Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Puppyish

Peter just devised this, with the cooperation of the puppy, the assistance of this website, and apologies to Shepard Fairey.

Transparency

I have been enjoying the newly remodeled White House website. I note with relief that it unambiguously places the Vice President in the executive branch. I was pleased to see that under the heading "Civil Rights," the first topic alphabetically on its "Agenda" menu, the Obama administration asserts that it wants to

enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.

The new White House blog looks a bit formal. More promising, perhaps, is the slot, so far empty, that looks as if it will soon house the daily reports of the White House press pool. As for any daily report here, all I have to say is that I was utterly destroyed by Aretha Franklin.

Silence and Song

Childhood, an early short film by Terence Davies, tells the story of Robert Tucker in two phases: as a boy growing up in an unhappy family in Liverpool and as a young man who has just barely survived it. The best thing in the movie is a long scene on a bus. It begins as a flashback. Robert Tucker, as a young man, has just visited a doctor who has prescribed him medication for depression and has asked whether he's developed any interest in girls yet. He hasn't. He walks to a bus stop, where a couple of young women titter at his doleful looks, and before the bus comes, there is a flashback: Robert, as a boy, is boarding a double-decker bus with his mother.

"Can we sit inside?" the boy asks. This tells us something about the boy; he's the sort who thinks it's more of a treat to sit inside a double-decker than on top. The boy's mother is played by a woman with attractive features but hollow eyes. The two sit down, he in a window seat, she in an aisle seat beside him so that she is closer to the camera, and the bus pulls away. They don't say anything further; they don't look at each other. She stares at the middle distance. He watches the streets of Liverpool pass by. The camera stays on them. Rows of workers' housing roll past; a corner is turned; more rows of similar housing roll past. The camera still does not move. It begins to occur to the viewer that this is not a scene that sets up another scene, despite its apparent lack of event. After a long while, the mother quietly cries. The boy does not try to comfort her; the viewer senses that an "interaction" of any kind would be false. Mere presence is as much as the mother and the boy are able to give each other.

There are a number of parallels between Childhood and Davies's later, full-length film The Long Day Closes. Both seem to be autobiographical. Both portray a boy who says "thank you" to school authorities when they whip him across the palm, who is awkward in the school swimming pool, who is set upon by bullies, and who will, we understand, grow up to be gay. Even the layout of the family home in both movies is the same. But The Long Day Closes is a warmer film—a film so full of love, in fact, that it's almost painful to watch—and there are important differences. It's in color, for one thing, and it has a sense of humor, for another, complete with Dickensian minor characters such as a plethoric, henpecked husband who does flawless impressions of Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. In the later movie, the parallel to the Childhood bus scene takes place at home. The hero, a young boy named Bud, is sitting beside his mother. Their faces are lit by a fire, not visible. She sings a song while looking into it. As with many of the songs in the movie, the gender of its persona conflicts with that of the singer, and so the mother explains, when she finishes, that it was her father's song—he used to sing it to her when she was a girl. She begins to cry as she explains this, and the boy, though he seems to be listening intently, continues to stare straight ahead into the fire, almost as if he doesn't notice her grief. There is no need for him to notice it, we sense; he is at one with her; he feels her sorrow as if it were his own, because the song and her touch have communicated it to him, and have also communicated the strength and the beauty that he will need in order to bear it. In Childhood nothing was in the place of song. Literally nothing: it was through silence and the absence of touch that Robert's mother communicated to him.

Silence and song are not so different. The matter of both is time; neither is intelligible unless you can hear rhythm. In watching Childhood the viewer has the sense that what was communicated was so sad, so heartbreaking that it could do violence to Robert. It hurt him as a boy, and it might kill him as a young adult, in the form of a depression he can't understand. What's shared is just as sad in The Long Day Closes. Perhaps it's even sadder. The trouble in Childhood, after all, seems to be that love is sometimes met by cruelty, and the trouble in The Long Day Closes is that those we love, and who love us, will in time die. But Bud is able to bear the greater grief in The Long Day Closes because his mother's sorrow comes to him as part of the company she offers. It is a further sweetness. And so Bud does not grow up to be a fragile or a brittle man. He grows up to be the maker of the film The Long Day Closes, whose presence is so palpable in the film that he should perhaps be thought of as a character in it.

Almost every detail in the movie reminds the viewer that he is watching a movie not life. The rain—and there is a lot of rain—is always movie rain. When at Christmastime the camera pans slowly away from a family tableau into the darkness down the street, the darkness is streaked with not real snow but movie snow, meteoric and fanciful. When Bud daydreams in class of a ship in a storm, and we see the ship, it is patently a model ship, photographed in close-up. None of this artifice lessens the movie. It is a kind of understatement. It is part of the director's way of speaking: It was like this, but of course all I can show you is a movie.

He communicates to us not with spectacle, that is, but the way his mother communicated to him, through silence and song. The silence has become famous. There is a long scene in The Long Day Closes when the camera rests on a carpet while sunlight shifts there. When I first saw the movie, in 1993, this scene frightened me. I remember worrying whether the friends beside me would grow impatient. They had brought me to the movie, but I was falling in love with it, and the scene made me worry that I would need to protect the movie from them. It made me feel how attached I was to it. It made me realize that I didn't mind sitting with it for a long time while nothing appeared to happen. The scene is a little like staring out the bus window while your mother is crying beside you and you are trying to allow her her privacy. And it is a little like noticing how beautiful even the most trivial and casual thing is, once love has attached you to the world it is a part of. To some it will seem like poverty, and to others, like enormous wealth.

Sun shifting on a carpet: light moving on a screen. When the camera at last rises from the carpet, it goes to Bud, kneeling in the sill of a window so that he can stare through it, the lace curtain draped over him like some kind of ritual vestment. It is largely by looking through windows that Bud turns life into a movie that he is watching. Sometimes the window is open and the sun is shining, as when he watches a shirtless bricklayer, who winks and embarrasses him. (In Childhood and its two sequels, Robert's sexuality was sometimes a heavy-handed matter, and its punishments were sometimes melodramatic. In The Long Day Closes, in contrast, the workman's wink is the only direct acknowledgment.) Sometimes rain is streaming down the window's glass, softening the light, rendering it more complex, as if the glass had come alive. Rain also destroys, however. In geology class, Bud learns about erosion, and from David Lean's Miss Havisham, whose words come to Bud after a friend betrays him by going to the movies with another boy, he learns that decay is the fate of those who can't find love. In the very first scene of the movie, for that matter, we see under rain the ruins of the world we are about to enter. It existed in time only, not in eternity. It existed in silence and in song. Bud's mother sang about the loss of her father to him, but Bud will have no children to whom he can sing the loss of his mother and the world he shared with her. Instead there is just a movie, radiating outward like the flashlight that Bud shines into the sky one night, after being told in school that such a light will go on forever, and which Bud turns, finally, into the lens of the camera, canceling it.

Why I remain pessimistic

The National Endowment for the Arts has just released a new report, Reading on the Rise, which contains good news: In a 2008 survey administered by the Census Bureau, Americans reported higher rates of literary reading than they did in 2002. In earlier reports, the decline of readers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four had been a subject of special concern. Between 2002 and 2008, however, the proportion in that age group who reported that they had read a work of literature in the previous year jumped by 8.9 percentage points.

I've had an interest in American reading rates for some time, and I wrote an article on the subject for the New Yorker that was published in December 2007, so I read the New York Times article on the report and the report itself with great curiosity. I'm happy that there's some good news on the topic. I nonetheless remain pessimistic about the trend of reading in America overall, and it might be worth explaining why.

Before I do, though, I'll waste a paragraph or three on the Sisyphean task of trying to clear up a common misconception about the NEA-sponsored surveys. It is often claimed that in earlier surveys, the NEA undercounted literary reading because it failed to ask about reading that happened online. This is not exactly true. Starting in 1982, the survey asked, "During the last 12 months, did you read any a) plays, b) poetry, or c) novels or short stories?" Respondents weren't prompted to think about the internet, but they weren't told not to think about it, either, and the NEA has always said that a poem read online counted just as much as a poem read in a book. Moreover, the NEA asked a nearly identical question in 2008 (the only change was a variation in the order of the genres). So if the new report does show that reading rates have indeed recovered, it isn't because the NEA has only just now gotten around to asking about the internet. That, nonetheless, is the latest misconception about the NEA in circulation. For example, on Monday morning, Publisher's Lunch, a publishing insider's newsletter, made fun of NEA chairman Dana Gioia for claiming that his agency was partly responsible for the rise and suggested that the props should instead go to the internet:

Aside from the yeoman efforts of the NEA chairman, what could possibly explain the sudden change? "In 2008, the survey introduced new questions about reading preferences and reading on the Internet."

The quote within the quote is true but the juxtaposition is somewhat misleading. Yes, the 2008 survey for the first time asked about reading preferences (i.e., it asked whether those who read prose preferred mysteries, thrillers, romance, or "other" fiction) and about internet habits. But the central measure—that of literary reading—came from the question I quoted above, the wording of which neither included nor excluded online reading. In other words, the improved results can't be explained by a shift in the NEA's methodology about the internet.

There's another way of reading the Publisher's Lunch passage: PL might have been trying to imply that Internet use has itself spurred the appreciation of literature in the past six years. That, more or less, is the claim made in a similar mocking report in the blog Valleywag. It's a pretty bold claim. It doesn't seem outright impossible to me, because as I noted in my New Yorker article last year, there's some evidence that internet use and literacy go hand in hand. But relatively few of the internet's electrons are devoted to poetry and fiction, and it seems to me on the face of it unlikely that the internet could have caused significantly more people to take an interest in those genres. (Yes, I know about fan fiction, and despite the existence of it I stand by these hunches.)

But enough about the internet. Why aren't I celebrating the new numbers about the reading of literature? First, the numbers are good, but they're not that good. The proportion of Americans who said in 2008 that they read some literature in the previous twelve months may be higher than it was in 2002, but it's lower than it was in 1992, 1985, and 1982. Moreover, the same is true of the rates in the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old bracket. Over the longer span, we're still talking about a decline.

Second, another of the NEA's measures shows a continued, stubborn decrease. To the question "With the exception of books required for work or school, did you read any books during the last 12 months?" the proportion of respondents saying yes dropped from 56.6 percent in 2002 to 54.3 percent in 2008. Here the internet may be relevant, because the word "book" is generally understood as referring to the ink-and-paper object. But even if the internet is the culprit, I'm still dismayed. Nationwide, there aren't yet that many e-book readers; it's simply not yet possible for very many people to read the electronic equivalent of books. Online substitutions may be taking place, but they're probably not "literary," so I doubt it's good news if the proportion who say they read books for pleasure continues to decline.

Okay, but a piece of good news is still good news, even if it's not great news, and even if another piece of news is bad. Right? Yes, but even of the limited good news I'm skeptical, because I can think of three reasons why the results might not be as good as they seem. First, there's a chicken-and-egg-like measurement difficulty. In the readiness to make fun of Gioia for crediting his own agency with the turnaround, the critics have so far missed a trick. It may be that Gioia does deserve credit, but not for what he thinks he does. The sticky part about the measurement of reading, sociologically, is that reading is a prestige activity. People tend to lie and say they do more of it than they do. As the afterword to the new report points out, the NEA in the last few years has reached out to millions of Americans with brand-new, well-funded programs to encourage reading. In the fall of 2007 it released a report on reading's decline that got lots of attention from journalists like me. Thanks in part to the NEA, literacy was a big news story in 2007 and 2008. I even saw it referred to on television, and I don't watch much television. All of this is worthy and to the good. But it's possible that in raising people's awareness of the importance of reading, the NEA encouraged them to exaggerate their reading habits. With a survey like the NEA's, which relies on self-reporting, there's no way to know for sure whether reading habits themselves were changed. It's as if there were a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work here. A government agency can either measure reading habits or intervene in them, but if it tries to do both, it runs the risk of measuring no more than the spread of its intervention message. (As I wrote in my article, the best way to measure reading is with a time-use survey, which is harder for respondents to fudge.)

Second, the new survey took place in a different month. In 2002, the NEA's survey took place in August. In 2008, it took place in May. If people had steeltrap minds, that wouldn't matter, but twelve months is longer than most people remember very accurately. I suspect that when you ask people about behavior over such a broad timespan, especially when you're focusing on the subset of people who are the liminal case—that is, on people for whom it was a toss of the coin whether they did or didn't read a work of literature in the past year—respondents may sometimes extrapolate from their sense of themselves in the present, rather than answer according to a comprehensive memory. If that's the case, then the month will influence their answer, if the month happens to have any relation to the aspect of themselves relevant to the question. And in this case it does. Like it or not, literary culture in America is largely keyed to the school year. Search Google Trends for the word "literary," in fact, and you'll see a curve that has acute declines every summer and every Christmas. (You'll also see that it slumps slowly over time, but that's not relevant to my point here.) You'll see the same shape if you search for "poem" and "short story". (Intriguingly, the novel has some but not all of this characteristic wiggle, perhaps because it hasn't altogether surrendered to the academy.) I don't know in which month the 1982, 1985, or 1992 surveys took place. But it's possible that the improvement between 2002 and 2008 owes something to the difference between May and August.

Third, and finally, there's the matter of the years. When Americans were asked in August 2002 about their reading habits over the preceding twelve months, they were of course being asked about the year immediately following 9/11. That was a period when everyone's media intake was wildly disrupted. If you look at the NEA's graph of the percentage of adults who read literature between 1982 and 2008, the outlier isn't 2008. It's 2002.

In fact, if you ignore the 2002 results, you're looking at a gentle but almost uncannily straight descending line. One possible explanation of the graph above: Reading has been declining in America for decades, but the 2002 results were worse than they ought to have been, because in the aftermath of September 11 the nation was panicked out of its usual literary diversions. Between 2002 and 2008, the interruption of 9/11 corrected itself, and many people returned to literature, but not all of them. The underlying decline, the part owed to secular causes, continued.

These are mere speculations, and I'm grateful to the NEA for providing the data that I'm reluctant to accept. Time will tell whether I'm just being a curmudgeon; inshallah, my pessimism will be belied. But right now I think it's too soon to unpop the corks. If other indicators were favorable—in particular, if there were better prospects for newspapers or book publishers, or if anyone had figured out how to make enough money off of writing on the internet to subsidize lots of high-caliber investigative reporting—I might be willing to partake in the festivities. As things stand, though, I think the fate of reading is still a matter of concern.

Notebook: The Ludlow Massacre Revisited

"There Was Blood," my review-essay of two recent books about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, appears in the New Yorker on 19 January 2009. What follows is a bibliography and supplementary online smorgasbord, which won't make much sense until after you've read the article itself.

My first debt, as ever, is to the books under review, Thomas G. Andrews's Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War and Scott Martelle's Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West, both excellent. Also in print and useful were Rick J. Clyne's Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado's Company Towns, 1890-1930, Ron Chernow's Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Elliott J. Gorn's Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. Marilynn S. Johnson's Violence in the West: The Johnson County Range War and Ludlow Massacre: A Brief History with Documents arrived too late for me to consult it when writing the article but we dipped into it while fact-checking. Among older sources, the most useful were Barron B. Beshoar's Out of the Depths: The Story of John R. Lawson, a Labor Leader (1942), George Korson's Coal Dust on the Fiddle (1943) for lore and songs, George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge's The Great Coalfield War (1972), and Zeese Papanikolas's Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre (1982).

Which should you read, if you want to know more about Ludlow? Martelle has the best day-by-day account of the conflict. Andrews has the most insight into the geological, economic, and sociological forces, and he gives the context of the preceding decades in more detail than any of the others. I think both deserve the highest marks in terms of their scholarship and their accuracy. Beshoar's father was a doctor who treated the Ludlow strikers, and the strikers named a camp after him. As a result, Beshoar's version of events is frankly partisan, and sometimes he veers into the propagandistic. His account is one of the liveliest, though, perhaps because he tapped oral sources not available to later writers (don't be put off by the subtitle; his book is only nominally restricted to Lawson). As you would expect, McGovern and Guttridge are very good about the politics, which got quite complex, as the federal government was brought in against the state, and as various committees undertook to investigate the mine operators and interfere with one another's investigations in the process. Papanikolas's is a very nice piece of writing, though a somewhat melancholy one, and he has a novelist's eye for detail. When Papanikolas tracks down Tikas's grave, for example, the manager of the cemetery recalls for him how he adopted a runaway St. Bernard on the day of the massacre. Later, reading testimony contemporary with the massacre, Papanikolas finds mention of a St. Bernard loose in the desolate camp carrying a burning timber in its mouth, and he wonders if he's found the historical trace of the cemetery manager's animal. Papanikolas's book is worth reading as much as an essay on the historical impulse as for its account of Ludlow (like Beshoar's, his book isn't limited by its apparent focus on a single individual). Though I name-check King Coal in my article, it isn't Upton Sinclair's best novel. If you're hell-bent on reading Sinclair, which I'm not sure you should be, read Oil! instead (and notice, when you do, that in the book, corporate power and false religiosity are hand-in-glove allies—not opponents, as in the movie—and that they are united to suppress the revolutionary force of labor, which the movie knows not of).

The Ludlow massacre and the Great Coalfield War are well documented online. The best compilation is the Colorado Coal Field War Project, produced by the University of Denver, which has a historical outline, a bibliography, photos, a historical map that links to some of the photos, and information about an archaeological exploration of the site. The Holt Labor Library of San Francisco, meanwhile, also offers a Ludlow bibliography, comprised of print and online sources. The Bessemer Historical Society, custodian of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company's archives and legacy, has published a brief history of the company and sells several texts about mining and CFI in its store, including a reprint of Camp & Plant, the weekly run by CFI's Sociological Department.

As it happens, Google Books has digitized a stray volume from Camp & Plant, so you can examine for yourself the paternalism of CFI's early years, as instanced in such photos as these of worker-made adobe homes (left) and the factory-made wood-and-concrete structures that replaced them (right). Here, by the way, is what the factory owners thought of workers who failed to subscribe to their periodical. (Andrews reports that one miner quipped that the mule workforce "was unionized before some of us.")

Most of the surviving photographs of the Ludlow massacre were taken by Louis R. Dold, whom Papanikolas, amazingly enough, tracked down and interviewed for his book. (Elsewhere Dold's first name is sometimes spelled "Lewis" and his last name "Dodd.") Dold's Ludlow photographs, and those taken by several others, are available for browsing in the Denver Public Library's Western History collection. Here, for example, is an evocative one of the pit below Tent No. 58, which Dold has annotated as follows: "Hole Where Bodies of 11 Women and 2 Children Were Recovered From After Fire at Ludlow Coloney [sic]." You can also see strikers' children playing in the snow with what is either an effigy or a scarecrow; the chaos in Trinidad when a panicked National Guard general ordered his cavalry to "ride down" a group of women protestors; the Death Special; strikers playing baseball; numerous shots of the Ludlow camp before and after it was razed; and an image of Tikas's corpse, mislabeled in the Denver Public Library's files as being that of another striker (the indefatigable Papanikolas writes of having come across the same misidentification when he visited the archives in person).

More cheerfully, there's also a 1914 photo of a "coal miner's wife", whom I believe may be Mary Thomas O'Neal. I'm guessing based on the resemblance between the photos reproduced here. At left is a detail from the Denver Public Library's photo (call number X-60426). At right is an image of Mary Thomas O'Neal that pops up when you play an oral-history interview with her conducted in 1974 and available online through the Virtual Aural/Oral History Archive at California State University Long Beach. Mary Thomas O'Neal is one of the few Ludlow survivors who left a first-person account, published as Those Damn Foreigners in 1971. As Martelle observes in an end note, her memoir "differs radically" from the testimony she gave shortly after the massacre; Papanikolas had similar doubts about the reliability of her memory when he interviewed her; and the oral history comes with the caveat that she herself was aware that her memory was deteriorating. But there's no doubt that she was a coal miner's wife (though she was separated from her husband during the strike); that she was active in the union cause, lending her talent as a singer to its recruiting parties; and that she was in Ludlow camp with her children the day of the massacre. You can hear her, in her eighties, singing the union song "We're Coming, Colorado," if you click through to section 1a, segment 11, of the Virtual Aural/Oral History Archive interview with her. (She starts singing roughly at the 1:50 mark.)

Under the hood

I just spent the morning trying to simplify some of the jerry-rigged HTML under the hood of this blog. The bad news: If you read with an aggregator like Bloglines, I may have messed up your subscription. Sorry! If it's not working any more, try re-subscribing with this link. The good news: If I didn't mess up your subscription, then supposedly it now works better than it used to, and it's now possible to subscribe to this blog by email, if you want. Also added: little doohickeys to social-network recommendation sites.

Rad tot lit

"Children of the Left, Unite!" my essay about Tales for Little Rebels, an anthology of radical children's literature edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Phlip Nel, appears in the 11 January 2009 issue of the New York Times Book Review.

An afterthought: Though, as you will see if you read my essay, the play about the beavers left me cold, I learn from Vicky Raab, writing at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog about Sally Quinn's new history of the WPA theater, that when it was staged with roller skates in the 1930s, it seemed "so thrilling that it incited children to rush the stage." De castoribus* non est disputandum, evidently.

* Declension corrected! A proper Latinist points out that not the genitive but the ablative is required here.