I have long admired Clark DeLeon and his shtick of being Philly's Jimmy Breslin. But his bizarre conjoining of the expected execution of Timothy McVeigh with the Sixers' very unexpected arrival at the NBA finals makes my spirit double dribble. The absurdity of alleging that American sports mania would have inoculated McVeigh against treason is laughable. McVeigh's mushy brain is a result of the triumph of infantile commercial entertainment over a mature politics. The phony euphoria that the local dailies are whipping up to whistle in the gathering darkness of their plummeting circulations didn't start yesterday.
The bad American media habits really took off in the 1920's when the newer media of tabloid journalism and network radio competed fiercely for circulation by creating sports celebs--Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bill Tilden, Babe Diedrickson Zaharias--you know the roll call, the media have embedded their names in our collective consciousness. And the struggle towards the lowest common denominators just escalated over the decades as movies and TV shouldered their ways into the media mix.
Now we have a shamefully dysfunctional electorate, half of whom don't vote at all, and half of those who do, vote for morons. Consider our Republic, the ignorance of whose citizens about real problems at home and abroad is a global scandal. What the hell kind of a representative democracy is it where the even the dumbest know batting averages to the third decimal place and haven't a clue about the emerging world around them?
"If Timothy McVeigh had been a Sixers fan, he wouldn't care if no one remembered his name. . . He'd know he was part of something bigger. Something special. Something beyond names." And then Clark drags in Shakespeare, kicking and screaming, if he's the same Shakespeare I taught for thirty years. Really. And he also drags the heretofore unenthusiastic girls into his act, "caught up in the magic of an athletic moment that so perfectly describes what Philadelphia loves about itself".
Yeah. Tell that to the barbarians that cause so much grief at football games. Tell that to the oafs in Denver who trashed their downtown to celebrate victory. Hell, it's becoming Burn, Bubba, Burn when you win and Trash, Bubba, Trash when you lose. I can only infer that DeLeon has momentarily lost his faculties through an acute attack of Iversonitis, a disease that's spreading with dangerous rapidity in our town.
"Heart. Soul. Grit. Magnificence.Desire, Pride. You got a problem with that?" Unhuh. A Big, big problem. And I've got a problem with heroizing seven foot "giants" from the Congo or Canada, or wherever. The giants who made Philly great were Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, John Wanamaker and Walt Whitman, Joe Clark, Richardson Dilworth and Ed Bacon.
Sports heroes are pygmies compared with the thoughtful people who gave our democracy its infrastructure, which sports maniacs are steadily piddling away. Clark is beginning to sound like our president, "Leave no tall center behind". Overemphasis on sports has twisted our university system. Parental hunger for family stars has turned even T-ball into a ridiculous farce. Parents fighting refs. Parents fighting each other over games. God, where are we headed?
So Philly has an inferiority complex. (I grew up in Detroit, so I understand the metabolism of sports to self-esteem.) And Philly has a lot to feel inferior about--blighted neighborhoods, endemic racism, rampant individualism. But sports is no answer to these long range defects.
It is another anesthetic, which keeps us from taking sensible, thoughtful steps to build a city we can be rightfully proud of. The Sixer Sillies will pass, whether we win or lose. To be followed perhaps by Flyer Fantasies and Eagle Egregiousness. But they won't give us the grit to dig ourselves out of the pits we've dug for ourselves over the decades. Only ideas and character will do that. The rest is double drivel. Clark, put down that megaphoney and start thinking again.
*
Yo, Bro--because of the innumerable loads of shit I have inflicted on an unblinking world, I know it when I see it.One bad essay deserves another--so I'm e-mailing the piece I offered to the Inquirer on Timothy McVeigh. (I'm still working on an Iverson piece.) Patrick.
From: CDeleon88@aol.com
To: pdhazard@hotmail.com
Subject: Full of shit
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 04:47:49 EDT
Damn, Pat, if you weren't so right, I'd be offended. It was absurd of me to compare the two. I plead guilty to temporary insanity. Not only did my reach exceed my grasp, but it was purple and completely overdone. And depending on the outcome Wednesday night I might repeat my silliness by quoting Invictus on my deathbed.
I know you know I know better. I apologize for being ridiculous, but not for the emotions that led to it. At least I wasn't ironic. I meant what I said. And, God, wasn't that what you always liked about me?
Clark
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Monday, 14 September 2009
Facing Up to Modernity
PETER L. BERGER. Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1977. $11.50.
Facing up to the idiosyncratic sociologist is almost as hard for a humanist as facing up to all of modernity. On the face of it, there is much that is beguiling in Berger’s majority of one. His cover photo reveals a kind of Middle European Buddha, perky cheroot clenched contentiously. His print persona is no less offbeat: He brags, shall we even say swaggers, about being an unreconstructed Hapsburg! He flaunts his conservative Lutheran theology at the least hint of a liberal cliche. He makes it clear that these old commitments do not, in the smallest way, inhibit him in his activist contempt for American racism or in his opposition to the Vietnam War.
In short, Berger obviously relishes his role as the Ancient’s gadfly in a too complacently Modernist sociology. In his praxis (to use a term he perversely uses as a synonym for practice), he gives a new twist to that old line of W. H. Auden: Thou Shalt Not Commit a Social Science.
Having granted all this (mostly) in his favor, I have concluded there are at least two Bergers in this volume. One is the witty essayist for thoughtful weeklies; I should guess an ideal dining-drinking companion. The other is the aspiring (perspiring?) Big League Thinker who, after warning his readers (We have so far avoided formulating our perspective in systematic sociology-of-knowledge terms, so as not to offend prematurely with the proverbial barbarity of the specialist’s jargon (p. 172), can deliver this body blow to the solar plexus of civilized English: The social infra-structure of a particular ideational complex, along with various concomitant maintenance procedures, practical as well as theoretical, constitute its plausibility structure, that is, set the conditions within which the ideas in question have a chance of remaining plausible (p. 173).
I have puzzled long and lonely over this passage, thinking it might be a public service to translate it into idiomatic English; to give it a chance, so to speak, of remaining plausible. But the passage goes on and on, glossing the truism that ideas exist in a social context. The polysyllables add not a whit to one’s understanding of how that process works in discrete cases. (Berger is a delectable whiz, on the other hand, when he probes the America which gave us Calley and Manson in the same set of headlines.)
Hemingway used to argue that the first thing a serious American writer needed was an internal mechanism that made him sense when words were not reporting reality truly. Maybe social science needs a sludge rejector. And Berger One would seem to me to be the ideal person to teach this lesson to the endemic Berger Twos of his discipline.
From what I do understand in this book, I suspect I am missing a lot of significant insights because I cannot penetrate the Latinate/Teutonic barriers of Berger’s Higher Style. Because almost all of these 18 essays have appeared elsewhere, there is the usual problem of having heard some points more than thrice: I got to know Fritz Machlup often, if not well, in these pages. And because the essays were written with very heterogenous media in mind, readers will have to shift gears frequently to stay on the main road. The term excursions in Berger’s subtitle is perhaps too diffident, although it does announce the author’s willingness to do battle with every facile consensus in his craft.
My favorite essays-The Blueing of America and The Socialist Myth-occur in the first section on Understanding Modernity. He (and his wife Brigitte) are really cogent when they speculate about how upper middle class dropping out in the 1960s broadened upward mobility for blue-collar children. And his explication of the covert theological assumptions of the socialist mystique is deservedly classic in its reputation. In part II, Acting in Modern America, (a rubric I don’t really comprehend), I found Languages of Murder (on Calley/Manson) and The Greening of American Foreign Policy particularly thoughtful.
I suspect, however, that his heart is really in Part III, Transcending Modernity, where his theological critique of secular liberalism is centered. I feel about his enterprise here the same way I feel about William Buckley’s television series: However much I disagree with them on ad hoc issues, I would defend for the sake of our common intellectual life their opposition to unexamined deadliness. Because the whole incentive structure of university and media life discourages authentic conservative voices, those few which have survived deserve our closest attention. Liberalism without disloyal oppositions leads directly to the distended bureaucracies that disfigure our public life. The more I read Berger the more I wish he would quit trying to be another Max Weber and keep writing in the English of his journalistic essays.
PATRICK D. HAZARD
Beaver College
Glenside
Pennsylvania
Facing up to the idiosyncratic sociologist is almost as hard for a humanist as facing up to all of modernity. On the face of it, there is much that is beguiling in Berger’s majority of one. His cover photo reveals a kind of Middle European Buddha, perky cheroot clenched contentiously. His print persona is no less offbeat: He brags, shall we even say swaggers, about being an unreconstructed Hapsburg! He flaunts his conservative Lutheran theology at the least hint of a liberal cliche. He makes it clear that these old commitments do not, in the smallest way, inhibit him in his activist contempt for American racism or in his opposition to the Vietnam War.
In short, Berger obviously relishes his role as the Ancient’s gadfly in a too complacently Modernist sociology. In his praxis (to use a term he perversely uses as a synonym for practice), he gives a new twist to that old line of W. H. Auden: Thou Shalt Not Commit a Social Science.
Having granted all this (mostly) in his favor, I have concluded there are at least two Bergers in this volume. One is the witty essayist for thoughtful weeklies; I should guess an ideal dining-drinking companion. The other is the aspiring (perspiring?) Big League Thinker who, after warning his readers (We have so far avoided formulating our perspective in systematic sociology-of-knowledge terms, so as not to offend prematurely with the proverbial barbarity of the specialist’s jargon (p. 172), can deliver this body blow to the solar plexus of civilized English: The social infra-structure of a particular ideational complex, along with various concomitant maintenance procedures, practical as well as theoretical, constitute its plausibility structure, that is, set the conditions within which the ideas in question have a chance of remaining plausible (p. 173).
I have puzzled long and lonely over this passage, thinking it might be a public service to translate it into idiomatic English; to give it a chance, so to speak, of remaining plausible. But the passage goes on and on, glossing the truism that ideas exist in a social context. The polysyllables add not a whit to one’s understanding of how that process works in discrete cases. (Berger is a delectable whiz, on the other hand, when he probes the America which gave us Calley and Manson in the same set of headlines.)
Hemingway used to argue that the first thing a serious American writer needed was an internal mechanism that made him sense when words were not reporting reality truly. Maybe social science needs a sludge rejector. And Berger One would seem to me to be the ideal person to teach this lesson to the endemic Berger Twos of his discipline.
From what I do understand in this book, I suspect I am missing a lot of significant insights because I cannot penetrate the Latinate/Teutonic barriers of Berger’s Higher Style. Because almost all of these 18 essays have appeared elsewhere, there is the usual problem of having heard some points more than thrice: I got to know Fritz Machlup often, if not well, in these pages. And because the essays were written with very heterogenous media in mind, readers will have to shift gears frequently to stay on the main road. The term excursions in Berger’s subtitle is perhaps too diffident, although it does announce the author’s willingness to do battle with every facile consensus in his craft.
My favorite essays-The Blueing of America and The Socialist Myth-occur in the first section on Understanding Modernity. He (and his wife Brigitte) are really cogent when they speculate about how upper middle class dropping out in the 1960s broadened upward mobility for blue-collar children. And his explication of the covert theological assumptions of the socialist mystique is deservedly classic in its reputation. In part II, Acting in Modern America, (a rubric I don’t really comprehend), I found Languages of Murder (on Calley/Manson) and The Greening of American Foreign Policy particularly thoughtful.
I suspect, however, that his heart is really in Part III, Transcending Modernity, where his theological critique of secular liberalism is centered. I feel about his enterprise here the same way I feel about William Buckley’s television series: However much I disagree with them on ad hoc issues, I would defend for the sake of our common intellectual life their opposition to unexamined deadliness. Because the whole incentive structure of university and media life discourages authentic conservative voices, those few which have survived deserve our closest attention. Liberalism without disloyal oppositions leads directly to the distended bureaucracies that disfigure our public life. The more I read Berger the more I wish he would quit trying to be another Max Weber and keep writing in the English of his journalistic essays.
PATRICK D. HAZARD
Beaver College
Glenside
Pennsylvania
Sunday, 13 September 2009
The Community of Arts
Emily Dickinson
NBC-TV carries away cultural honors this month. One of the most ominous recent notes in discussions among broadcasters, however, is the threatened disappearance of the spectacular--the big-budget, ninety minute show, in which category are most programs of high cultural value. If larger audiences do not materialize for these programs, they will disappear from network schedules, to be replaced by formula shows, cheap to produce and ephemeral by design.
La Traviata by Verdi (NBC Opera Theatre, 2:00-4:30 p.m., NBC-TV, February 10) stars Elaine Malbin as Violetta, John Alexander as Alfredo, and Igor Gorin as Germont. The opera is based on the "Camille" story. For study suggestions see George Huddock's essay in February 1957 Clearing House. Your students will appreciate the NBC Opera Company's efforts to bring operas in English to the American public; see Chandler Cowle's explanation in October 1956 Clearing House. Superior students should study W. H. Auden's translation of Mozart's The Magic Flute (Random House) for an earlier NBC Opera presentation.
The last announcement is best of all: Julie Harris will recreate her Broadway role in Jean Anouilh's The Lark (Hallmark Hall of Fame, 9-10:30 p.m., February 10). Compare this version with Siobhan McKenna's RCA Victor recording of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, to be reviewed here next month. Tape the soundtrack of The Lark for an introduction to comparative aesthetics.
RECORDINGS
A composer's pleasure in a piece of literature frequently leads him to the sincerest of compliments: a composition based on that writer's work. Such musical tributes provide the English teacher with a sound rationale for introducing students in literature classes to contemporary music. Several of these musical variations on literary genius have recently monopolized this department's hi-fi: Virgil Thomson's "Five Songs from William Blake" (Columbia LP, ML 4919), Aaron Copland's "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson" (Columbia LP, ML 5106), and Igor Stravinsky's "In Memoriam Dylan Thomas" and "Three Shakespeare Songs" (Columbia LP, ML 5107).
The Thomson disc is perhaps the best one for in-class use. Mr. Thomson wrote: "It was my hope in selecting these poems to give a compact but complete view of Blake's humane philosophy. I did not attempt to include his prophetic ideas, as expounded in the hermetic writings." The five poems set to music, with Mack Harrell's baritone voice and the Philadelphia under Ormandy, are "The Divine Image," "Tiger! Tiger !," "The Land of Dreams," "The Little Black Boy," and "Did Those Feet." Highly recommended.
The Copland and Stravinsky are both interesting but perhaps more suitable for a classroom library. Somehow Martha Lipton's voice and Copland's music don't seem to embody the spirit of the poetry as effectively as the Blake recording does; and Stravinsky's advanced musical style would probably be too steep for most students. "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is the Thomas poem presented by Stravinsky.
The essential point of the "community of arts" is made clearly by this kind of recording. There are other ways to illustrate this same concept of the cross-fertilization of aesthetic traditions: the operatic presentation of Shakespeare's plays; the Leonard Bernstein-Lillian Hellman-Richard Wilbur musical comedy based on Voltaire's Candide; the musical comedy Lil' Abner, wherein the lowly comic strip stimulates the Broadway stage; the musical embodiment of the Greek myths. The LP is going to allow us to destroy the false image of literature as isolated from the other arts.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Movie-goers in search
Movie-goers in search of truly critical reviews usually find such a quest a long day's journey into night. Daily newspapers generally have all the dispassionate objectivity of the ads in the adjoining columns. Magazine critics are hampered by lack of space. Film magazines generally seem more intent on proving their superiority to Hollywood than on developing more mature patrons. One wishes, if not for more "positive" criticism (which so easily slips into blurbdom), then for coherent principles that illuminate the art in the better movies as well as explain its absence in the worst ones.
Two essays on the movies in recent paperback anthologies provide such sorely needed perspective: Pauline Kael assails "Movies, the Desperate Art" in Modern Writing #3 (Berkley Books) and Sidney A. Diamond appraises the difficulties of "Creating for the Screen" in New World Writing #10 (New American Library). Both have the virtues of the general essay (as opposed to the ad hoc fare of column criticism); each has the further asset of familiar, specific examples to support the general principles laid down.
Diamond's approach is historical, technical, anatomical (but not forbidding as some film aesthetics is); Kael's is sociological. "Creating for the Screen" presents the basic grammar of the film and explains clearly the artistic importance of the many people in the credits other than the blatantly ballyhooed actors.
Diamond also analyzes the movie's special qualities as an art, distinguishing it from related forms like the stage play. Miss Kael, again complementing Diamond's article, warns of the rarified nonsense that this esthetic approach sometimes engenders-such as the purists' rationale for the "chase" of cowboy and Keystone fame. Where Diamond outlines an ideal aesthetic for movies, Miss Kael explains why they so often fall short of their great potential.
Movies are spectacular because size sells; broadminded "critics" pander to a false conception of democracy; significant experimentation is short-circuited by both box office and the security-ridden fans fixated on early Chaplin and Rene Clair. Worst of all, the pressures of well-intentioned groups have calcified the image of minority members as heroes and of marriage as romance. The two essays provide the teacher and intelligent student with an excellent introduction to the movie both as art form and popular culture.
Two essays on the movies in recent paperback anthologies provide such sorely needed perspective: Pauline Kael assails "Movies, the Desperate Art" in Modern Writing #3 (Berkley Books) and Sidney A. Diamond appraises the difficulties of "Creating for the Screen" in New World Writing #10 (New American Library). Both have the virtues of the general essay (as opposed to the ad hoc fare of column criticism); each has the further asset of familiar, specific examples to support the general principles laid down.
Diamond's approach is historical, technical, anatomical (but not forbidding as some film aesthetics is); Kael's is sociological. "Creating for the Screen" presents the basic grammar of the film and explains clearly the artistic importance of the many people in the credits other than the blatantly ballyhooed actors.
Diamond also analyzes the movie's special qualities as an art, distinguishing it from related forms like the stage play. Miss Kael, again complementing Diamond's article, warns of the rarified nonsense that this esthetic approach sometimes engenders-such as the purists' rationale for the "chase" of cowboy and Keystone fame. Where Diamond outlines an ideal aesthetic for movies, Miss Kael explains why they so often fall short of their great potential.
Movies are spectacular because size sells; broadminded "critics" pander to a false conception of democracy; significant experimentation is short-circuited by both box office and the security-ridden fans fixated on early Chaplin and Rene Clair. Worst of all, the pressures of well-intentioned groups have calcified the image of minority members as heroes and of marriage as romance. The two essays provide the teacher and intelligent student with an excellent introduction to the movie both as art form and popular culture.
Friday, 11 September 2009
Erik Barnouw's Mass Communication
Erik Barnouw's Mass Communication: Television, Radio, Film, Press: The Media and Their Practice in the United States of America (Rinehart, $4.50) deserves a place in your library next to Seldes' The Public Arts (Simon & Schuster). Barnouw, an associate professor of dramatic arts at Columbia, has been a free lance writer in all the media he describes, program director for several advertising agencies, network script editor, and government communications consultant.
His idealism, then, is tempered but not a bit weakened or compromised by a lively sense of the facts of life in the communication industries. This awareness is indispensable: too much well-intentioned criticism of excesses on the mass media is irrelevant because ignorant of the practical preconditions for achieving excellence. Barnouw's expertise is apparent in all four sections of his book: on the history, the psychology, the individual media, and the sponsors of mass communication.
Barnouw sees mass communication as an intrinsic part of the larger industrial revolution, characterized by quantity production (of words, images, sounds), wide geographic distribution, and retail outlets. Particularly fresh and convincing is his metaphor of the local broadcasting station as a supermarket of information and culture.
Just as the local A & P stocks local produce in addition to nationally advertised brands of canned goods, so must the local station create its own local programs in addition to serving as a distribution outlet for programs canned in New York or Hollywood. This single image provides the broadcaster and journalist with an entire theory of responsible communication. May many of them read Barnouw's book and act upon its mature and realistic idealism.
Barnouw is not "shocked" by the blatant emotional appeal of successful entertainment. The trick is to reach man's mind by touching his heart. The great challenge to the serious broadcaster, then, lies not in appealing to highly focused, intellectually disciplined audiences within easy reach; he must rather aim at the unfocused audiences that most desperately need intelligent perspectives on their lives and problems.
Finally, on the basis of his great experience in the media, he insists on an essentially optimistic principle: not only is triviality no guarantee to success on the media, but substance is not doomed to failure. The real question is not whether the program or message is fluff or great wisdom, but rather does the form of the message engage the deepest sympathies and energies of man.
Neither Pollyanna nor Cassandra, Barnouw is a tough-minded idealist who knows it's not enough to feel superior to frequent vulgarity on the media. The man with important ideas must learn how to use these new disciplines of communication. Clear, informed, completely unsentimental, Barnouw's book will give most teachers all the perspective they need on the media that predetermine the minds and sensibilities of their students.
His idealism, then, is tempered but not a bit weakened or compromised by a lively sense of the facts of life in the communication industries. This awareness is indispensable: too much well-intentioned criticism of excesses on the mass media is irrelevant because ignorant of the practical preconditions for achieving excellence. Barnouw's expertise is apparent in all four sections of his book: on the history, the psychology, the individual media, and the sponsors of mass communication.
Barnouw sees mass communication as an intrinsic part of the larger industrial revolution, characterized by quantity production (of words, images, sounds), wide geographic distribution, and retail outlets. Particularly fresh and convincing is his metaphor of the local broadcasting station as a supermarket of information and culture.
Just as the local A & P stocks local produce in addition to nationally advertised brands of canned goods, so must the local station create its own local programs in addition to serving as a distribution outlet for programs canned in New York or Hollywood. This single image provides the broadcaster and journalist with an entire theory of responsible communication. May many of them read Barnouw's book and act upon its mature and realistic idealism.
Barnouw is not "shocked" by the blatant emotional appeal of successful entertainment. The trick is to reach man's mind by touching his heart. The great challenge to the serious broadcaster, then, lies not in appealing to highly focused, intellectually disciplined audiences within easy reach; he must rather aim at the unfocused audiences that most desperately need intelligent perspectives on their lives and problems.
Finally, on the basis of his great experience in the media, he insists on an essentially optimistic principle: not only is triviality no guarantee to success on the media, but substance is not doomed to failure. The real question is not whether the program or message is fluff or great wisdom, but rather does the form of the message engage the deepest sympathies and energies of man.
Neither Pollyanna nor Cassandra, Barnouw is a tough-minded idealist who knows it's not enough to feel superior to frequent vulgarity on the media. The man with important ideas must learn how to use these new disciplines of communication. Clear, informed, completely unsentimental, Barnouw's book will give most teachers all the perspective they need on the media that predetermine the minds and sensibilities of their students.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
The Three Graphic Media
The Steerage, Alfred Stieglitz
The three graphic media of most importance to English teachers are the comics, photojournalism, and motion pictures. We have seen just enough excellence achieved within each of these media not to be taken in by snobbish cliches about these "vulgar" forms. Cartoonists Walt Kelly and Al Capp, photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, movie creators John Huston and Ingmar Bergman--to name at random from the growing roster of immortals in the graphic media--serve to remind us that these art forms have significant histories, i.e., achievements worth remembering.
The comic industry has bounced back from the panic of 1954 over imminent censorship brought on by a plethora of sadism and sex. A large and superficially impressive publicity campaign is under way now which includes a large research project at Boston University into the history of comics. In a magazine which goes to retail newsdealers appears the subtitle: "Comics: Teacher's Pet!" The article claims research conducted at Teachers College, Columbia, under Professor Irving Lorge has found: " . . . comics can give children a very sound and thorough orientation into facts of biography, the appreciation of the outdoors, understanding of science, enjoyment of a plot, or the appreciation of humor.
The amount of incidental information youngsters are likely to pick up is considerable." Some can give children, of course, is a far cry from all do give children. But such distinctions are not the kind that the pleasant blur of trade association public relations traffics in. "Educators," the trade magazine, Newsdealer, widely generalizes, "increasingly recognize that comics serve as a powerful stimulus to the development of the reading habit among the millions of young people who read them regularly.
The intense enjoyment and excitement with which children read comics, provide an introduction to the infinite world of books and magazines. For reading of comics involves application to the printed page--while other media, similarly popular among the young--TV, movies, radio--do not. Children who are avid comics readers tend toward other forms of literature as well, for the reading habit has been established in them." It then goes on to quote child psychologist Dr. David Goodman who writes in a syndicated educational column that since the comics self-censorship Code forbids horror and crime he does not think parents should object to their children reading comics. His reasoning is questionable: the more children read, the more they can read.
"The nonreader is a defeated, maimed person in our society subject to many social and psychological distresses. Anything that can make him read is all to the good. Of the various mass media, the two that appeal most to children are TV and comic books. Both supply the excitement the young crave and need. But the former calls for a mere passive attention of little profit in a child's education. The comic books help a child learn to read." (Newsdealer, July, 1960, p. 11.)
It is truly embarrassing to have such stereotypes about the intrinsic superiority of print media being presented by an educator; it merely obfuscates the public's understanding of a newer graphic form like the comics. For reading for the sake of reading is pedantic folly. The little girl who buries her nose in a book because she is afraid to face a threatening world is not growing; she is merely postponing a rude reckoning. The scholar burrowing through the Library of Congress with no important questions on his mind is reading himself into a deeper and deeper rut of irrelevance. Our criterion for every medium is simply this: Does a person grow in contact with a specific product of that medium? Does his imagination expand, his intelligence deepen, his control over himself grow?
Captain Kangaroo or Leonard Bernstein are surely more conducive to such growth than run-of-the-mill comics; and Mad magazine is more intellectually stimulating than most of the simpery teenage books I've seen. So in spite of the fact that the Chamber of Commerce gave the Comics Magazine Association of America its National Recognition Award because 90% of the publishers, distributors, printers, and engravers submitted themselves to private self-censorship (twenty years after the industry started!) we cannot be greatly impressed by their "outstanding achievement in the business and the public interest."
The only way to make English teachers applaud would be more UPA and Disney cartoons, more inspiring artists using this potentially instructive medium at a much higher level of intellectual complexity with much greater respect for quality of paper and color. Even then, because our prime commitment is to maximum individual growth and optimum social maturity, we would recommend to our students that they forgo the secondhand pleasures of, say, Disney's nature comics for the real thing. Observation, first-hand experience, careful inspection of the real world seem too easily passed by when youngsters stuff themselves greedily with stacks of poorly printed, more often than not innocuous, "clean" comics.
Our strategy should be to push the intelligent comics but promote even more a summer in the woods, a vacation in a workshop, a mind and sensibility engaged in contemplation or in activity, not one soaking up misregistered four-color pulp dreams.
Wednesday, 9 September 2009
"What's TV Doing to English?" Part II
A scene from the Americanization of Emily by Paddy Chayefsky
The Public Arts: "What's TV Doing to English?"--Part II Author(s): Patrick D. Hazard and Mary Hazard Source: The English Journal, Vol. 48, No. 8 (Nov., 1959), pp. 491-493 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Last month we raised a question as to what is a "natural" for the English teacher on television. Is it Bergan Evans' "The Last Word" where that witty Northwestern University English professor draws a great deal of his charm by being an "untypical" English teacher, i.e., one, who instead of guarding the language over his own dead body, gaily makes a thing out of being permissive about linguistic usage? The trouble is that Bergan Evans is a welcome antidote to the kind of lady I met on the train who would mark off a theme that used "dilapidated" in reference to anything but a stone house because of the Latin root.
But in the kind of wild and wooly contexts that most of us teach in, a good stiff dose of standard English ain't gonna scar anybody's psyche. But instead of the cocktail party approach to language characteristic of Bergan Evans' show, I would rather students develop an ear for style and appropriateness-which they might get more quickly from Mad magazine's "translation" of "The Night Before Christmas" into Variety-ese, Time-style Confidentialisms, and that semantic glue otherwise known as a Presidential press conference. The last word on language is style not repartee.
Well, then, what is a "natural" for the English teacher? Is it Shakespeare, Shaw, and any other accepted classic? Is it "Hallmark" or "DuPont"? Is it Greek tragedy on "Omnibus"? I think not. I have always felt and still do that every cultural gesture, no matter how ill conceived, deserves the careful attention if not the uncritical support of the English teacher. But we can never let the TV programmers salve their consciences or try to lull our sensibilities with a systematic looting of the creativity of other media. Robert Sherwood once noted that it took TV only five years to run through 500 years of literature.
The primary criterion, and we must never forget this, is how well is TV serving the contemporary artist and audience. As long as "Camera Three" is just a substitute for church on Sunday mornings, we've got something to gripe about. Ex-English teacher Jack McGiffert, by the way, is the producer of that program which constantly experiments with TV as a medium for the familiar visual essay. Better an average Sunday with "Camera Three" than any ninety-minute thumbnail version of Shakespeare.
But even "Camera Three" is less original than it wants to be because of low budgets. The real "naturals" for English teachers are original TV playwrights like Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, J. P. Miller, and the whole Philco-Goodyear Theatre group who have had lean years on TV lately but who kept the tradition alive in "Playhouse 90" and may become more visible in NBC's new "Sunday Showcase."
For a serious weakness with the arts in America is a tendency to make them compensatory for the dreariness and barrenness of a half-mature industrial society. And the English teacher historically has been as powerful as any other group in encouraging this dispirited play. A brilliant examination of this tendency to erect Culture as something over and above society is in a new book by Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Columbia University Press, $5.00).
Mr. Williams is talking about England, but given our occupational tendency to Anglophilism, this fact just makes his comments more pertinent to us. Alfred Kazin has succinctly stated the theme of this seminal book in his review for The Reporter, "What's Wrong with Culture?" (July 23, 1959, pp. 43-44): "I once met in a German university a professor of English literature who thought it 'uncultivated' to discuss the concentration camps. Admittedly, this was an extreme case (though not untypical of German professors) of what 'culture' has come to mean. But as Raymond Williams shows in this remarkable study of the different uses to which English writers have put this term since 1780, the distinctly modern conception of culture as something 'higher' than society is itself extreme-a desperate response to the Industrial Revolution and modem mass society.
"Oddly enough, the term came into usage as a way of handling new social facts, not of escaping them. Romantic poets like Blake and Coleridge, who are now symbols for the cultivation of private fantasy, were concerned with every conceivable social abuse in a way that would stagger many American writers today. The great succession of literary salvationists in Victorian England-John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris offered different gospels of what 'culture' should mean; all of these were nothing but indirect reports on the ugliness, poverty, and despair of industrial England.
"But these ideas of 'culture' were always rivals to industrialism and democracy, alternatives to them rather than means of social change based on an acceptance of them. And step by step, this conception of culture as a rival party to society, as the ideal realm of value opposed to the dreary actuality of industrialism and mass culture, has led to our present idea of culture--not as a way of creating a good society but of escaping from society altogether."
The Regents Exam concept of cultivation--just memorize enough of the right stuff and you are ipso facto civilized-is our American variant of this sterile substitution of Culture for culture as a total way of life. So the real "naturals" for the English teacher on television are the original plays about the moral ambiguities of private and social life in American industrial democracy. We must never be satisfied with mooning over the glories of preindustrial excellence; Miniver Cheevys are passe.
We must ask of TV that it help create a new industrial community by having what every responsible patron must have: guts to give real artists head and a faith that intelligent support is more reliable over the long haul than hypersensitivity to the residue of smalltownishness that still afflicts America. What we need rather than puppetlike genuflections by the networks to the "safe" classics of the past is a gradual subsidization on TV of artists by businessmen who want to have their own and the "sovereign" customers' formless experience of mid-twentieth century life given the kind of shape that Paddy Chayefsky gave it in The Catered Affair, Middle of the Night, Marty, and Rod Serling in The Velvet Alley and The Rank and File, and J. P. Miller in The Rabbit Trap and The Days of Wine and Roses, and Tad Mosel in Five-Dollar Bill, and Adrian Spies in A Trip to Paradise.
Until TV becomes a patron of new art rather than a robber baron who strip-mines the past for Cultural curios like the tycoons who used to transport whole castles to America to show their peers, until then, we can give it only half our heart. The answer to our editor's question, "What is TV doing to English?" turns out to be another question: "What are English teachers doing with and for TV?" From where I sit, much--but not nearly enough, with more in the offing.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
"What's TV Doing to English?"
While I stumbled, wan and weary, through a boring committee meeting last summer, a long-distance phone call jangled me half-alive in my office. It was the TV editor of a national weekly, posing an apparently simple question: "What's TV doing to English?" He was planning a feature story and was looking for leads. As I gradually shook off the occupational ennui that makes committee meetings tolerable, his problem came into focus: He really meant to ask what TV was doing to the state of the English language, given the prevalence in teenagers' consciousness of rock and roll performers with guide-book size vocabularies and pool-hall diction.
When I explained that English teachers not only taught students the nature of the language but they also counseled them in how it is best used in first-rate fiction and non-fiction, he admitted that TV's impact on teaching drama and the arts also interested him but that the medium's influence on factual reporting didn't especially.
Wide awake now, having parried his questions, I found I could only hum and haw inadequate answers even though I had intentionally sought answers to his very question for the past several years for myself and the readers of this department. I promised to call him back in a day or so. I finally decided to write him an answer by thinking aloud about a problem that understandably concerns every thoughtful English teacher. Here is what I told him:
The funny thing about TV is that at its infrequent best it outclasses even the best classroom by a mile, but at its ordinary deadly level it puts even the best teacher at a real disadvantage. For as the National Education Association's Educational Policies Commission pointed out with a lucidity unusual in official pedagogical papers: The newer media complicate the teacher's role by enormously extending the vicarious experience of the student at the same time that the media create authority figures who undermine the status and respect of the teacher. (Mass Communication and Education, 1958, $1.25.)
Put simply, the typical teenager has probably seen more entertainment of high calibre on the Ed Sullivan Show than his parents saw in all of their pre-TV lives; and the same "sophisticated" teenager looks to Dick Clark's column in This Week rather than to his parents or teachers for help on the problems of adolescence.
Teachers ignore this shift in the nature of extracurricular experience and the rise of new authority figures at their peril. If this media experience or the new models of "excellence" remain unexamined, not all the Matthew Arnold in the world is going to help the ordinary youngster grow to maturity within the parochial limits of popular culture. This unexamined surface experience envelops the teenager in a cocoon of comfortable complacency: Thus the peculiarly American phenomenon of perennial adolescence, in which the adults concur in the teenager's equation of happiness with irresponsibility by saying, and wistfully, that you're only young once. (How untrue, when so few really grow up because they never grow tired of that cliche.)
The teacher who wants his students to grow in their handling of the language and to mature in their ability to read and write at complex levels of understanding must find ways to refine the low-grade ore of secondary experience that the media dump on our students in daily carloads, and must learn how to use authority figures in the mass media in ways that increase the rate of growth of their students as intelligent, imaginative individuals.
The first necessary but not sufficient step is to track down relentlessly every conceivably teachable smidgin of excellence on the medium. This is not as hard as it used to be. For over three years now, "The Public Arts" in this journal has given in its Bulletin Board details on promising plays, documentaries, and cultural events. A three-month deadline introduces a certain margin of error into these prognostications, but these can be checked against the weekly listings and study-guides prepared by my wife and me in "Look and Listen" in Scholastic Teacher (33 W. 42nd Street, New York 36).
Even closer checks are possible with the lively and literate syndicated column, "TV Key." (Write 28 E. 56th Street, Manhattan, to find out the nearest newspaper that carries this feature.) In the case of "naturals" (of which more later) for English teachers, The English Journal and "The Humanities Today" department in Clearing House (Fairleigh Dickinson U., Teaneck, N. J.) supply detailed study guides like Henry B. Maloney's on "Half a Hamlet Better Than None?" in last February's Journal.
A trickier but equally indispensable next step is to help students understand the mediocrity of the mediocre. This, essentially, is making ladders out of walls. If TV goes half-cocked on westerns, push Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie, and Francis Parkman for all they're worth. Use the unmotivated violence of mysteries and police films to explain the artistic integration of violence in the Greek tragedians, Elizabethans like Shakespeare, and moderns like Tennessee Williams.
Use sick humor as a peg for the analysis of the ugly strain of morbidity that runs through American humor from the frontier gander pullings of A. G. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, through Ambrose Bierce to Mark Twain's later darkness. What is there in an officially 100% Happy Society that causes sick humor? In this task of baiting subversive trends in popular culture, our best critics are indispensable. John Crosby is well enough known by English teachers to be widely anthologized by now, but there are others, less known, who deserve whopping Trendexes in your classroom: William Ewald, syndicated by United Press International (my own current favorite), Robert Lewis Shayon of the Saturday Review, John Lardner of the New Yorker, Marya Mannes of the Reporter, Charles Mercer of the Associated Press, and cover stories and features in Time and Newsweek.
These writers are only a mimeograph away from your class, and print still remains the most democratic of media, giving as it does writers equal opportunities to express their thoughts however complex or simple and readers equally differentiated amounts of time to cover and understand such a range of expression.
Once you have used everything at hand to analyze TV's excellence and exercise mediocrity with a critic's infectious laughter, you are ready to tackle the tough one: the emergence of new authority figures like Dick Clark, Elvis Presley, and Fabulous Fabian who are frequently all the more influential because they are teenagers themselves with none of the inhibitions and reservations about entertainment-as-a-way of life that maturity entails.
Here I think our best strategy of the moment is to fight fire with fire (I'm tempted to say fight smoke with real fire). The only effective answer to Dick Clark is Leonard Bernstein; Steve Allen (Is his book on comedians, The Funny Men, Simon and Schuster, 1956, in your high school library?) is proof positive against a glib booby like Art Linkletter; Dave Garroway and Charles Van Doren are God's answer to a teacher's curse on unamiable nonentities like Jack Paar and that senile Beatnik Alexander King; Robert Herridge and John Frankenheimer, not Desi and Lucy; Chet Huntley and David Brinkley sufficiently reveal how unnecessary the next-door-neighbor approach is in world travelers like Lowell Thomas and John Cameron Swayze. For what we're after when we try to help our students use well the language and the cultural heritage it unlocks is to give them a modicum of urbanity, a sense of irony, the universal resiliency that is necessary in a metropolitan civilization where everyone is a citizen.
It's not that we have anything against rubes per se; it's just that the world moves too fast for folksiness to be a virtue anymore. Wholesome, cleancut types like Dick Clark are not up to it; absence of social vices is no sufficient measure of personal maturity. And that is what we're after as English teachers whose subject is at once the key to understanding all of the products of man's intelligence and that major sector thereof described as the humanities.
Monday, 7 September 2009
Jazz Plus
PRINT
Marshall Stearns' The Story of Jazz (Oxford University Press, $5.75), quite apart from its primary value as a splendid survey and analysis of jazz from ancient West African origins to the latest weird collocations of sounds emerging from some basement on New York's 52nd Street, is a book that will provoke a good many double-takes among English teachers.
And that's as it should be. For Stearns, Harvard A.B. and Yale Ph.D., and currently associate professor of English literature at Hunter College, shows what intellectually stimulating things can happen when a rigorously trained humanist takes a role as penetrating and scholarly critic of a popular art. By academic training a specialist in medieval literature, with a biography of Robert Henryson (Columbia University Press) to his credit, Stearns has parlayed an avocational interest in jazz to his present preeminence as dean of jazz academicians-director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, indefatigable lecturer and organizer of symposia and jazz festivals, and State Department representative on Dizzy Gillespie's recent musical tour of the Middle East.
His book has seven sections: on pre-history in West Africa and the West Indies; origins in the vodun rituals and Negro marching bands of New Orleans; the nineteenth century American background, examining the various roles of the Great Awakening, the work song, blues, minstrelsy, spirituals, culminating in ragtime, a jazz style flourishing for the two decades to the end of World War I; the jazz age in the twenties; jazz yesterday and today, covering swing, bop, and Afro-Cuban music; three musicological chapters on the nature of jazz; and four final chapters on the future of jazz.
For an expert's analysis of what this book does and doesn't do in an absolute sense, readers should see Nat Hentoff's review in Commonweal (November 9, 1956). Hentoff, an editor of Downbeat, finds it "an important, original, and provocative study," but necessarily not the last word. Robert George Reisner's thirteen-page bibliography and list of jazz magazines and the splendid centerfolio of photos add to the book's value. Stearns brings an admirable catholicity to his appreciation of jazz, avoiding and deriding those various parochialisms that admire, at one extreme, only the most recent dissonance, or at the other, only the "purest" Dixieland.
RECORDS
Marshall Stearns' lively yet solid performance is reassuring: an academic approach does not necessarily smother the vitality of popular art in a sandhill of footnotes. No such prior doubt exists in the case of the protean Leonard Bernstein--composer, conductor, performer, entertainer. Last season on "Omnibus" Bernstein created a major sensation by his informally literate explication of his own love for jazz. The highlights of that program have been released as "What Is Jazz?" (Columbia LP 919), an analytic, as opposed to historical, study of this musical form.
A completely admirable aural essay, it proceeds in illuminating counterpoint from Bernstein's discussion to musical illustrations to further verbal explication. Blue notes, breaks, syncopation, instrumental colors, and other elements of jazz are explained through specific musical examples, e.g. pieces are played only on the white keys or without syncopation--and the musicological points are thereby made unmistakably clear. Bernstein is an unusually effective teacher. He explains the nature of the blues by creating "The Macbeth Blues": "I will not be afraid of death and bane--I said I will not be afraid of death and bane; Till Birnan Forest comes to Dunsinane."
A twelve-bar stanza, in which the first line of a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter is repeated, Bernstein archly explains. Bernstein's record is a natural complement to Stearns' book. High school libraries should have them both. In fact, a single English teacher could bring a great deal of perspective to his high school's patronage of popular music by starting either a jazz club or a jazz library or both, each taking care of the other.
Further items for such a club library: The Story of Jazz, narrated by Langston Hughes (Folkways LP, FP 712, 117 West 46th Street, New York 36, with program notes); A Musical History of Jazz, narrated by Wally Cox, with notes by George Simon (Grand Awards Record LP, G.A. 33-322, Kingsland Avenue, Harrison, New Jersey); two jazz--records-of-the-month clubs: The Jazztone Society, 45 Columbus Avenue, New York 23; and Jazz Division, American Recording Society, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13; Rex Harris, Jazz (Penguin, A247, 850); Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (Grove Press, 795 Broadway, New York 3, $3.50); Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (Dial, $5); Jacques Barzun, Music in American Life (Doubleday, $2.75); Stephen Longstreet, The Real Jazz, Old and New (Louisiana State Press, $5); and Carter Harman's A Popular History of Music: From Gregorian Chant to Jazz (Dell, 500).
FILM
The lure of TV money prompted MGM and other major film producers to withdraw some of their abridged features from distribution. The same economic forces have, on the other hand, resulted in MGM's releasing many full-length features for educational distribution on 16 mm: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bad Day at Black Rock, Billy the Kid, Captains Courageous, David Copperfield, Julius Caesar (Marlon Brando, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson), Mrs. Miniver, Pride and Prejudice, Red Badge of Courage, and Romeo and Juliet (Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, John Barrymore). Black and white features rent from $15.00, on a sliding scale based on enrollment. The Romeo and Caesar have a $25 minimum rental. There are definite advantages to be had from studying the complete film even if they can't be squeezed into class periods as the abridged versions could. Assembly programs at the end of the school day might be a solution. Films Inc. (home office, 1150 Wilmette Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois) distributes these newly released features.
For an excellent analysis of the economic counterpressures between the film and TV industries, read Arthur Knight's "Films and TV--A Shotgun Marriage?" The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, X (1956). In the same issue are good articles on TV playwrights in Hollywood, the future of film and TV in Britain, two articles on Olivier's Richard III and one on Maurice Evans' TV Taming of the Shrew-an extremely rewarding issue for the English teacher.
Pauline Kael's "Movies, The Desperate Art," The Berkley Book of Modern Writing, #3 (Berkley Publishing Corporation, 145 West 57th Street, New York 19, 500) is a jaundiced but frequently perceptive essay on the dilemma of the film critic in America. This paperback is a continuation of the Avon series on modern writing edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv of the Partisan Review.
More moderate yet no less committed to the film as art is Richard Griffith's Samuel Goldwyn: The Producer and His Films (Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 11 West 53rd Street, New York 19). Griffith, curator of films at the museum, neatly destroys, in Goldwyn's case at least, the stereotype of the producer as a cigar-chewing moneybags disdainful of ART. This fifty-page pamphlet reviews a number of Goldwyn's films over the last generation and assesses his creative part in their production.
Ellen Conroy Kennedy has written a study guide for Friendly Persuasion, the film based on the Jessamyn West stories, in January Clearing House.
BROADCAST
Teachers who have wanted to use the free Hallmark film of Maurice Evans' Richard II (Association Films, 347 Madison Avenue, New York 17) but have hesitated because they lacked texts can now find an attractive, thoroughly reliable, substantially made paperback edition of the play in the new Pelican Shakespeare (Penguin Books, Alfred Harbage, general editor, 50 each). More will be said about this series in the future, the first volumes of which are Macbeth, Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V.
Martin Mayer's "Television's Lords of Creation," Harper's (November 1956) is an excellent analysis of what a creative producer is up against in trying to bring a worthwhile program idea from conception through to production. Mayer discusses Weaver's regime at NBC and the reasons for his resignation. For people who have never seen TV programs in production, there is a remarkably clear description of how programs are staged. Mayer will study public affairs programing at CBS in a succeeding article. His article on NBC is all the more relevant to the English teacher since Weaver's departure from NBC has been taken by many as a signal that "cultural" programing will soon come upon less fortunate, if not evil, days.
A number of programs merit our attention this month: January 7, NBC-TV, Jose Ferrer in Pal Joey; January 13, NBC-TV, the American premiere of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace; and on the same date, over ABC-TV, Christopher Plummer appears in a long-awaited "Omnibus" production of Oedipus Rex. Next month, on February 4, NBC-TV, Anatole Litvak will produce Mayerling with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer in the leads. And you might want to look ahead to the Old Vic's presentation of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Bloom, John Neville, and Paul Rogers on NBC-TV, March 4. A picture essay on the "Old Vic" appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (October 14, 1956).
Marshall Stearns' The Story of Jazz (Oxford University Press, $5.75), quite apart from its primary value as a splendid survey and analysis of jazz from ancient West African origins to the latest weird collocations of sounds emerging from some basement on New York's 52nd Street, is a book that will provoke a good many double-takes among English teachers.
And that's as it should be. For Stearns, Harvard A.B. and Yale Ph.D., and currently associate professor of English literature at Hunter College, shows what intellectually stimulating things can happen when a rigorously trained humanist takes a role as penetrating and scholarly critic of a popular art. By academic training a specialist in medieval literature, with a biography of Robert Henryson (Columbia University Press) to his credit, Stearns has parlayed an avocational interest in jazz to his present preeminence as dean of jazz academicians-director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, indefatigable lecturer and organizer of symposia and jazz festivals, and State Department representative on Dizzy Gillespie's recent musical tour of the Middle East.
His book has seven sections: on pre-history in West Africa and the West Indies; origins in the vodun rituals and Negro marching bands of New Orleans; the nineteenth century American background, examining the various roles of the Great Awakening, the work song, blues, minstrelsy, spirituals, culminating in ragtime, a jazz style flourishing for the two decades to the end of World War I; the jazz age in the twenties; jazz yesterday and today, covering swing, bop, and Afro-Cuban music; three musicological chapters on the nature of jazz; and four final chapters on the future of jazz.
For an expert's analysis of what this book does and doesn't do in an absolute sense, readers should see Nat Hentoff's review in Commonweal (November 9, 1956). Hentoff, an editor of Downbeat, finds it "an important, original, and provocative study," but necessarily not the last word. Robert George Reisner's thirteen-page bibliography and list of jazz magazines and the splendid centerfolio of photos add to the book's value. Stearns brings an admirable catholicity to his appreciation of jazz, avoiding and deriding those various parochialisms that admire, at one extreme, only the most recent dissonance, or at the other, only the "purest" Dixieland.
RECORDS
Marshall Stearns' lively yet solid performance is reassuring: an academic approach does not necessarily smother the vitality of popular art in a sandhill of footnotes. No such prior doubt exists in the case of the protean Leonard Bernstein--composer, conductor, performer, entertainer. Last season on "Omnibus" Bernstein created a major sensation by his informally literate explication of his own love for jazz. The highlights of that program have been released as "What Is Jazz?" (Columbia LP 919), an analytic, as opposed to historical, study of this musical form.
A completely admirable aural essay, it proceeds in illuminating counterpoint from Bernstein's discussion to musical illustrations to further verbal explication. Blue notes, breaks, syncopation, instrumental colors, and other elements of jazz are explained through specific musical examples, e.g. pieces are played only on the white keys or without syncopation--and the musicological points are thereby made unmistakably clear. Bernstein is an unusually effective teacher. He explains the nature of the blues by creating "The Macbeth Blues": "I will not be afraid of death and bane--I said I will not be afraid of death and bane; Till Birnan Forest comes to Dunsinane."
A twelve-bar stanza, in which the first line of a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter is repeated, Bernstein archly explains. Bernstein's record is a natural complement to Stearns' book. High school libraries should have them both. In fact, a single English teacher could bring a great deal of perspective to his high school's patronage of popular music by starting either a jazz club or a jazz library or both, each taking care of the other.
Further items for such a club library: The Story of Jazz, narrated by Langston Hughes (Folkways LP, FP 712, 117 West 46th Street, New York 36, with program notes); A Musical History of Jazz, narrated by Wally Cox, with notes by George Simon (Grand Awards Record LP, G.A. 33-322, Kingsland Avenue, Harrison, New Jersey); two jazz--records-of-the-month clubs: The Jazztone Society, 45 Columbus Avenue, New York 23; and Jazz Division, American Recording Society, 100 Sixth Avenue, New York 13; Rex Harris, Jazz (Penguin, A247, 850); Andre Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (Grove Press, 795 Broadway, New York 3, $3.50); Eddie Condon's Treasury of Jazz (Dial, $5); Jacques Barzun, Music in American Life (Doubleday, $2.75); Stephen Longstreet, The Real Jazz, Old and New (Louisiana State Press, $5); and Carter Harman's A Popular History of Music: From Gregorian Chant to Jazz (Dell, 500).
FILM
The lure of TV money prompted MGM and other major film producers to withdraw some of their abridged features from distribution. The same economic forces have, on the other hand, resulted in MGM's releasing many full-length features for educational distribution on 16 mm: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bad Day at Black Rock, Billy the Kid, Captains Courageous, David Copperfield, Julius Caesar (Marlon Brando, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson), Mrs. Miniver, Pride and Prejudice, Red Badge of Courage, and Romeo and Juliet (Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, John Barrymore). Black and white features rent from $15.00, on a sliding scale based on enrollment. The Romeo and Caesar have a $25 minimum rental. There are definite advantages to be had from studying the complete film even if they can't be squeezed into class periods as the abridged versions could. Assembly programs at the end of the school day might be a solution. Films Inc. (home office, 1150 Wilmette Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois) distributes these newly released features.
For an excellent analysis of the economic counterpressures between the film and TV industries, read Arthur Knight's "Films and TV--A Shotgun Marriage?" The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, X (1956). In the same issue are good articles on TV playwrights in Hollywood, the future of film and TV in Britain, two articles on Olivier's Richard III and one on Maurice Evans' TV Taming of the Shrew-an extremely rewarding issue for the English teacher.
Pauline Kael's "Movies, The Desperate Art," The Berkley Book of Modern Writing, #3 (Berkley Publishing Corporation, 145 West 57th Street, New York 19, 500) is a jaundiced but frequently perceptive essay on the dilemma of the film critic in America. This paperback is a continuation of the Avon series on modern writing edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv of the Partisan Review.
More moderate yet no less committed to the film as art is Richard Griffith's Samuel Goldwyn: The Producer and His Films (Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 11 West 53rd Street, New York 19). Griffith, curator of films at the museum, neatly destroys, in Goldwyn's case at least, the stereotype of the producer as a cigar-chewing moneybags disdainful of ART. This fifty-page pamphlet reviews a number of Goldwyn's films over the last generation and assesses his creative part in their production.
Ellen Conroy Kennedy has written a study guide for Friendly Persuasion, the film based on the Jessamyn West stories, in January Clearing House.
BROADCAST
Teachers who have wanted to use the free Hallmark film of Maurice Evans' Richard II (Association Films, 347 Madison Avenue, New York 17) but have hesitated because they lacked texts can now find an attractive, thoroughly reliable, substantially made paperback edition of the play in the new Pelican Shakespeare (Penguin Books, Alfred Harbage, general editor, 50 each). More will be said about this series in the future, the first volumes of which are Macbeth, Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V.
Martin Mayer's "Television's Lords of Creation," Harper's (November 1956) is an excellent analysis of what a creative producer is up against in trying to bring a worthwhile program idea from conception through to production. Mayer discusses Weaver's regime at NBC and the reasons for his resignation. For people who have never seen TV programs in production, there is a remarkably clear description of how programs are staged. Mayer will study public affairs programing at CBS in a succeeding article. His article on NBC is all the more relevant to the English teacher since Weaver's departure from NBC has been taken by many as a signal that "cultural" programing will soon come upon less fortunate, if not evil, days.
A number of programs merit our attention this month: January 7, NBC-TV, Jose Ferrer in Pal Joey; January 13, NBC-TV, the American premiere of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace; and on the same date, over ABC-TV, Christopher Plummer appears in a long-awaited "Omnibus" production of Oedipus Rex. Next month, on February 4, NBC-TV, Anatole Litvak will produce Mayerling with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer in the leads. And you might want to look ahead to the Old Vic's presentation of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Bloom, John Neville, and Paul Rogers on NBC-TV, March 4. A picture essay on the "Old Vic" appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (October 14, 1956).
Sunday, 6 September 2009
American Literature and Painting
Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, by Benjamin West
Another new dimension on our civilization can be found in a sumptuous new color volume, Three Hundred Years of American Painting, by Alexander Eliot (Random House, $13.50), 250 plates and over 300 pages on a subject that is only now coming into clear focus through the labors of such scholars as Edgar P. Richardson, whose Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years (Thomas Crowell, $10.00, 17 color plates, 170 B&W) appeared a year before Eliot's.
Especially useful to English teachers unfamiliar with the field of American painting is the list in the Richardson book of "One Hundred Collections of American Painting" throughout the country, where a lot of looking will convince one of the feasibility and importance of relating Eliot's volume to the traditional survey of American literature. His time-line chronologies will suggest connections between poets and painters who shared the shifting climates of belief that constitute our intellectual history.
The pictures in the book will suggest even more obvious filiations: Asher B. Durand's painting of William Cullen Bryant and the nature painter Thomas Cole, appropriately called "Kindred Spirits" (1849) on page 72; the sternly sober visage of "The Reverend Thomas Hiscox" (1745) is a visible emblem of the thought and expression of Jonathan Edwards; Benjamin West's "Penn's Treaty with the Indians" (1771) is motivated by the same historical spirit that prompted the Hartford Wits to try to pen epics celebrating the Infant Republic; Washington Allston's "Moonlight Landscape" (1819) can help you teach your students the meaning of the sublime and ethereal in romantic poetry; Edward Hick's "The Peaceable Kingdom" (1830) has something to say about the Quakers of American literature, from Woolman to Whittier.
John Quidor's "Rip Van Winkle at Nicholas Vedder's Tavern" (1839) is another example of the community of the arts in America of which our textbooks give no hint, e.g., the Harcourt, Brace volume prints Durand's "Kindred Spirits" with the caption, "William Cullen Bryant with a companion enjoying the scenic Catskills ... ," thereby completely ignoring a chance to show how practitioners of various arts in America shared points of view and interests. To put it baldly, this is bad teaching.
Neither Richardson nor Eliot is completely satisfactory on the twentieth century in American painting: the former because he suspects it is too early to say anything certain; the latter because he tends to be anecdotal rather than critical. Luckily there is a third volume, New Art in America, edited by John I. H. Baur (New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Connecticut, $22.50), in which five first-rate curator-critics (Barr, Lloyd Goodrich, Dorothy C. Miller, James Thrall Soby, and Frederick S. Wight) examine carefully, through fifty full page color plates and 177 B & W illustrations, the work of fifty major American artists of the twentieth century.
Once again the connections that can be made between art and literature are as obvious as they are unexploited. The Ashcan School of urban realists like Robert Henri, John Sloan, and William Glackens are cultural cousins of Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg. Joseph Stella's love affair in paint with the Brooklyn Bridge is not unrelated to Hart Crane's poetry. Marsden Hartley's wonderfully vitriolic satire of Junkerism in "Portraits of a German Officer" is reminiscent of the anti-war writings of the 1920's. Philip Evergood's "The New Lazarus" and Ben Shahn's "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" show the continuing vitality of the American tradition of artistic social conscience exemplified by Babbitt-baiters like Sinclair Lewis and proletarian critics like John Steinbeck in the 1930's.
If the Negro's torment is verbally recorded in Richard Wright and others, the same misery of body and soul is given visual embodiment in Jacob Lawrence's powerfully hopeful "Slums," in which one is almost overwhelmed by the ugliness until, almost hidden, a flower in a tin can emerges in the foreground.
But quite apart from the pedagogical usefulness of this handsome book, there is the simple attraction of expanding one's horizons to include the profound pleasures of American painters like Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keefe, Jack Levine, Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Stuart Davis, Peter Blume, and George Grosz. The next step in developing anthologies that exploit new technologies of communication and the best available scholarship will be to include study references to books like these on American painting, with, ideally, film strips based on the books produced for more efficient use.
The same thing applies to American music, about which I will talk next month, and to American architecture, dance, drama, sculpture, indeed the whole range of artistic expression. It is no longer necessary to look at American culture on a small B & W screen; when it's relevant, why not a three-dimensional portrait of America, in technicolor yet?
Saturday, 5 September 2009
America in 3-D
The Public Arts: America in 3-D Author: Patrick D. Hazard Source: The English Journal, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Mar., 1958), pp. 170-172 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
The teaching of American literature has been at a serious disadvantage for the few generations it has been a standard subject. This is because our technology achieved the feat of mass-reproducing print a century before it could do the same with color pictures and sound. Literature has sister arts--of architecture, music, painting, sculpture; together they form that rich and comprehensive network of meaning we call a country's culture.
Cold print by itself can sometimes get through to a new generation's special sensibility, but only at great waste of time and teaching talent. However, once technology makes it possible to recreate the community of arts, in all their variegated ways of attracting the attention of the intelligence and imagination, then a really balanced study of a culture is at last possible.
Added to the engineering miracle must be the results of scholarly investigation and explication of examples from each of the various arts. We are just reaching that point of convergence in American Studies, and this means that our textbooks must be redone from Jamestown to the Newport Jazz Festival--i.e., unless we want to tolerate the absurdity of having our classrooms less competent guides to culture than the mass magazines.
The new Harcourt, Brace "Olympic Edition" of The Adventures in Literature Program may be taken as a firm step, if not very long stride, in the necessarily new directions we must take. I have been examining a copy of their fascinating American volume, edited by John Gehlmann and Mary Rives Bowman. It has a number of new features that push it at once ahead of the standard anthologies. First of all, it has built the use of LP recordings right into the book by printing the texts that appear on 2-12" LP's read by first-rate artists and performers.
There are picture essays of distinction: I especially liked one on young poet-professor Richard Wilbur (pp. 320-325), which will surely take the hex off many teen-age stereotypes of poets (if less is made of the rhymed jingles of the sentimental nineteenth century versifiers). It is a mistake, too, not to print more of Wilbur--or if his verse is too metaphysical for high school students then try Philip Booth or Donald Hall or Kim Kurt or some other writer under forty, the criterion for admission to the anthology, New Poets of England and America (Meridian, 1957, $1.45).
The proof of the poet is in the reading, after all, and pictures showing what a regular guy the poet is are beside the point if his poetry doesn't ring true to young readers. The hex that this photo essay will probably take off the image of the poet was put on him in the first place because for too long we have been trying to prod our students into deep reactions to superficial poetry--Longfellow, Whittier, et al.
But the Harcourt, Brace volume makes a good start, even though eighteen selections from the Cambridge Poets against six from the New Voices in American Poetry (Wilbur, Eberhart, Rodman, Bishop, Shapiro, Jarrell) is for me a bad bargain, esthetically and pedagogically. Some day we'll all find out that students respond more deeply to Karl Shapiro's "Auto Wreck" than they do to Longfellow's trite "Hymn to the Night"--a good sign of their potential poetic sensitivity.
I should not leave the impression that the book is short on "modern poetry": there are selections from Frost (9), Masters (5), Lindsay (4), Wylie (5), Sandburg (8), Millay (6), and others. The book has other splendid features: selections from student writing, in the sensible tradition of Scholastic Writing Awards; essays on new art forms--Paddy Chayefsky's "Television Craft"; Budd Schulberg on writing a novel from an original film scenario; and a good, if cluttered,
word-and-picture essay on "The American Tradition" by Clifton Fadiman.
But this Fadiman essay does have serious weaknesses as an attempt to use color photography to illustrate a half-descriptive, half-hortatory lay sermon. The graphics are amateurish: any issue of Life magazine makes this fumbling use of a new form of expression (the photo-essay) worse than none at all. The same criticism applies even more to the first Fadiman essay, "What Do Americans Write About?" The two-color spread on people in America is an artless abuse of color: full of clutter and incoherence.
There is something ironic about a textbook for taste that is tasteless, in terms of the best that is being designed and drawn in American graphics today. It may be that this expensive color work ought to be left to magazines that can afford to do it well: black and white photography when used with both flair and restraint (as in Life full-page bleeds) communicates more effectively than poorly deployed color.
The teaching of American literature has been at a serious disadvantage for the few generations it has been a standard subject. This is because our technology achieved the feat of mass-reproducing print a century before it could do the same with color pictures and sound. Literature has sister arts--of architecture, music, painting, sculpture; together they form that rich and comprehensive network of meaning we call a country's culture.
Cold print by itself can sometimes get through to a new generation's special sensibility, but only at great waste of time and teaching talent. However, once technology makes it possible to recreate the community of arts, in all their variegated ways of attracting the attention of the intelligence and imagination, then a really balanced study of a culture is at last possible.
Added to the engineering miracle must be the results of scholarly investigation and explication of examples from each of the various arts. We are just reaching that point of convergence in American Studies, and this means that our textbooks must be redone from Jamestown to the Newport Jazz Festival--i.e., unless we want to tolerate the absurdity of having our classrooms less competent guides to culture than the mass magazines.
The new Harcourt, Brace "Olympic Edition" of The Adventures in Literature Program may be taken as a firm step, if not very long stride, in the necessarily new directions we must take. I have been examining a copy of their fascinating American volume, edited by John Gehlmann and Mary Rives Bowman. It has a number of new features that push it at once ahead of the standard anthologies. First of all, it has built the use of LP recordings right into the book by printing the texts that appear on 2-12" LP's read by first-rate artists and performers.
There are picture essays of distinction: I especially liked one on young poet-professor Richard Wilbur (pp. 320-325), which will surely take the hex off many teen-age stereotypes of poets (if less is made of the rhymed jingles of the sentimental nineteenth century versifiers). It is a mistake, too, not to print more of Wilbur--or if his verse is too metaphysical for high school students then try Philip Booth or Donald Hall or Kim Kurt or some other writer under forty, the criterion for admission to the anthology, New Poets of England and America (Meridian, 1957, $1.45).
The proof of the poet is in the reading, after all, and pictures showing what a regular guy the poet is are beside the point if his poetry doesn't ring true to young readers. The hex that this photo essay will probably take off the image of the poet was put on him in the first place because for too long we have been trying to prod our students into deep reactions to superficial poetry--Longfellow, Whittier, et al.
But the Harcourt, Brace volume makes a good start, even though eighteen selections from the Cambridge Poets against six from the New Voices in American Poetry (Wilbur, Eberhart, Rodman, Bishop, Shapiro, Jarrell) is for me a bad bargain, esthetically and pedagogically. Some day we'll all find out that students respond more deeply to Karl Shapiro's "Auto Wreck" than they do to Longfellow's trite "Hymn to the Night"--a good sign of their potential poetic sensitivity.
I should not leave the impression that the book is short on "modern poetry": there are selections from Frost (9), Masters (5), Lindsay (4), Wylie (5), Sandburg (8), Millay (6), and others. The book has other splendid features: selections from student writing, in the sensible tradition of Scholastic Writing Awards; essays on new art forms--Paddy Chayefsky's "Television Craft"; Budd Schulberg on writing a novel from an original film scenario; and a good, if cluttered,
word-and-picture essay on "The American Tradition" by Clifton Fadiman.
But this Fadiman essay does have serious weaknesses as an attempt to use color photography to illustrate a half-descriptive, half-hortatory lay sermon. The graphics are amateurish: any issue of Life magazine makes this fumbling use of a new form of expression (the photo-essay) worse than none at all. The same criticism applies even more to the first Fadiman essay, "What Do Americans Write About?" The two-color spread on people in America is an artless abuse of color: full of clutter and incoherence.
There is something ironic about a textbook for taste that is tasteless, in terms of the best that is being designed and drawn in American graphics today. It may be that this expensive color work ought to be left to magazines that can afford to do it well: black and white photography when used with both flair and restraint (as in Life full-page bleeds) communicates more effectively than poorly deployed color.
Friday, 4 September 2009
Musical Comedy
But we should not, in our proper new enthusiasm for husbanding the energies of the exceptional students in mass education, forget that the recording boom can also give us new avenues of communication with our mediocre and poor students. This is particularly true of the maturing genre of musical comedy. We ought to have room in our classrooms, not only for many levels of taste, but also for many degrees of seriousness.
Indeed, in a musical comedy like Li'l Abner (Columbia OL 5150, 1-12" LP) the comic muse is used with great effectiveness to say some serious things about moral and intellectual soft spots in contemporary America. "What's Good for General Bullmoose" is not fair (nor were reporters) to Charlie Wilson, the wonderfully forthright ex-Secretary of Defense, but it is still a good spoof of spurious patriotism. And "The Country's in the Very Best of Hands" is Herblock set to music. "Progress Is the Root of All Evil" runs lightly over the political scene since the New Deal in an unreconstructed way.
And "Oh, Happy Day" (when everyone will think, act, look, inhale, and exhale exactly alike) is the best satire of pseudo-scientific progress and conformity culture that I have heard in a long time. This specific satire of contemporary life, by the way, is something impossible to come by in the classics; one must turn to popular culture for it--The Mad Reader, Humbug magazine, the Stan Freberg radio show on CBS (Sunday, 7:30 p.m., E.S.T.), and of course a paperback like The World of Li'l Abner (Ballantine, 350), in spite of John Steinbeck's rather strong introduction.
A useful color essay about the musical appeared in Life (January 14, 1957). And, if you can read it with few reservations about its solemnity, useful, too, is "How to Read Li'l Abner Intelligently," by Arthur J. Brodbeck and David M. White, in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, $6.95), an important landmark in the criticism of popular culture-to be reviewed here next month, along with other new books on popular culture.
The most "traditional" paperback-recording combination is the Rex Harrison-Julie Andrews My Fair Lady (Columbia 5090, 1-12" LP) and the Penguin edition of Shaw's Pygmalion. A curious thing happened when I taught this combination as the culmination of a Shaw centennial unit to college sophomores: they expressed amazement at how little they had understood the juke box songs from the musical before they read the play. In other words, it took the printed text of the Shaw play to bring the disparate record hits into an integral artistic experience. Other natural combinations are the Kathryn Grayson-Howard Keel Kiss Me Kate (MGM Record E3077, 1-12" LP) and an edition (hardcover) of The Taming of the Shrew; the Carol Channing-Eddie Bracken archy and mehitabel (Columbia OL 4963, 1-12" LP) and Doubleday's inexpensive edition of the "flea verse" of Don Marquis' indomitable cockroach and his ungenteel cat friend.
The big news from Broadway is that Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurent, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim have an exciting new musical on the boards, a Romeo and Juliet story set in the slums of New York's upper West Side where two juvenile gangs--the Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks--engage in tragic conflict.
For background see the Life color spread (September 16, 1957) and several reviews--Walter Kerr's in the Tribune (October 6, 1957) and Atkinson's in the Times (October 6, 1957), Wolcott Gibbs' in the New Yorker (October 5, 1957), T. H. Wenning's in Newsweek (October 7, 1957), and Louis Kronenberger's in Time (October 7, 1957). Columbia's LP of the show is at the pressing plant at this moment.
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Drama's Electronic Renaissance: III
Christopher Marlowe
This series on new possibilities for teaching drama began with the conviction that much instruction in the genre of drama had been ritualistic and ineffective simply because a printed text is no substitute for living theatre. Now, less vicariously than before, through TV, movies, LP recordings, and inexpensive paperback texts, our students can learn more emphatically than ever that the play's the thing. The LP repertory particularly deserves our attention, and some notice has already been taken in this department of material available from Greek times through the English Middle Ages.
Christopher Marlowe's The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, with Frank Silvera in the title role (Caedmon TC 1033, 1-12" LP), is Volume IV in that firm's Moments of Early English Drama. Particularly impressive beyond the strong reading of Marlowe's "mighty line" are the weirdly appropriate music in the magic scenes and the effective use of sound effects to create the illusion of physical action. This short version deserves inclusion in a school library because the play reveals the conflict between medieval and Renaissance values. Also, as the Shakespeare repertory grows, it is reasonable to add recordings like this one to give students a fuller sense of the richness and diversity of Elizabethan theatre.
The Old Vic's Romeo and Juliet (RCA-Victor LVT-3001, 3-12" LP's) is now available for those whose appetites were whetted (?) by last season's truncated TV version. Unluckily Paul Rogers' TV Mercutio is missing, but the performance is a useful one, in spite of Claire Bloom's quavery-voiced Juliet. It is hard, however, to understand why RCA-Victor failed to include the text of the play in the album. Such unreasonable skimping (given the regal price-tag for the three-record set) is tolerable so long as Appleton-Century-Crofts keeps its inexpensive paper-covered edition in print. And it is easy to be in a forgiving mood to RCA-Victor now that George Marek of that company has announced plans for a complete Hamlet, with John Gielgud, in the fall.
The Hallmark TV productions of Macbeth and Richard II are available free from Associated Films, 347 Madison Avenue, New York 17. Teachers who have shied away from the Richard kinescope for lack of texts will now find the Pelican edition cheap and durable enough. The Macbeth volume can be taken as typical of the series, since the editor of this play is also general editor. His prefatory essays on "Shakespeare and His Stage" and "The Text of the Plays" precede a special essay on Macbeth. It is useful for information on both sources and allusions, but one wishes there were more specific analyses of imagery (such as his helpful comments on the apparitions) and fewer metaphysical speculations about the nature of evil.
It would help work-a-day teachers to have a first-rate explication of the "fair is foul, foul is fair" theme that runs through the play, or to have an explanation of how the themes of the play are supported by the imagery of blood, death, and sleep. On the other hand, while one desires the insights of the "New Criticism," still one cannot denigrate the importance of scholarly knowledge: e.g., the information that the "cat i' th' adage" wanted fish but didn't want to get its paws wet (I, vii, 44, p. 43). But isn't it possible now to have the benefits of both aesthetic and historical approaches to literature in the same discussion? That these complementary modes of enriching literary awareness are not incompatible is brilliantly argued in Lionel Trilling's "The Farmer and the Cowboy Make Friends," The Griffin (Fall 1956, Reader's Subscription, 1140 Broadway, New York 1).
Penguin Books would put us even more in debt if they asked their editors to prepare critical comments and study suggestions for teachers on the film translations of Shakespeare now available to schools, e.g., MGM's Julius Caesar, Hallmark's Macbeth and Richard II, and Olivier's Hamlet and Henry V. Meanwhile we look forward with eagerness to the completion of their splendid new series.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (Angel 3542, 3-12" LP's) belongs in every basic library of English drama. From the very first line when Lady Sneerwell asks Snake, the (literal, not figurative) scandal-monger, if her spiteful paragraphs have been planted in the papers, to Snake's final telling the truth (for twice the price of telling a lie), Sheridan etches a schoolful of acidly scandalous portraits: foppish, unpublished poet Sir Benjamin Backbite; hen-pecked Sir Peter Teazle; and his ambitious, too-young (for Sir Teazle) country wife; the brothers Surface; and gossipy Mrs. Candour. A handsome, sixteen-page folio pamphlet prints excerpts of the text (what's wrong with the entire text! ! !), Alan Dent's informative history of the play, and profiles of the actors. The play is reprinted along with others by Sheridan in Louis Kronenberger's Dramabook ($1.45: Hill Wang, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York 11).
Penguin has a text of Shaw's Saint Joan to use with the Siobhan McKenna version (RCA-Victor LOC 6133, 3-12" LP's). This is a recording of the famous Phoenix Theatre production. It is really extraordinary to be able to recreate in any classroom in America the performance that made Miss McKenna the sensation of London, Dublin, Boston, and New York. Now that the Shaw canon is finally finding its way into the anthologies, let us hope that Saint loan will soon become a standard piece.
Perhaps the most important tactical use of the recording is to counteract the bad effects of the Otto Preminger film, which has been almost universally condemned as a monument to bad taste. Preminger's gross and vulgar strategies of promotion (his screening 18,000 possible Joans to come up with his own creation) ought not pass by unnoticed and uncriticized.
The fact that commercial films and TV go in cycles, some of which are not useful to English teachers, should not make us despair. At the present time, it seems that paperbacks and recordings are the most useful media. Let us use them all the more while we sit out a slack TV season or two. The paperback-recording combination affords teachers an unusually effective tandem aid for stretching the horizons of the best students. We can bring them closer to the classics now than ever before.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Art Linkletter Says the Damndest Things!
Art Linkletter's "House Party," where kids said the darnedest things.
The Public Arts: Art Linkletter Says the Damndest Things! Author(s): Patrick D. Hazard and Mary Hazard Source: The English Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3, English Today: Eight NCTE Convention Addresses (Mar., 1960), pp. 197-200 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Amid the excitement of the television quiz scandals another sort of television rigging goes unobserved--a fixing more insidious in its operation and more serious in its implications. Public anger aroused by the quiz show exposes is directed at having been played the fool. The real scandal, of course, is not that a contestant be paid $64,000 for an answer he did not know, but that anyone be paid $64,000 for any answer-prompted or spontaneous--and that millions of viewers should be satisfied that the intellectual has thereby come into his own. The real scandal is the illusion of the intellectual created by the network, agency, audience, and participant.
Television and the compliant squealing audience have created another illusion: the television world of children-a world of frenetic activity, perpetual din, adult innuendo, and children's home permanents. The child is exploited in many ways to create this nightmare world: the curried child performer appears on adult programs; real live children attend a nursery "school" whose curriculum is largely brand-name toys for Mommy to buy-today!; rows of dutiful "Hey, Kids!" sit watching hard-sell commercials punctuated only briefly by the vulgar antics of an unfunny clown and some unimaginative puppets.
Having been thus shouted, cajoled, seduced, and bribed into his role as amplifier for adult pitchmen, the child is fit for nothing more demanding in his non-working hours than crude old cartoons and new slapstick shorts. Having looked on all this horror, he is on holidays treated to a classic cleaned up for television so that he need not look on life-like emotion such as family contention (fairy tales) or a real death from causes other than gun-shot wounds (Little Women). A Captain Kangaroo or a Mr. Wizard suggest what might be done for children's TV with quiet common sense, adult restraint, and a speaking acquaintance with a live child, but each Captain Kangaroo is overwhelmed by fifty Captain Videos and every Mr. Wizard is overrun by hordes of Mighty Mice.
Art Linkletter, however, has his own satellite for the television world of children: Art Linkletter's secret world of kids. He has recently presented two exhibitions of this arcane world for the uninitiated: the first, a television program on NBC, "The Secret World of Kids" (October 27, 9:30-10:30 p.m.), which was largely a visual aid to the second presentation, his book of the same title, published on the same day by Bernard Geis Associates ($3.50).
The television show was purportedly a running feud between Linkletter's "abiding faith in kids" and Vincent Price's faith in chimpanzees. Price's faith in kids was shaken onstage when Tom Sawyer (played by Mickey Rooney's son, Teddy) whitewashed Price's "Blue Boy" canvas. Price was further exasperated that Tom did not enjoy his library of children's books: "Did you ever try to explain a children's classic to a child raised in front of a TV set?"
The scene adjourned to "Aunt Polly's Place" where Tom Sawyer, Private Eye, observed a ten-year-old cabaret dancer executing bumps and grinds (did she wear a toy girdle?) while belting out "Blues in the Night" in a Theresa Brewer hiccough. Dialogue of the Spillane-Webb school followed, adapted to ten-year-old interests such as seduction and fast living.
Ed Wynn narrated cute captions for a baby's thoughts as we plodded through his nursery routine in the next sequence. Short shots of Price and the chimp kept us posted on the simian progress with the TV stereotype of culture: violin, ballet, and easel painting.
Finally, the "part where we live dangerously, proving that kids say the darndest things." Five children played Mr. Bones to Linkletter's Mr. Interlocutor. He set them up with questions about their genealogy ("Where did you get that flaming carrot-top?"), their love life ("How are you on kissing?" thrusting a beefy cheek at the little girl), and their parents' love life ("How did your parents meet?") Linkletter's naive surprise at the forthcoming double entendres was hardly less simulated than the prurient tittering in the audience. Most of the children were cooperative Pinocchios to Linkletter's wooden-headed Geppetto, but not all had cute responses every time. After all, did you ever try to teach a children's classic to a kid raised in front of a TV set?
Mrs. Hannah Nixon, mother of the Vice President, suffered an interview with Linkletter as her son beamed behind her on a TV monitor. Mrs. Nixon's dismayed reaction at discovering him on the set behind her will win no Emmys. Nor will the cosmic cliches exchanged about child rearing endanger the suburban vote for Nixon.
The last shot of the Chimp showed him at work translating Linkletter's book into foreign languages. He apparently does not spend his time before the TV set and Linkletter.
The Book
The book presents the same rigged world of the child, television model, but with the added dimension of Linkletter's philosophy. This embraces such bromides as "life is a complicated business, and the sooner kids realize it the better." And no matter if one bromide contradicts another; Linkletter's digestion is strong. Within four pages of each other, the best cure for a spoiled kid is a new baby (p. 62) and mother should understand that her suddenly unruly angel is just jealous of the new baby (p. 66). There is even a soporific to soothe the incompatible bromides: "Your American youngster may know less Latin and, [sic] be hazy about higher mathematics and get lost in the maze of philosophy. But he has the toughness of mind and the capability for compromise and the ability to get along with people that enable him to swim, not sink, in our highly competitive society."
Having thus written off philosophy, Mr. Linkletter can yet consider himself a writer. Always the psychologist, he traces his "ear for words and their rhythm" to his childhood forced encounters with the Bible. The author's foreword dispels any doubts about his literary abilities: "Here's hoping the following words of wisdom don't wind up as trash in your basket. If they do, I'll never forgive myself. Or you!"
Unrepentant, we can dismiss Linkletter as man of letters. There remains his self-image as Link, Everykid's Homey Adviser. (Linkletter apologizes for such fancy terms as "psychologist.") He promises that in this book he is "going to talk about the secret world of kids as he sees it every day through the most wonderful window in the world-the eyes of a child." He adjusts his smoked bifocals for a better peep through the wrong end of a telescope.
His first exhibit is the world of his own five children. We are told the competitive drive of each, his attitude toward money and success, his ability to stick to a hobby, and his ability to get along with people. We are told that the Linkletters transferred their children from a school with high standards to one less demanding so that they might "achieve success more easily and find out what it tasted like." We are told, in the only reference to art and music in the book, about the world of the child, that one son is "artistic like his mother." He plays a rock and roll guitar, and he built a fort out of colored marshmallows, mirrors, and tiny flags. (A microcosm of the Linkletter world?)
Linkletter's generalizations about psychology include a disclaimer about the harmfulness of toy guns (his own Link Research Corporation works closely with the Mattel toy company-makers of some of the most offensive war toys whose commercials approach hysteria during the Christmas shopping season from roughly mid-July to December). Several pages are given to a righteous attack on the child psychologists who, says Linkletter, made a whole generation of parents afraid of their kids-the same kids whose brassiness, encouraged by Linkletter, makes his program possible and popular. Unlike most entertainers who fear controversy, the outspoken Linkletter comes out four-square for spanking and against high school kids owning cars.
The bulk of the book contains examples of the questions he uses to prime children so that he may better understand them: "What does your Dad do for fun?" "What do people do when they get married?" "What did your mother tell you not to say?" "What has happened at your house that's funny, something about your mother and father?" When European children had the decency to register shock at his prying, Linkletter was forced to abandon a projected "Kids Say the Darndest Things All Over the World."
This defeat prompted an impartial comparison of American and European children. He concedes that we Americans sometimes go too far with our business of being a good sport, but it would be hard to "introduce the goose-step mentality into this country"--unless it had a rock and roll beat. American kids are "less regimented, in school and in the home, they are more individualistic." Some of them occasionally clean their white bucks.
Yes, American kids can be relied upon to turn their parental boudoir into an isolation booth, with prompting from Linkletter, but The Secret World of Kids is still a well-kept secret. Art Linkletter is not even in the same galaxy.
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