‘Reading Jackie’

My new Deconstruction Zone for Pop Matters is up and running, focusing on Bill Kuhn’s exceptional Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books. This one was rewarding but challenging, seeing that I had to switch gears from writing a trade magazine article about oncology to the life (and the life of a notable woman) in books within days:

Why Art Matters: this is where the task assigned to the cultural essayist becomes an onerous one. The near-existential question I have been grappling with since reading Kuhn’s meticulously researched book is how to address the relevance of a work like Reading Jackie – a biography culled from the detritus of a well-bred woman’s affection for art and literature – to a culture wherein literary reading has declined significantly in direct proportion to rising Internet use (PopMatters readers notwithstanding, Alexa demographics report that you’re a well-read crowd).

A November 2007 report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) finds that negative trends in American reading habits “have demonstrable social, cultural, and civic implications.” The current generation is simply too hardwired into the world of mass media (television, computers, video games, cell phones, social media) and the more facile fragments of pop culture – think Justin Bieber or the exploits of Charlie Sheen – to cultivate a taste for reading and cultural activities, the NEA frets in a separate report.

In other words, personalities like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, celebrities with an intellectual bent, are few and far between in modern times.

Read ‘Reading Jackie: When Literary Choices Become Biography’ at Popmatters.

Rest … At Last

I am only now coming down after almost three weeks of deadline assignments, one on a ridiculously complex subject for a medical arts magazine and the other my new Deconstruction Zone column for Pop Matters. An excerpt from the latter in advance of publication:

A November 2007 report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) finds that negative trends in American reading habits “have demonstrable social, cultural, and civic implications.” The current generation is simply too hardwired into the world of mass media (television, computers, video games, cell phones, social media) and the more facile fragments of pop culture – think Justin Bieber or the exploits of Charlie Sheen – to cultivate a taste for reading and cultural activities, the NEA frets in a separate report.

In other words, personalities like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, celebrities with an intellectual bent, are few and far between in modern times.

“What of the current generation?” I asked the author of Reading Jackie in a recent email dialogue. “How will we ‘read’ them in the future? By their Netflix choices? Their Twitter and Facebook histories?”

“When I taught history at Carthage,” Kuhn replied, “(young students) were certainly better at picking up visual details from movie clips I showed in class – often things I missed – than at reading texts, which they invariably regarded as very hard work.”

Kuhn went on to say that when he sits down to read a newspaper (the real thing manufactured of pulp and ink) he pays “much more attention to it than when I glance at the news headlines online. I guess I conclude from that that long forms of fiction and non-fiction may die out, although short stories and short essays may revive.”

The entire piece — 2,790 words — will run later this month at Pop Matters.

Reading ‘Reading Jackie’

Yesterday I finally received my review copy of William Kuhn’s Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books from Random House; in the preface to his work, Kuhn states that “despite her love of books” the late Mrs. Kennedy-Onassis “spent a lifetime trying to prevent people from writing about her.”

It’s too early to evaluate the worth of the book (and I’m reserving those remarks for my March Pop Matters column) but in reading the first 50 pages last night, I was struck by the reality that, compared to Jackie’s world, circa 1929-1994, there is an abundant absence of art and beauty in modern American discourse, especially arts with an international flavor. As if to underscore this reality, GOP leaders yesterday proposed slashing all government spending for PBS and NPR — the relevance of the two broadcast networks aside (another topic entirely), this is a sad statement about the cultural vacuum we find ourselves living in today. I welcome your input in the comments.

Return of The Deconstruction Zone

After an extended absence, my Deconstruction Zone literature column for Pop Matters returns this month with a look at the new Library of America release, Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut:

In 1908, Harry Ward’s Social Creed of the Churches, calling for the abolition of child labor, a shortened work week, greater emphasis on safety in the workplace, and a living wage for all workers, was adopted by ecumenical Federal Council of Churches, and would become synonymous with the moral platform for workplace reform.

Aside from chairing the ACLU for the first 20 years of its existence, Harry Ward was also a co-founder, in 1907, of the Methodist Federation for Social Services (MFSS), a national organization dedicated to mobilizing clergy and laity to take action on issues of poverty and social injustice; Harry served with the MFSS until 1945, the same year that his son Lynd was elected an Associate Member in Graphic Arts of the National Academy of Design in New York City.

This then was the caliber of a man that the HUAC and so-called “friendlies” of McCarthy’s misguided anti-Communist committee like Walt Disney sought to discredit and destroy with their sanctimonious patriotism.

“Actually if you could see close in my eyes,” Disney once told an interviewer (as cited by Dave Smith in The Quotable Walt Disney), “the American flag is waving in both of them and up my spine is growing this red, white and blue stripe.”

Read Lynd Ward and Walt Disney: Illustrators of America’s Tumultuous History at Popmatters.

 

Something Rare

I tend to get my best writing accomplished in the dark, quiet hours of the morning; my new essay for Pop Matters is, I believe, a good example of Fitzgerald’s ‘dark night of the soul’ composing:

Thanks to a progressive high school curriculum in the San Francisco Bay Area of the ‘70s, not to mention the popularity of martial arts owing to the Bruce Lee “kung fu” phenomenon that spawned a widespread interest in Zen and Buddhism, I was subjected to a Comparative Religions course in my junior year that rearranged my thinking about Christianity; the mere fact that all Great Religions of the World, as I learned, share the same advertising jingle (‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’) was enough to make me suspect the viability of the Christian Bible as the ultimate authority on religious faith.

Ernest Hemingway, one of my early literary favorites, was no great cheerleader of monotheistic fairy tales either; there is precious little discussion of faith to be found in his novels and short stories, save for the mystic communion between man and nature that the macho author/adventurer explores … well, religiously.

Read Something Rare: Ernest Hemingway’s Mystic Communion at Pop Matters.