poet of the everyday, and work

So, Studs Terkel is 95! And he's written another book! I was raised on his books, where ordinary people told their stories of living through extraordinary times. Of course, the ordinary is extraordinary, and most people are just that if you give them space to be. You should read this article - it is stuffed full of anecdotes and soundbites (the yuppies at the bus stop; New Labour, "baby mandarins;" "the United States of Alzheimers": "do I have to be 94 years old to remember these names?"). I want to be just like him, and fortunately he has given us a brief guide to how he does it:

"'I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us,' he writes in his latest book, Touch and Go: A Memoir. 'For lending voice to the face in the crowd ... My curiosity keeps me going. My epitaph is all set: Curiosity did not kill this cat. I took a vacation once - it involved a beach - and to tell you the truth, I had no idea what to do with myself. It was torture. Work is life. Without it, there is no life'."

On the McCarthy years: "He was later blacklisted for having signed numerous leftwing petitions. 'Don't you know communists are behind this?' he was asked. 'And if the communists are against cancer does that mean we have to be for cancer?' he replied. He owes his survival through those rough times in no small part to Chicago and its working-class culture. 'If I was in New York or Los Angeles, I would have been dead meat,' he says. 'That's why I love Chicago - it has always been and still is the City of Hands. Horny, calloused hands.'"

Do read it: the story of the couple at the bus stop is great.

(Edited in: I wrote this this morning, and when I was sitting at work later there was a sudden and relentless sound of sirens - then a helicopter - so we went to the window, just in time to see the police blocking off the intersection across from our building for the march. 22,500 police marched across London for a better pay deal - like, one that might reflect cost of living increases, which Ms B is rather big on, and which might give them parity with the nurses and teachers. It took them over an hour to walk past us, in their white baseball caps. Studs would have loved it.)