October 30, 2009, 10:00 AM ET

TV Culture and Books

With C-SPAN's BookNotes, various local cable shows such as Connie Martinson's interviews, and author appearances on national shows such as Charlie Rose and Colbert (which are preserved on the Web--see this appearance, for instance, by Andrew Keen), there is, in fact, more screen exposure for authors and books than ever before.

It's a fact that cultural conservatives mistakenly overlook, and when they speak of culture going down the drain, they are vulnerable to example after example of literary and bookish material out there on multiple channels all the time. A better conservative argument is that while book culture has spread across TV, non-book culture has proliferated at a faster rate, making books appear less and less a force in culture at large. Yes, you can find an author here and there, but you have to plow through more and more non-book stuff to get there.

Just think of what used to happen in the last 10 minutes or so of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, and other talk shows. They usually had an author segment, a writer with a book just out there to talk about it in leisurely conversation. When Milton Friedman published Free to Choose, co-authored with Rose Friedman, for instance, Donohue had him on for a full hour (see here). Compare that extended conversation to the dribbles you get on shows today.

You could go back further and find literary culture amply represented in prime time. In a Baltimore Sun op-ed from a few years back, Alan Rosenthal noted what could be found decades earlier:

"Here were some of the recommended TV programs for October 1959: 'Startime' with Ingrid Bergman and Alec Guinness; Armstrong Circle Theater and Playhouse 90 (original drama); Bell Telephone Hour (classical music); 'The Moon and Sixpence,' adapted from W. Somerset Maugham, with Laurence Olivier; Beethoven's 'Fidelio' (NBC Opera); 'A Doll's House,' by Ibsen; 'The Killers,' by Ernest Hemingway; Young People's Concert with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic; and Shakespeare's 'The Tempest.'" (I can't link to the op-ed, but it appeared March 13, 2007.)

Remember, this programming took place when there were only three national channels available.

Echoing the point is Dana Gioia, who in a 2007 commencement address at Stanford stated:

"There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.

"Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

"I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

"Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

"I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.

"I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw -- along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars -- classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

"The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American -- because the culture considered them important."

That's the problem the cultural conservatives should highlight. Not the decline of high culture in absolute terms, but its steadily declining presence, its diminishing portion, in mass and popular culture.

Comments

1. _perplexed_ - October 30, 2009 at 04:31 pm

While I agree with much of this assessment of the cultural landscape, I don't see that such a view follows directly and only from cultural conservatism. I would guess (I havn't done the research) that at least a few of the individuals named here (Carson? Hellman?) would not have been admired by the conservatives of their day-- but that's really not the point, is it?

2. markbauerlein - October 30, 2009 at 06:00 pm

No, indeed, perplexed. Lillian Hellman was hated by liberals and conservatives in her day--and for very good reasons.

3. goxewu - October 30, 2009 at 10:49 pm

It's really, really boring to watch and listen to people discussing books on television.

Now, before you swallow your store teeth in indignation at such a seemingly philistine and anti-intellectual statement, consider:

* There's a mismatch in media with books and television. Words on paper are best enriched and elucidated with more words on paper (or even words on a screen), not a couple of talking heads on television. (I can read faster than people can talk; I can back up and go over the words if I want to; I can peruse and dip into text much more easily and effectively than I can do the same--even with the latest TV technology--with the dialogue of talking heads.)

* Sitting around discussing books with friends is good, serious fun. But if one has to listen to people discuss books without participating in the discussion, radio is at least acceptable. You can either close your eyes and concentrate on what they're saying, or brush your teeth or cook dinner while you're listening. To have to look at authors is enervating at best, actually unpleasant at worst. If you doubt this, just tune in to one of those televised bookstore readings and Q & A's on C-SPAN: rumpled clothes, bad combovers, neglected teeth, fussing with eyeglasses, nil stage presence, and suck-up questions from the audience. Tee-dee-yum.

* Perhaps the neglected comparison in Prof. Bauerlein's ongoing fret about the inevitable decline of ink-on-paper reading material is the passive electronic screen (television) versus the active electronic screen (the computer's). Why sit there passively and watch cheaply produced, static television book shows when you can open your laptop and zip around to any number of websites about books (or a particular book, or kind of book, or an issue currently hot in books), and not only read many more words in, say, half an hour, than you can listen to on television, but post your own comments and get reaction to them?

Footnote #1: Before we get all misty-eyed over such as that October, 1959 TV schedule, it'd be good to re-view, if possible, some kinescopes of those often hokey productions that look so illustrious on (pun intended) paper. A lot of those Playhouse 90 dramas play better in memory than they do upon further review, and their main virutes are not so much sheer theatrical quality, but that they were simply "serious" drama in a sea of sitcoms (many of which, e.g., Sgt. Bilko, are revealed as real art with the passing of time) and that they were risky live television. And sitting around today, WATCHING a symphony orchestra on television--even a 50-inch plasma screen? C'mon.

Footnote #2: If Mr. Goia really thinks that fifty years "most Americans" (that's MOST Americans, remember, more than 50 percent) would have had name-recognition familiarity with Arthur Miller, Leontyne Price, and Margaret Mead, then I'm glad that the realistic Landesman guy is now running the NEA.

4. markbauerlein - October 31, 2009 at 08:58 am

Before knocking Dana Gioia, goxewu, you should check the record and tally his accomplishments (particularly the National Initiatives), as well as noting the widespread bipartisan support he created on Capitol Hill--effectively and rightly taking the NEA off of the political radar.

5. goxewu - October 31, 2009 at 01:41 pm

And what's the NEA's budget again? (The NEA is "off the political radar" because it's so effing tiny none of the control towers can pick it up.)

Glad Prof. Bauerlein agrees with everything else in #3, though.

6. markbauerlein - October 31, 2009 at 08:17 pm

If you want a history of the NEA, goxewu, you can find the tome I co-edited here:

http://www.amazon.com/National-Endowment-Arts-History-1965-2008/dp/tags-on-product/0615232485

There you will find that the small size of the Ars Endowment's budget never prevented it from becoming a lightning rod in the culture wars.

7. goxewu - October 31, 2009 at 08:43 pm

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Being "a lightning rod in the culture wars" is not any measure of the NEA, any more than Karen Finley's or David Wojnarowicz's or Robert Mapplethorpe's turning the NEA into that lightning rod is a measure of the power of art.

All I was saying in #3 was that if Dana Goia thinks that "most Americans" 50 years ago knew who Leontyne Price was, he's full of hockey pucks, plain and simple. My announced preference for a hands-on theater figure, a vulgarian compared to a poet perhaps, at the NEA was just to reinforce the point that Mr. Goia might be living on a different planet than the rest of us. And that I thought necessary because about 300 words of Prof. Bauerlein's 700-word post were a long quotation from Mr. Goia.

No big deal, but I was on a few NEA panels a comparatively long time ago. My knowledge of its history is participant-spotty, but not nonexistent.

Rule of thumb: The Good Old Days are actually only old.

8. markbauerlein - October 31, 2009 at 10:03 pm

You said that "The NEA is 'off the political radar' because it's so effing tiny none of the control towers can pick it up." The fact is that the tiny budget hasn't prevented the NEA from being squarely at the center of the political radar time and again--to few people's satisfaction. The reason why Dems and Repubs liked Gioia so much is that his programs and logistics were so solid that it allowed both sides to approve it and move on. It speaks to larger matters of culture/art and politics. The fact is that for most politicians, culture/art is a losing issue. During the culture wars, Dems had to defend the NEA, Repubs had to attack it. Neither one liked doing so.

9. goxewu - November 01, 2009 at 08:19 am

Let me get this straight: It is among Mr. Goia's accomplishments at the NEA to have taken it "off the political radar," where, in spite of its miniscule budget,* it had been "time and again" because of political squabbles. So the agency went from being an unpleasant lightning rod to being invisible or, to quote The New York Times's most readable critic, A.O. Scott (movies), from being "embattled" to "emasculated."

Yes, Mr. Goia tweaked this and that and got some modest budget increases, but the NEA is less a cultural player involved with the greatness, failures, and risk ("lightning rod") of truly ambitious art than it is a kind of PTA bake sale to benefit arts projects (Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, etc.) we can all feel warm and cuddly about. Kind of vanilla--maybe Jell-O brand vanilla pudding.

All of this is, however, sideways to Prof. Bauerlein's original post in which he evokes a Good Old Day when TV paid more attention to books and authors (to which I commented with some substance that books and authors are boring on TV, which is the wrong medium for them), and when, quoting Mr. Goia, "most Americans" knew who the likes of Leontyne Price were (which the slightest reflection will reveal to be a fantasy).

* The biggest Federal purchaser of musical instruments is....the DOD.

10. markbauerlein - November 02, 2009 at 08:27 am

Judging the Operation Homecoming entries as "vanilla, goxewu, you've shown you don't have any idea what you're talking about.

11. factfiles - November 02, 2009 at 11:27 am

I agree that it's pretty dubious that over half of the US population knew those names, but Dana Gioia is probably right about one of them. Over half of the US public probably did know of Arthur Miller in 1959, because of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956. As for the October 1959 TV shows (and BTW, there were really only two truly national networks in 1959: ABC was still under construction): yes, there were a few examples sustained in part by politically liberal NYC broadcasting tastemakers like Ed Murrow who interviewed cultural figures and in part by FCC mandates and norms that called on all broadcasters to present "quality" fare and take on public service functions. But if 1959 was such a Golden Age, then what's the basis for Newton Minow's famous 1961 "vast wasteland" speech?

The problem according to Bauerlein: "Not the decline of high culture in absolute terms, but its steadily declining presence, its diminishing portion, in mass and popular culture."

Hmm....so Mark Bauerlein thinks we should go back to those days of FCC standards and the "laying on" of culture? The Republican Party doesn't think so; at least if you listen its current leaders such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Quite the contrary, as they denounce media liberals and PBS and NPR and want no restraints on broadcasting. Hats off to Mark, who seems to agree that government regulation is needed to balance the unfettered capitalist marketplace. (Although in an earlier piece Mark seems to confuse Fox News with actual journalism while praising Fox as entertaining.)

How does Bauerlein deal with the plain fact that today the average cable/dish subscriber and internet user has vastly greater opportunity to choose "high culture" programming? Sure it's a niche audience thing, but it's more widely available and open to people in rural and small town areas more than ever before. There's a disconnect here between Mark's political conservatism that wants to celebrate free market capitalism as freedom itself and his cultural elitism that wants to impose high culture on the public, just as he can require freshmen to read his version of canonical literature.

If, as Mark says, the problem is the declining presence of high culture in mass and popular culture, what is the cause of that? What agency is involved? And what can be done to change the situation? All too often it seems that Mark identifies what he sees as a problem but then just wrings his hands.

Chuck Kleinhans

12. markbauerlein - November 02, 2009 at 11:40 am

Note: I'm not really a political conservative, Chuck, just a cultural/educational conservative. You're right, though, that I don't have any solution, except to fill the airwaves and campuses with more high-culture/historical-understanding/civic-awareness arguments. As for the Golden Age, Johnny Carson once has Beverly Sills serve as guest host for a week. Can you imagine Letterman having an opera singer today do the same?

13. goxewu - November 02, 2009 at 04:39 pm

"The NEA created Operation Homecoming in 2004 to help U.S. troops and their families write about their wartime experiences. Through this program, some of America's most distingished writers have conducted workshops at military installations and contributed to educational resources to help the troops and their families share their stories."

This is a socially noble purpose, but it has little to do with art and the NEA's motto, "A great nation deserves great art." Operation Homecoming's purpose is more therapeutic than artistic, and probably should have been a VA program, not an NEA one. Artistically, it's vanilla. Cold-hearted to say, but true.

I thought "cultural conservatives" were the ones concerned with greatness--i.e., what they would want in art from war writing is the next "The Red Badge of Courage" or "The Naked and the Dead" or "A Flag for Sunrise" and not a whole lot of people being able to get traumatic experiences of their chests--and that we liberals (with whom I break ranks here) were the ones who'd flip that preference.

14. markbauerlein - November 02, 2009 at 04:48 pm

Have you read any of the writings in the Homecoming project, goxewu? You can read my summation, with examples, of the project in the May 2007 PMLA.

15. goxewu - November 02, 2009 at 05:04 pm

Yep.