If familiarity were the same thing as understanding, it would be supererogatory to raise the question of what the media mean. Nothing is more generally familiar in our time, nothing deals more consistently with the familiar, and nothing familiarizes masses of men more rapidly with certain classes of events. Surely it should be enough for...
Surely the most significant text a man ever starts out to interpret is the compromise that is his own life. The events, ragged and serene, that tempt explanation were shared by others, and so it is with delicacy and humility that the autobiographer should seek to set the record straight—yet all too frequently the public...
Perhaps it was in retaliation for those fried potatoes that are served up in little bags and cartons at McDonald’s that they did it, that they performed an act which is so horribly outlandish. The French, those in question, have always been a very proud people; nowadays, the word French in English seems to be...
Seth Cagin and Philip Dray: Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs, Violence, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Politics; Harper & Row; New York. One of the big blows to the underground press in America in the 1960’s was an ad campaign staged by a major record company that used such toy-gun revolutionary slogans as “The...
Fluff John Bernard Myers: Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World; Random House, New York. Books — paper ones, not those cassettes that are now hanging on racks in bookstores for the busy executives who would like to listen to a paragraph or two while not making deals on their cars’...
Building It’s always with pleasure that we come upon a volume by Saul Bellow, for he is a writer with talent and, more importantly, vision, a man who can meld the quotidian and the profound into a unified, intellectually compelling narrative. With the case of Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories...
Cyndi Lauper, current clown princess of the new (or, given its nature, is that gnu?) rock scene, recently squeaked: It was all traditional: The church, the family, the government. Any you know what I learned? Those are the biggest oppressors of women that will ever come along. And girls just wanna have fun, right, Cyndi? ...
The End Nears . . . “The end nears when fools are hailed and the sages ignored —.” This bit of ancient wisdom came to our minds when we were going through Time magazine’s cover story on one Shirley MacLaine, a successful actress and a quasicultural emblem of the liberal America. The gist of Time‘s...
George W. S. Trow: The City in the Mist; Little Brown; Boston. What’s in a name? Fair Juliet’s answer notwithstanding, we insist that there is something to it. Take the case of a relatively young author who places two initials between his given title and his surname. There’s something to that in the closing years...
Richard Mayne: Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe; Schocken Books; New York. It is common today to describe Western Europe as facing a crisis. Its physical problems are manifold: economic stagnation, high unemployment, political dissatisfaction, demo graphic decline, military flaccidity. It would appear, however, that these overt problems are surface manifestations of a deeper malaise-the...
Representation Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, a Democratic party hack, a Catholic feminist (what a spiritual and spirited concoction, brewed according to the recipes of the Queens-Long Island bourbon culture!) whom the amalgamated USA womanists (the newest vocable) wished to see as the next vice president, said of late: “The only real threat to women in America...
Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of...
Ideology as Prognosis Village Voice, the chief organ of the radical-industrial complex (a multi-billion-dollar enterprise in left-wing snobbery whose chief products include: mattresses, vociferous anti-Americanism, mink coats, elitist social engineering, rock music, phony populism, instantly disposable footwear, recreational fornication, drugs, trendy political ardors for terrorist “underdogs” such as El Salvador guerillas, PLO, etc.), assessing Mr....
Caroline Bird: The Good Years: Yours Life in the Twenty-First Century; E. P. Dutton; New York. Richard Louv: America II; Jeremy Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin; Los Angeles. There are some serious people in the United States today attempting to ensure that the next generation of Americans has a decent place to live. Unfortunately, none of their work...
Of Careers, Criminals, and Creative Writers Theodore Dreiser: An Amateur Laborer; University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia. Nelson Algren: The Devil’s Stocking;Arbor House; New York. By the time the average American child has reached adolescence, he has been asked hundreds of times by solicitous relatives and politely curious strangers, “What are you going to be when...
One of the little-remarked phenomena of modern popular music is the fact that the familial tradition evident 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s (e.g. the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters, Steve and Edie) continues on. Merciful impulses insist that the Partridge Family and Sonny and Cher are expunged from consideration. The Davies brothers, Ray and Dave, of...
Of Isms and Idolatry The Economic System of Free Enterprise: Its Judeo-Christian Values and Philosophical Concepts; Edited by Paul C. Goelz; St. Mary’s University Press; San Antonio, TX. During their relatively short but incredibly bloody existence as a world historical force, Marxists have murdered millions of men, women, and children, largely without regret. Many Marxists, however,...
Max Apple: Free Agents; Harper & Row; New York. Picture a man. About fivc eight-and-a-half in height, wire rimmed glasses, curly hair, salt-and-pepper beard, blue brushed-cotton shirt, loose navy tie, khaki pants, and Top Siders. Picture him in two dimensions–as if he is a life-sized cartoon, like a Lichtenstein. Once the image is fixed, imagine...
In Playboy, our time’s Vulgate of the congregation of the unwashed, we read a month’s sermon by one Exene, a female rock particle: I don’t believe in anything that’s morally right. My friend the poet Lydia Lunch said she believes in beauty, truth and filth. That about says it all. Our friend, Suzy Snack, a painter, told...
Reinhard Kuhn: Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature; Boston University Press/University Press of New England; Hanover, NH. Presumably, since every adult was once a child, all adults should understand childhood. Somehow, however, the child remains a profound mystery to anyone who has left childhood. Trying to wrest understanding and utilitarian control out of that...
George Perry: The Life of Python; Little, Brown; Boston. Three-card monte is a game of chance that’s often dealt by those who leave absolutely nothing to chance. To play, the dealer takes three cards, shows their faces to the player, places them face down on the table, then shuffles their position. The player attempts to...
Cay Van Ash: Ten Years Beyond Baker Street; Harper & Row, New York. In 1929, when producer David O. Selznick was still young enough to be designated a “Wunderkind,” he came up with an idea for a story that could be a part of a movie revue called Paramount on Parade. As he wrote in...
Romancing the Stone; Directed by Robert Zemeckis; Written by Diane Thomas; Twentieth-Century Fox. Romancing the Stone is a cinematic Raisenette: sweet, chewy, and individually unsatisfying. It is, in design and execution, sort of a Raiders of the Lost Ark for that segment of The Big Chill generation that likes to think itself above such...
Richard Morris: Dismantling the Universe: The Nature of Scientific Discovery; Simon & Schuster; New York. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot’s title character asks, or muses, at one point, “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” That question is but one of many in the poem; it is not, then, unlike the two found in one...
Footloose; Directed by Herbert Ross; Written by Dern Pitchford; Paramount. Break dancers–those young people who go writhing, flipping, and spinning about like modern, urban, secular dervishes–probably do not think about sex once they’ve completed their bouts. Rather, they undoubtedly wonder whether there’s a chiropractor in the house. Television’s Dance Fever structurally emphasizes sex through the...
George A. Seielstad: Cosmic Ecology: The View from the Outside In; University of California Press, Berkeley. Gerald S. Hawkins: Mindsteps to the Cosmos; Harper & Row; New York. When astronaut Bruce McCandless moved outside of the space shuttle Challenger last February and slowly (relatively speaking, that is) moved away from the ship sans umbilical cord, it was...
One of the deleterious aspects of enclosed shopping malls is the audible environment–not the sounds of shoppers shouting, scuffling, and struggling about, around, and over imaginary bargains, but the ever-pervasive schmaltz that fills the air. There are the standard packaged long-playing tapes that the large department stores utilize; the always-too-loud FM radio that teen-oriented boutiques...
Peter Hutchinson: Games Authors Play; Methuen; New York. During a conversation with Jorge Luis Borges at the Ingersoll Prizes ceremony in Chicago last December, we were informed that, in his estimation, “Literature is supposed to be enjoyed.” He added, “It is fun, is it not?” There was what can only be described as a whimsical...
Given simply the title of J. M. Coctzee’s most recent novel, Life & Times of Michael K (Viking Press; New York), it is clear that this is an adventure in Kafka land, which literary land developers (novelists, critics, and those taking classes that will qualify them to peddle space) have been clearing, bulldozing, excavating, and building...
George Johnson: Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics; Jeremy P. Tarcher; Los Angeles. Before the world became a smaller place as a result of communications and transportation webs, apocryphal tales about magical and mystical powers emanating from sages in Africa and the Orient permeated the nooks and crannies of civilized environments....
Joe Haldeman: Worlds Apart; Vikings Press; New York. It’s widely reported that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the highly adaptive life form known by the sobriquet “cockroach” will inherit the remains. Joe Haldeman, in this science fiction sludge, posits a variation on this theme: the order Blattaria, in 2085, will include bipedal creatures...
Bertolt Brecht, the cultural left’s most astute perceiver of poignant ironies embedded in social injustices, never commanded our rapt allegiance, yet we wouldn’t mind listening to what he might have said about the Memorial Day spectacle. Watching it, we thought we could have appreciated, at that particular moment, some of his biting existential sarcasm, always...
Lest it seem that we pay undue attention to the Chicago Tribune’s man in the aisle seat and not enough to his Sun-Times competitor and At the Movies cohort, Roger Ebert, we would like to make amends by providing an example of Mr. Ebert’s deep erudition. Here is Under the Volcano as described by the movie maven: the...
James J. Thompson, Jr.: Christian Classics Revisited; Ignatius; San Franciso. Among the ends to which writers may put their words is that of leading the reader toward the divine Word of Christian belief. In the secularized world of modernity, such efforts, even when practiced with subtlety, insight, and creative intelligence receive remarkably little attention, however....
The Politics of Interpretation (University of Chicago Press; Chicago), edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, contains essays and responses to them by some of the leading literary theorists of our time–Booth, Bruns, Graff, Hirsch, Kristeva, Said, and others. One of the more lively controversies that emerge in the text has little to do with deconstructing,...
Roger Scruton: Kant; Oxford University Press; New York. Peter Singer: Hegel; Oxford University Press; New York. J. O. Urmson: Berkeley; Oxford University Press; New York. Michael Howard: Clausewitz; Oxford University Press; New York. Peter France: Diderot; Oxford University Press; New York. Peter Stansky: William Morris; Oxford University Press; New York. While most things liberal tend to be...
She is frail. The Avedon on the dust jacket shows a blond Shelley Duvall with a touch of anorexia. Is that important? Possibly. Just as a person wouldn’t be likely to say to an anorexigenic personality, “How’s it going–chubby?” it would be hard to say to Renata Adler, after looking into those eyes of a pained doe,...
Neo-Camelot For years supermarket tabloids have shamelessly made merchandise out of John F. Kennedy by promulgating almost every imaginable shred of gossip or speculation about his life and its untimely end. During the recent revival of Kennedy nostalgia occasioned by the 20th anniversary of his assassination, however, antiestablishment journals claiming intellectual respectability have introduced a...
by Gary S. Vasilash Look long and hard at the “official” list of 20th-century American painters: Jackson Pollock … Arshile Gorky … Robert Rauschenberg … Willem de Kooning … Jasper Johns … Robert Motherwell … Mark Rothko … Almost nowhere, outside of Iowa, will the name Grant Wood be found. A recent show at The...
A Prudent Progressive Upwardly mobile young professionals became, suddenly, the intriguing and fashionable term of this political season. Senator Hart, the latest in the long history of electoral meteorites, a rather vapid man who talks a lot without saying much, popularized this designation and so made it apart of the daily news’ vocabulary, for which...
Tumbling Down Memory Lane Herb Hendler: Year by Year in the Rock Era: Events and Conditions Shaping the Rock Generations That Reshaped America; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Late in February NBC broadcast a night to forget. First up was something designated TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes, which was based on a strategy similar to that of...
Slime After Slime Star 80; Written and Directed by Bob Fosse; Ladd Company/Warner Brothers. by Stephen Macaulay An ad for Star 80 claims that it is considered “One of the Year’s [1983] Ten Best” by a number of people who should know; lest anyone have doubts, the claimants are listed. One man, apparently, just couldn’t...
Aloof and Awry George H. Douglas: Edmund Wilson’s America; The University Press of Kentucky; Lexington, KY. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond, so he told the world, to get away from people. But the reader of Walden may wonder with James Russell Lowell if Thoreau is not just a poseur who actually wants “a...
I. Grekova: Russian Women: Two Stories;Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York. Judy Blume: Smart Women; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. During the “sexual revolution” in Russia in the l920’s, writer Alexandra Kollontai acquired notoriety for her “glass of water” theory, according to which “love was but [a] sexual urge akin to thirst, with the quenching...
Spent Fireworks Allen Wier: Departing as Air; Simon & Schuster; New York. by Dennis R. Perry Critic Allen Tate once commented that the epic could not be written in a society without common values. Allen Wier’s Departing as Air unfortunately—and unintentionally—reminds us that if there is a basis for fiction in our society, it is based...
Red Rainbow What’s astonishing (or, perhaps, moderately surprising, if we remain aware of what life in liveral America has taught us over the last two decades) is the media’s color blindness when it comes to making an ideological evaluation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s programmatic rhetoric. At a closer look, this agenda followed by the...
At the Crossroads Not long ago, Mr. Theodore White, connoisseur of presidential elections, crafted a well reasoned, though intellectually prefabricated, article for the New York Times Magazine. His was a solid analysis of this country’s shifting political geology: some major social forces are in the process of crystallizing into defined political powers, moved by ideas...
A Gloaming Raymond Aron: The Committed Observer; Interviews with Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. On 17 October 1983, thelight in the world of the intellect and action became dimmed with the passing of critic, scholar, thinker, teacher, journalist Raymond Aron. Aron, of course, left much behind him—40 books, enlightened students, journalism, lectures,...
Technical Problems One facet of music that’s often unacknowledged is that technology has a large effect on it, not merely on the creation of music (i.e., through the development of new or somehow modified instruments), but on it’s reception. For example, in 1948 John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain invented the transistor. By the...
Physician, Heal Thyself— That American society is vile, unequal, unjust, and unfair is by now a sort of commonplace, a once-and-for-ever fixed obviousness, as self-evident as the presence of McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola. The trite naturalness of this characterization has been driven into the popular consciousness by the omnipotent and omnipresent liberal media. And no...