‘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.

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.