Photo of the Day: So Deeply Immersed in His Reading

Photography by: Joseph O. Holmes, NYC

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An Imaginary Life: Where Do Dead Imaginary Friends Go?

My Imaginary Friends

I usually very frequently post articles about Barack Obama. In fact, my articles here about him go way back to when he first published The Audacity of Hope. I ran across Barack when he was doing a book signing at one of our neighborhood bookstores, 59th Street Books in Hyde Park. Immediately afterwards, I went home and began writing my first and second articles about Obama. One of my last articles about him was posted here upon the emotionally stunning occasion of Obama’s election to be President of the United States. Subsequently, almost all of the media attention has been focused on the quotidian details of speculations about who Obama might select for senior staff positions in his administrations, and about how and how well various potential candidates might perform. And media pundits’ quarrelsome bickering about all of that. I have decided to refrain from joining in on the daily dramas of the media “guessing games.” For now, Barack is gone; he’s been very busy in a bunch of secret meetings, hidden away behind closed doors. And for the time being, that leaves me feeling a bit sad, like my imaginary friend has faded away.

So then I began to think more about imaginary friends. It’s hard for me to remember having any imaginary friends. Never did. Ever. That I can remember, anyway. Well, now that I’ve thought about it some, I did meet up with some imaginary friends when I was a youngster. I liked them a lot, too. I met them through books. You see, nobody taught me how to read, but I was already reading books when I was just five-years old. Robinson Caruso was my first imaginary friend, though he was always a bit fuzzy and cluttered up by all the pictures of the flora and fauna on that lush tropical island, as well as by the various colorful characters he encountered. Anyway, I didn’t stick with any one imaginary companion very long, over the years running through uncountable adventures of the the Bobbsey Twins (mostly Bert), Dorothy from Oz (but mostly The Tin Man and The Scarecrow), Black Beauty, The Lone Ranger, Rocketman and Lassie. Oh, I certainly can’t forget this one, and I had a dog that was really my bestest-ever-ever imaginary friend. I rescued him from a situation of terrible physical and emotional abuse, and we immediately became inseparable. But then he died (actually, got run over). All of them ended up just fading away from me. But part of me still wonders: where did all of my dead imaginary friends actually go?

About Imaginary Friends

For much of the first-half of the 20th century, experts about children either relegated or attributed imaginary friends to an immature stage of “magical thinking” that children needed to outgrow, or else the very notion of the existence of imaginary friends was just plain darkly dismissed.

But nowadays, an almost exactly opposite perspective prevails about imaginary friends. Studies in the area of child development have found that far from being done with imaginary companions at the age of four, older children (as well as some teenagers) report having imaginary companions. Research now suggests that imaginary friends can provide emotional stability, feelings of competence and a sense of enhanced social perception. Once again, “wholesome fantasy” is alive and well!

But what happens to one’s imaginary friends when childhood imaginary companions fade away, are rejected or dismissed when real-world opportunities for social interaction become more available and appealing to the child? Where do the poor little imaginary friends go when they die? Are they really gone or dead, or are they still sadly hanging around down here, watching as the real world goes around and passes them by? The following animated short film addresses that very question. At first, the film seems to be a light-hearted and humorous one, but the issues with which it deals are universally serious topics, matters of rejection, life and death.

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Where Do Dead Imaginary Friends Go?

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Chicago’s Studs Terkel Dies at 96: A Champion of the Human Spirit

Chicago’s Studs Terkel Dies at 95: A Champion of the Human Spirit

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NBC News: Chicago’s Studs Terkel Dies at the Age of 96

Studs Terkel Dies: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The New York Times has reported that Chicago’s legendary Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the enthusiastic host of a popular nationally syndicated radio show on WFMT-FM in Chicago, died Friday at his home there at the age of 96.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Mr. Terkel relied on his effusive but gentle interviewing style to bring forth in rich detail the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. For more than the four decades, Studs produced a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.

Division Street: America (1966), his first best seller, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974).

Mr. Terkel’s book The Good War: An Oral History of World War II won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. In Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977), Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir. In Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992) and Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It (1995), he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.

In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized his books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.” The amiable Mr. Terkel was a gifted and seemingly tireless interviewer who elicited provocative insights and colorful, detailed personal histories from a broad mix of people. “The thing I’m able to do, I guess, is break down walls,” he once told an interviewer. “If they think you’re listening, they’ll talk. It’s more of a conversation than an interview.”

Readers of his books could only guess at Mr. Terkel’s interview style. Listeners to his daily radio show, which was first broadcast on WFMT-FM in 1958, got the full flavor as Studs, with both breathy eagerness and a tough-guy Chicago accent, went after the straight dope from guests like Sir Georg Solti, Muhammed Ali, Mahalia Jackson, the young Dob Dylan, Toni Morrison and Gloria Steinem.

Now that the author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol has died, what should be his epitaph? “My epitaph will be ‘Curiosity did not kill this cat,’” he once said.

The entire New York Times article can be read here.

Rick Kogan has written a detailed article in The Chicago Tribune, which can be read here.

Studs Terkel’s website at The Chicago Historical Society can be accessed here.

Studs Terkel’s (1970) WFMT-FM radio interview with me (Patrick Zimmerman) can be heard here. Parts of this radio interview later become a selection (pp. 489-493) in Terkel’s acclaimed book, Working:

Audio: Part I of The Radio Interview

Audio: Part II of The Radio Interview

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Studs Terkel: Remembering His Life and Times

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Conversations about Studs Terkel (2004)

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Studs Terkel: About the Human Spirit (2002)

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Studs Terkel: The Pioneering Broadcaster

Music Audio: Mavis Staples/Hard Times :

Studs Terkel: A Champion of the Human Spirit

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Bob Dylan’s Foto-Rhetoric: Hollywood Behind the Sign

“t dare not ask your sculpturer’s name/with glance back hooked, time’s hinges halt.”

Bob Dylan’s text for a photo of Marlene Dietrich at Gary Cooper’s funeral in 1961.

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript

Barry Feinstein, the rock and roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he found a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark and moody snapshots taken of Hollywood in the early 1960s. And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.

At the time that he had originally arranged the group of photographs in the 60s, Mr. Feinstein had thought of Dylan, whom he had met earlier on the East Coast. “I asked him as a joke, ‘Wanna come out and maybe write something about these photographs?‘ ” Mr. Feinstein said. “So he came out and wrote some text.” Mr. Dylan, then in his 20s, arrived in Hollywood, examined the photographs and wrote his own prose poems to accompany them.

Now, after being neglected in storage for more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November in a collection titled Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript. The photographs in the book were taken during a period in the 1960s when Mr. Feinstein was in his 20s and just a lackey at a Hollywood movie studio. “I was living in California, in Hollywood, working at the studio, and I thought there was something there journalistically in taking these pictures that were not at all glamorous,” Mr. Feinstein said. “They were really the dark side of glamour.”

The result is a collection of vintage photographs that is sometimes dreary and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, snapshots of movie props and roadside stands, topless starlets and headless mannequins. In one photograph a young woman, who is visible only from the ankles down, crouches on Sophia Loren’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, her hand pressed onto the cement. In another photograph, a completely empty parking lot at 20th Century Fox is sardonically marked by a large sign for “Talent.”

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Hollywood: Behind the Sign

Music: Bob Dylan/Farewell

Hollywood: Behind the Sign

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