"We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It one of the rivers we have to dam."
There are so many songs about violence, often sung from the point of view of a murderer. Indeed, the second one that sprang to my mind was from the sanctimonious promoter of censorship, Neil Young:
I don't know rap. Never heard of "drill rap" before just now. So I have no rap-focused opinion. But I oppose censorship, and I understand art well enough to make the distinction between the writer and the story told.
Down by the river I shot my baby/Down by the river/Dead, ooh/Shot her dead, ooh....
I've never seen "A Christmas Story," though I am one of Jean Shepherd's biggest fans. For years, in the 1960s, I used to get in bed in time to hear the "Call to Post" — which, today, sounds like something about blogging — on my radio tuned to WOR. And then...
Listening to those Jean Shepherd radio shows in the dark, night after night, was the pop culture highlight of lifetime. Of course, I heard him read "A Christmas Story" ever year. That was a tradition. But better than that was any random show on whatever he decided to talk about that night — another story of his childhood (back in Indiana) or some odd trail of musings.
Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."...
Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them."
In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd.
Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence.
An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).
A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments:
I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....
I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...
I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him.
So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas.
I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.
"... At the microphone, he is the opposite of a 'man of ego, hubris and entitlement.'... Some 35 miles east-northeast of here, in Northampton, Jonathan Edwards preached his fierce sermon, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' during the First Great Awakening. In the midst of America's Fifth Great Awakening, the Awakening of the Woke, here sat Garrison Keillor, a sinner, bearing witness, though slyly. He paid a steep price for his sins, whatever they were. He said it didn't matter -- it was 'injustice on behalf of a good cause.' The 'good cause' was #MeToo. 'The way you change behavior,' he said, is through fear -- the same point that Jonathan Edwards made. It 'is to whack prominent men with a two-by-four.'"
Writes Lance Morrow in The Wall Street Journal, about Garrison Keillor's appearance at the Meeting House in New Marlborough, Massachusetts (where he was interviewed by Simon Winchester).
Does Morrow take Keillor's remarks at face value? I wish I'd been there and able to look him in the eye and hear the sound — the famous sound — of his voice. He is a humorist. I wouldn't take at face value the notion that the way to change behavior is through fear and that it's fine to whack prominent men with a two-by-four for a good cause. I'm going to take Morrow's "but slyly" to mean that he took it all as satire, even the choice of setting, the New Marlborough Meeting House, which looks like this:
Wrote Christopher Morley, an American journalist, novelist, essayist, and poet who lived from 1890 to 1957.
I encountered that as I was looking for quotes about journalism (for reasons described in an earlier post). The Morley quote is from an AdWeek article by Meranda Adams, "15 Quotes to Inspire Journalists."
The article is from 2011, so it's interesting to encounter this from the now-disgraced Garrison Keillor: "Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material." If he's true to his own adage, we'll have a fantastic book.
There's also this quote from David Sedaris, which feels, today, like an warning to Keillor: "Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."
And this is sweet, from Eric Hoffer: "In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
A letter from MPR president Jon McTaggart. In the main part of the letter, he responds to questions that he frames for the purpose of explaining and justifying MPR's actions. Sample:
"Did MPR overreact to a single incident of Garrison touching the back of the woman who is making the allegations?" Answer: no.
"Did MPR provide due process to Garrison or was this a rush to protect MPR in the current environment?" Answer: "MPR’s process was deliberate, diligent and included Garrison...."
"Has MPR unfairly tarnished Garrison Keillor’s reputation?" No, much of the damage Keillor did to himself by using social media to stir up outrage over how unfairly he was treated. And: "The irony is that while MPR has been careful to protect Garrison’s privacy and not hurry any decisions, others have rushed to judge and criticize MPR’s actions without knowing the facts."
"... the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for."
I could talk about what a phony Garrison Keillor is — "plain thoughts," indeed — or go on at length about the excellence of Haidt's book, but what I did was Google "Who died for poetry?," and that got me to an article titled "The Man Who Died for Poetry":
When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century poetry's most famous martyrs. Vastly talented and fearlessly subversive, he is perhaps best remembered for his scathing "Stalin Epigram," the poem that sealed his fate....
[Christian Wiman, the translator]: We think of Mandelstam as the quintessential twentieth-century European poet, hounded to death by an out-of-control state and writing poems of fierce, poignant protest. He was that, of course, but he was also, right up to the end, funny and friendly and crazed in the best sense. Poetry was fun for him.... Honestly, I think it's this pure and irrepressible lyric spirit that drove Stalin mad, even more than the famous poem that Mandelstam wrote in mockery of Stalin. Mandelstam—his gift and the untamable nature of it—was like a thorn in Stalin's brain....
Here's "The Stalin Epigram" (by different translators, W.S. Merlin and Clarence Brown):
Last month, MPR was notified of the allegations which relate to Mr. Keillor's conduct while he was responsible for the production of A Prairie Home Companion (APHC). MPR President Jon McTaggart immediately informed the MPR Board Chair, and a special Board committee was appointed to provide oversight and ongoing counsel....
MPR will end its business relationships with Mr. Keillor's media companies effective immediately. By terminating the contracts, MPR and American Public Media (APM) will: end distribution and broadcast of The Writer's Almanac and rebroadcasts of The Best of A Prairie Home Companion hosted by Garrison Keillor; change the name of APM's weekly music and variety program hosted by Chris Thile; and, separate from the Pretty Good Goods online catalog and the PrairieHome.org website.
ADDED: Keillor created a folksy character for himself, but if I ever believed it was anything like his real-life self, I quit believing that in 1993 when Spy Magazine pranked him (click to enlarge and read):
In his statement on Wednesday, Mr. Keillor said he was “deeply grateful” for the saga of Lake Wobegon and for all his years doing his radio programs and his tours, as well as the friendships of musicians and actors.
"I’m 75,” he said, “and don’t have any interest in arguing about this. I cannot in conscience bring danger to a great organization I’ve worked hard for since 1969,” he said. He also apologized to “all the poets whose work I won’t be reading on the radio and sorry for the people who will lose work on account of this.”...
“‘Prairie Home Companion’ came on the scene just as public radio was trying to figure out what its identity was,” Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” told The New York Times last year. “The fact that here was such a visibly weird, funny, idiosyncratic show opened up the space of other weird, idiosyncratic shows, like ‘Car Talk,’ and our show.”
[Nicolas] Sarkozy is unabashedly pro-American, a man who openly proclaims his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone and his admiration for America’s strong work ethic and its belief in upward mobility.
The last film that made Mr. Sarkozy cry was Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” He once said he wanted Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as his victory song. He calls himself “proud” to wear the label “Sarkozy the American.”
America! We've got Stallone, Garrison Keillor, and disco.
... this "sort of book," by a Frenchman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who did some traveling in America and then "worked up his notes," to be witheringly reviewed by Garrison Keillor in the NYT:
In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.
The book is called "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville." (You can read the first chapter here.)
Keillor:
Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions....
America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . .
No matter how many words beginning with D in a sentence there may be...
"no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."
Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming.
Ha. This reminds me of a book in my half-read books collection: "America," by Jean Baudrillard. I got some ways into it -- I was seriously trying to read it, you know, doing that thing readers do where we submit to merging our mind with the mind of another human being -- and I just had to shake myself out of it and say nothing here rings true.
Hmmm.... "America" has a blurb from a NYT book review on the back. "Since de Tocqueville...."
IN THE COMMENTS: An interesting process of melllowing on Lévy!
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