Contemplating Iran: Announcing the 2013 Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series Speaker

Readers of this blog know of the generosity of my father, and many of you know about the Distinguished Historians Lecture Series that he founded in my mother's name at Villanova University.

James McPherson gave the inaugural lecture in 2009, and two years ago Jill Lepore honored us with an early glimpse of her new book on Jane Franklin—a book that now sits on the long list of the National Book Awards.

This year, on October 8, starting at 7 PM, in the Villanova Room/Connelly Center (Villanova University), the series is hosting yet another extremely timely presentation: "Iran in Transition: US-Iran Relations in the Nuclear Age." Ray Takeyh, (Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations Professor, Center for Strategic Studies, Georgetown University) will be the speaker, and the presentation is free and open to the public.

Interested? You can register here.

Our family looks forward to hosting you for this conversation.

Read more...

Jill Lepore: The Prodigal Daughter

Each year, for the Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series, a group of faithful Villanova University scholars (including my good friend Paul Steege) work with my father to choose a speaker who will engage the Villanova students, faculty, and greater community. In 2011, that speaker was Jill Lepore, whose work I have always admired and whose presentation on Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's sister, was exquisite. Jill was working on a book, she'd told us. What a great a book we knew it would be.

In this week's New Yorker, Jill Lepore contributes an essay titled "The Prodigal Daughter" that interleaves her research on Jane Franklin with her own growing up with a mother who was primed for beauty and who insisted that Jill go out and embrace the world. It is the most personal essay I've ever read by Lepore—and, by far, the most wrenching. It bears reading by any writer seeking proof of how the personal can elevate the historical, and how history bears on the present day. The final paragraph of Lepore's essay made me weep, literally. But let me share here the place where it all begins:

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock. She'd be out running errands, see something wonderful, pull over, and pop the trunk. I never knew anyone better prepared to meet with beauty.

And later—a passage I remember well from Lepore's 2011 talk:

He ran away in 1723, when he was seventeen and she was eleven. The day he turned twenty-one, he wrote her a letter—she was fourteen—beginning a correspondence that would last until his death. (He wrote more letters to her than he wrote to anyone else.) He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name.

Lepore's new volume, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, is set for publication in October. My mother would have loved Jill Lepore. If you don't already love her,  you will after reading "The Prodigal Daughter."

Read more...

Jill Lepore and the electrifying evening

I'd like to use the word "electrifying" in the following post.  I'd like to use it several times.

Because that's the word that kept coming to mind throughout our time with Jill Lepore, who last evening graced Villanova University as the third speaker in The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series.  If I had allowed myself to wonder, theoretically, how one young woman could have already achieved so much in life—she's a professor of American History at Harvard and one of my very favorite writers at The New Yorker; she's published books on topics ranging from the Tea Party to the origins of American identity; she's gone to Dickens camp and read 38 volumes of original Ben Franklin; her work has won the Bancroft Prize and been a finalist for the Pulitzer; she's even co-authored a novel—I stopped wondering two minutes after she walked into the room.  The answer is pretty basic, pretty simple:  Jill Lepore doesn't waste an ounce of her intellect on posturing or presumption.  Her enthusiasm is equal to her intelligence.  Her facility with language, structure, theme is all in rather happy accordance with her capacity to sleuth her way toward truth.

She was extraordinary last night.  She was—here it comes—electrifying as she spoke about Jane Franklin, Ben Franklin's sister and truest correspondent (for more on the topic, please click here).  My mother would have loved Jill Lepore.  She would have sat there as I sat there, on the edge of a seat in a crowded room, happy to be in the company of one that exhilarating, that engaged. 

There are so many who make an event like this happen.  I'm particularly grateful to my friend Paul Steege, a Villanova University associate professor of history who sits on the speaker selection committee, to Diane Brocchi, to Father Kail Ellis, to Marc Gallicchio, and to Adele Lindenmeyr.  And of course, none of this would be possible without my father, Horace Kephart, who had the foresight to create this lecture series in memory of the woman he loved. 

Read more...

Am I a Narcissist?

I'll be headed to London in a few days for a very quick trip and so, in typical Beth style, I am trying to complete every single task on every single list before I get on that plane.  Stupid, I know.

That means that the last few days have been consumed with the writing of the second draft of a commemorative book for a client, the back-and-forthing with an insurance agent, the prepping for a school visit at the Eighth Grade Center @ Springford, the watching of a documentary about graffiti, the blogging about Ismet Prcic's debut novel Shards, the writing of stories for a client news magazine, the neglect of a few emails I still have to write, the repolishing of my nails, the development of a plan to put my William novel into the world, the forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning, the thinking through of my spring Penn course, the preparation for the upcoming Jill Lepore lecture at Villanova University (wait, how does one prepare?), the reading of the first two chapters of The Art of Fielding because it is about time, the cooking of a dinner that could have been better, the reading of a friend's forthcoming novel, the writing of verse for our holiday card, the realization that the roof is leaking again, and the completion of an adult novel that has been in the works for years.  I also purchased a few early holiday gifts and made the decision—an emphatic one—that I do not like shopping.  No, I do not.

{For those, who, understandably, plan to read no further, please note (see below) that this tongue-in-cheekish list was produced to make a larger point.}

In the midst of all of this, I paged through (lightning speed) the December 5 issue of Newsweek.  (Frankly, I still have a lot of questions about this new iteration of Newsweek, but those questions are for another day.)  I stopped at page 61, the Omnivore page, where Diablo Cody and Charlize Theron look out upon the reader.  The story is called "The Narcissist Decade," and it's an essay Cody has penned in anticipation of the December 9 release of her film "Young Adult."

"Young Adult," as it turns out, is about a not-very-nice seeming young adult author.  Cody tells us:  "Mavis's humble peers possess something that eludes her more each year:  growth.  They've matured into seasoned adults with perspective and humility, while Mavis continues to flail in a self-created hell of reality TV, fashion magazines, blind dates, and booze."

(I sincerely hope that Mavis is not meant as a stand-in for all YA authors.  I sincerely hope that.  I do.)

In any case, later on in the essay, Cody, whose husband has told her that she shares a number of traits with Mavis (an assertion Cody at first denies), goes on to suggest that perhaps we are all narcissists.

Before you get as offended as I did, allow me to explain.  Sure, we're not all deranged homewreckers in pursuit of past glory.  But if the era of Facebook and Twitter has fed any monsters, it's those of vanity, self-obsession, and immaturity.  Who among us hasn't Googled an ex, or measured our own online social circle against that of a perceived rival, or snapped multiple "profile photos" in an attempt to find the best angle?  Who hasn't caught herself watching an episode of "Jersey Shore" and thought, "I'm a grown-up. Why am I concerned with these people and their sex lives?

I haven't actually ever done any of those things (helped in part by the fact that I never had an ex and that I'm too uncool to know what channel "Jersey Shore" is on).  But I suspect that anyone could look upon a blogger who enumerates her week's activities as a narcissist (for the record, I was just trying to make a point up there).  Any memoirist (and heck, I've written five and am halfway through a sixth) could also be called one of those—you know—those.  Any Facebooker who has ever logged a single status update could also get slammed with the term.

But here's what I'm going to suggest, a modest proposal:

It's how we live our whole life (lives?) that counts.

Read more...

Jill Lepore, Ben Franklin and his Sister, and an Invitation to an Evening at Villanova University

On December 6, 2011, starting at 7 PM, Jill Lepore will join hundreds of students, faculty members, and university neighbors in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. I'm extremely proud that Dr. Lepore represents the third speaker in The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series, an annual event that my father created in memory of my mother, who graduated in the top of her Villanova University class following a college career that was not initiated until she had raised her three children.

Dr. Lepore's talk is titled "Poor Jane's Almanac: The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin's Sister," with the further subtitle: "an 18th century tale of two Americas."  We get some hint of the fascinating content to come in this New York Times op-ed piece, which appeared on April 23, 2011.  I am excerpting at length, and I hope to be forgiven:

Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.

Their lives tell an 18th-century tale of two Americas. Against poverty and ignorance, Franklin prevailed; his sister did not.

At 17, he ran away from home. At 15, she married: she was probably pregnant, as were, at the time, a third of all brides. She and her brother wrote to each other all their lives: they were each other’s dearest friends. (He wrote more letters to her than to anyone.) His letters are learned, warm, funny, delightful; hers are misspelled, fretful and full of sorrow. “Nothing but troble can you her from me,” she warned. It’s extraordinary that she could write at all.

“I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed.

He would have none of it. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.” He was, sadly, right.

She had one child after another; her husband, a saddler named Edward Mecom, grew ill, and may have lost his mind, as, most certainly, did two of her sons. She struggled, and failed, to keep them out of debtors’ prison, the almshouse, asylums. She took in boarders; she sewed bonnets. She had not a moment’s rest.

And still, she thirsted for knowledge. “I Read as much as I Dare,” she confided to her brother. She once asked him for a copy of “all the Political pieces” he had ever written. “I could as easily make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails,” he joked. He sent her what he could; she read it all. But there was no way out. 

Dr. Lepore, whose work in The New Yorker always thrills me and whose mind seems to track one curiosity after the other—Charles Dickens, Planned Parenthood, the Tea Party, Stuart Little, (she's even got a co-authored novel to her name)—is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American history at Harvard University.  She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engaging Andrew Bacevich as a Distinguished speaker in the series.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is recommended, given the large turnout we are blessed with each year.  Here, again, are the facts:

Jill Lepore, PhD

Poor Jane's Almanac: The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin's Sister

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

7 PM

Villanova Room, Connelly Center

http://www.villanova.edu/events/lectures/kephartseries/

I hope to see you there.  I'll be in the front along with family and friends.

(The photo, by the way, is in honor of the fact that Benjamin Franklin was key among those early environmentalists who fought to preserve the Schuylkill and her drinking water.)

Read more...

Jill Lepore to Headline the Third Annual Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture

A week or so ago, when my husband and I were powerless, my father called and invited us to dinner at his home, where my mother's orchids still grow, the figurines still shine, and the sun yet goldens the rooms.  Glimmers of my mother, all.  We were almost finished with this delightful repast (cloth napkins! dimmed lights! smart vegetables! organic cookies!) when my father mentioned that the Villanova University committee entrusted with the selection of a scholar for the Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series had made its decision, and that Jill Lepore was slated to come.  She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engaging Andrew Bacevich  in this role, and she will appear at the university on the evening of December 6th, details to come.

Jill Lepore happens to be one of my idols. She's not just the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker.  She's a woman who smiles warmly back at you from her portrait photos, despite the fact that her head is preposterously full of stuff about Charles Dickens and the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and the Tea Party, eighteenth-century Manhattan and the King Philip's War (she has written or is writing books about it all).  For an apparent change of pace, she's even co-authored a widely acclaimed novel called Blindspot.  And once she wrote a New Yorker piece called "The Lion and the Mouse" (about E.B. White, Stuart Little, and the sometimes ridiculously short-sighted nature of critics and publishing houses) that was so letter perfect I didn't just blog about it here.  I wrote Ms. Lepore a gushing fan letter.  Miraculously, Ms. Lepore wrote back. 

Jill Lepore will be talking about the Tea Party and the Constitution in December.  I'll be providing more details as I can.  For now I'm simply expressing my excitement that my mother and father are working together once again to bring all of us something grander than grand.

My thanks to Paul Steege, a good friend, fine teacher, smart writer, and great soul, who remains a key member of this selection committee.

Read more...

Suitability, Stuart Little, and Teen Readers

Jill Lepore, who chairs the History and Literature Program at Harvard and has a novel due out in December, has written a most extraordinary piece in this week's New Yorker. "The Lion and the Mouse" takes a definitive look at E.B. White's journey with Stuart Little and at the librarian and social forces that sought to thwart the perpetually tidy mouse's very existence. Banned from many libraries, despised by the self-righteous, barred from the Newbery Medal list, Stuart Little nonetheless went on to sell more than four million copies. Fortitude is an essential character in the story here. So is the power of American readers to override the gate-keeping critics.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore

In her exquisite essay, Lepore also explores a question that haunted me throughout my chairing of the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury in 2001: What makes a children's book a children's book, especially for stories aimed at the pre-teen and teen set? What, in other words, determines suitability? Young readers have before them an entire world of books—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens, Tolstoy, anything anywhere that sits on any shelf or (now) resides on some virtual post. Why the need for a YA label? Why not just write and sell good books and trust the teens to find them?

In my own work on what will be four novels for young adults and one long short story for an upcoming anthology, I've taken the stance that teens are as smart as and often smarter than adults (at least, as compared with moi, they demonstrate an acutely superior intelligence). Teens are smart, they are discerning, and—trafficking as they do in blog contests and book reviews and often electrifying e-book talk—they are some of the most important readers around. What gets written for and read by teens is being talked about today and will reverberate tomorrow, and so, in my own small way, I have chosen to write about big issues—identity, dying, loss, poverty, and, in the short story, suicide—in language that does not sacrifice itself to some false premise about teen vocabularies.

Today, on the myspace Harperteen blog, I'll be continuing my discussion of an issue I wrestled with earlier this week: brand name novels for girls. In the meantime, I send this calla lily from my garden to bookluver, who embraced HOUSE OF DANCE earlier this week.

http://www.myspace.com/harperteen

http://bookluver-carol.blogspot.com/2008/07/house-of-dance.html

Read more...