When Steve Fentress retired as director of the Rochester Museum and Science Center’s Strasenburgh Planetarium after 35 years at the position, he struck up a new hobby unrelated to the cosmos.
“Welcome to ‘The Forgotten Bookshelf’: readings so interesting they put you to sleep. Set your sleep timer for 30 minutes. I’m Steve, your host.”
So begins Fentress’s podcast, in which he reads texts more than a century old and in the public domain. The books he selects are usually instructional in tone, ranging from a guide on running a movie theater to advice about the kinds of walls that should be in homes.
“It's not related to anything the rest of the world is doing today, it's a real niche project,” said Fentress. “I was following a whim and maybe I don't totally understand the whim. But I'll do a season of episodes, maybe 16 or 24 of them and see how it goes.”
He’s now more than five episodes in, and although “The Forgotten Bookshelf” isn’t about evoking a particular emotional state or mood, Fentress does want it to feel remote.
“Suppose you're watching an old movie, and in the movie, somebody turns on a radio and what's coming over the radio sounds old in the movie,” he explained. “I wanted something that would sound like that: fascinating, but irrelevant.”
Fentress himself is a fascinating individual. After earning a degree in physics, the California native worked part-time as a guide and lecturer at the renowned Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, where the iconic James Dean movie “Rebel Without a Cause” was filmed, among others. Meanwhile, he went back to college to study music, first in California, and later in Bloomington, Indiana. While a student there, Fentress hosted a daily science show and a weekly choral music program at the local public radio station. His first job at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in 1989 was as a composer, creating soundtracks for planetarium shows, and he eventually went on to run the whole operation.
“It's well-liked,” Fentress said of the planetarium. “The box office revenue is strong. So nobody is talking about closing it (anymore). I wanted to kill that idea and make sure it stayed dead for as long as possible. My dream is that the people who go there and the people who work there have fond memories of it 20, 30 years from now.”
After his tenure at the planetarium, Fentress’s work continues to inform. His 2017 book “Sky to Space: Astronomy Beyond the Basics with Comparisons, Ratios, and Proportions,” includes a guide to understanding and experiencing the upcoming solar eclipse on April 8.
Alternatively, while listening to his non-astronomy podcast, it’s easier at times to be drawn in by the language of the books and how Fentress is delivering narrative, rather than the actual substance of the words themselves. It’s engaging to listen to, but it’s not really about learning and applying the instructions he provides. It’s about the atmosphere he conjures.
Fentress likened it to the ethos found on license plates while studying choral conducting at Indiana University in Bloomington: “Wander Indiana” was the instruction. “You’re driving down the main highway and here goes this road, it looks like it’s going someplace intriguing,” he said.
Jim Bader, the current director of the Strasenburgh Planetarium and Fentress’s successor, had a different takeaway from “The Forgotten Bookshelf.”
“He’s clearly trying to let you take a nap,” Bader said. “That has to be what he’s doing.”
After meeting Fentress and working with him during the transition of leadership at the planetarium, Bader was impressed by his predecessor’s clear, no-frills communication skills. He found listening to the podcast to be a magical experience.
“I probably got a solid 15 minutes into the podcast before I realized what he was doing,” Bader said. “I was taking it too seriously. I was waiting for, ‘this is why I'm doing this,’ and then (realized) he really is just trying to let you relax and read you something oddly interesting, for reasons you're not sure why.” theforgottenbookshelf.buzzsprout.com
Daniel J. Kushner is an arts writer at CITY.