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 classic novel about a day...
Confluences – Mysterious Activities
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, reconstructing, or similar critical activities....
Notables – Tenderhearted–and Headed
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, “Why don’t you look for a...
Liberal Culture – Ethics & the Mystery of Meals
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 us that she’s familiar with...
Screen – Sharks
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 correctly identify the location of...
Screen – A Big Bonbon
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 “childish amusements” (though that assessment...
Screen – Shaking a Money-Maker
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 use of the over-endowed women who...
Post-Modern Muzak
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 play; and, of course, the...
Notables – Construction Notes
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 upon for years. Now there...
Of Women and Wanderlust
Elizabeth Arthur: Beyond the Mountain; Harper & Row; New York. Blanche d’Alpuget: Turtle Beach; Simon &Schuster; New York. Janet Turner Hospital: The Ivory Swing; E. P. Dutton; New York. by Bryce Christensen Home, as Robert Frost observed, is that place “where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But who are the “they” who...
Commendables
Be True to Your School Ernest L. Boyer, High School, A Report on Secondary Education in America; Harper & Row; New York. by Carlisle G. Packard In 1955, two-thirds of Americans asked by a Gallup poll indicated that they would be willing to pay more taxes if the increase were applied to raising teachers’ salaries. In 1980, only 30 percent indicated...
Tending the Abused Garden
Max Hayward: Writers in Russia: 1917-1978; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. by Charles A. Moser At the time of his premature death in 1979, Max Hayward was among the finest Western interpreters of contemporary Russian literature in the Soviet Union. As one of Britain’s most accomplished Slavists, he had obtained a research position at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford for...
Ideological Time Twisting
John Arden: Vox Pop: Last Days of the Roman Republic; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. by E. Christian Kopff The fact that John Arden has written a novel is important news for people who care about the health of the English language and its literature. As with his plays, the basic idea for the book is a good one,...
Down Home—& Out to Lunch
James Wilcox: Modern Baptists; Dial Press; New York. Joan Williams: Pariah and Other Stories; Atlantic/Little, Brown; Boston. by Fred West First novels can be wonderful events, given the shrinking market for fiction these days. In general, creative writers have hit the bottom of the totem pole, as indicated by the endless string of credits flashed before and/or after every TV...
Selling the Rope…and More
Joseph Finder: Red Carpet; New Republic/Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York by Henry L. Mason III One of the most persistent sources of confusion among educated Americans is the failure to realize that the Soviet Union’s relations with the outside world are conducted on levels which do not correspond to those of democratic societies. On Good Morning, America, for example,...
Comment
The case study of Teheran and Yalta can be ultimately reduced to the question: Should the President of the United States lie? Pericles would have thought so, “for there is justice in the claim that steadfastness in his country’s battles should be a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and...
Pop Biography
Gilbert A. Harrison: The Enthusiast: A life of Thornton Wilder; Ticknor & Fields; New Haven CT. by Ronald Berman Thornton Wilder was a hugely successful writer and evidently a very good man. As to the first, in 1927 The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned $20,000 in royalties, a figure which can be compared with the amount that The Great...
The Reaper with Steel-Rimmed Glasses
Arnold Beichman and Mikhail S. Bernstarn: Andropov: New Challenge to the West; Stein and Day; New York. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova: Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin; Macmillan; New York. by T. Mark Kulish On November 15, 1982, an overcast and cold day in Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev was buried. The new Soviet leader Yuri Andropov eulogized...
The American Proscenium
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 press-at-large seems oddly identical with...
Journalism
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 new twist to the Kennedyfor-profit...
Art
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 Art Institute of Chicago, “Grant...
A Prudent Progressive
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 he should be commended. The...
Music
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 a self-referential statement. That is,...
Screen
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 say it enough; Gene Siskel...
In Focus
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 seclusion which keeps him in...
Perceptibles
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 of either a trivial enough...
Waste of Money
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 on the common nonbelief system...
In Focus
Signals of Strength Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox: Delta Force; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. This warrior’s account will leave its mark above all as hero saga in a land by no means lacking in heroes but oblivious and often antagonistic to their deeds. Nor will it be forgotten as testimony in a vituperative controversy about American military will...
The Essence of Evil
Susan Jacoby: Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge; Harper & Row; New York. Joe McGinniss: Fatal Vision; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. These two very different books are linked by a common theme—coping with evil. Jacoby presents a philosophical-historical view of revenge, and a case for its utilization under certain guarded conditions. McGinniss tells the story of Captain Jeffrey...
From Nonsense to Understanding
Who Were The Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism; Edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust; Distributed by Columbia University Press; New York. Richard F. Hamilton: Who Voted for Hitler?; Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ. Who Were The Fascists consists of more than 800 pages of papers (replete with notes) which formed the basis of a...
Comment
Decline, decay, the falling away from a former excellence. All the conventional definitions of decadence are negative on their face. The term denotes a state of decline, but it also connotes an enlightened view of that decline on the part of the user, who is sophisticated, worldly-wise, and never ever shocked. A very respectable hotel advertises its bar as “elegant,...
Horrors in the Age of Disbelief
Stephen King: Pet Sematary; Doubleday; New York. If it is true that popular literature, in however unexamined a fashion, embodies many of the presuppositions of an age, then the last decade and a half’s spate of supernatural shockers raises some intriguing questions. According to the higher wisdom of the academy, for instance, the creature known as Modern Man has outgrown the...
Correspondence
Letter from Brazil: The Consuming Crisis Returning to Brazil for five months as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer after an absence of seven years, I expected to see considerable change. Things happen rapidly in such a developing nation. And indeed Brazil today presents striking contrasts to the Brazil I knew for two years in the mid-1970’s. There has been a general...
Screen
Return to Remedial Physics Silkwood; Directed by Mike Nichols; Written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen; ABC Motion Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. One of the latest causes of self-righteousness, posturing, and enlightened indignation is not a person or place, but a thing: a group of heavy metals that disintegrate and emit various rays (alpha, beta, gamma), or radioactive materials. Everybody knows...
Dreams of Avarice
Ivan Fallon and James Srodes: Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. Delorean; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. Elizabeth Drew: Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption; Macmillan; New York. Ethics in America, a recent Gallup survey conducted for the Wall Street Journal, finds that business-class marijuana smokers are twice as likely as nonusers to fake...
Scholarly Smut
Peter Gay: Education of the Senses, Volume I of the Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud; Oxford University Press; New York When Brantôme in the 16th century wrote a rather spicy Life of Great Ladies, or Samuel Pepys, in the 17th century, wrote his diary, neither intended these works as a history of culture, which is a modern erudite/academic genre. Nor...
Consequences of Misused Terminology
Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin: Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism; Simon & Schuster; New York. The authors identify “the first recorded reference to Jews in non-Jewish sources” as a report an Egyptian king caused to be written 1200 years before Christ. “Israel is no more,” it boasts. Israel has proved somewhat more resilient than this early critic estimated....
The American Proscenium
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 which would aspire to “sharpen”...
Commendables
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, and, indeed, a tradition. Yet...
Music
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 mid-50’s, the transistor made its...
Journalism
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 other power of the American universe...
A Telltale Heart
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer: The Madness of a Seduced Woman; E. P. Dutton; New York. The specter of solipsism has long haunted the romantic temperament, and romantic eros in particular. The sense that one’s self is the locus and source of all value and meaning in the universe has characterized both the critical celebrations and the denunciations of romanticism as a...
Waste of Money
More Equal Than Thou Judith A. Baer: Equality Under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. Among the amendments to the Constitution, none were ever more morally justified nor more desperately needed than the three which abolished slavery and gave blacks the rights of citizenship and of equal protection under the law. Now, however, the...
Who’s Number One?
In a recent editorial attacking the Reagan Administration’s Central American policies, The Nation demonstrated once again how pro-Soviet attitudes so warp the mind that even such simple mental tasks as counting and adding and subtracting are no longer possible. Opined The Nation’s casuists: If the State Department was seriously interested in reducing the daily body count, it could begin in...
Cock Fight
Last full, a holier-than-thou exercise in breast-beating was sponsored by The Nation and The New Republic; it was designated “Were the Rosenbergs Framed?” As expected, the one-up manship lasted long after the programs were littering the floor of Town Hall. Andrew Kopkind, associate editor of The Nation, wrote up the event for his employer, which provoked a great deal of...
The Crisis of Controlled Thinking
A General’s Life by Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair; Simon and Schuster; New York. General of the Army Omar N. Bradley’s military career spanned a half-century of dramatic change for the United States. When he entered West Point in 1911, the United States had few military interests beyond its borders; when he retired in 1953, American military commitments stretched around...
Video Clones
Television created a subgenre of music a few years ago that can be designated as “artificial, nonexistent, techno-pop,” which must be differentiated from the succeeding, garden variety of techno-pop aired today by the human/machine combinations known as the Eurythmics, Flock of Seagulls, etc. The original includes the music of The Monkees, that group of well-scrubbed faces that was put together...
Old & Old as New
Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans, LA; Volume II. Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans, LA; Volume III Linda Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra; What’s New; Electra/Asylum Records. On the back cover of Volume Ill, the entire Preservation Hall crew is grouped around a table on which is mounted a feast of classic Creole New Orleans food....
Images, images, ima…
The Work of Atget: The Ancient Re gime; The Museum of Modern Art; New York. Bill Harris: New York at Night; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Robert Freson: The Taste of France; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Ansel Adams: Examples; New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown; Boston. William Manchester: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy; Little, Brown; Boston. Photography...
The Ring and the Brush
Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze by Norman Bryson; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. Western painting—at least that which was produced before the advent, or onslaught, of photography in the 19th century—shares a characteristic with a trinket that could once be found in cereal boxes and gum ball machines: the flicker ring. The surface of this ring...