In this timely examination of television and American identity, Cummins and Gordon take readers on an informed walk through the changes that TV has already wrought-and those still likely to confront us. Commercial television in America is less than 60 years old, yet it has had an enormous impact on what we like, what we do, what we know, and how we think. A family transplanted from the 1940s to the present day would certainly be stunned by a fundamentally different world: instead of gathering in the living room for a shared evening of radio, they would be scattered around the house to indulge their individual interests on one of a hundred cable channels; instead of a society with rigid racial and ethnic divisions, they would see people of different ethnicities in passionate embraces; and certainly they would see very different sets of values reflected across the board. They would, in short, find themselves in an unrecognizable America, one both reflected in and shaped by television, a medium that has been shown to have an unprecedented influence on our lives both for better and for worse. By focusing on the development of television within the cultural context that surrounds it, and drawing on such phenomena as quiz shows, comedy hours, the Kennedy assassination, the Olympics, sitcoms, presidential ads, political debates, MTV, embedded journalism, and reality TV, the authors reveal television's impact on essential characteristics of American life. They cover topics as diverse as politics, crime, medicine, sports, our perceptions, our values, our assumptions about privacy, and our unquenchable need for more things. In addition, they consider the future of the medium in the light of the proliferation of programming options, the prevalence of cameras and receivers in our lives, the growing links between TV and computers, and the crossed boundaries of television throughout the world.
Whether on a resort island, on a bus burrowing through the darkness, disoriented in European cities and villages, fearful at a lakeside table or on a mountain climb, bewildered in the crypt of the Vatican or in rooms and landscapes suddenly strange, the people in these sixteen stories don't know where they are or who they are. They struggle to locate themselves in their lives.
A man who can't bring himself to return to the apartment of his failing marriage, a woman spied on by a neighbor, a father terrified by the four-year- old next door, a boy living in a house haunted by his mother's madness, a mother whose children are freezing in a heatless bedroom--the characters in the Stories of Local Music are unsettled in their own homes, their lives dissonant and discordant.
Walter Cummins learned very early on that the writer he knew as a person, no matter how well, is not the writer whose words he read. Even when the material is autobiographical, even based on incidents he's heard about in great detail, the written version is another reality and the voice or character experiencing the situations a much more complex being than the person who told him about them. So, what does it actually mean to know a writer?
The worlds of these stories challenge the realities we think we inhabit, bending them away from a norm, some just a shade askew, others warped into a radical strangeness. All confound our expectations.
The authors of From Pantyhose to Spandex: Writers on the Job Redux take you on a tour through a single night in a taxi in Copenhagen while listening to Mahler¿s Ninth, through the ¿Melancholy House¿ of a maximum-security prison and assigning juveniledelinquents as their sentence to do the sentences of an essay, through a woman¿s decision to sell her eggs for five thousand dollars, through why the legendary jewelry store is called ¿Tiffany¿ rather than ¿Tiffany¿s,¿ and on to a beach where forty-eightthousand pounds of lobster wait to be packed, moonlighting (a teacher¿s necessity), the sleepless nights of a veterinary assistant, working as a babysitter/envelope, stuffer/carhop/Christmas ballsaleswoman/gas-pumpattendant/and so much more, a day job as a bookseller, a translator, and even more ways of putting food on the table to feed the muses.
Literary travelers Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins set off for an afternoon with J. P. Donleavy in his Irish mansion, to visit the Paris of Hemingway, the Lisbon of Bernardo Soares, Joyce's Dublin and his gravesite in Zurich, the Ionian home of Lefcadio Hearne where Sappho plunged to her death (or did she?), the Victorian pubs of London where Phileas Fogg made his famous wager, Synge's Aran Islands, Voltaire 's Ferney, the luxurious abode of Baroness Varvara in Copenhagen, the secret erotic shrine of Emanuel Vigeland in Oslo, Robert Graves's Mallorca, and the digs and haunts of scores of New York writers, Helsinki, Chicago, Florence, Venice, Slovenia, the Rhine of Goethe and Byron, the Alps, Stonehenge, Oxfordshire, the mysteries of the Yorkshire Dales, and the poets and pubs of Edinburgh's Auld Reekie. Journey with them, off the beaten path, down the narrow allies, up the mountainsand into the pubs in search of literary history.
The settings of these stories-whether the streets of London and Paris, the canals of Venice and Leiden, or the icy paths of the Swiss Alps-are solidly grounded. It's the people who are lost, struggling to understand where they truly are and break free to find their way home.
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