic fact checker. His book is too playful, too catholic in its curiosities, too much of a gentle tease in the way it engages the reader. In fact, a chief charm of Darwin’s Orchestra is its tempo, and, for that, one of Sims’ favorite writers, Edwin Way Teale, perhaps deserves some credit. In an essay outlining the contributions of this important American naturalist, Sims describes Teale borrowing a line from Swiss philosopher Henri Amiel to observe that, in the autumn of life, “time, instead of flying, seems to hover.” And so it does for the reader borne aloft by the year of pages in Michael Sims’ generous book of days.

To comment, cavil, or compliment, your e-mail is welcome at historix@bellsouth.net

To comment, cavil, or compliment, your e-mail is welcome at historix@bellsouth.net