Reading - 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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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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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

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Reading • Voices in Chicago

I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel and addressed the gathered crowd as “the United States government-in-exile.” Though I couldn’t find any footage, but I did come across this fine moment, when Gore Vidal calls William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatens to punch him in the face. But I digress.

I was struck, as I watched President-elect Obama declaim in Grant Park last week, not only by his eloquence…

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

…but also by the idea that there are so few great public orators and memorable speeches—and that, arguably, Obama has already made a handful of such speeches, from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to, more recently, speeches in Berlin and in Philadelphia.

The New Yorker’s James Wood has already provided an astute commentary on the election campaign speechifying, and now he has published a clear-eyed and succinct exegesis of Obama’s Nov. 4 oration, which, by the way, prompts me to offer that that speech is also impressive on the page, as an inspiring read.

Should you choose to pursue this notion, here are a few worthy compendia of speeches: former presidential speechwriter William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, which collects over 200 speeches from Ancient Greece to the present (you will, as I was, be surprised to see George W. Bush amongst these worthies) and the Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory From the Revolution to the Civil War and American Speeches: Political Oratory From Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 17, 2008

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Reading • “Have You Seen…?”

Though he is the author of more than 20 worthy tomes that range over a broad literary landscape—novels, essays, biographies, histories—eagle-eyed cinephile David Thomson is likely best known for a number of editions of the incomparable and valuable A Biographical Dictionary of Film and recently The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Having those in his oeuvre, one wonders why he would then go on to compile and write “Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf), a thousand pages devoted to as many films? His excuse:

I was first approached to try this book by Nigel Wilcockson of Penguin in London. It was a prolonged process. After the Biographical Dictionary of Film I did not believe it was a sane idea to write another very long book on the same subject. But Nigel was not to be told no and saw little evidence that I was sane. He talked to me. He sent me superb books on the churches of England as inspiration. He never stopped until he had me persuaded…”

As Thomson is an authoritative and savvy observer, his take on films and other elements of contemporary culture makes for useful and fulfilling reading. Recognizing, as he opines, “that film culture is not a tidy place,” he explains:

I wanted a bumper book for your laps, a volume where you could keep turning the pages and coming up with juxtapositions of the fanciful and the fabulous (Abbott and Costello go to Zabriskie Point?) or some chance alphabetical poetry that might make your scalp tingle—like Bad Day at Black Rock leading into Badlands. I wanted old favorites to be neighbors with films you’ve never heard of. I wanted you to entertain the unlikely possibility that everything is here. Of course it is not—everything remains in our scattered “there.”

Some—I expect they would be film zealots—might read “Have You Seen…?” cover to cover; it is more likely that one takes small sips rather than large gulps from this highly and wonderfully opinionated film survey. Nonetheless, any way you take David Thomson offers another fine and fun compendium on movies. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 14, 2008

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Reading • Best Thought, Worst Thought

Given the titans residing in the pantheon of aphorists—Oscar Wilde, Karl Kraus, G.K. Chesterton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce—it takes a writer of high self-regard or no sense of history to attempt a book of aphorisms. Or like poet, editor, musician, and Scotsman Don Paterson, who brings us Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death (Graywolf Press), someone who does not take the task all that seriously:

The shorter the form, the greater our expectation of its significance—and the greater its capacity for disappointing us. A book of aphorisms is a lexicon of disappointments. The form’s only virtue is its brevity; at least the reader cannot seriously hold that it has wasted their time.

Or:

The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem is a complete waste of time. The novel is a monumental waste of time.

Then there is this:

His corpse was beyond such trifling repose as mere peace. He had left time and I could not help but reflect on the elegance of the move. Even my slow walk from the funeral parlor to the Tube station felt like an epileptic fit.

Or:

I have no more ambition for this book than that some day someone will be lying in bed and read out a single line—and that their companion will turn away from them in silence …

—Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 12, 2008

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Reading • A Great Idea

The decision by the Christian Science Monitor to no longer print a hard-copy version got me to thinking about my reading habits vis-à-vis that great American news appliance, the daily newspaper—and I was pushed into a state of befuddlement, realizing I had not picked up a piece of newsprint in … I cannot remember how long. The why of it I will take up another time, but in the instance of my local dailies, the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe (except for Gail Caldwell, Mark Feeney, and Katherine Powers—interesting voices all), both long ago became irrelevant to my life and cluster of habits. Considering that I began reading newspapers back in 1957, this divestiture I am sure augurs something—as in, obviously, we can take the “papers” out of “newspapers.”

Columnist Alex Beam is another reason to brave the tactile smudginess of the Globe. Beam, among other things, regularly directs elegant strokes—or, if you will, lashes of iconoclasm—at the World’s Greatest University and other ripe veins of pretense and pomposity. Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital) has a new book, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Public Affairs), which examines the so-called Great Books movement that arose in the late ‘40s and its two main proselytes, University of Chicago wunderkind president Robert Hutchins and mad-dog public intellectual-qua-philosopher Mortimer Adler.

It is indeed a lucid trip in the Wayback Machine through some of the fundamental issues regarding the nature of a liberal arts education. The creation of a Great Books canon was Hutchins’s and Adler’s answer—which in the status conscious society of mid-20th-century America became a commodity sold door to door (or as the publisher asks, “Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen?”). Among the other benefits of this smart and well-conceived intellectual excursion is a sensibility that holds librarians as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. A good fulcrum upon which to balance a worldview. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 10, 2008

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Reading • A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity

In the end, it is difficult to view perennial Countdown “Worst Person in the World” candidate and Fox Network blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly as anything other than a blustering clown with a deep streak of the bully in him. Why then, you ask, have I engaged in the selfless service of examining O’Reilly’s latest opus, A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (Broadway Books)? Simple, I assert: Having found little useful in my very occasional glimpses of him as a TV pundit and interviewer, I wondered what he could possibly say on the page in this, his eighth tome, a so-called “issues-based memoir” (which, by the way, is ranked no. 30 in sales at the big online bookseller). The title of which the author claims was bestowed upon him by Sister Mary Lurana in the third grade at St. Brigid’s elementary school.

Besides leading with a profound epigram from Don Henley’s song “The Boys of Summer” (“Don’t look back / You can never look back”), I was struck by the boldness of the before-the-title page Pledge of Allegiance complete with graphic drawing of the American flag. No mistaking O’Reilly for anything other than a red-blooded, meat-eating, American patriot. And in case you are impatient to know what Bill is about, here he is in his own words:

I could go on with my story but as I like to say on the air, enough is enough. You’ve got it, a bold fresh piece of humanity fights his way up and becomes a media force. Along the way he has many adventures and encounters that have shaped his vision and philosophy. If there is a Cliff notes for this book, I’ve just summed it up in a paragraph.

Yup, that’s what you get in 272 pages—bold fresh piece of humanity Bill having adventures. Or here’s O’Reilly’s ultimate revelation:

My father had no clue what my future would be and, truthfully, avoided much conversation about it. My parents cared, but from a distance. Through the years, whenever I whined about some workplace injustice, my father’s reply always met his usual pithy standards: “Slug it out.”

OK.

This will not come as a shock to you, but to say I went to work with a chip on my shoulder is like saying Britney Spears might have made a few bad decisions. Stating the obvious. But here’s the beauty of being the bold, fresh guy in the world of journalism: That edge made me work harder than most everybody else in the newsroom.

Admittedly, the lack of vocational support or wise counsel when things got difficult put me at a disadvantage in the marketplace. But I got very good at “slugging it out.”

And I needed that skill because, to this day, I have to deal with some very bad people in TV land. Most of the time, I defeat them. Most of the time.

And there you have it. Whatever it is. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 7, 2008

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Reading • In Memoriam: Studs Terkel

[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] Having grown up in Chicago I had the great good fortune to be introduced to Studs Terkel’s work early on—as well as the other Chicago wonders, all hidden in plain sight from the rest of America—Mike Royko, Ernie Banks, Curtis Mayfield, Sid McCoy, Leon Despres, Chester Burnett (aka Howling Wolf), Nelson Algren, hotdogs served on steamed sesame buns with the works, thick-crust pizza, and real brown mustard slathered on hotdogs served at lakeshore kiosks.

Anyway, by now millions of words have been written in tribute to Chicagoan Louis “Studs” Terkel (Division Street America), who passed away last weekend at the glorious age of 96.

Terkel was still signing three book contracts in his ninth decade—one of which was his second memoir, Touch and Go, published last year and, most recently, P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening, which anthologizes a selection of Studs’s unpublished writings, broadcasts, and interviews.

Studs was a true American original whose great talent was to listen, really listen to the vast array of people he interviewed.

Quite a trick for a deaf guy.

RIP Studs Terkel. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 5, 2008

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Tuesday, December 2, 2008