Forget about weapons (plural) of mass destruction. Our enemies (plural) have only one: the uterus. Along our Mexican border, and throughout the Islamic World, our enemies are slowly but inexorably moving towards the mass destruction of America and Western Europe as we know them—through an unbridled population explosion. Our friend and ally, Israel, is already terrified by the prospect (witness the desperation of its hyperdestruction of Lebanon) of Palestinians outbirthing Jews both in Israel proper and improper (as in the occupied West Bank.)
What to do? The reasonably affluent West has learned the hard way that a small family is the best way to achieve and maintain their daily pleasures and routines. Large families mostly mean poverty in both the West and the demographically explosive Third World. How do we prevent the reproletarianization of America and its allies? The Bush II Administration tried it first with Cowboy Diplomacy: Bring ‘em on! That only alienated the few natural allies we had in parts of developed EuroAmerica. Now it’s shifting to semantic sleight of mind by coining terms like Islamo-Fascist to silence those who find our current policies self-destructive. When even so conservative a cohort as pundit George Will takes on Rumsfeld, it is panic time in the West Wing.
Such impasses are inevitable in these United States of Amnesia. George W. Bush’s sudden discovery of “freedom” and “democracy” as terms of endearment are scarcely credible in an administration that subverts democracy at home with ever more secretive policies and mocks our former ideal of a shared democracy by hyping the income of the already rich and blocking such simple expedients as raising the mininum wage As we speak, both Ford and General Motors are planning outsourcing more car production to Mexico.
The globalizing corporations have no sense of fidelity to the average American. Their terminally dumb SUV overproduction policies have surrendered without a shot the world auto market to the more thoughtful Japanese. The thinking world recognizes as well that all our sleazy moves are the cynical cover ups of Our Oiligarchy. We invaded Iraq to guarantee access to its oil reserves. Fatuous rhetoric about spreading democracy in the Middle East flies in the face of a century of collusion with the authoritarian regimes there. Even Donald Rumsfeld has no answer to his shilling for Iraq in their war with Iran. Now that such duplicities have come home to roost, W. brays fecklessly about his ideals, and pretends to be a Reader. How sad Jefferson must be. Not to mention his reputed role model, Honest Abe. Honest George?. The very concept is an oily oxymoron. Leave no President Behind.
But these recriminations help us not a whit in the current Uterine Crisis enveloping the West, from the distraught banlieus of Paris to the porous borders of the Rio Grande. Patrick J. Buchanan has just published a book deploring the inevitability of the Mexican invasion. We are outraged at a million illegal Mexicans (sporting their “legal” national flag) massing in Los Angeles to protest projected restrictive immigration policies.
But, James Polk to the contrary notwithstanding, we did steal their land from them in the 1840’s –because it was convenient, and we could! Now their long delayed counteroffensive is a wave of births that makes legal citizens of all who are born on the formerly Mexican land.( Talk about the Israeli’s and their Holy Land!) And we have to allow that the fierce destructiveness of Muslims in Europe is a belated payback for the colonial oppression that first gave them the notion of climbing onto the European social welfare wagon.
It doesn’t advamce our defenses one whit to now wave the rhetorical flag of our long besmirched ideals. That’s as feckless as Canute ineffectually commanding the waves. The only way out of our self-deluded trap is to actually start practising the ideals of a shared democracy that we have fouled with our hypocritical policies. For example, we have to stop subsidizing the American sugar millionaires and give tropical countries access to our markets.
The only way out of the Uterine Impasse is to start walking the egalitarian walk, instead of confusing ourselves by merely talking the Fourth of July talk. It’ll be a hard slog, in any case. But at least it will eventually stop our demented talk of America as “the last, best hope of Mankind”. We subverted that characterization a century ago with our brutal conquering of the Phillipines.What percentage of decent Americans have any notion of how cruelly and crudely we took over the Phillipines—as a coaling station for our new Pacific fleet? After they had fought nobly to free themselves from the Spaniards.
And believe me, we are not alone in the Uterine Wars. Spanish authorities have gone apoplectic this summer over Africans slying boating over to the Canaries. Morocco used to be their jumping (makes that diving) off place for Africans head first for Spain (and EU-ishly, all the rest of Europe.) But since Spain had the “foresight” (or chutzpah) to save itself two “free” ports on the Moroccan coast, they have been able to plug that hole in their Mediterranean dike. But the Uterine Hordes now risk their lives (over 550 have already drowned this summer alone) by boating over from more distant Mauretania, some 600 nautical miles from Tenerife.
This weekend EURONEWS reported that 674 Uteros had arrived in the last 24 hours this weekend (1-3 September 2006). And the pace is picking up: 4751 refugees altogether in 2005. 6000 in August, with an estimated total of 20,000 in 2006. While we dither and diddle, protecting oversubsidized American corporate farms, the wretched of the earth in a diaspora of despair, flood into the soft underbelly of Spain and the former Spanish America. Global warming? Energy Crisis? Islamic Terrorism? Un Uhh.
Silently, exponentially escalating Uterine Warfare.No Kaiserschnitts in this battle. We either share our wealth graciously with the lethally poor, or die separately. The true Apocalypse is just around the corner: a billion living on a dollar a day, 4 billions threatened by an obesity epidemic. Such a world ends not with a nuclear bang, but rather a starving whimper.Or overfed belch.
Finally, in these United States of Amnesia I was reminded that my hero,Thomas Jefferson, had led America's first war against Muslim terrorists, between 1801 and 1805. It was the Barbary Pirates then, an unruly lot, and since the Europeans had bought immunity, they sought out American ships. We often flew British flags to sucker the Barbary barbarians to sail in close enough to be shot out of the water, a ruse that worked more than once. The story is told freshly in Joseph Wheelan's Jefferson's War (Carroll and Graf, 2003).
This Good and Evil Syndrome George W.Bush sloppily uses, in lieu of the more difficult process of actually thinking through our new threats is a strategy doomed to failure. Oilogarchs don't think. They emote oilily. Cutting brush is not thinking. They endanger all of US with their slovenly cynicism.
Monday, 12 October 2009
Sunday, 11 October 2009
The Pleasures of Naming
May Fitzpatrick
I think I got my joy for naming from my mother, May Fitzpatrick. It’s part of my Irish temperament. In 1937 she named my first dog, Heinz, because it was such a mischling that you could easily see its 57 diverse varieties. (John Kerry’s wife Theresa got her gelt from the Pittsburg family factory famous for the diversity of its eating products.) We won’t go into the messes Heinz caused at Holy Rosary Academy when the nuns foolishly let my mother’s summer whim (a dog is good for a fatherless child) follow me in the fall to Bay City.
Our first family dog in the 1960’s we called Barnaby. There was little visible correlation between his sweet flakiness and that somewhat imposing moniker. So we often used famous short cuts like “The Barknob”. In the loneliness of my divorce, I bought a tiger cat back from the SPCA pound. He was so archetypically tiger, I called him Toby.
When he inevitably went to that Great Litter Box in the Sky, I returned to the SPCA and brought home Twoby. I was about to replace him with Threeby, when I inherited some money, quit teaching, and took a postdoctoral education snooping in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. There’d be a Threeby, even a Fourby even my cat averse German wife said it was my computer room or a litter box. Not both.
One of my first passions growing up in Detroit was the Paradise Theatre on Woodward Avenue, the main drag, and conveniently close to the Cultural Center with the Main Library and Detroit Institute of Arts--so you could play hooky with an esthetic cover. Actually my humanistic education began there, watching the great “colored” dance bands of the 40’s and 50’s: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and later the Motown Supremes.
It was my first onomastic experience: the blacks were compensating for their low esteem in the white super culture by assuming the names of royalty to snidely mock the fake egalitarianism of their “enemies”. King Oliver started the tradition way back in New Orleans. The Paradise name itself was analogous onomastic compensation, which I only found out in 1980 when I took my brother Mike back to bury him next to Mother May—in Mount Olivet Cemetery!
Courtesy of a Bicentennial historical plaque, I learned that the Paradise was originally Orchestra Hall, home of the Detroit Symphony. When the blacks moved up for the South during World War II for the good defense jobs, the whites fled to the burbs and their orchestra pitched its new (inferior) tent next to the Detroit River. No less an ear than Pablo Casals said it was the best performing space in North America. Little did we care watching vaudeville stars like PegLeg Bates entertain while we patiently waiting for the Duke.
In one of the very few happy endings in poor disintegrating Detroit, a benignly obsessed oboe player in the DSO raised twenty three million dollars to rehab the abandoned Paradise in 1982 and reopened it with a flair: the 500,000th Steinway designed by a great American wood artist. I dropped by for a rehearsal, to tease the oboist for destroying My Youth. “Hell, you say,” he tartly replied, "we have a jazz concert every Saturday night!”
When it came time to name my first batch of kids—Michael (1952), Catherine (1954), and Timothy (1956), we went Hibernian. My first wife was a kraut (father Schneider, mother Stocker) but German still had a not very welcome ring. So we went Hibernian. Except that Catherine Ann, as befit the offspring of two English professors, was a stealth tribute to a writer we were inordinately fond of at the time, Katherine Anne Porter!. Change the “K” to “C” and drop an “e”.
My latest child, until I saw it, was the last thing on earth I wanted in my 80’s. It was the only thing my young wife (40, and on the brink) wanted. She won, in vitro, after five tries! I got to name him, after ugly spats (during the pregnancy) over non starters like Leopold and Hellmutt. Ooff.
My first batch of names (for a Catholic slowly losing his faith) saint’s names were de rigeur. I chose a secular saint and hero of mine—Daniel Patrick Moynihan—to name Danny Boy. “Who?” My skeptical wife exclaimed. I Googled to his name in the Wikipedia and held forth: “Born poor in Tulsa (an Okie? that was new to me!), moved very young to Harlem where he shined shoes among other lowly occupations, Tufts U (not yet an Ivy, he!), started gaining a national rep working with Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, was by firm principal nonpartisan, having worked for JFK; LBJ and Richard Nixon among others.”
“O.K., O.K.” Hildegard replied testily. (The list of German names was much, much longer, but I don’t want to repeat that experience!) “And he preceded Hilary Rodham Clinton as New York Senator,” bringing down to a name she recognized. So Daniel Patrick Hazard it is. I still have to deal with my Catholic relatives about the planned Lutheran baptism!
But the pleasures of naming are not restricted to one’s idiolect. (Linguists allege that each person has a use of language as unique as the fingerprint, or to be more up to date DNA.) And so do groups, even nations. Consider, for example, the American idiolect: early in the Jacksonian period working class Americans resented being regarded as “servants”. So they made up the euphemism “help”. You will see in the American idiolect a playing out of such illusions as to how we should be or actually are.
It all began with the ubiquitous “New”. New England, New Hampshire, New Netherland (morphed into New York). This linguistic trait is not unique for those who ultimately became American. Think of New Guinea, New Zealand, even New Hebrides—all manifestations of that first surge of globalization the Iberians began and the English, French, and Germans in their own ways and at their different speeds continued.
But shortly after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed—in 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a year late for the 400th anniversary due to a ill-timed financial panic, our politicians started using “New” in a more or less defensive way. The frontier may have closed, but we still have a great future: Teddy Roosevelt coined his program the New Nationalism, implying that the whole country had to learn how to bust trusts and keep “malefactors of great wealth” from taking over.
A decade later, that selectively idealistic head of Princeton and later governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson, talked about the “New Freedom” as a political program. We are more familiar with FDR’s “New Deal” after the great stumble of Normalcy run by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. JFK picked the newness shtick with his “New Frontier”, marking almost a century of speculating what America’s egalitarian future would become when the physical frontier that was supposed to shape our national character was closed. Space, dreamt JFK, and saw to it that we flew to the moon. Our national idiolect is obsessed with the fear that our “New” may be over.
And then there’s the “studied casual”, that Humphrey Bogartish attire that looks very natural but is actually very artificial. Nice ‘n’ Easy does it. The “and” minus its first and last letters is endemic in our national talk and advertising. I think it suggested everyone could buy his way to a happy life, if he only surrounded himself with neat things. It’s a Saturday Evening Post version of America, a loosey goosey Normal Rockwell ideal.
What I think it implies is that there was a wide, even widening, indeed ever widening, gap between the American egalitarian Dream and how things were on the ground. Most Americans don’t realize that the American Dream as a concept didn’t become the standard version of American Exceptionalism before the Depression. (See David Madden’s “The American Dream”, LSU Press, 1966).
Bigness was also a basic trait of the American idiolect: The Whopper! The suffix –arama is a popular manifestation of this obsession with bigness. Note the fun headline writers are having now with Obama-arama! I even invented a part game I called “Suffixes”. (What do you call a sheep stud farm? A RAMARAMA!) When the guests got too loaded to think up new daffy definitions, we played the complementary quiz, “Prefixes”, based on the British penchant for using the prefix, “mini”, any and everywhere. (What do you call an undersized bull? A MINITAUR.) And so on, and on, and on. Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, The Rockies, The Mississippi. Bigness was all, in our national character. And our idiolect shows it.
Humor is also a goofy American trait. I read recently about a small Missouri village (pop. 83) that named itself Tightwad, after a nasty dispute between a postman and a grocer over what a watermelon should cost. When a small bank was set up in 1984 in that blip in the road, patrons from all over the United States sent their money there, $3 millions was the high point. They wanted replicas of its logo, a tight fist with a sheaf of dollar bills! Students stole the village sign. Tourists bought T-shirts by the bale. MSB just pulled the plug on the Tightwad Bank because its population growth, 83-91, in 23 years was not the expansion they expected. Damn Tightwads!
Names, names, names. Personal idiolect. And national idiolect. Genesis starts with the naming of creation. It keeps on going. Nothing impersonal. It just the way the world works.
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Brinkley Meets the (Teenage) Press
Every once in a while, a TV network does something that makes you believe again in its enormous potential for enlightenment. NBC's First Annual Broadcast News Conference was such an occasion; I was so impressed by it that I thought you might like a first-hand report.
David Brinkley, of the Huntley Brinkley news team, took the toughest quiz of his scholastic life Friday, February 20, at WRCA-TV's day-long seminar for some 800 student journalists in the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut area. Four shrewd and knowledgeable high school editors fired amazingly mature questions at Brinkley in Washington over closed circuit from NBC's cavernous Studio 8-H. And for the first time on TV the ordinarily unruffleable Brinkley looked and sounded worried! Brinkley confessed from the start that he was facing his betters: he had been only a lowly "exchange" editor on his own high school paper, the man who clips tired jokes and stale stories from other papers.
Ann Levenson of Seward Park High School wanted to know why there were no more muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens in journalism today. Brinkley replied lamely that the two biggest issues--Communism and corruption--left little room for controversy because everyone already knew about them and agreed they were evil. To which this audacious young lady retorted that journalists shouldn't let these evils "stay in a stagnant state" but should rile up the people to get rid of them. When Brinkley asked for some evils to work on, she suggested juvenile delinquency and segregation. With the clock running out, Brinkley-obviously relieved and with his usual self-assured wryness returning said that it was probably up to the juveniles to stop that kind of delinquency!
The NBC newsmen were as frank as their teenage interrogators. Asked what he thought Eisenhower's place in history would be, Brinkley admitted that in his opinion it would be less than great. Another scholastic editor, making a learned allusion to U. S. Grant, wondered how long it would be before the American electorate would fall for another general; Brinkley ployed by hoping we would never have another war big enough to create a hero.
Frank McGhee, describing the way the White House press conference works, noted that Mr. Eisenhower cued the correspondents by saying, "I am ready for questions"--a statement the press usually found hard to believe. And, jibing at the President's immunity from the laws of logic and syntax, McGhee noted that the stenotypers took down the press conference verbatim--grammatical errors and all.
Morgann Beatty urged the assembled students not to forget radio's importance as a news medium; he claimed that the old "Chinese" proverb about the relative power of pictures over words was actually a plot of a Printer's Ink space salesman. Leon Pearson covered the cultural beat by giving a capsule lecture on moral abnormality and perversion on the American stage.
Chet Huntley, his own ears still ringing from his imprudent NAACP broadcast, made a good case nonetheless for the right of a commentator to give his own clearly identifiable opinions on the air. For, Huntley argued, "if the news broadcaster has no opinion on anything, I would wonder about his value." He contended that a thoughtful commentator was "forced to come to a conclusion on at least a few occasions. It is all right to leave tough issues up in the air and conclude they are only more dilemmas. But to expect a man to be a consistent dealer in dilemmas is asking a little too much and is casting him in a most unnatural light."
Another highlight of the all-day session (9:45 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.) was the announcement by Robert W. Sarnoff of an NBC News Working Fellowship Award to be given to one of the delegates for the best report of the conference in his student newspaper. A committee headed by Dean Edward Barrett of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism will select the winner. First prize includes a portable typewriter and the chance to work for eight weeks in the NBC newsroom at $75 a week.
The all-day-seminar was a stimulating and demanding educational experience. President Robert Kintner himself gave the opening talk on the place of youth in electronic journalism. Then Dave Garroway gave his personal philosophy of reporting; Chet Huntley narrated a special film for the occasion, "First, Fastest, Finest: Inside NBC News"; Pauline Frederick related her own experiences as a woman covering the U.N.; Merrill Mueller counseled his audience to take tough subjects in high school and college if they wanted to follow him into foreign correspondence; John K. M. McCaffery narrated "Playback of History"-a documentary on the key events in modern history as covered by radio and TV reporters.
What this day meant to me was that if the networks put as much conviction and energy into enlightening the nation as they do into singing it teenage lullabies, our educational crisis would diminish dramatically. For our educational malaise is essentially a paralysis of motive. The rock-and-rolling teenage subculture entertains our young people into intellectual limbo.
Strike at the root of the anti-intellectualism that pervades our society and people will begin to educate themselves in the humanities; it is only the will they are lacking now. I hope the next year's seminar is broadcast via closed circuit to all major cities in the United States. Students in the other forty-eight states need the opportunity; and NBC's six-gunned prestige needs some refurbishing.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 48, No. 5 (May, 1959), pp. 279-291 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
David Brinkley, of the Huntley Brinkley news team, took the toughest quiz of his scholastic life Friday, February 20, at WRCA-TV's day-long seminar for some 800 student journalists in the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut area. Four shrewd and knowledgeable high school editors fired amazingly mature questions at Brinkley in Washington over closed circuit from NBC's cavernous Studio 8-H. And for the first time on TV the ordinarily unruffleable Brinkley looked and sounded worried! Brinkley confessed from the start that he was facing his betters: he had been only a lowly "exchange" editor on his own high school paper, the man who clips tired jokes and stale stories from other papers.
Ann Levenson of Seward Park High School wanted to know why there were no more muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens in journalism today. Brinkley replied lamely that the two biggest issues--Communism and corruption--left little room for controversy because everyone already knew about them and agreed they were evil. To which this audacious young lady retorted that journalists shouldn't let these evils "stay in a stagnant state" but should rile up the people to get rid of them. When Brinkley asked for some evils to work on, she suggested juvenile delinquency and segregation. With the clock running out, Brinkley-obviously relieved and with his usual self-assured wryness returning said that it was probably up to the juveniles to stop that kind of delinquency!
The NBC newsmen were as frank as their teenage interrogators. Asked what he thought Eisenhower's place in history would be, Brinkley admitted that in his opinion it would be less than great. Another scholastic editor, making a learned allusion to U. S. Grant, wondered how long it would be before the American electorate would fall for another general; Brinkley ployed by hoping we would never have another war big enough to create a hero.
Frank McGhee, describing the way the White House press conference works, noted that Mr. Eisenhower cued the correspondents by saying, "I am ready for questions"--a statement the press usually found hard to believe. And, jibing at the President's immunity from the laws of logic and syntax, McGhee noted that the stenotypers took down the press conference verbatim--grammatical errors and all.
Morgann Beatty urged the assembled students not to forget radio's importance as a news medium; he claimed that the old "Chinese" proverb about the relative power of pictures over words was actually a plot of a Printer's Ink space salesman. Leon Pearson covered the cultural beat by giving a capsule lecture on moral abnormality and perversion on the American stage.
Chet Huntley, his own ears still ringing from his imprudent NAACP broadcast, made a good case nonetheless for the right of a commentator to give his own clearly identifiable opinions on the air. For, Huntley argued, "if the news broadcaster has no opinion on anything, I would wonder about his value." He contended that a thoughtful commentator was "forced to come to a conclusion on at least a few occasions. It is all right to leave tough issues up in the air and conclude they are only more dilemmas. But to expect a man to be a consistent dealer in dilemmas is asking a little too much and is casting him in a most unnatural light."
Another highlight of the all-day session (9:45 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.) was the announcement by Robert W. Sarnoff of an NBC News Working Fellowship Award to be given to one of the delegates for the best report of the conference in his student newspaper. A committee headed by Dean Edward Barrett of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism will select the winner. First prize includes a portable typewriter and the chance to work for eight weeks in the NBC newsroom at $75 a week.
The all-day-seminar was a stimulating and demanding educational experience. President Robert Kintner himself gave the opening talk on the place of youth in electronic journalism. Then Dave Garroway gave his personal philosophy of reporting; Chet Huntley narrated a special film for the occasion, "First, Fastest, Finest: Inside NBC News"; Pauline Frederick related her own experiences as a woman covering the U.N.; Merrill Mueller counseled his audience to take tough subjects in high school and college if they wanted to follow him into foreign correspondence; John K. M. McCaffery narrated "Playback of History"-a documentary on the key events in modern history as covered by radio and TV reporters.
What this day meant to me was that if the networks put as much conviction and energy into enlightening the nation as they do into singing it teenage lullabies, our educational crisis would diminish dramatically. For our educational malaise is essentially a paralysis of motive. The rock-and-rolling teenage subculture entertains our young people into intellectual limbo.
Strike at the root of the anti-intellectualism that pervades our society and people will begin to educate themselves in the humanities; it is only the will they are lacking now. I hope the next year's seminar is broadcast via closed circuit to all major cities in the United States. Students in the other forty-eight states need the opportunity; and NBC's six-gunned prestige needs some refurbishing.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 48, No. 5 (May, 1959), pp. 279-291 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Friday, 9 October 2009
The Public Arts: Gilbert Seldes
Gilbert Seldes, The Public Arts. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.) $3.95.
Mr. Seldes' new book provides us with a cogent rationale and a title for this new department. Why should English teachers be concerned about the effects and prospects of the public arts of commercial entertainment? Precisely because it is "not what anyone can turn off, but what nearly everyone turns to" that "creates the moral and intellectual and emotional climate in which we live." In short, it is because the public arts predetermine in an overwhelming way the level of the private sensibility that English teachers should "enter into open conspiracy to use the public arts in order to protect our heritage of national culture."
The unusual merit of this volume lies in its ability to state so clearly the problems involved in starting such an "open conspiracy." Seldes neatly quashes the broadcasters' evasive dogma of "giving the public what it wants" by showing that broadcasters create audiences for specific kinds of programs-to their glory in the instance of classical music, to their shame in the case of so many "harmless" genres. The public, he argues, has no more than an indeterminate desire to be entertained; the broadcaster fixes the ways by which such hazy desires are satisfied.
Disney's TV success, for example, clearly indicts those producers who covered their own lack of imagination by claiming children would only watch inferior material. Seldes further contends that "the need for bold imaginative creation for children will never be acutely felt while the standard of acceptability remains what it has been in broadcasting from the start: as long as no positive proof of harm is presented, the program may be transmitted. It is as meager an ethical standard as can be imagined." It is not enough that programs be innocuous; too few are bold enough to be disturbing, to challenge the mind and uplift the heart of the audience.
The real achievement of the book is that it immediately raises the level of discussion above the niggardly level of "no damage" to the reasonable one of positive contribution. Since the public arts dominate the common consciousness, they have the duty to ennoble it. This department will try to provide English teachers with strategies to be used in Seldes' "open conspiracy." Reading Seldes' book should be our first conspiratorial act.
Records
David Allen reads very beautifully selections from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" (Poetry Records, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York 17, $5.95, 12" LP, PR #300). His choices are "One's Self I Sing," "I Hear America Singing," "Poets to Come," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "Song of Myself" (excerpts), "When I heard the Learned Astronomer," "The Last Invocation," "Goodbye, My Fancy," "Hushed Be the Camps Today," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed." All these are contained in the Mentor edition of "Leaves of Grass" (New American Library, Ms 117, 50?); most of them plus generous selections from the poet's prose are in The Whitman Reader (Pocket Books, GC-25, 50?).
Whitman's "Lilacs" brings to mind another interesting record, Abraham Lincoln as read by Carl Sandburg, Walter Huston, Orson Welles, and Agnes Moorehead (Decca, DL 8515, 12" LP, $4.98). The various angles of vision that different writers bring to bear on a single personality reveal much of both that person and of the nature of literature. The record contains writings on Lincoln by Sandburg, Edwin Markham, Walt Whitman, Rosemary Benet, Vachel Lindsay, as well as the President's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses. Paul M. Angle's The Lincoln Reader (Pocket, GC-23, 50') might well be included as supplementary reading.
It has become very easy for English teachers to keep up with both recordings and collateral paperbound books through two indispensable guides: Paperbound Books in Print (R. R. Bowker, 62 West 45th Street, New York; twice yearly, $3.00, "for a 200 page catalog of paperbacks indexed by subject, author, and title; individual copies, $2.00) and The Long Player (Sam Goody, 235 West 49th Street, New York 19, monthly catalog of all LP's; sample copy free; single issue, 35 ; $4.00 per year). Section 8, "Theatre, Films, and Speech," lists records of most immediate concern to the English teacher. "New Releases" are conveniently listed each month at the front of the catalog. Most interesting new releases: "My Fair Lady," musical based on Shaw's "Pygmalion," 12" Columbia CL 895; Prof. Frank C. Baxter's "The Nature of Poetry," 12", Spoken Art 703; "Siobhan McKenna reads Irish Poets," 12", Spoken Art 707; "Arthur Miller Reads from The Crucible and The Death of a Salesman," 12", Spoken Art 704 (Spoken Art, 275 Seventh Avenue, N.Y. 1, for catalog.)
Film
If Disney's Davy Crockett series dusted off one hero in the American pantheon, perhaps John Huston's film translation of Melville's Moby Dick will persuade some of our students to ship out on the Pequod this semester. The complete and unabridged novel (New American Library, 501 Madison Avenue, New York 22; 500) and an abridgement with introduction by Maxwell Geismar (Teen Age Book Club, 33 West 42nd Street, New York 36; 350) are ready to quench their sea-thirst.
Timid mariners can chart their courses by Harvard maritime historian Samuel Morison's essay on "how-to-read" the novel, printed with some handsome color stills from the film, Life (June 25, 1956). Other bulletin board material: Cover story in Saturday Review (June 9, 1956); two pages of black and white stills, New York Times Magazine (May 13, 1956), and a sixteen-page brochure (Dr. Charles Steinberg, Warner Brothers, 321 West 44th Street, New York). For teachers who want to set sail from Nantucket with an entire class, three essays contain suggestions for presenting the film and novel together: Milton Stern, "A New Harpoon for the Great White Whale," Clearing House (May 1956); "The Whale and the Minnow: Moby Dick and the Movies," College English (May 1956); and Ruth Goldstein, High Points (June 1956). Miss Goldstein's essay is reprinted, along with Dr. Joseph Mersand's study questions, in the September issue of The Green Sheet, Joint Estimates of Current Entertainment Films, c/o Mrs. Marjorie, 28 W. 44th St., N.Y., 36. Free.
Cecile Starr, the Saturday Review's 16mm. film critic, has edited Film Primer ($1.00, 'from Miss Starr, 311 East 72nd, New York), a volume that suggests clearly how English teachers can begin extracurricular discussions of the film as an art form by organizing high school film societies. See my descriptive review in Clearing House (September 1956).
Brandon Films (200 West 57th Street, New York 19) has just made available study guides to the following superior entertainment films: The Pickwick Papers; Elephant Boy, based on Rudyard Kipling's short story "Toomai of the Elephants"; Alexander Korda's Rembrandt; and Maurice Herzog's Annapurna.
Broadcast
There will be more first-rate dramatic and cultural programs on the networks next year than even the most exacting teachers could assign and explicate effectively. In the hope of providing sufficient time for them to prepare themselves and their classes, we will list even tentative scheduling of outstanding events. For definite confirmations see "Listenables and Lookables" in Scholastic Teacher; for last minute cancellations see either the drama section of the Sunday New York Times or TV Guide.
NBC-TV "Producer's Showcase" continues its ambitious planning: "The Lord Don't Play Favorites," with Louis Armstrong and Kay Starr (September 17); Somerset Maugham's "The Letter," with William Wyler as director (October 15); "Jack and the Beanstalk," a musical (November 12); Sol Hurok's second "Festival of Music" (December 10); "Lysistrata," with John Huston as producer-director (January 7); "Mayerling," with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer (February 4) ; the Old Vic company in "Romeo and Juliet" (March 4); "Ruggles of Red Gap," a musical, possibly with Alec Guinness (April 1); Sadler's Wells in "Cinderella" (April 29); and the Lunts in "The Great Sebastians" (May 25). Monday evenings.
Maurice Evans will produce some of Hallmark Hall of Fame's programs, with "Man and Superman" (November 25) and "Born Yesterday" (October 28). Sunday evenings, NBC-TV. "Omnibus" has moved to ABC-TV in prime Sunday evening time and has selected Walter Kerr as drama consultant. "Camera Three" (CBS-TV), Sunday mornings, deserves a better time period, and English teachers could very well muster grass roots sentiment for a change. The first thing to do is to see that your local station carries it. Robert Herridge, brilliant producer of "Camera Three," has moved into nighttime drama, and his "Studio One" (CBS-TV), Monday evenings, will bear watching. Worthington Miner, one of the creative giants of TV drama, is producing the new "Kaiser Aluminum Hour" (NBC-TV), Tuesday evenings. "Playhouse 90" (CBS-TV), Thursday evenings, is the first weekly 90-minute drama; it has interesting plans.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 45, No. 6 (Sep., 1956), pp. 367-369
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Mr. Seldes' new book provides us with a cogent rationale and a title for this new department. Why should English teachers be concerned about the effects and prospects of the public arts of commercial entertainment? Precisely because it is "not what anyone can turn off, but what nearly everyone turns to" that "creates the moral and intellectual and emotional climate in which we live." In short, it is because the public arts predetermine in an overwhelming way the level of the private sensibility that English teachers should "enter into open conspiracy to use the public arts in order to protect our heritage of national culture."
The unusual merit of this volume lies in its ability to state so clearly the problems involved in starting such an "open conspiracy." Seldes neatly quashes the broadcasters' evasive dogma of "giving the public what it wants" by showing that broadcasters create audiences for specific kinds of programs-to their glory in the instance of classical music, to their shame in the case of so many "harmless" genres. The public, he argues, has no more than an indeterminate desire to be entertained; the broadcaster fixes the ways by which such hazy desires are satisfied.
Disney's TV success, for example, clearly indicts those producers who covered their own lack of imagination by claiming children would only watch inferior material. Seldes further contends that "the need for bold imaginative creation for children will never be acutely felt while the standard of acceptability remains what it has been in broadcasting from the start: as long as no positive proof of harm is presented, the program may be transmitted. It is as meager an ethical standard as can be imagined." It is not enough that programs be innocuous; too few are bold enough to be disturbing, to challenge the mind and uplift the heart of the audience.
The real achievement of the book is that it immediately raises the level of discussion above the niggardly level of "no damage" to the reasonable one of positive contribution. Since the public arts dominate the common consciousness, they have the duty to ennoble it. This department will try to provide English teachers with strategies to be used in Seldes' "open conspiracy." Reading Seldes' book should be our first conspiratorial act.
Records
David Allen reads very beautifully selections from Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" (Poetry Records, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York 17, $5.95, 12" LP, PR #300). His choices are "One's Self I Sing," "I Hear America Singing," "Poets to Come," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "Song of Myself" (excerpts), "When I heard the Learned Astronomer," "The Last Invocation," "Goodbye, My Fancy," "Hushed Be the Camps Today," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed." All these are contained in the Mentor edition of "Leaves of Grass" (New American Library, Ms 117, 50?); most of them plus generous selections from the poet's prose are in The Whitman Reader (Pocket Books, GC-25, 50?).
Whitman's "Lilacs" brings to mind another interesting record, Abraham Lincoln as read by Carl Sandburg, Walter Huston, Orson Welles, and Agnes Moorehead (Decca, DL 8515, 12" LP, $4.98). The various angles of vision that different writers bring to bear on a single personality reveal much of both that person and of the nature of literature. The record contains writings on Lincoln by Sandburg, Edwin Markham, Walt Whitman, Rosemary Benet, Vachel Lindsay, as well as the President's Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses. Paul M. Angle's The Lincoln Reader (Pocket, GC-23, 50') might well be included as supplementary reading.
It has become very easy for English teachers to keep up with both recordings and collateral paperbound books through two indispensable guides: Paperbound Books in Print (R. R. Bowker, 62 West 45th Street, New York; twice yearly, $3.00, "for a 200 page catalog of paperbacks indexed by subject, author, and title; individual copies, $2.00) and The Long Player (Sam Goody, 235 West 49th Street, New York 19, monthly catalog of all LP's; sample copy free; single issue, 35 ; $4.00 per year). Section 8, "Theatre, Films, and Speech," lists records of most immediate concern to the English teacher. "New Releases" are conveniently listed each month at the front of the catalog. Most interesting new releases: "My Fair Lady," musical based on Shaw's "Pygmalion," 12" Columbia CL 895; Prof. Frank C. Baxter's "The Nature of Poetry," 12", Spoken Art 703; "Siobhan McKenna reads Irish Poets," 12", Spoken Art 707; "Arthur Miller Reads from The Crucible and The Death of a Salesman," 12", Spoken Art 704 (Spoken Art, 275 Seventh Avenue, N.Y. 1, for catalog.)
Film
If Disney's Davy Crockett series dusted off one hero in the American pantheon, perhaps John Huston's film translation of Melville's Moby Dick will persuade some of our students to ship out on the Pequod this semester. The complete and unabridged novel (New American Library, 501 Madison Avenue, New York 22; 500) and an abridgement with introduction by Maxwell Geismar (Teen Age Book Club, 33 West 42nd Street, New York 36; 350) are ready to quench their sea-thirst.
Timid mariners can chart their courses by Harvard maritime historian Samuel Morison's essay on "how-to-read" the novel, printed with some handsome color stills from the film, Life (June 25, 1956). Other bulletin board material: Cover story in Saturday Review (June 9, 1956); two pages of black and white stills, New York Times Magazine (May 13, 1956), and a sixteen-page brochure (Dr. Charles Steinberg, Warner Brothers, 321 West 44th Street, New York). For teachers who want to set sail from Nantucket with an entire class, three essays contain suggestions for presenting the film and novel together: Milton Stern, "A New Harpoon for the Great White Whale," Clearing House (May 1956); "The Whale and the Minnow: Moby Dick and the Movies," College English (May 1956); and Ruth Goldstein, High Points (June 1956). Miss Goldstein's essay is reprinted, along with Dr. Joseph Mersand's study questions, in the September issue of The Green Sheet, Joint Estimates of Current Entertainment Films, c/o Mrs. Marjorie, 28 W. 44th St., N.Y., 36. Free.
Cecile Starr, the Saturday Review's 16mm. film critic, has edited Film Primer ($1.00, 'from Miss Starr, 311 East 72nd, New York), a volume that suggests clearly how English teachers can begin extracurricular discussions of the film as an art form by organizing high school film societies. See my descriptive review in Clearing House (September 1956).
Brandon Films (200 West 57th Street, New York 19) has just made available study guides to the following superior entertainment films: The Pickwick Papers; Elephant Boy, based on Rudyard Kipling's short story "Toomai of the Elephants"; Alexander Korda's Rembrandt; and Maurice Herzog's Annapurna.
Broadcast
There will be more first-rate dramatic and cultural programs on the networks next year than even the most exacting teachers could assign and explicate effectively. In the hope of providing sufficient time for them to prepare themselves and their classes, we will list even tentative scheduling of outstanding events. For definite confirmations see "Listenables and Lookables" in Scholastic Teacher; for last minute cancellations see either the drama section of the Sunday New York Times or TV Guide.
NBC-TV "Producer's Showcase" continues its ambitious planning: "The Lord Don't Play Favorites," with Louis Armstrong and Kay Starr (September 17); Somerset Maugham's "The Letter," with William Wyler as director (October 15); "Jack and the Beanstalk," a musical (November 12); Sol Hurok's second "Festival of Music" (December 10); "Lysistrata," with John Huston as producer-director (January 7); "Mayerling," with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer (February 4) ; the Old Vic company in "Romeo and Juliet" (March 4); "Ruggles of Red Gap," a musical, possibly with Alec Guinness (April 1); Sadler's Wells in "Cinderella" (April 29); and the Lunts in "The Great Sebastians" (May 25). Monday evenings.
Maurice Evans will produce some of Hallmark Hall of Fame's programs, with "Man and Superman" (November 25) and "Born Yesterday" (October 28). Sunday evenings, NBC-TV. "Omnibus" has moved to ABC-TV in prime Sunday evening time and has selected Walter Kerr as drama consultant. "Camera Three" (CBS-TV), Sunday mornings, deserves a better time period, and English teachers could very well muster grass roots sentiment for a change. The first thing to do is to see that your local station carries it. Robert Herridge, brilliant producer of "Camera Three," has moved into nighttime drama, and his "Studio One" (CBS-TV), Monday evenings, will bear watching. Worthington Miner, one of the creative giants of TV drama, is producing the new "Kaiser Aluminum Hour" (NBC-TV), Tuesday evenings. "Playhouse 90" (CBS-TV), Thursday evenings, is the first weekly 90-minute drama; it has interesting plans.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 45, No. 6 (Sep., 1956), pp. 367-369
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Thursday, 8 October 2009
The Public Arts: Media Translation
Film
The paperback-LP combination of My Fair Lady and Pygmalion is not the only current instance of what Marshall McLuhan calls exercises in media translation. A number of Broadway plays are currently appearing in movie houses under varying degrees of revision. Luckily, the plays are available in cheap paper editions: Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, William Inge's Bus Stop and Picnic, William March's The Bad Seed, Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll. Now these plays are obviously too mature for class assignment in most instances, yet they can provide the raw material for individual themes that can solve a growing dilemma for many teachers.
The dilemma is this: we know that many of our students read literary and sub-literary material far beyond the sophistication allowable by either school boards or the median awareness of most classes. Yet we also know our avoiding these controversial areas in the classroom in no way keeps such reading matter from affecting our students. If we ignore their actual reading habits, we implicitly encourage them to lead unexamined lives; if we bring mature material into the typical classroom, we scandalize immature students and alienate community policymakers who are understandably shocked by our lack of prudence.
It seems to me that individual reading assignments can solve most of this dilemma. Encourage students to write criticism of their movie experience; then when the maturity of the writer warrants it, suggest in your critical comments that the student analyze, say, Robert Anderson's film translation of his own play, Tea and Sympathy. George Seaton's "A Comparison of the Playwright and the Screen Writer," The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, X (Spring 1956), will prove enormously useful in giving you ideas on how to go about analyzing film translations of printed literature.
Seaton directed such films as Song of Bernadette, The Country Girl, and The Proud and the Profane. In fact, other articles in the same issue make the cost ($1.25) reasonable: John Houseman (Stratford, Conn.'s Shakespeare director) on "How-and What-Does a Movie Communicate?"; John E. Twomey's "Some Considerations on the Rise of the Art-Film Theater"; an excerpt from editor Kenneth MacGowan's forthcoming book, The Film of Yesterday and Tomorrow; and Robert Herridge's "'Camera Three'-An Adventure in Education," an analysis of that experimental program. Write to the University of California Press, Berkeley 4, California.
For more background, see Cosmopolitan's special movie issue, October 1956, 35' (The Hearst Corporation, 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, New York 19). This issue, which, sampled, looks surprisingly good, contains an excellent summary of Hollywood's economic plight, "The Movie Business," alone worth the 35?. There are other features on great movies of the past; the star system, past and present; the people of Hollywood; a profile on a flourishing chain of "art houses" in New York City; and, most important for teachers who would like to anticipate forthcoming popular films for "media translation" purposesa two-page forecast of projected new films. In some schools, a class unit based on student use of this magazine could prove a most stimulating introduction to the film as an art form.
The October 1 issue of the "Green Sheet" (Joint Estimates of Current Entertainment Films) contains Sarah Thorwald Stieglitz's study guide for War and Peace. (Free copies. Write Dr. Joseph Mersand, Jamaica High School, 168th St. & Gothic Drive, Jamaica 32, N.Y.)
Broadcast
Greer Garson, whose reputation as an actress has been earned through decorous and ladylike roles, will have a chance to break this typecasting when she plays Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, to be colorcast on "Hallmark Hall of Fame," December 16, 7:30-9:00 P.M., NBC-TV. George Schaefer will produce and direct the TV adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play about a rapacious family in the Deep South in the 1900's. Miss Garson has expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the chance to portray the personally venomous sister constantly at war with her two conniving brothers over the family fortune. Tallulah Bankhead played the role on Broadway in 1939; Bette Davis was Hollywood's choice in 1941.
"Camera Three" (CBS-TV, Sundays, 11:30 A.M.) continues to please the TV viewer in search of mature perspectives on all the arts. Both producer Lewis Freedman and writer John McCiffert have taught English; this experience should make their December plans all the more interesting. They will present a four-part study of Victorianism on December 9, 16, 23, 30. Because this series should be the English teacher's ideal introduction this season to "Camera Three," I will publish detailed information on the content of each program in my weekly Scholastic Teacher broadcast schedule, "Listenables and Lookables."
"Omnibus" has moved to a new network, ABC-TV, Sundays, 9:00-10:00 P.M. Its time strikes me as more convenient for Monday morning assignments. Its subject matter would certainly merit inclusion in any upper-grade English class. Already this year, Walter Kerr, the program's new drama consultant, has shown what we can expect under his tutelage: Bert Lahr in Androcles and the Lion and Tallulah Bankhead interpreting the "Southern Belle" as seen from different dramatic traditions from Kerr's own script. A long-awaited highlight: Christopher Plummer in Oedipus Rex, January 9.
Olivier's Hamlet will be telecast in two parts on ABC-TV, "Famous Film Festival," November 24 and December 1, 7:309:00 P.M. "Ford Star Jubilee" for December on CBS-TV is Sidney Kingsley's Men in White, a ninety-minute, live adaptation. Amahl and the Night Visitors gets its traditional presentation over NBC-TV on December 16. John Huston's production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is planned for "Producers' Showcase," January 7, 8:009:30 P.M. The American premiere of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace is tentatively set for January 13, NBC-TV, a fine opportunity for your Audrey Hepburn fans to compare different artistic presentations of a great novel they may someday read.
Recordings
"As scarce as tickets to My Fair Lady" has become the Broadway superlative of 1956. To unlucky souls long resigned to "seeing musicals" at the local movie or at home with a phonograph, this special kind of Gothamite anxiety is hard to sympathize with. Still, perhaps the Lady is a special case. After having listened to the Columbia original cast LP (12" OL 5090, $3.98) many more times than I should have, I found myself rationalizing my delight in this record (and the uncorrected themes) on professional grounds.
Wasn't My Fair Lady the perfectly natural way to introduce my students to the art of musical comedy? Based on Shaw's Pygmalion (available in a 50? Penguin edition, 3300 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore), preaching in Shaw's irresistible way about the social matrix and relevance of the English language, and already touted as the major musical in this genre's short history, My Fair Lady seemed like a Shavian conspiracy to insinuate the disreputable popular arts into our English classrooms.
Fearing I had been victimized by the sounds of my Sam Goody hi-fi, I picked up a paperback of the play. The reading that followed was a new experience: it had a special flavor. For I found myself vicariously translating the play into the musical. Here is where that song came from; there is something he didn't use, I wonder why; and why don't they do this more often? Such pleasant reflections added an entirely new dimension to my reading of the play.
And, it suddenly dawned on me, this play was actually a printed aid to the complete appreciation of the musical. For the student unfamiliar with the Pygmalion story, the play is a necessity for complete enjoyment of the recording. For the teacher whose memory of the play needs freshening, the paperback is very handy. A printed aid democratizes appreciation of fast-paced popular arts like film, TV, and theatre, for with the printed reference slower students can go back and mull over what they missed. Without the printed play, most students will not hear a "musical" at all; they will merely listen to a series of hit tunes. A reading of Shaw thus ties together the separate performances of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, and Stanley Holloway on the recording into a quasi-artistic whole; that's the closest we can approach this superlative musical until Hollywood puts all of it on celluloid for all of us.
When I learned that Coward-McCann was about to publish Alan Jay Lerner's book and lyrics, I became convinced that this musical had been foreordained for the English classroom. Now all we really needed was an imaginative gesture from Penguin Books, offering teachers, say, twenty-five copies of the paper-covered play, the Columbia LP, and the Coward-McCann book at a bargain price. When I had definitely decided to teach the play and the musical together, I felt I had better test this decision by becoming my own devil's advocate. How justify music in an English classroom? But what, in the last analysis, were ballads? Nevertheless, if you can justify teaching a musical, you can justify anything; the English classroom then becomes a sideshow or vaudeville stage.
On the contrary, I am merely using my students' awareness of excellence in popular culture to deepen their understanding of a literary classic. What could be more respectable ? But wouldn't it be too much fun for an English classroom? Oh, come on now, devil, you can do a better job of confusing our profession than that. "Wouldn't It be Loverly" if those Penguin people would help out? While we wait for them to make an offer, we can fortify our background on Shaw with G. K. Chesterton's biography, just out in a new paperback line, "Dramabooks." Send 95? to Hill and Wang, Inc., 104 Fifth Avenue, New York 11, N.Y.
Follow up your class discussion of Maurice Evans' production of Man and Superman with a class audition of the unstaged third act of the play, "Don Juan in Hell" (Columbia LP, 2-12", OSL, $10). If your class used the Penguin paper edition (50?) for the TV performance, they can easily follow the Paul Gregory-First Drama Quartette production with Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorhead. Allow four days for recording and discussion, a side a day; each side takes between twenty and thirty minutes. Side 1, pp. 126-141; side 2, pp. 141-149; side 3, pp. 148-161; side 4, 161-175, with slight deletions on pp. 144, 162-164, 169, 174, 175.
For more suggestions on Columbia Records suitable for school use, write for Records for School, Volume 1, Secondary Education, compiled by Florette Zuelke, Educational Department, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York 19, Free.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 45, No. 9 (Dec., 1956), pp. 562-564
The paperback-LP combination of My Fair Lady and Pygmalion is not the only current instance of what Marshall McLuhan calls exercises in media translation. A number of Broadway plays are currently appearing in movie houses under varying degrees of revision. Luckily, the plays are available in cheap paper editions: Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, William Inge's Bus Stop and Picnic, William March's The Bad Seed, Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll. Now these plays are obviously too mature for class assignment in most instances, yet they can provide the raw material for individual themes that can solve a growing dilemma for many teachers.
The dilemma is this: we know that many of our students read literary and sub-literary material far beyond the sophistication allowable by either school boards or the median awareness of most classes. Yet we also know our avoiding these controversial areas in the classroom in no way keeps such reading matter from affecting our students. If we ignore their actual reading habits, we implicitly encourage them to lead unexamined lives; if we bring mature material into the typical classroom, we scandalize immature students and alienate community policymakers who are understandably shocked by our lack of prudence.
It seems to me that individual reading assignments can solve most of this dilemma. Encourage students to write criticism of their movie experience; then when the maturity of the writer warrants it, suggest in your critical comments that the student analyze, say, Robert Anderson's film translation of his own play, Tea and Sympathy. George Seaton's "A Comparison of the Playwright and the Screen Writer," The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, X (Spring 1956), will prove enormously useful in giving you ideas on how to go about analyzing film translations of printed literature.
Seaton directed such films as Song of Bernadette, The Country Girl, and The Proud and the Profane. In fact, other articles in the same issue make the cost ($1.25) reasonable: John Houseman (Stratford, Conn.'s Shakespeare director) on "How-and What-Does a Movie Communicate?"; John E. Twomey's "Some Considerations on the Rise of the Art-Film Theater"; an excerpt from editor Kenneth MacGowan's forthcoming book, The Film of Yesterday and Tomorrow; and Robert Herridge's "'Camera Three'-An Adventure in Education," an analysis of that experimental program. Write to the University of California Press, Berkeley 4, California.
For more background, see Cosmopolitan's special movie issue, October 1956, 35' (The Hearst Corporation, 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, New York 19). This issue, which, sampled, looks surprisingly good, contains an excellent summary of Hollywood's economic plight, "The Movie Business," alone worth the 35?. There are other features on great movies of the past; the star system, past and present; the people of Hollywood; a profile on a flourishing chain of "art houses" in New York City; and, most important for teachers who would like to anticipate forthcoming popular films for "media translation" purposesa two-page forecast of projected new films. In some schools, a class unit based on student use of this magazine could prove a most stimulating introduction to the film as an art form.
The October 1 issue of the "Green Sheet" (Joint Estimates of Current Entertainment Films) contains Sarah Thorwald Stieglitz's study guide for War and Peace. (Free copies. Write Dr. Joseph Mersand, Jamaica High School, 168th St. & Gothic Drive, Jamaica 32, N.Y.)
Broadcast
Greer Garson, whose reputation as an actress has been earned through decorous and ladylike roles, will have a chance to break this typecasting when she plays Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, to be colorcast on "Hallmark Hall of Fame," December 16, 7:30-9:00 P.M., NBC-TV. George Schaefer will produce and direct the TV adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play about a rapacious family in the Deep South in the 1900's. Miss Garson has expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the chance to portray the personally venomous sister constantly at war with her two conniving brothers over the family fortune. Tallulah Bankhead played the role on Broadway in 1939; Bette Davis was Hollywood's choice in 1941.
"Camera Three" (CBS-TV, Sundays, 11:30 A.M.) continues to please the TV viewer in search of mature perspectives on all the arts. Both producer Lewis Freedman and writer John McCiffert have taught English; this experience should make their December plans all the more interesting. They will present a four-part study of Victorianism on December 9, 16, 23, 30. Because this series should be the English teacher's ideal introduction this season to "Camera Three," I will publish detailed information on the content of each program in my weekly Scholastic Teacher broadcast schedule, "Listenables and Lookables."
"Omnibus" has moved to a new network, ABC-TV, Sundays, 9:00-10:00 P.M. Its time strikes me as more convenient for Monday morning assignments. Its subject matter would certainly merit inclusion in any upper-grade English class. Already this year, Walter Kerr, the program's new drama consultant, has shown what we can expect under his tutelage: Bert Lahr in Androcles and the Lion and Tallulah Bankhead interpreting the "Southern Belle" as seen from different dramatic traditions from Kerr's own script. A long-awaited highlight: Christopher Plummer in Oedipus Rex, January 9.
Olivier's Hamlet will be telecast in two parts on ABC-TV, "Famous Film Festival," November 24 and December 1, 7:309:00 P.M. "Ford Star Jubilee" for December on CBS-TV is Sidney Kingsley's Men in White, a ninety-minute, live adaptation. Amahl and the Night Visitors gets its traditional presentation over NBC-TV on December 16. John Huston's production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is planned for "Producers' Showcase," January 7, 8:009:30 P.M. The American premiere of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace is tentatively set for January 13, NBC-TV, a fine opportunity for your Audrey Hepburn fans to compare different artistic presentations of a great novel they may someday read.
Recordings
"As scarce as tickets to My Fair Lady" has become the Broadway superlative of 1956. To unlucky souls long resigned to "seeing musicals" at the local movie or at home with a phonograph, this special kind of Gothamite anxiety is hard to sympathize with. Still, perhaps the Lady is a special case. After having listened to the Columbia original cast LP (12" OL 5090, $3.98) many more times than I should have, I found myself rationalizing my delight in this record (and the uncorrected themes) on professional grounds.
Wasn't My Fair Lady the perfectly natural way to introduce my students to the art of musical comedy? Based on Shaw's Pygmalion (available in a 50? Penguin edition, 3300 Clipper Mill Road, Baltimore), preaching in Shaw's irresistible way about the social matrix and relevance of the English language, and already touted as the major musical in this genre's short history, My Fair Lady seemed like a Shavian conspiracy to insinuate the disreputable popular arts into our English classrooms.
Fearing I had been victimized by the sounds of my Sam Goody hi-fi, I picked up a paperback of the play. The reading that followed was a new experience: it had a special flavor. For I found myself vicariously translating the play into the musical. Here is where that song came from; there is something he didn't use, I wonder why; and why don't they do this more often? Such pleasant reflections added an entirely new dimension to my reading of the play.
And, it suddenly dawned on me, this play was actually a printed aid to the complete appreciation of the musical. For the student unfamiliar with the Pygmalion story, the play is a necessity for complete enjoyment of the recording. For the teacher whose memory of the play needs freshening, the paperback is very handy. A printed aid democratizes appreciation of fast-paced popular arts like film, TV, and theatre, for with the printed reference slower students can go back and mull over what they missed. Without the printed play, most students will not hear a "musical" at all; they will merely listen to a series of hit tunes. A reading of Shaw thus ties together the separate performances of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, and Stanley Holloway on the recording into a quasi-artistic whole; that's the closest we can approach this superlative musical until Hollywood puts all of it on celluloid for all of us.
When I learned that Coward-McCann was about to publish Alan Jay Lerner's book and lyrics, I became convinced that this musical had been foreordained for the English classroom. Now all we really needed was an imaginative gesture from Penguin Books, offering teachers, say, twenty-five copies of the paper-covered play, the Columbia LP, and the Coward-McCann book at a bargain price. When I had definitely decided to teach the play and the musical together, I felt I had better test this decision by becoming my own devil's advocate. How justify music in an English classroom? But what, in the last analysis, were ballads? Nevertheless, if you can justify teaching a musical, you can justify anything; the English classroom then becomes a sideshow or vaudeville stage.
On the contrary, I am merely using my students' awareness of excellence in popular culture to deepen their understanding of a literary classic. What could be more respectable ? But wouldn't it be too much fun for an English classroom? Oh, come on now, devil, you can do a better job of confusing our profession than that. "Wouldn't It be Loverly" if those Penguin people would help out? While we wait for them to make an offer, we can fortify our background on Shaw with G. K. Chesterton's biography, just out in a new paperback line, "Dramabooks." Send 95? to Hill and Wang, Inc., 104 Fifth Avenue, New York 11, N.Y.
Follow up your class discussion of Maurice Evans' production of Man and Superman with a class audition of the unstaged third act of the play, "Don Juan in Hell" (Columbia LP, 2-12", OSL, $10). If your class used the Penguin paper edition (50?) for the TV performance, they can easily follow the Paul Gregory-First Drama Quartette production with Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorhead. Allow four days for recording and discussion, a side a day; each side takes between twenty and thirty minutes. Side 1, pp. 126-141; side 2, pp. 141-149; side 3, pp. 148-161; side 4, 161-175, with slight deletions on pp. 144, 162-164, 169, 174, 175.
For more suggestions on Columbia Records suitable for school use, write for Records for School, Volume 1, Secondary Education, compiled by Florette Zuelke, Educational Department, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York 19, Free.
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 45, No. 9 (Dec., 1956), pp. 562-564
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
Some Criticism Stranger than Fiction
> Edmund Fuller, Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing. Random House. 171 pp. $3.50.
> Maxwell Geismar. American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. Hill and Wang. 265 pp. $1.95.
> Charles Shapiro, ed. Twelve Essays on Great American Novels. Wayne State University Press. 289 pp. $5.00.
The "man" in Edmund Fuller's modern fiction is man measured against the Judeo-Christian ethic. Fuller somehow attaches the Hellenistic tradition onto this ethic and offers the resulting mash as the only prescription for the dignity of man. Fuller's "modern fiction," on the other hand, is a flock of sitting ducks like Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones; and even lesser birds. If Mr. Fuller is hunting a clear statement of the modern liberal's position in literature, why not flush bigger fowl (in this respect) like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams?
Though Fuller's vision or version of maturity may not be ours, he draws a steady bead on the adolescent in American literature. As an example of this arrested development, he cites the failure of the American novelist to create a mature love story, the critical salaams before Kerouac, and the many novels with the tone of the small boy who has just learned to read those four-letter words chalked in public places.
In what probably is his best chapter, "The New Compassion in the American Novel," Mr. Fuller laments the progression from the "lovable bum" to the "genial rapist, the jolly slasher, the funloving dope-pusher." Contemporary writers of the belligerently subterranean school are dissatisfied with the traditional good guys and bad. Under the new villain's mustache one may find the clean-cut face of the old hero. These contemporary authors (Steinbeck, George Mandel, and James Joyce among them) have a new compassion which withholds blame from the ex-villains. "Therefore, since their concept of compassion will not permit them to blame anything upon the criminal, the degraded, and the destroyed, they blame everything upon the non-criminal, the non-degraded, and the undestroyed. It is a kind of counter-puritanism." (For that last happy mot, we can forgive Fuller all his "dishes of tea," "getting in dutch's," and "slaps in the face.")
Twice at least Fuller suggests the virtues of pluralism. In a defense of Wouk against the intellectuals' attack, Fuller cites the complexity of Queeg and his situation as a literary merit. He condemns in the same chapter, "The Hipster or the Organization Man?," the hipster's either/or blinders on life. It is unfortunate that he does not allow the same latitude to writers who value other religious or ethical views than his own, but perhaps Fuller's offensive will incite liberals to some fruitful re-examination of their positions. On most questions of religion, sex, politics, and literary theory, Maxwell Geismar would be at odds with Edmund Fuller. It is surprising, then, to see how often the two concur or at least complement one another.
Geismar's book is a collection of essays written for a literate audiencereaders of the Saturday Review, Nation, the New York Times Book Review. His predilection might be described as "social consciousness," or more accurately "realism." He does not wield the naive "for or agin' the peepul" proletarian probe, but he does insist that literature remain faithful to history, to social facts, and to psychological truth. Thus, for instance, he questions Faulkner's romantic view of the Old South and his malicious multiplication of the Snopses of the New. So too he impales Sinclair Lewis as full of the manners, habits, and idioms of the people of the United States., but largely ignorant of the "basic determinants of the life which surrounds them," giving as one large omission in Lewis' America the real institutions of finance capitalism. This critical method is certainly fruitful, but some readers feel their reservations justified when they come upon Geismar's mauling of J. D. Salinger.
Geismar uses his critical method not only to indict culpable omissions but also to point out the renewed values of some American classics for the contemporary scene. His use of history is also valuable as a corrective for some of Mr. Fuller's ideas. Thus Geismar concedes the excesses of brothel literature, but observes that these were the almost inevitable backlash from the Puritanical and Victorian repression of the last century.
Like Fuller, Geismar sees the blight of arrested development on some of our best novelists: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Mailer. Vorse, he discerns a certain fear, even a hatred for sex and life itself in Cozzens, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, and Jones. His exhibit of quotations seems to make a convincing case, but could he be mistaking the venom of satire for the values of the writer?
In spite of other areas of agreement Fuller and Geismar part company on Wouk. Geismar summons "Woukism" as a dirty descriptive epithet for the worst aspects of contemporary society; Fuller defends The Caine Mutiny as a case for military discipline, not a plea for conformity in society at large. They line up similarly on Marquand--whenever, I suppose, the question of "conformity" is posed baldly.
They do share a certain unexamined readiness to invoke "life" or "vitality" as the real measure of literary worth. Geismar, for instance, describes From Here to Eternity as a "living organism of the first class," an awkward expression conjuring images of amoebae. This abdication of the real work of the critic for simple effervescence is rationalized by George P. Elliott in our third book of criticism: "For how can one define, account for, analyze vitality? Here is an alive world; it delights me to learn about it. These, I think, are the fundamental assertions to be made about a great novel; criticism comes rationalizing after."
True Confessions is an alive world; its readers delight to read about it. It is neither novel, however, nor is it great. Chronologically criticism may come "rationalizing after," but this does not diminish its stature as a guide to new ways of seeing and understanding how books come alive or why they fail to.
Some of the better pieces in Twelve Original Essays do just that, as, in fact, does Mr. Elliott himself when he talks about Huckleberry Finn. He brings the charge against Twain that his other work lacks "sustained moral seriousness." The last of Huckleberry Finn is a "cheat" with the introduction of Tom Sawyer as clownish deus ex machina to dissolve the real moral dilemmas Twain has made come alive.
Richard Chase does a good analysis of how the images in Henry James's The Ambassadors work, and his discussion of "those all too gratuitous renunciations that James prizes so highly" is worth all the critical clucking over James's lack of "vitality." Charles Shapiro sees Theodore Dreiser as chronicler of industrial America of the early twentieth century its dreams, frustrations, and the "cruel misdirection of American energy." Henry Fleming's story in The Red Badge of Courage is, to Bernard Weisberger, the story of an isolated country boy's discovery of self in a day before the mass media were supplying ready-made self-images for the G.I.
Probably the richest essay in the collection is David Brion Davis' "The Deerslayer, a Democratic Knight of the Wilderness." Davis explains the failure of Cooper to create psychological reality by his attempt to "combine Homeric heroism and Christian sainthood in the figure of the American pioneer." While one still meets people trying to defend Cooper's novels as esthetic realizations it is refreshing to read an essay which allows them some literary merit but finds the novels more valuable for their insights into the nature of American civilization.
Together these three books suggest many ways of reading (and rereading) American fiction. Their great value to the high school teacher, it would seem, is how they make it possible to decentralize honors programs, by putting many university scholars and literary critics at the disposal of the bright student. In combination with paperback editions of the novelists considered, the teacher can use the mass media (paperbacks and university presses) to individualize the instruction of those bright students who unhappily too often get lost in the egalitarian shuffle.
> Maxwell Geismar. American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity. Hill and Wang. 265 pp. $1.95.
> Charles Shapiro, ed. Twelve Essays on Great American Novels. Wayne State University Press. 289 pp. $5.00.
The "man" in Edmund Fuller's modern fiction is man measured against the Judeo-Christian ethic. Fuller somehow attaches the Hellenistic tradition onto this ethic and offers the resulting mash as the only prescription for the dignity of man. Fuller's "modern fiction," on the other hand, is a flock of sitting ducks like Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones; and even lesser birds. If Mr. Fuller is hunting a clear statement of the modern liberal's position in literature, why not flush bigger fowl (in this respect) like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams?
Though Fuller's vision or version of maturity may not be ours, he draws a steady bead on the adolescent in American literature. As an example of this arrested development, he cites the failure of the American novelist to create a mature love story, the critical salaams before Kerouac, and the many novels with the tone of the small boy who has just learned to read those four-letter words chalked in public places.
In what probably is his best chapter, "The New Compassion in the American Novel," Mr. Fuller laments the progression from the "lovable bum" to the "genial rapist, the jolly slasher, the funloving dope-pusher." Contemporary writers of the belligerently subterranean school are dissatisfied with the traditional good guys and bad. Under the new villain's mustache one may find the clean-cut face of the old hero. These contemporary authors (Steinbeck, George Mandel, and James Joyce among them) have a new compassion which withholds blame from the ex-villains. "Therefore, since their concept of compassion will not permit them to blame anything upon the criminal, the degraded, and the destroyed, they blame everything upon the non-criminal, the non-degraded, and the undestroyed. It is a kind of counter-puritanism." (For that last happy mot, we can forgive Fuller all his "dishes of tea," "getting in dutch's," and "slaps in the face.")
Twice at least Fuller suggests the virtues of pluralism. In a defense of Wouk against the intellectuals' attack, Fuller cites the complexity of Queeg and his situation as a literary merit. He condemns in the same chapter, "The Hipster or the Organization Man?," the hipster's either/or blinders on life. It is unfortunate that he does not allow the same latitude to writers who value other religious or ethical views than his own, but perhaps Fuller's offensive will incite liberals to some fruitful re-examination of their positions. On most questions of religion, sex, politics, and literary theory, Maxwell Geismar would be at odds with Edmund Fuller. It is surprising, then, to see how often the two concur or at least complement one another.
Geismar's book is a collection of essays written for a literate audiencereaders of the Saturday Review, Nation, the New York Times Book Review. His predilection might be described as "social consciousness," or more accurately "realism." He does not wield the naive "for or agin' the peepul" proletarian probe, but he does insist that literature remain faithful to history, to social facts, and to psychological truth. Thus, for instance, he questions Faulkner's romantic view of the Old South and his malicious multiplication of the Snopses of the New. So too he impales Sinclair Lewis as full of the manners, habits, and idioms of the people of the United States., but largely ignorant of the "basic determinants of the life which surrounds them," giving as one large omission in Lewis' America the real institutions of finance capitalism. This critical method is certainly fruitful, but some readers feel their reservations justified when they come upon Geismar's mauling of J. D. Salinger.
Geismar uses his critical method not only to indict culpable omissions but also to point out the renewed values of some American classics for the contemporary scene. His use of history is also valuable as a corrective for some of Mr. Fuller's ideas. Thus Geismar concedes the excesses of brothel literature, but observes that these were the almost inevitable backlash from the Puritanical and Victorian repression of the last century.
Like Fuller, Geismar sees the blight of arrested development on some of our best novelists: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Mailer. Vorse, he discerns a certain fear, even a hatred for sex and life itself in Cozzens, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, and Jones. His exhibit of quotations seems to make a convincing case, but could he be mistaking the venom of satire for the values of the writer?
In spite of other areas of agreement Fuller and Geismar part company on Wouk. Geismar summons "Woukism" as a dirty descriptive epithet for the worst aspects of contemporary society; Fuller defends The Caine Mutiny as a case for military discipline, not a plea for conformity in society at large. They line up similarly on Marquand--whenever, I suppose, the question of "conformity" is posed baldly.
They do share a certain unexamined readiness to invoke "life" or "vitality" as the real measure of literary worth. Geismar, for instance, describes From Here to Eternity as a "living organism of the first class," an awkward expression conjuring images of amoebae. This abdication of the real work of the critic for simple effervescence is rationalized by George P. Elliott in our third book of criticism: "For how can one define, account for, analyze vitality? Here is an alive world; it delights me to learn about it. These, I think, are the fundamental assertions to be made about a great novel; criticism comes rationalizing after."
True Confessions is an alive world; its readers delight to read about it. It is neither novel, however, nor is it great. Chronologically criticism may come "rationalizing after," but this does not diminish its stature as a guide to new ways of seeing and understanding how books come alive or why they fail to.
Some of the better pieces in Twelve Original Essays do just that, as, in fact, does Mr. Elliott himself when he talks about Huckleberry Finn. He brings the charge against Twain that his other work lacks "sustained moral seriousness." The last of Huckleberry Finn is a "cheat" with the introduction of Tom Sawyer as clownish deus ex machina to dissolve the real moral dilemmas Twain has made come alive.
Richard Chase does a good analysis of how the images in Henry James's The Ambassadors work, and his discussion of "those all too gratuitous renunciations that James prizes so highly" is worth all the critical clucking over James's lack of "vitality." Charles Shapiro sees Theodore Dreiser as chronicler of industrial America of the early twentieth century its dreams, frustrations, and the "cruel misdirection of American energy." Henry Fleming's story in The Red Badge of Courage is, to Bernard Weisberger, the story of an isolated country boy's discovery of self in a day before the mass media were supplying ready-made self-images for the G.I.
Probably the richest essay in the collection is David Brion Davis' "The Deerslayer, a Democratic Knight of the Wilderness." Davis explains the failure of Cooper to create psychological reality by his attempt to "combine Homeric heroism and Christian sainthood in the figure of the American pioneer." While one still meets people trying to defend Cooper's novels as esthetic realizations it is refreshing to read an essay which allows them some literary merit but finds the novels more valuable for their insights into the nature of American civilization.
Together these three books suggest many ways of reading (and rereading) American fiction. Their great value to the high school teacher, it would seem, is how they make it possible to decentralize honors programs, by putting many university scholars and literary critics at the disposal of the bright student. In combination with paperback editions of the novelists considered, the teacher can use the mass media (paperbacks and university presses) to individualize the instruction of those bright students who unhappily too often get lost in the egalitarian shuffle.
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Chapter I: Pre-Ramble, part 2
And my life has been marked by sharp breaks: after I got thrown out of Sacred Heart Seminary (the rector Monsignor Donnelly told my mother it was because I was caught smoking after midnight in the Gothic Tower—with Jim van Slambrouck.), I had no further truck with the Sem. The real reason for the expelling was in retrospect more bipolar disorder—while I was Father George’s star Latin pupil, I got so bored by the slow pace of the rest of the class that I cut up, maniacally, to the Latin teacher’s eventual despair. No looking back.
I was bounced over Easter vacation--so there was little possibility of finding another Catholic high school that would take me on such short and ambiguous notice so I, faute de mieux, went to the local Edwin Denby High. A brief walk from the first house my mother bought with another teacher boarder in Northeast Detroit. It was theoretically a shock, since Denby had a rep, through no activities of mine, as the Whorehouse of Detroit. The classes I took were college prep, so my classmates were generally highly motivated achievers, like Chuck Riddle, the football center who became a Grosse Pointe gynecologist, end Ed Sohacki who became a dentist in Birmingham, and Ed LeBoeuf, a lawyer and politico in Detroit.
Because I was an excellent student when I wasn’t messing around (the bipolar cooled off in the strangeness of Denby) I graduated second in a class of 432 students. I’ve always wondered who had been a bigger grind than I! But too lazy to look up the records. In a dance club I met my first serious date, Fran Gilpin, perky daughter of a Chrysler engineer and a phys ed teacher in the public schools. When I got back from the Navy, I started dating her. And I’m embarrassed to admit that we broke up because she was a Protestant! But she was very dear, and I’ll never forget our winter meeting at the Lake, when we had both turned fifty.
She had married an engineer from Dow Chemical in Midland, MI and taught elementary school after graduating from Michigan State. She and her hunting husband Dee sired five Ph.D.’s, a record for any family I knew! Our isolated meeting on the frozen bluffs over Lake Huron was just a gesture that we were still fond of each other after all those years separate and alone. I was about to go on my three month circumambling of the Mediterranean in honor of my fiftieth birthday. It was the sweetest closure in a life without many. So. No friends from the Seminary. From Denby. From the Navy. One friend, Henry B.Maloney, from the University of Detroit, but that fizzled after 50 years when he blocked my e-mail address—for reasons unknown.
I kept loosely in touch with Steve Sweeney, a lawyer in Detroit for many years. From Graduate School, a great scholar, Stan Idzerda who dropped me when I dropped the Catholic Church!. From East Lansing High, zero. From Ford Fellowship in New York, Bill Sloan and his wife Gwenn, until I got too intimate with their daughter Jennifer. From Trenton State, none, except for Fred Kiley, a Rhode Island Mick who replaced me when I got a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn. No friends from the Annenberg, except Gilbert Seldes who was old enough to be my intellectual grandfather. And was. No friendships from my year in Honolulu. Or from twenty years at Beaver College, except for Benton Spruance, the great printmaker who died early, in 1967. So when Joseph Epstein writes an entire book on “Friendship”, I simply stand by, and sigh, enviously.
I did finally find someone to call my best friend, Jake McGoldrick (I taught his sisters at Beaver), a former Philly roofer who moved to San Francisco where he eventually became a professor at the Jesuit University there and in 1990 a City Supervisor representing the Richmond District in City Hall. I should also add my first son, Michael, a poet and filmmaker, who emails me daily as we continue our mutual father/son postgraduate education of each other.
I call him fondly, My Altered Ego. Needless to say, it’s only in retrospect that I see how utterly inept I was at starting, and especially maintaining, friendships. Even my second marriage, at age seventy four to an Ossi thirty four, was not what you would call friendship. Companionship, yes. But we rarely, if ever, share an idea. She is a non-reading librarian. She chides me for abusing books physically, and for reading too much! I tease her for not reading at all, and for saying I read too much.
Slowly we have reverted to disparate, non parallel diets, converging, say, once a year to share a ritual goose on St. Martin’s Day. It’s an experiment in cross cultural living in which very little ever crosses. She’s huggable and pretty. She is my high IQ pet! Every time we visit her relatives, which gets oftener and oftener, I realize how disparate East Germans and Midwest Americans are.
And yet I’m happy I settled down in Weimar, where I can order any book in Germany on interlibrary loan for l euro (say two dollars.) And when I read the morning papers in English and German at the great Anna Amalia Research Library every day but Sunday,when I take a bath while my wife sings in the Lutheran choir. I goof around with the librarians. But I’ve made no friends at all in Germany.
I’m just on assignment, safe from the growing anxieties of life in Philadelphia. When I get too sick, having no health insurance, I’ll return to America. But friendless is not aloneness. I’m greedy every morning at six o’clock to seine as much of the Internet as possible. Starting with Time Select, Paul Krugman, M. Dowd, and T. Friedman, I move on to DRUDGE, dredging Pat Buchanan, Richard Cohen,Joe Conason, Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, John Leo, Thomas Sowell, and George Will.
What a life the Web is. Lately, I’ve started writing for Dan Rottenberg’s website, the Broad Street Review. For ten years I wrote a weekly column, “Hazard at Large” for his alternative paper, the Welcomat. But he’s not a friend. He’s a young mentor, showing me how to edit after a life behind the teacher’s desk. I should mention in the same breath Derek Davis who was the arts editor for the Welcomat. He’s defected to the Northern Pennsylvania Woods, and is as happy as Bush cutting brush. If I ever learned how to make friends, I’d begin with him! Now after this interminably long windup, the first pitch. Holy Rosary Academy.
I was bounced over Easter vacation--so there was little possibility of finding another Catholic high school that would take me on such short and ambiguous notice so I, faute de mieux, went to the local Edwin Denby High. A brief walk from the first house my mother bought with another teacher boarder in Northeast Detroit. It was theoretically a shock, since Denby had a rep, through no activities of mine, as the Whorehouse of Detroit. The classes I took were college prep, so my classmates were generally highly motivated achievers, like Chuck Riddle, the football center who became a Grosse Pointe gynecologist, end Ed Sohacki who became a dentist in Birmingham, and Ed LeBoeuf, a lawyer and politico in Detroit.
Because I was an excellent student when I wasn’t messing around (the bipolar cooled off in the strangeness of Denby) I graduated second in a class of 432 students. I’ve always wondered who had been a bigger grind than I! But too lazy to look up the records. In a dance club I met my first serious date, Fran Gilpin, perky daughter of a Chrysler engineer and a phys ed teacher in the public schools. When I got back from the Navy, I started dating her. And I’m embarrassed to admit that we broke up because she was a Protestant! But she was very dear, and I’ll never forget our winter meeting at the Lake, when we had both turned fifty.
She had married an engineer from Dow Chemical in Midland, MI and taught elementary school after graduating from Michigan State. She and her hunting husband Dee sired five Ph.D.’s, a record for any family I knew! Our isolated meeting on the frozen bluffs over Lake Huron was just a gesture that we were still fond of each other after all those years separate and alone. I was about to go on my three month circumambling of the Mediterranean in honor of my fiftieth birthday. It was the sweetest closure in a life without many. So. No friends from the Seminary. From Denby. From the Navy. One friend, Henry B.Maloney, from the University of Detroit, but that fizzled after 50 years when he blocked my e-mail address—for reasons unknown.
I kept loosely in touch with Steve Sweeney, a lawyer in Detroit for many years. From Graduate School, a great scholar, Stan Idzerda who dropped me when I dropped the Catholic Church!. From East Lansing High, zero. From Ford Fellowship in New York, Bill Sloan and his wife Gwenn, until I got too intimate with their daughter Jennifer. From Trenton State, none, except for Fred Kiley, a Rhode Island Mick who replaced me when I got a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn. No friends from the Annenberg, except Gilbert Seldes who was old enough to be my intellectual grandfather. And was. No friendships from my year in Honolulu. Or from twenty years at Beaver College, except for Benton Spruance, the great printmaker who died early, in 1967. So when Joseph Epstein writes an entire book on “Friendship”, I simply stand by, and sigh, enviously.
I did finally find someone to call my best friend, Jake McGoldrick (I taught his sisters at Beaver), a former Philly roofer who moved to San Francisco where he eventually became a professor at the Jesuit University there and in 1990 a City Supervisor representing the Richmond District in City Hall. I should also add my first son, Michael, a poet and filmmaker, who emails me daily as we continue our mutual father/son postgraduate education of each other.
I call him fondly, My Altered Ego. Needless to say, it’s only in retrospect that I see how utterly inept I was at starting, and especially maintaining, friendships. Even my second marriage, at age seventy four to an Ossi thirty four, was not what you would call friendship. Companionship, yes. But we rarely, if ever, share an idea. She is a non-reading librarian. She chides me for abusing books physically, and for reading too much! I tease her for not reading at all, and for saying I read too much.
Slowly we have reverted to disparate, non parallel diets, converging, say, once a year to share a ritual goose on St. Martin’s Day. It’s an experiment in cross cultural living in which very little ever crosses. She’s huggable and pretty. She is my high IQ pet! Every time we visit her relatives, which gets oftener and oftener, I realize how disparate East Germans and Midwest Americans are.
And yet I’m happy I settled down in Weimar, where I can order any book in Germany on interlibrary loan for l euro (say two dollars.) And when I read the morning papers in English and German at the great Anna Amalia Research Library every day but Sunday,when I take a bath while my wife sings in the Lutheran choir. I goof around with the librarians. But I’ve made no friends at all in Germany.
I’m just on assignment, safe from the growing anxieties of life in Philadelphia. When I get too sick, having no health insurance, I’ll return to America. But friendless is not aloneness. I’m greedy every morning at six o’clock to seine as much of the Internet as possible. Starting with Time Select, Paul Krugman, M. Dowd, and T. Friedman, I move on to DRUDGE, dredging Pat Buchanan, Richard Cohen,Joe Conason, Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, John Leo, Thomas Sowell, and George Will.
What a life the Web is. Lately, I’ve started writing for Dan Rottenberg’s website, the Broad Street Review. For ten years I wrote a weekly column, “Hazard at Large” for his alternative paper, the Welcomat. But he’s not a friend. He’s a young mentor, showing me how to edit after a life behind the teacher’s desk. I should mention in the same breath Derek Davis who was the arts editor for the Welcomat. He’s defected to the Northern Pennsylvania Woods, and is as happy as Bush cutting brush. If I ever learned how to make friends, I’d begin with him! Now after this interminably long windup, the first pitch. Holy Rosary Academy.
Monday, 5 October 2009
Chapter I / Pre-Ramble: Anti-cedents, part 1
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Lillian and May Fitzpatrick (age 2)
The reason I am writing this memoir is to try to explain to myself as well as my children how it was that I could have so much “Dumb Irish Luck” and do so little with the serendipities I was blessed with. It is not a happy story although I have been, with the exception of certain crises, a happy go lucky man. It involves a sweetheart marriage that failed after twenty years, and was followed by crippling animosities that have seriously damaged two of our three children psychologically. I’m not trying to blame anyone—besides myself. But my weaknesses have an etiology that deserves to be described.
The most damaging event in my life was my father’s running off with his secretary Ruth in 1930 when I was three years old. My only sibling, Harry Jr., was ten at the time, and it definitely wrecked him utterly. He had already become an alcoholic at Catholic Central High School, and after service as a bombadier in B-29’s in the Far East during World War II, returned to Detroit to a bleak life that ended in a fatal drunk during the Belmont Stakes in 1980, aged sixty. He was a charming man, but a mean brother: my own recollections of him were utterly negative:as a three year old taking the Michigan Central train from Detroit to Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City, I was pissing my pants on the way to the train toilet and he was mocking me to his friends instead of helping me.
Ten years later, as I walked along a path to our cottage at Lake Huron my swimming trunks were sliding down. Instead of quietly telling me to shape up, he pulled them down further-- to the delight of his peers. I was in the hospital getting born at the same time he was suffering from infantile paralysis. When the nurses heard that I was being named Patrick, they immediately dubbed him Mike—and the Pat/Mike paradigm followed him through life. My kids called him Uncle Mike. Our father’s absconding must have been much more damaging to him than to me, who barely knew the man. But I must sadly say that I never had any fraternal feelings for him at all, ever.
My father was a blank to me until I was thirty and flacking for the new Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania—visiting, for example, the TV networks in Hollywood to tell them what we were up to, and how they could help us with their expertise which we would translate into a new kind of curriculum. On the way back from LA on my way to the Aspen Design Conference in 1957 I stopped in Las Vegas and proceeded to his real estate office without an invitation.
The receptionist pointed to his office and I knocked on the door. “Harry Hazard,” I asked as he smilingly stood up to welcome any new real estate customer. “Yes, what can I do for you today?” like he was willing to sell me a hundred feet of the Sunset Strip. “I’m Pat Hazard.” He blanched. You see, Brother Mike had a bad reputation of gray mailing him.
He’d come out to Vegas to drink and gamble, two things he did inordinately in excess with very little success, and then rely on Harry’s fears as a bigamist to take care of his debts and other offenses. Harry jumped to the conclusion that I was another gray mailer and got me into his Buick to drive me to the Hoover Dam faster than you could say Senator Pat McCarran, one of his pals. He was relieved to learn that I was just a harmless professor—simply curious to see the man that had betrayed his youth.
I have often wondered about why he took off with Ruth after only ten years of marriage. He had been a small town boy from Pinconning, MI who had risen very fast in the American Expeditionary Force in 1918-19, returning a Captain, to take up a life as a furniture salesman for Jury-Rowe, a chain that moved him from Battle Creek, where I was born in 1927, to Jackson and then to Detroit. My mother May was the last of eight children born to Edward and Catherine Macdonald Fitzpatrick in 1895.
They were immigrants from Ireland, and they put all eight children through college (unusual for first generation Irish at that time) because of his very successful career as a lumberman in Ausable, MI. The oldest William G made it to a villa in Grosse Pointe, as the legal counsel for the Detroit Street Railways.(Holidays we poor cousins romped through his regal house, walking proudly across the street to Lake St.Clair to watch Gar Wood break new speedboat records.
It was son Leo took over the lumber business in Detroit. Uncle Vic became a Veep for Bell Telephone in Richmond, Va, Ned was a salesman at Hudson’s, Detroit’s most prestigious department store. Al studied theology in Rome and became the editor of the Catholic Universe Bulletin in Cleveland. The three girls came last, Loretta, Lillian, and May. Trained to be teachers, only Lillian was content to be a mother—of a factory worker.
Loretta became the first woman principal of a middle school in Detroit. Innocently, we regarded her as the family egghead, as she took the Sunday New York Times out of her rural mailbox on U.S.23, ten miles south of Tawas. My mother’s cottage she dubbed Birchloft because of the glorious second stand of birches on our bluff overlooking Lake Huron. Loretta followed with Silver Birches.
It wasn’t until graduate school that I discovered by walking across the highway to Jack Oates’s woods (he built our cottage for $750 in 1938, $800 for the fifty feet of frontage.)that our land was originally covered by humungous pine trees. The stump was so broad in circumference that I was stumped at first imagining what it was. Grandpa Fitz, of course, was the happy felon who directed this soft larceny!
It was a very traditional Catholic family—the high point of Gramma and Grandpa Fitz’s life together was sailing the Atlantic to Rome for Al’s consecration as a priest. The high point of Uncle Al’s summer vacation “at the Lake” was his saying Mass at an improvised altar, with me doing the altar boy thing. We never talked about serious things such as why Harry had abandoned his family.
I can imagine now that Harry spent too much time in Paris whorehouses to be easily satisfied by an American virgin. Though I don’t know because I only visited Harry twice after our strangely strained meeting in Las Vegas. Once in L.A. and once in San Francisco, where his brother Joe was a union official. That’s all I knew about him. Period. Indeed I was out in L.A. romancing a young lady at UCLA when Harry died in 1970, at age 77.
Mother asked me to do the family honors, although I didn’t get invited to the funeral, out of “respect” for his bigamous “wife” Ruth. (As a traditional Catholic, May wouldn’t, couldn’t at the time, give him a divorce.) Fifty years later, my ex-wife asked me to support her application for an annulment at the Detroit Catholic Tribunal: indeed she wanted to marry the man, now a widower, whom I had beaten out in the race to get married in 1950! For $75, it had become easy as pie not to get “divorced” but to pretend a legitimate marriage had never taken place!
When I visited Vegas for his death, a woman introduced as his “political secretary” (his bigamous state meant he had to work behind the scenes in Democratic politics in Nevada) said a lot of my father’s friends would be attending a fund raiser for the Women’s Committee of the Clark County Democratic Party. Would I like to go? I gladly went.
First it was Vice President Humphrey, “Oh, we’re really going to miss Hap.”(an unfamiliar appellation which made me smile!) Then it was Senator Bible. “Great Guy! Patrick.” Then the state’s Representative.. Then the Mayor. By the time I got to him in the reception line I wanted to say, “O.K. Tell me the truth what kind of a guy was this son of a bitch who walked out on his children.” But the nuns had trained me too well. I just had to accept that, now dead, my dad would never be able to explain his motives to me. But I had just gotten divorced (in Juarez, because in Pennsylvania you needed to plead adultery for a divorce, and though I had by then qualified on that account, for the sake of the children , I went alone to Juarez.) so I had a good idea of what had motivated Harry to split.
But the really salient effect of the fatherly betrayal was a pathological fear of being asked by other students at Holy Rosary who and where my father was. When I saw aimless chatter veering to family talk I would grandiosely change the subject—to the consternation of my companions! This obsession in effect kept me from forming close friendships for fear my secret (of abandonment) would be out. I would say such fears were the most important influence on the twisting of my character, as will become more apparent as the narrative unfolds.
Since my mother lived the life of a nun (her first boarder was a former nun!), never dating, except for one dinner with the gay guy who lived across the hall in an apartment in Highland Park. He once feigned fatherhood by taking me to see my first Detroit Tigers game at what was then called Navin Field, after the first owner. I was nuts about baseball at the time, even harboring the fantasy that I would one day replace Billy Rogell at short stop.
We had really good seats, right behind the visitors dugout near first base. Sunny Jim Bottomley, as it happened, was a slugger in a slump, and each time he ambled to the plate, I’d holler out, “Where’s that smile, Sunny Jim.?” Endlessly, until my effeminate patron began to fear that Sunny Jim might pop off to us, if he popped out another time. It was the first instance, in my memory, which I didn’t have analyzed until thirty years later as bipolar disorder! The solitary life my mother lived spilled over on me. We never had visitors. Indeed, the economics of the Depression had my mother giving up the apartment at the end of the school year, spending June, July, and August at the cottage, finding a new apartment in the fall.
Oddly, I was an easy going guy, always eager to say hello and meet a new person, whether in school or out. But never close. My cousin Bob (son of Aunt Lil and a half year older than I) was a chum throughout the summers at the cottage. He stayed a few cottages over with his Aunt Loretta. But I was a book worm and Bob turned out to be an industrial designer for General Motors as I started the intellectual preparation as a professor of American Literature.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
Technological Change and the Humanities Curriculum/part four
III. New Patterns in the Patronage of Music
What color reproduction techniques have done for the devotee of the visual arts, vinyl plastic has done for the music lover. The first new development is the emergence of the so-called bargain labels. Often not perfect in tone, and featuring second run artists and orchestras, these new labels still have the undeniable merit of bringing great music, adequately played, within reach of everyman's budget.
Some of the labels with widest distribution are Varsity, Royale, Allegro, Gramophone, Plymouth, Parade, and Remington. Established companies, in response to this new competition, have produced cheaper labels to the ultimate benefit of the patron. RCA's new Camden label, made by dubbing 78 masters on LP discs, thus brings top flight artists and orchestras under pseudonyms to a larger consumer public. Consult the complete listings in Schwann catalog for developments in a rapidly expanding field. Another new mode of patronage corresponds to the book clubs. First, there is the American Recording Society, made possible by a grant from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. It serves to redress the overemphasis of the commercial firms on the three B's by recording "200 Years of American Music."
Its formula of distribution is an occasional brochure explaining its current selection, accompanied by a card to be returned by un-interested subscribers. Its selections are largely 12" LP's, high fidelity records manufactured by RCA's Custom Record Division. A record costs five dollars plus postage, with a free bonus for every two records purchased. This scheme warrants support because of its attempt to create a literate audience for indigenous music. Music Treasures of the World distributes high fidelity 12" LP's for three dollars and postage. Each month the subscriber may decide from program notes whether or not he wishes the cur- rent selection.
Regardless of his decision he receives a helpful essay on "How to Appreciate Music" plus biographies of the composer or composers of the forthcoming recordings. Planned for this series are the most popular of the standard classics. Music Appreciation Records is a new plan sponsored by the Book-of-the Month Club. On one side of a high fidelity record there is a full performance of a great musical work, just as on an ordinary record; on the other side is an illuminating analysis of the music, with the various themes and other main features of the work played separately with running explanatory comment, so that the listener can learn what to listen for in order to appreciate the work fully.
Each month the new selection will be described by Deems Taylor. No specified number of purchases is required of the subscriber. The Standard Record, a 12" LP with performance and analysis, will sell to subscribers only for about four dollars including postage. Since many of the records will be from familiar often recorded works, an Analysis-Only Record on a 10" disc will be available for $2.40 plus postage. This type of imaginative cooperation between teacher-analysts and distributor is a hopeful sign of what may begin to happen when it is finally recognized that business and culture are not necessarily incompatible. A greater range of selections may be had from another mail order plan, The Musical Masterpiece Society.
Basically, its format is the distribution of lists of available recordings accompanied by order blanks. Recently, it has begun a monthly selection plan similar in operation to Music Treasures and Music Appreciation. The size, however, is 10" LP; the price, $1.50 plus postage; the recordings generally lesser known works. The competition of these various plans ultimately benefits the consumer-if he is aware of their existence. It seems the natural role of the humanities faculties to alert their students to the existence of all of these distribution schemes by listening or rental libraries for music, circulating galleries for the art, and honor payment or free rental for the paperbacks.
New technical processes and new methods of distribution-the contribution of business and technology to a maturing American culture-ought to have an impact on the humanities curriculum. And, if we stop to reflect, it is not surprising that a changing technology implies a changing humanities curriculum. The very fact that we have a humanities curriculum at all in mass education is a function of the increased leisure and income that technology has made more generally available. Indeed, mass education itself is a result of the industrial revolution.
Literature, at least reprints of classic selections, could become a staple in mass education only because of cheap paper and presses. As technology masters the problems of reproducing other art forms, it is only natural that the school will include them in the curriculum. It is because of the social results of the same industrial revolution that everyman's parlor, as it were, can become a library-concert hall-art gallery. Not only can the common man afford to spend money on these luxuries, but he also can afford to spend time on them. For the democratization of leisure is a corollary of the democratization of patronage we have been discussing.
It would be an irony of the most embarrassing kind if our purported enemies-the businessmen and scientists-could momentarily outstrip us in the effectiveness of their contribution to America's cultural maturity. But they have solved with amazing vigor the gargantuan problem of developing a mass supply of great art; perhaps it is one of our most important responsibilities at present to advertise for them and develop a mass consumer base for their newly created supply. In other words, it may be that one of our major roles as humanists in the immediate future is that of introducing our students to their new roles as patrons of the arts. To do that job competently, we must first know intimately the nature and scope of the mass reproduction revolution which has been merely outlined in the foregoing pages.
Finally, if this conscious cooperation with wholesome developments in the reproduction and distribution of the great art of the past is a legitimate goal of the humanities teacher, then an even greater responsibility is as yet almost totally unformulated. For technological change has not only changed the leisure and patronage patterns for classics. It has also created new art forms which are perhaps more crucial in their control over public taste than any of the great art forms and products of previous ages. Radio, TV, the movies, mass journalism, industrial design-the so-called popular arts-are the humanities, so to speak, of mass society.
Everyman is already their patron, albeit he is a rather untutored and disorganized one. If technological change affects humans-and it so obviously does, then it affects the humanities, or the expression of humanness. If we have a responsibility to help the common man become an intelligent patron of the classics, it seems we have an even more critical responsibility-that of making him a more intelligent patron of the popular arts. For it is a sad but accurate observation that in spite of the humanist's persistent ignoring of popular culture, it is only the humanist who has the special knowledge to develop and disseminate standards in the popular arts.
Technological change, then, not only changes the ways by which the classics are patronized, it also creates new art forms and patterns for patronizing them. How we can help our students fill their multiple roles as patrons of both the classics and the emergent technological arts is the question confronting the humanist in contemporary America. We could make the school a clearing house for the proven excellence of the classics and a seminar for developing and disseminating standards for the popular arts. To choose only the former is to run the risk of being submerged by vulgarity; to choose only the latter is to foolishly cut oneself off from the richest human experience.
A SELECTIVE LIST OF SOURCES FOR INEXPENSIVE REPRODUCTIONS
I. LITERATURE See Good Reading (November, 1954), p. 207 for comprehensive list of paperbound publishers and addresses. See "Mass Market" section of Publisher's Weekly for lists of new titles. Book Clubs. American History Publication Society, 11 E. 36th Street, New York 16. Book Find Club, 215 Fourth Avenue, New York 3. Book of the Month Club, 345 Hudson Street, New York 14. History Book Club, 45 W. 57th Street, New York 19. Readers' Subscription, 35 W. 53rd Street, New York 19. Seven Arts Book Society, 215 Fourth Avenue, New York 3.
II. ART Art Treasures of the World, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13. Associated American Artists Galleries, 711 Fifth Avenue, New York 22. Contemporary Arts, 31-S Stanhope Street, Boston 16, Mass. "Design Portfolio," Art News, 654 Madison Avenue, New York 21. Marboro Book Shops, 222 Fourth Avenue, New York 3. Metropolitan Miniatures, 345 Hudson Street, New York 14. Museum Pieces, 114 E. 32nd Street, New York 16. Sculpture Reproductions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd, New York 28. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Design Quarterly.
III. MUSIC Schwann LP Catalog, 131 Clarendon Street, Boston, 16, Mass. Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music (Mentor, $.35). Howard Taubman, How to Build a Record Library (Hanover House, $1.50). Record Clubs. American Recording Society, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13. Music Appreciation Records, 345 Hudson Street, New York 14. Musical Masterpiece Society, 250 W. 57th Street, New York 19. Music Treasures of the World, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13. 443
What color reproduction techniques have done for the devotee of the visual arts, vinyl plastic has done for the music lover. The first new development is the emergence of the so-called bargain labels. Often not perfect in tone, and featuring second run artists and orchestras, these new labels still have the undeniable merit of bringing great music, adequately played, within reach of everyman's budget.
Some of the labels with widest distribution are Varsity, Royale, Allegro, Gramophone, Plymouth, Parade, and Remington. Established companies, in response to this new competition, have produced cheaper labels to the ultimate benefit of the patron. RCA's new Camden label, made by dubbing 78 masters on LP discs, thus brings top flight artists and orchestras under pseudonyms to a larger consumer public. Consult the complete listings in Schwann catalog for developments in a rapidly expanding field. Another new mode of patronage corresponds to the book clubs. First, there is the American Recording Society, made possible by a grant from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. It serves to redress the overemphasis of the commercial firms on the three B's by recording "200 Years of American Music."
Its formula of distribution is an occasional brochure explaining its current selection, accompanied by a card to be returned by un-interested subscribers. Its selections are largely 12" LP's, high fidelity records manufactured by RCA's Custom Record Division. A record costs five dollars plus postage, with a free bonus for every two records purchased. This scheme warrants support because of its attempt to create a literate audience for indigenous music. Music Treasures of the World distributes high fidelity 12" LP's for three dollars and postage. Each month the subscriber may decide from program notes whether or not he wishes the cur- rent selection.
Regardless of his decision he receives a helpful essay on "How to Appreciate Music" plus biographies of the composer or composers of the forthcoming recordings. Planned for this series are the most popular of the standard classics. Music Appreciation Records is a new plan sponsored by the Book-of-the Month Club. On one side of a high fidelity record there is a full performance of a great musical work, just as on an ordinary record; on the other side is an illuminating analysis of the music, with the various themes and other main features of the work played separately with running explanatory comment, so that the listener can learn what to listen for in order to appreciate the work fully.
Each month the new selection will be described by Deems Taylor. No specified number of purchases is required of the subscriber. The Standard Record, a 12" LP with performance and analysis, will sell to subscribers only for about four dollars including postage. Since many of the records will be from familiar often recorded works, an Analysis-Only Record on a 10" disc will be available for $2.40 plus postage. This type of imaginative cooperation between teacher-analysts and distributor is a hopeful sign of what may begin to happen when it is finally recognized that business and culture are not necessarily incompatible. A greater range of selections may be had from another mail order plan, The Musical Masterpiece Society.
Basically, its format is the distribution of lists of available recordings accompanied by order blanks. Recently, it has begun a monthly selection plan similar in operation to Music Treasures and Music Appreciation. The size, however, is 10" LP; the price, $1.50 plus postage; the recordings generally lesser known works. The competition of these various plans ultimately benefits the consumer-if he is aware of their existence. It seems the natural role of the humanities faculties to alert their students to the existence of all of these distribution schemes by listening or rental libraries for music, circulating galleries for the art, and honor payment or free rental for the paperbacks.
New technical processes and new methods of distribution-the contribution of business and technology to a maturing American culture-ought to have an impact on the humanities curriculum. And, if we stop to reflect, it is not surprising that a changing technology implies a changing humanities curriculum. The very fact that we have a humanities curriculum at all in mass education is a function of the increased leisure and income that technology has made more generally available. Indeed, mass education itself is a result of the industrial revolution.
Literature, at least reprints of classic selections, could become a staple in mass education only because of cheap paper and presses. As technology masters the problems of reproducing other art forms, it is only natural that the school will include them in the curriculum. It is because of the social results of the same industrial revolution that everyman's parlor, as it were, can become a library-concert hall-art gallery. Not only can the common man afford to spend money on these luxuries, but he also can afford to spend time on them. For the democratization of leisure is a corollary of the democratization of patronage we have been discussing.
It would be an irony of the most embarrassing kind if our purported enemies-the businessmen and scientists-could momentarily outstrip us in the effectiveness of their contribution to America's cultural maturity. But they have solved with amazing vigor the gargantuan problem of developing a mass supply of great art; perhaps it is one of our most important responsibilities at present to advertise for them and develop a mass consumer base for their newly created supply. In other words, it may be that one of our major roles as humanists in the immediate future is that of introducing our students to their new roles as patrons of the arts. To do that job competently, we must first know intimately the nature and scope of the mass reproduction revolution which has been merely outlined in the foregoing pages.
Finally, if this conscious cooperation with wholesome developments in the reproduction and distribution of the great art of the past is a legitimate goal of the humanities teacher, then an even greater responsibility is as yet almost totally unformulated. For technological change has not only changed the leisure and patronage patterns for classics. It has also created new art forms which are perhaps more crucial in their control over public taste than any of the great art forms and products of previous ages. Radio, TV, the movies, mass journalism, industrial design-the so-called popular arts-are the humanities, so to speak, of mass society.
Everyman is already their patron, albeit he is a rather untutored and disorganized one. If technological change affects humans-and it so obviously does, then it affects the humanities, or the expression of humanness. If we have a responsibility to help the common man become an intelligent patron of the classics, it seems we have an even more critical responsibility-that of making him a more intelligent patron of the popular arts. For it is a sad but accurate observation that in spite of the humanist's persistent ignoring of popular culture, it is only the humanist who has the special knowledge to develop and disseminate standards in the popular arts.
Technological change, then, not only changes the ways by which the classics are patronized, it also creates new art forms and patterns for patronizing them. How we can help our students fill their multiple roles as patrons of both the classics and the emergent technological arts is the question confronting the humanist in contemporary America. We could make the school a clearing house for the proven excellence of the classics and a seminar for developing and disseminating standards for the popular arts. To choose only the former is to run the risk of being submerged by vulgarity; to choose only the latter is to foolishly cut oneself off from the richest human experience.
A SELECTIVE LIST OF SOURCES FOR INEXPENSIVE REPRODUCTIONS
I. LITERATURE See Good Reading (November, 1954), p. 207 for comprehensive list of paperbound publishers and addresses. See "Mass Market" section of Publisher's Weekly for lists of new titles. Book Clubs. American History Publication Society, 11 E. 36th Street, New York 16. Book Find Club, 215 Fourth Avenue, New York 3. Book of the Month Club, 345 Hudson Street, New York 14. History Book Club, 45 W. 57th Street, New York 19. Readers' Subscription, 35 W. 53rd Street, New York 19. Seven Arts Book Society, 215 Fourth Avenue, New York 3.
II. ART Art Treasures of the World, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13. Associated American Artists Galleries, 711 Fifth Avenue, New York 22. Contemporary Arts, 31-S Stanhope Street, Boston 16, Mass. "Design Portfolio," Art News, 654 Madison Avenue, New York 21. Marboro Book Shops, 222 Fourth Avenue, New York 3. Metropolitan Miniatures, 345 Hudson Street, New York 14. Museum Pieces, 114 E. 32nd Street, New York 16. Sculpture Reproductions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd, New York 28. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Design Quarterly.
III. MUSIC Schwann LP Catalog, 131 Clarendon Street, Boston, 16, Mass. Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music (Mentor, $.35). Howard Taubman, How to Build a Record Library (Hanover House, $1.50). Record Clubs. American Recording Society, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13. Music Appreciation Records, 345 Hudson Street, New York 14. Musical Masterpiece Society, 250 W. 57th Street, New York 19. Music Treasures of the World, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13. 443
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Technological Change and the Humanities Curriculum/part three
Vincent Van Gogh, Self Portrait
New Patterns in the Patronage of Art
The situation in the visual arts is similar. For example, an excellent paperback on the history of Western art has just appeared. Bernard Myers, Fifty Great Artists (BN) is a survey of "Six Centuries of Art from Giotto to Picasso."
Highly praised by art historians and critics, it contains over 100 full-page reproductions, sixteen of them in full color. Two issues of a paperback anthology, Seven Arts (PE) have appeared. These collections contain writings by men of the stature of Thomas Mann, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaron Copland, William Carlos Williams and Gian-Carlo Menotti. In the words of the editor, Fernando Puma, the collections provide "an exciting opportunity to read valuable and provocative articles by the foremost leaders in the world of painting, sculpture, music, literature, dance, theatre and architecture."
The first volume contained, in addition to over 200 pages of text, forty-eight pages of black and white plates of sculpture, architecture, photography, and painting. The Pocket Library of Great Art (PB) is a new series of pocket-size art books that sell for fifty cents. Degas, El Greco, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Matisse, Cezanne, Botticelli, the French Impressionists, Dufy, Van Gogh, Utrilo, and Rembrandt were the first titles; many more have since appeared.
The first titles met with such success that the series is now planned as a continuous operation. The Nation's art critic has described them well: These superb little books give many times their value in their texts, abundance of illustrations, and the quality and size of their twenty color plates, six of which double or even treble the size of the page by use of the double spread or the folded sheet. There are twenty supplementary illustrations of excellent quality in black and white. (October 10, 1953, p. 296.)
Each volume is edited by an outstanding authority, indicating that mass production and distribution need not imply vulgarization if the scholar and critic are willing to interpret their special knowledge for a non-specialized audience. Marboro Book Shops have launched another type of mass distribution program. Fourteen paintings were chosen for reproduction from the Louvre. Modigliani, Renoir, Rouault, Van Gogh, Lautrec, Monet, Vlaminck, Dufy, Utrillo, Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne are represented. Most of the paintings are approximately 20" X 24", in full color; the rest vary slightly from these dimensions. These color reproductions are available by mail order for two dollars each. Here again technology and business combine to provide the average American with an exciting opportunity for patronage.
Another popularization of classic paintings that deserves the support of the humanities faculties in mass education is the Metropolitan Miniature series. Each volume in the series contains twenty-four post-card size reproductions that the buyer mounts in an album with text. For each six volumes purchased, an attractive filing box is provided. Quite often this series is topically organized: "Children in Art," "Six Centuries of Flower Painting," "Three American Water Colorists," "Great European Portraits," "The Story of Christ," "Japanese Prints," "Medieval Vista," "Italian Renaissance Painting," "Persian Painting," and "American Folk Art." These albums fit the standard opaque projector, and the topical organization makes some of them excellent supplementary material for certain phases of English and American literary history. Each volume costs $1.25 and postage; the subscriber has no selection. Art Treasures of the World has started an even more impressive venture.
Here the formula is a portfolio of sixteen color reproductions, individually mounted on 11" X 15" matting paper ready for framing. An eminent critic has described the quality of re- production as "miraculous." Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso, Modigliani, Cezanne, Gauguin, El Greco, and Toulouse-Lautrec are among the first artists presented. Added features are analyses of individual paintings and a separate "Art Appreciation Course" prepared monthly by outstanding art educators. Each portfolio costs three dollars; the subscriber has complete freedom of purchase.
Even the reproduction of three dimensional objects is coming within the range of the average purchaser. According to Francis Henry Taylor, writing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog, Sculpture Reproductions, this new dimension in the democratization of art patronage is also based on a technical advance: In 1946 a new process for sculpture reproduction was adopted by the Museum. In addition to making many objects available for reproduction that could not have been cast before, this process makes it possible to achieve the greatest accuracy of detail in reproduction and to make an exact and sensitive recreation of the original sculpture. A brief text prepared by a member of the staff provides a description and history of the original Museum sculpture.
Similar sculpture reproductions can be obtained from Museum Pieces, an organization that is not limited to the work of the Metropolitan but includes many more. Its work retails by mail at prices from two to seventy-five dollars. Contemporary Arts, a Boston firm, specializes in outstanding modem sculpture. Not only are the possibilities of patronizing the classic arts being broadened, but also an entirely new consciousness of good design in everyday objects is being disseminated by the mass circulation magazines.
Side by side with the Life and Time color reproductions of art masterpieces and feature stories on all phases of art history will be found advertisements of and articles about well designed articles of everyday use. Art News, sensing the importance of this philosophy to the visual environment of industrial America, has inaugurated its "Design Portfolio." The first two issues of this feature have been devoted to advertising art and political cartooning. The Walker Art Center continues to publish its excellent Design (formerly Everyday Art) Quarterly.
Hallmark Cards again last year commissioned artists like Saul Steinberg to do Christmas cards for the mass market. Again the British are ahead of us in this respect: Penguin has started an excellent series called "The Things We See," with volumes on houses, public transport, and ships, among others. Finally, the Associated American Artists Galleries should be mentioned as an example of the creative personalities' banding together to develop a more conscious art patronage in America. This organization distributes original work in lithographs, etching, experimental media, tiles, and Christmas cards.
If we are slow to respond to the businessman and technician, surely we ought to cooperate with these overtures of the artist.
Friday, 2 October 2009
Technological Change and the Humanities Curriculum/part two
I. New Patterns in the Patronage of Literature
Most teachers know and appreciate the inexpensive reprints of the classics made available by such firms as Harpers, Regnery, Modern Library, and Rinehart.
It confirms the thesis of this paper to recall that these long established lines are excellent examples of how technological change can aid the humanities. The new patterns-the paperback revolution, the appearance of quality literature in mass circulation magazines, book clubs, and the recording of literature on film and record- promise greater riches founded on new production and distribution techniques developed by our businessmen and scientists. Noteworthy in the paperback revolution was the appearance of paperback anthologies devoted to the best in current writing. New World Writing (MN)* has reached its sixth semi-annual issue; Discovery (PB), its fourth; and Stories in the Modern Manner (AV) and Modern Writing (AV) have had two issues each.
Rolfe Humphries edited New Poems by American Poets (BB), a highly successful attempt to bring contemporary poetry of high quality to a mass audience. American Accent (BB) uses the paperback form to bring fourteen stories by members of Bread Loaf Writer's Conference to a larger audience. The last two are examples of the Ballantine plan of publishing originals simultaneously in hard and soft cover editions. Six Great Modern Short Novels (DL) contains work by Faulkner, Joyce, Melville, Gogol, Porter, and Wescott; Short Story Masterpieces (DL) is what one might expect from its editors, Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine.
Finally, it is interesting to note what happens when scholar and paperback meet, as in the Penguin series. The two most recent examples are Marcus Cunliffe, The Literature of the United States (PN) and first volume in a new series edited by Boris Ford, The Age of Chaucer (PN). It is ironic to find, in the case of the former, an Englishman writing a highly literate survey of American literature-a use to which an American scholar has not yet put a paperback. The new series, called a layman's guide to English literature, will contain seven volumes: The Age of Chaucer, The Age of Shakespeare, From Donne to Marvell, From Dryden to Johnson, From Blake to Byron, From Dickens to Hardy, The Present Age.
The format of the volumes include an account of the social context of literature, a literary survey of the period, detailed studies of some of the chief writers, and an appendix of essential facts for reference purposes. The first volume includes an anthology of medieval verse. That American scholars are beginning to use this new means of communication is apparent in Sculley Bradley's recent edition of Leaves of Grass (MN), Oscar Williams' The Pocketbook of Modern Verse (PB), and John Ciardi's new translation of The Inferno (MN).
Edith Hamilton's Mythology (MN) may be taken as example of material available in reprint. The Society of American Historians, Inc., whose membership of 400 writers of history is interested in a wider diffusion of historical materials and ideas among the general public, has gained considerable success in its first paperback, The World of History (MN), an omnibus of historical writing by many prominent historians. The Uses of the Past (MN) by Herbert J. Muller and The Shaping of the Modern Mind (MN) by Crane Brinton are typical of values to be found in historical reprints.
The Wonderful World of Books (MN) and Good Reading: A Guide to the World's Best Books (MN) are useful volumes to stimulate and guide the newly interested. The November, 1954 edition of the latter is especially important for its new comprehensive checklist of the best paperbound books. This checklist is twenty-five pages long and is divided topically. This list includes in its coverage the important new middle price range paperbacks, Anchor Books, Meridian Books, and Vintage Books.
Another new pattern in the patronage of good literature in contemporary America is the publication of mature work in the mass circulation magazines. The appearance of a Hemingway novella in Life is just a most spectacular instance in a general development. Harper's and Atlantic consistently publish work of high quality in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. More heartening is the regularity with which serious writing is found in the fashion magazines: Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Charm, and similar outlets.
Paperback and magazine come together in Saturday Review Reader #3 (BN), an excellent introduction for the general college student. This issue is particularly useful because of its essays on the theme of the common man and the mass media. Harper's and Atlantic have also published readers in this format-in effect, trial subscriptions at a price that permits inclusion in a variety of English curricula. The book clubs and related activities take advantage of a highly efficient postal service to distribute books at considerable savings to the subscriber.
For example, recently, the Book-of-the-Month Club offered the following to prospective members: Lindbergh's The Spirit of St. Louis, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Cousteau's The Silent World, Costain's The Silver Chalice, Paton's Too Late the Phalarope, Herzog's Annapurna, Johnson's two-volume Dickens, and Wouk's The Caine Mutiny. This is a respectable, if not an exalted, level of taste. And for those with higher aspirations, there is plenty of room for upward movement in the other book clubs. Book Find, Seven Arts Book Society, History Book Club, American History Publication Society, and Readers' Subscription are among the more specialized audiences assembled through efficient and imaginative use of the mails in book salesmanship.
Marboro Books distribute remainders and odds and ends by the same methods, usually at considerable savings. Perhaps the humanities could make the existence of such outlets more generally known. The mechanical preservation of literature by film and record is an asset long known by members of the NCTE. Teaching Films Custodians and the NCTE's poetry records are time-tested adjuncts to many literature programs. The developments along this line are equally exciting. Television's achievements now include Hamlet, Richard II, and Macbeth. Maurice Evans' Richard II has been made available on free kinescopes for school use. It is available from the Institute of Visual Training, Inc., 40 East 49 Street, New York 17.
The Schwann LP Catalog, available from most retail record dealers, is a most valuable source of recorder plays and poetry. Recent entries under its "Spoken and Miscellaneous" section include the Classic Theatre Guild's series of plays, contemporary work by Eliot, Arthur Miller, Christopher Fry, and performances of various of Shakespeare's plays. One of the major projects of the Caedmon Publishers for fall, 1954 is "a four-record set called 'Monuments of English Drama,' in which are acted major dramatic works beginning with the Quem Quaeritis, through Everyman, The Second Shepherd's Play, Gorboduc and a number of others, including Abraham and Isaac, and concluding with the Spanish Tragedy and Faustus."
Caedmon is outstanding for its pioneer work in recording not only drama and poetry but also fiction. Columbia Literary Series contains twelve LP's of the outstanding literary figures. Folkways is creating a reputation for imaginative material in this field: witness its recent "Anthology of Negro Poets" edited by Anna Bontemps and read by the poets themselves. In effect, the Schwann LP Catalog will become to the teacher of literature what Lewis Leary's volume has become for the scholar of American literature-an indispensable aid.
Paperbacks, the appearance of quality work in magazines of wide circulation, book clubs and mail order schemes, and mechanical methods of recording literary performances are among the most heartening facts of cultural life in contemporary America. It seems only natural that teachers in the humanities will do everything possible to finish what businessmen and technicians have started.
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Technological Change and the Humanities Curriculum/part one
TECHNOLOGICAL change and the humanities curriculum? The very suggestion--that a developing technics will exert a profound and consistent pressure on the humanities curriculum--has a faintly ridiculous tone. For our special prejudices as teachers in the humanities dispose us to think of our subject matter as fundamentally opposed to technology.
This is to say, the idols of our academic cave persuade us to a series of facile dichotomies: the humanities are an island of sanity in a morass of technological insanity; the humanities develop the whole man; the humanities are a reservoir of stable values in a civilization badgered by an unassimilated series of technical innovations. Technology stresses the mechanical; the humanities develop the imaginative. With technology we associate the clinical, the standardized, the commercial; with the humanities, the sympathetic, the individual, the esthetic. The end result of the first series is the one-eyed televiewer; the proud product of the second, a contemporary counterpart of Doctor Johnson.
There is just enough truth in this vision to blind us to its larger falseness. And this distrust of the businessman and technician as inimical to culture has roots deep in American experience. The frontier, Jacksonian vulgarity, the Gilded Age, Babbittry, and the ad-copy conformity of the present--these echo the theme that, in America, practical accomplishment is what counts. Art, in this mythos, is for the ladies and expatriates. And, indeed, as the "custodians" of culture in America, we have seldom operated in what might be called an encouraging atmosphere. We act the way we feel: just another generation of dedicated people fighting a delaying action against the vulgar masses.
Our tradition reminds us that we are "defenders" of the humanities. For these and other reasons, then, we view with skepticism the possibility that business technology has anything to offer our own specialty. Co-existence sounds too much like the appeasement of vulgarity. This condition of armed truce no longer fits all the facts. In the writer's opinion, important changes have taken place in the patronage of the arts in America largely because of business and technology. These changes, further, are major contributions to the power of the humanities in our national life. Our previous experience with the cruder excesses of business and technology has prevented us from seeing and cooperating with, in any thorough-going way, these new developments.
This paper describes, in an introductory fashion, some of these new modes of patronage. It also suggests ways in which humanists might contribute to the effectiveness of these changes. Though it may appear too uncritical of certain phases of these new media of esthetic communication-sensational advertising, for example, the reader should remember that we are usually well aware of these negative tendencies.
Moreover, we are in no position to criticize until we have done our best to encourage the positive factors. And there are many. For technology-through innovations in paperback book publication, LP recording processes, and color reproduction methods; and business-through its creation of new methods of distribution: the ubiquitous pocketbook rack and the book, record, and portfolio of the month clubs; have revolutionized the patterns of art patronage in the United States.
These developments have taken place largely since World War II; their end is not in sight. Above all else these factors in the mass reproduction revolution need what only the imaginative and unstinting cooperation of the humanities faculties can give: stability and a sense of direction. In return, we can expect unmatched resources in new reproductions of literature, art, and music.
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