Mark leaps onto the Twain track again

At my request, former Beacon Journal and current Plain Dealer TV writer Mark Dawidziak provided me with this information:

I'm just up for air after helping to run the 103rd International Dickens Fellowship Conference in Cleveland (we did our three-person Mark Twain show, "Twain By Three," for the Dickensians) and delivering a paper on the importance of Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight!" at the State of Mark Twain Studies Conference at Elmira College. Editor's note: In New York state.

Hal made good on his promise to get to Elmira to hear the paper. A friend from Thousand Oaks was in the audience and made the following clips from the video function on his digital still camera. He then posted them on Youtube. Watch the first one to the end (the others are optional viewing).

I started teaching the Reviewing Film and Television course at Kent State University this past spring. And Kent State University Press has issued the first two reprints by the lost Ohio author Paul Bauer and I have been researching for, oh, about 17 years: "Shanty Irish" (with a sublime foreword by "Matewan" director John Sayles) and "Circus Parade" (with a foreword by Harvey Pekar).

For a brief rundown on Tully, go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tully

He worked briefly for the Akron Beacon Journal around 1908.

Links to the reprints:

http://upress.kent.edu/books/Tully_J2.htm
http://upress.kent.edu/books/Tully_J.htm

And our biography of Tully will be published by KSU Press, with a foreword by Ken Burns, in 2011. We just finished it, so it has been an incredibly packed summer.
Updates as they occur,
All best,
Mark


-----------------------

Ken Burns, of course, is the guy who has produced some of PBS' finest series. Burns' works include "Mark Twain." And there's “Baseball,” “The Civil War,” “Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Huey Long,” “Lewis and Clark,” “The Statue of Liberty,” “Thomas Jefferson” and “The West," to pluck a few from a long, long list.

To watch Hal Holbrook's chat, click on the headline, and watch to the end to see Holbrook hug Dawidziak, our Mark, who also puts on an excellent Twain show in local venues along with his wife, Sara Showman.

If you want to see other YouTube bits from the Twain gathering, which are all of Dawidziak talking about Holbrook, go to these four other YouTube sites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za9vvI7ia4w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAwH-TsB5qs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yW2LunVaZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB9zys6zu4w


The BJ lost a boatload of talent to the Plain Dealer as the BJ wound down from the dominant quality newspaper in Northeast Ohio to the McClatchy financial fiasco to the Canadian Black Press.

A sorry state, indeed, for the newspaper that began John S. Knight's climb to journalism immortality.