Digest - The Morning News

Reading • Lincoln Logorrhea

Even before the grand finale of the 2008 election campaign, new books on the only other president elected from the great state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, were much in evidence in reviews and bookstores. No surprise there, as somewhere in his forthcoming tome, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik mentions that Lincoln is the second most popular biographer’s subject after Jesus Christ. In the past few months we have seen (the titles are effectively descriptive): Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President edited by Brian Lamb (Public Affairs); Lincoln’s Darkest Year: The War in 1862 by William Marvel (Houghton Mifflin); Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press); The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination by Gary Ecelbarger (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press); Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 by Harold Holzer (Simon & Schuster); Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson (Penguin Press); Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins); and Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Philip B. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt (Knopf).

As the process of knitting a cabinet and administration has unfolded, rehabilitated plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln has been frequently cited, not the least of the reasons being the president-elect’s gestures and consideration of past and future rivals. (Mrs. Clinton being the chief example—in the same vein as Lincoln appointed Edward Seward as secretary of state.) I have no doubt that the Lincoln bibliography listed above represents fine scholarship for students and history buffs. On the other hand, though it falls under the rubric of historical novel, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (Random House), part of his Narratives of Empire series, offers a narrative true to the known facts and insights and coloration that are informative beyond a collection of factoids, dates, and such. Vidal is gifted with making the story a vivid, unfolding drama and presenting the dramatis personae from Lincoln and his coterie to the various eastern political establishment bigwigs as real and lively. Of course, Vidal was criticized (read: attacked) for his portrayal of Lincoln, and per usual, he gives better than he gets:

Although I do my own research, unlike so many professors whose hagiographies are usually the work of those indentured servants, the graduate students, when it comes to checking a finished manuscript, I turn to Academia…

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures… I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require…

—Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 1, 2008

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Listening • Feeling for Iceland

I feel for Iceland. They’ve got supermarket flags flying over their parliament, they’ve spent way too much money. It’s economic meltdown for real. You wouldn’t blame them hibernating til spring, emerging with hope that the glacial movements of recession have retreated back up the mountain. Compatriots Sigur Ros and Bjork are good for soundtracking the crash of waves, ships sinking, and bank-Execs being fed to the fishes. But Sin Fang Bous’s “Sinkership,” sounds more like forgotten dreams, electro-poptimism, and collective folk-choices to renew. It’s reflected through the crowds, the haze, the innovation, and second-hand machinery of this sweet song, a side project to band Seabear.

Dear Iceland, I would like to visit. I don’t know where your musicians begin, but I would like to see it. You should listen to this record through the winter, the album will emerge from its chrysalis, fully formed, next spring. Get it now from that popular online music store if they are still accepting your currency. —Mike Smith, Dec. 1, 2008

» Listen to "Sinkership" at Bunnynico

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Watching • Determining the Best Thing

This vs That. Lobsters vs Godfather II. In this video, some architects, as part of their work with the Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America, ask us to think about the relative advantages of McDonalds, seahorses, English people. They contend that thing-literacy is important to designing the places we live and understanding why things are as they are. They are utterly convincing. In terms of really getting down to the nitty-gritty, NCAA inspired brackets force you to choose the best quality, not by abstract criticism but by simple direct comparison! We do it everyday, these guys have just spent a lot of time thinking about it. Democracy or Heated Seats? What is the best thing? A thing that helps create or facilitate other things, or something that just works, everytime? Those crazy architects. —Mike Smith, Dec. 1, 2008

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Reading • Poetry As Insurgent Art

Poetry As Insurgent Art (New Directions), a slender (90 pages), pocket-sized, clothbound volume with the title embossed on the black coverboard is a work in progress (the earliest version transcribed from a KPFA radio broadcast in the late ‘50s) by octogenarian poet patriarch Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Ferlinghetti has been amending and publishing this work intermittently throughout a lifetime of poetizing. If you need an introduction to him, his classic and much loved A Coney Island of the Mind celebrated its 50th anniversary, and is available in a new edition (including a CD). Here some choice tidbits from Insurgent Art:

“Through art, create order out of the chaos of living.”

“Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident.”

“Read between the lives and write between the lines.”

“Pursue the White Whale but don’t harpoon it. Catch its song instead.”

And here are more:

“What times are these? Silence and horrors.”

“Create works for apocalyptic times.”

“Write living newspapers.”

“The lisp of leaves.”

“A lyric poet must rise above sounds found in the alphabet soup of language poetry.”

“Do you have the mad sound?”

“Compose on the tongue.”

“A poem should not have to be explained.”

“Imagine Shelley at a workshop?”

“Catch its song.”

“Liberate.”

Liberate, exactly! —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 26, 2008

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Listening • Larkin Grimm

Read Larkin's blog to get a better sense of her thoughts: "One problem with the underground music scene now is that a lot of the more radical kids are afraid to be sexy... We know that John McCain is staring at Sarah Palin's ass while she is making speeches... the whole universe is contained in this moment."

Before, Larkin Grimm sung folk for the forests—see her myspace for country chanting, etc. Now, she rides out of the trees on great magical horses—like a Tolkienian spaghetti western. Years back, Larkin Grimm persuaded a crowd and I to lie on the floor and engage in some astro-traveling. She walked amongst us as we lay in that room above the pub, still wrapped in scarfs, warmed by candlelight. Most would have thought of ice palaces burning to the ground, thinking of the winter outside and the increasing heat inside. Now though, in “Ride the Cyclone,” I imagine a spiritual journey to get back to civilization, following the songlines, eager to destroy, rebuild, summon wild voices, and warm the blood of the next generation. —Mike Smith, Nov. 24, 2008

» Listen to "Ride that Cyclone" at Stereogum

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Reading • The Chicagoan

As an expatriate Chicagoan living in benighted eastern Massachusetts, I can attest to the geographical affliction prevalent in these and other parts of the East Coast that are apparently blind and ignorant of the United States west of Philadelphia—this year being an exception given the importance of funny sounding places like “Ohio” and “Indiana.” Possibly the election of a president from Illinois who lives in Chicago may change that: One has already seen the gushing tributes to ur-Chicagoan Studs Terkel—even the New York Times did a featurette on adopted Chicagoan Saul Bellow’s neighborhood.

Now comes The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (The University of Chicago Press), a wonderful and lavish book that recalls the relatively brief publication life of The Chicagoan, a magazine amazingly comparable to the New Yorker. Reportedly University of Chicago historian Neil Harris was trolling his university’s library and came across nine bound volumes of this periodical, which was published from 1926 to 1935. This well-reproduced, well-illustrated, oversized (coffee table), 400-page book contains one issue in its entirety and numerous samplings of covers, profiles, cartoons, and snippets of a section called “Talk of the Town.”

The only thing that could top this would be a Nelson Algren renaissance. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2008