Source: www.speakup.com.br
Language level: Advanced
Standard: American accent
American City Life
Our readings this month were recorded at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, which took place in New York in April. The first reading is set in San Francisco in the optimistic “flower power” era of the 1960s. It’s by the actor and comedian Steve Martin, who provides his own introduction:
1965: Steve Martin’s San Francisco
Steve Martin
I’m Steve Martin and let me just say that it’s a great honor for me be here among these great writers and it’s an incredible disgrace that they are here with me! I’m going to read from an unpublished book that will be published in December. It’s called Born Standing Up and it’s a memoir of my career as a stand-up comedian:
On a humid Monday night in the summer of 1965, after finding a $8 hotel room in the then economically-friendly city of San Francisco, I lugged my banjo and black hardshell prop case ten sweaty blocks uphill to the Coffee and Confusion, where I had signed up to play for free. The club was tiny and makeshift, decorated with chairs, tables, a couple of bare light bulbs and nothing else. I had romanticized San Francisco as an exotic destination, away from friends and family, and toward mystery and adventure. So I often drove my 20-year-old self up from Los Angeles to audition my fledglings comedy act at the club, or to play banjo on the street for tips. I would sleep in VW van, camp out in Golden Gate Park, pay for a cheap hotel, or snag a free room in a Haight Ashbury Victorian crash pad, by making an instant friend. At this point, my act was a catch all, cobbled together from the disparate universes of juggling, comedy, banjo playing, weird bits I’d written in college, and magic tricks. I was strictly Monday-night quality, the night when, traditionally, anyone could get up to perform. All we entertainers knew, Mondays were really audition nights for the club. I walked past Broadway and Columbus where Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ramshackle City Lights Books was jam-packed with thin, small-press publications, offering way-out poetry, and reissues of long ago banned erotic novels. Around the corner on Broadway was Mike’s Pool Hall, where bikers and hippies first laid eyes on each other, unsure of whether they should beat each other up, or just smoke pot and forget about it. Steps away was the Hungry Eye, a night club that had launched a thousand careers, including those of the Smothers Brothers, The Kingston Trio and Lenny Bruce, but I had to trudge on by. Just up Columbus, I passed the Condor, the first of a sudden explosion of topless clubs, where Carold Doda, in a new-fangled bathing suit that exposed her recently inflated, basketball breasts, descended from the ceiling on a gran piano that was painted virginal white. This cultural mélange and the growing presence of drugs made the crowded streets of North Beach shimmer with toxic vitality.
The Coffee and Confusion was on nearby Grant Avenue, a street dotted with used clothing stores and incense shops. I nervously entered the club and Ivan Holtz, the show runner, put me on the line-up. I lingered at the back, waiting for my turn and surveyed the audience of about fifteen people. They were arrayed in patchwork jeans with tie-dyed tops, and the room was thick with an illegal aroma. In the audience was a street poet dressed in rags and bearded like a yeti, who had a plastic, which he unloaded on performers he didn’t like. I was still untouched by the rapidly changing fashion scene – my short hair and conservative clothes weren’t going to help me with this crowd. Ivan introduced me. my opening line – “Hello, I’m Steve Martin and I’ll be out here in a minute –was met with one lone chuckle. I struggled through the first few minutes, keeping a wary eye on Mr. Ping Pong Ball, and filled in the dead air with some banjo tunes that went just OK. I could see Ivan standing nearby, concerned. I began to strum the banjo, singing a song that, I told the audience, my grandmother had taught me:
“Be courteous, kind and forgiving,
Be gentle and peaceful each day,
Be warm and human and grateful,
And have a good thing to say.
Be thoughtful and trustful and child-like,
Be witty and happy and wise,
Be honest and love all your neighbors,
Be obsequious, purple and clairvoyant,
Be pompous, obese and eat cactus,
Be dull and boring and omnipresent,
Criticize thing you don’t know about,
Be oblong and have you knees removed.”
And then I said, “Now everyone” and I repeated the entire thing, adding in, “Ladies only: ‘Never make love to Big Foot.’ Men only: ‘Hello, my name is Big Foot.’” Not many people sang along.
9/11/2001: Don DeLillo’s New York
Our second reading is set in New York and in a darker era – that of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001. Don DeLillo reads from his latest novel, Falling Man, which was published in May of this year:
Don DeLillo:
Standard: American accent:
The first cop told him to go to the checkpoint on block east of here and he did this and there were military police and troops in Humvees and a convoy of dump trucks and sanitation sweepers moving south though the parted saw horse barriers. He showed proof of address with pictures 10 and the second cop told him to go to the next checkpoint, east of here, and he did this and saw a chain-link barrier stretching down the middle of Broadway patrolled by troops in gas masks. He told the cop at the checkpoint that he had a cat to feed and if it died his child would be devastated and the man was sympathetic but told him to try the next checkpoint. There were fire-rescue cars and ambulances; there were state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, vehicles with cherry pickers, all moving through the barricades, and into the shroud of sand and ash. He showed the next cop his proof of address and picture 10 and told him there were cats he had to feed three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he showed the splint on his left arm. He had to move out of the way when a drove of enormous bulldozers and backhoes moved through the parted barricades, marking the sound of hell machines at endless revving pitch.
He started over again with the cop and showed his wrist splint and said he needed only fifteen minutes in the apartment to feed the cats and then he’d go back to the hotel and reassure the children. The cop said okay but if you’re stopped down there be sure to tell them you went through the broadway checkpoint, not this one. He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller checkpoints and detouring around others. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and sidearm and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask man or woman, half surreptitious, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were garbage bags stacked high at curb stones and against the sides of buildings. He walked slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp and failed storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin.
