Just as I’m finally clearing my head from last week’s endless Stars and Stripes Forever-laden fireworks displays, over at the New Scientist’s wonderful Space Blog, Maggie McKee (by way of NPR) offers an historical note about the March King‘s other passion: writing. [link to post]
In addition to writing a march about the transit of venus, a relatively (by human terms) event where venus passes between the earth and the sun, Sousa apparently wrote a book about it, along with a few others, some fictional, some autobiographical and some both.
Sousa was a bit of a Venus afficianado, or more likely, he was caught up in all the hoopla surrounding the 1882 transit. These transits appear in groups of two transits, eight years apart, every hundred or so. The last one was in 2004, the next will be 2012.
Sousa’s Transit of Venus novel, is about a He-Man Woman Haters’ Club of divorcees who charter a cruise to Africa to watch the transit and forget about dames for a while. A young woman stows away and the men all jockey for her affection. As Mckee notes, it would likely make a swell romantic comedy, if you can leave the apparent misogyny aside (or perhaps a nautical In The Company of Men, if you’d like to jack the misogyny up a bit).
No luck in finding the book on Project Gutenberg, although it lists an autobiography and a novel, the Fifth String. Although I haven’t read it, I wouldn’t recommend it for casual reading. Edison’s Conquest of Mars, aside, pop lit of that pre-Hemingway era can be really tough to slog through.
Of local interest, to my fellow suburban Philthadelphians, is the (mostly busted) Willow Grove Park site, which hosts some information on John Philip Sousa’s tenure at the amusement park in Willow Grove. Yes, before it was a mall on a sea of macadam, WGP was an amusement park amid the lush rolling farmhills of the countryside. That’s why all the gaudy carosel horses are twisting above the fountain outside of Sears.
Bonus lame trivia: to gain acceptance while touring Europe, Sousa’s manager spread rumours that he was orginally from [your country here] at each stop on the tour, before emigrating to the U.S. The manager put the initials S.O. on Sousa’s luggage tags, purportedly for an ethnic-sounding name for each country he visited (Siegrfried Otz, for example)