Like Steinbeck, Short Stories By Michael Katakis Show How Dangerous Men Can Be

July 27, 2020 by 2 Comments

hunters-moon-daily-express

John Steinbeck said Montana was the state he’d pick to live in if he hadn’t been born in California, or become a citizen of the world who now called Manhattan home. In the early short stories of The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and The Long Valley (1938), the author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden showed how vast spaces, violent events, and the struggles of victims and villains conspire to make good men dangerous and dangerous men deadly, stripping the veneer off civilization to expose the coarseness, and the fineness, of the essential human grain. Like Steinbeck, the American writer Michael Katakis can claim global citizenship (Carmel, Paris, London), international connections (as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and executor for Hemingway’s literary estate), and—as demonstrated in his latest book, Dangerous Men—an ability to transpose personal loss (the tragic death of his young wife, the anthropologist Kris L. Hardin) into a particularized locale (rural Montana) as remote from most readers’ experience as Hemingway’s Pamplona or Steinbeck’s Big Sur.

dangerous-men-michael-katakis

Dangerous Men is Michael’s first work of fiction, and “Hunter’s Moon”—the most nakedly autobiographical of the interconnected short stories in the collection—was written in Montana 16 years ago, long before Kris died from a brain tumor. Much of the rest of the writing was done over coffee or an appertif at a Paris-boulevard café, in a process of self-recovery that one doubts is finished, or ever will be. The result is a work whose dark tone and deadly theme are announced in the epigraph from The Pastures of Heaven that opens “The Fence,” the first story; the second, “Home for Christmas,” ends with a bitter reversal worthy of O’Henry, or the occasional Steinbeck. The remaining stories recount the revenge odyssey of a wandering hero with the wonderful name of Walter Lesser, a latter-day cowboy and Gary Cooper lookalike who ends up, like Tom Joad, as a larger-than-life legend. Raja Shehadeh, the author of Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008), has described Dangerous Men as “a work of great sensitivity and lyrical beauty.” For fans of John Steinbeck, the Montana short stories of Michael Katakis are also a form of continuing communion with the spirit of The Pastures of Heaven—a place where violent events play out against vast spaces under the sign of the Hunter’s Moon. Highly recommended for Steinbeck readers and others safe-sheltering from the dangerous men in Washington, D.C.

Hunter’s Moon photograph courtesy of the Daily Express.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Your Life Tagged With:

Cannery Row, Sea of Cortez Still Making Waves—On Both Sides of the Ocean—in 2019

August 28, 2019 by 5 Comments

john-steinbeck-from-the-guardian

Anticipating the 80th anniversary of John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts’s expedition to the Sea of Cortez, and the 75th anniversary of the publication of Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row, new profiles by or about a pair of writers born in England brilliantly reflect the role played by Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their free-range relationship in marrying literary imagination with marine biology to create modern ecological consciousness.

john-steinbeck-ed-ricketts

“John Steinbeck’s Epic Ocean Voyage Rewrote the Rules of Ecology”—a thoroughly researched and well-written feature by Richard Grant in the September 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine—recounts the 1940 journey that resulted in Sea of Cortez, the 1941 book co-authored by Steinbeck and Ricketts, and the ambitious project to restore The Western Flyer, the boat they used for their “voyage of discovery” to the waters and shores of Baja California. The fact-filled text by Grant, a British journalist based in Mississippi, is creatively complemented by photographs (like the one above) by Ian C. Bates, who lives near Port Townsend, Washington, where work on The Western Flyer continues, with an eye toward relaunch off Cannery Row in 2020.

How Cannery Row Became California

oliver-sacks-everything-in-its-place

The British literary naturalist and neurologist Oliver Sacks died from cancer in August of 2015, but the prolific polymath’s debt to Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, and the Steinbeck-Ricketts collaboration is detailed in a pair of books published in the first half of 2019. Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, the “final volume” of essays on life, death, and Planet Earth by Sacks (who published 15 books, including  Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) contains this paragraph about coming to Steinbeck country from Canada in 1960:

I was twenty-seven. I had arrived in North America a few months before and started out by hitchhiking across Canada, then down to California, which I had been in love with since I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in postwar London. California stood for John Muir, Muir Woods, Death Valley, Yosemite, the soaring landscapes of Ansel Adams, the lyrical paintings of Albert Bierstadt. It meant marine biology, Monterey, and “Doc,” the romantic marine biologist figure in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

How Melville and Steinbeck Became Bookends

oliver-sacks-lawrence-wechsler

By 1982 Sacks had achieved fame as a medical renegade with literary genius for his book Awakenings, a suspenseful history of the set of post-encephalitic parkinsonian patients temporarily unfrozen by experimental L-dopa at the Bronx psychiatric hospital where Sacks worked, not without controversy, after he moved to New York. In 1982 Sacks was accompanied by the American journalist Lawrence Wechsler (at right in photo with Sacks) on a trip home to England for a New Yorker magazine profile of Sacks that never appeared. And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?—Wechsler’s memoir of the 35-year friendship that developed between the two men—records the following exchange, about influences, after a visit with Sacks’s 90-year-old father, a genial general practitioner in London who introduced his four precocious sons early (three became doctors) to the pleasures of science and reading:

Later, conversation with Oliver reverts to his childhood and school years. I ask him what sorts of books captivated him as a youth.
      “Moby-Dick,” he replies, without a moment’s hesitation. “What can you say about Moby-Dick? There’s Shakespeare and there’s Moby-Dick and that’s that.
      “We liked Cannery Row and Sea of Cortez, for the marine biology.” (Funny that, as bookends go: Moby-Dick and Cannery Row.)

Shakespeare, Melville, and marine biology also fired John Steinbeck’s mind. As bookends go, Oliver Sacks and Smithsonian Magazine make splendid specimens of the exultation expected in 2020 around Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, and the marriage of marine biology and literary imagination—on both sides of the Atlantic.

Filed Under: Featured, Music & Media, Steinbeck's Press Tagged With:

New Light on John Steinbeck

December 31, 2018 by 1 Comment
john-steinbeck-by-yousuf-karsh(2)

John Steinbeck © 1954 Yousuf Karsh

According to Yousuf Karsh it was Art Buchwald who made the introduction that led to John Steinbeck’s June 15, 1954 sitting in Paris with the 40-something photographer from Ottawa. An amateur film maker who disliked having his photo taken but liked pictures and people with panache, Steinbeck warmed to Karsh, a Boston-trained Canadian immigrant whose black and white portraits of Winston Churchill and other public figures had already made him famous. Karsh’s European elegance and wit won over the author of East of Eden, distracted and depressed by events following the publication of the novel into which he’d folded the story of his mother’s family, the Scotch-Irish Hamilton clan. But it was his father’s family history that connected him to Karsh, an Armenian of Arab descent whose parents escaped Turkey through Syria during the 1914 Armenian genocide that signaled the final end of the Ottoman Empire. A half-century earlier, in the 1850s, Steinbeck’s Prussian-English grandparents made a similar escape following an attack on their missionary compound by Arab marauders in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. The ancestral sagas of both men included flight from the Holy Land, haven in New England, and secular self-reinvention against a background of 19th century marriage, migration, and religious mania. Recent detective work has unearthed new details about Steinbeck’s 19th century roots and 20th century connections, including the true story of his family’s religious conversion and the facts behind the fictions regarding his time at Stanford. Starting in 2019, these and other topics will be explored in a new series of essay posts at Steinbeck Now that put new light on John Steinbeck, like a portrait by Yousuf Karsh.

 

Filed Under: Life, Steinbeck's Life Tagged With:

Hemingway Book Prompts Steinbeck Question: Opinion

November 27, 2018 by 3 Comments

ernest-hemingway-michael-katakis

If a photo had been taken of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck when they met for the first and only time, at Tim Costello’s restaurant in New York in 1944, Michael Katakis would know, and he would have shared it with us in the visual biography that puts a fresh face on an old legend: Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life, a life story in pictures, with connecting word tissue, drawn from the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library, edited with an introduction by Michael, who has served as the executor of Hemingway’s literary estate since 1999. A writer and documentary photographer, he manages to divide his time productively between Paris, Hemingway’s city, and Steinbeck’s Carmel, California, a distance that symbolizes the divide experienced by the two writers in the 1920s, and the difference in attitude each took toward other writers in the decades that followed. Steinbeck, more sympathetic and less assertive, admired Hemingway and showed respect. That Hemingway behaved otherwise is apparent in the account of the 1944 meeting written in 1989 by Jackson Benson, author of the 1984 best-seller, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. The achievement of Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life in using archival material to reframe and restore Hemingway’s reputation in 2018 raises another issue regarding Steinbeck. Libraries at various locations hold an abundance of artifacts—family photographs, private correspondence, personal memorabilia—from Steinbeck’s life. Fifty years after his death, are his executors, editors, and heirs too distant, or too divided, to do the same thing for him?

Filed Under: Books, Cultural History Tagged With:

Road to Recovery for America and Americans Runs Through Alabama

June 19, 2018 by Leave a Comment

doug-jones-road-to-recovery

John Steinbeck’s expression of ambivalence about America and Americans in Travels with Charley proved to be prophetic. In the presidential campaign of 1968, the year Steinbeck died, Richard Nixon co-opted Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace—Nixon’s rival for the Southern white vote—and embraced the anger exemplified by the screaming mothers blocking the path of African American girls on the way to school in Steinbeck’s story. Forging Nixon’s path to the White House through the heart of the Confederacy paved the way for Donald Trump, Wallace and Nixon’s political heir, in 2016. The spring issue of the scholarly journal Steinbeck Review suggests that the road to recovery from Trump began in 2017 with the defeat of Trump’s candidate Roy Moore by Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, and that John Steinbeck first diagnosed the condition of America and Americans in his 1938 novella-play Of Mice and Men.

george-wallace-alabama

Driving Highway 31 Through George Wallace’s Alabama

Barbara Heavilin, the journal’s editor in chief, lives in northern Alabama and wrote a column recounting the race to replace Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s masochistic Mini-Me, as the junior U.S. Senator from the state. Moore, a Bible-spouting jurist, has an injudicious past, and opponents calling themselves Highway 31 organized money and volunteers around Jones, the federal attorney who prosecuted perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls less than a year after Travels with Charley was published. “They chose a good title for themselves, for Highway 31 is the old North-South route through the state before the advent of U.S. 65,” Heavilin wrote. “It winds through lovely little Gardendale with its neat rows of crepe myrtles down the center of the median, going through the middle of town, where I live and where the local high school is in pitted battle in the courts, demanding independence from Jefferson County [because it] would bring about a return to a type of segregation.”

donald-trump

Scaling the “Wall of Understanding” in Of Mice and Men

The editor of Steinbeck Review knew her readers would enjoy the Steinbeck symbolism in her true-life story, which has the advantage over John Steinbeck’s fiction of featuring a known outcome with a happy ending. As shown by the ambiguous conclusions of In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was dubious about the outcome of political battles in his own day. Doug Jones may have reminded Alabama voters of Atticus Finch, the Alabama lawyer who defends the black man in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, but heroes and happy endings are sparse in Steinbeck’s fiction, and Of Mice and Men is typical. To the eternal edification of readers with inquiring minds and open hearts, it dramatizes the failings of America—and Americans victimized by poverty, disability, racism, ageism, and misogyny—against the backdrop of fascism, fake science, and the breakdown of world order. Steinbeck described this context as the “wall of understanding,” and the phrase fits perfectly.

doug-jones-wins-nbc-news

John Steinbeck’s Antidote for Donald Trump’s Toxicity

Conceived with a wall of understanding that encompassed cold war, public corruption, environmental degradation, and anti-immigrant hysteria, the books about America written by John Steinbeck in the 1960s—The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley, America and Americans—completed the catalog of outrage, abdication, and abuse personified by the cast of characters who animate Of Mice and Men. Our wall of understanding now includes real walls built to bar Mexicans, Canadians, and America’s European allies, adding urgency to our reading of Steinbeck, who saw a dictator when he looked at demagogues like Huey Long during the Depression and despaired when Richard Nixon won in 1968. Donald was around and dodging the draft at the time, but if Steinbeck imagined a disaster like Trump in America’s future before he died he didn’t say so. Instead, he concentrated on symptoms of decline and the curative power of empathy for America and Americans in any age. As Barbara Heavilin reminds us in her encouraging editorial, the road to recovery starts with understanding and runs through Alabama.

We are suspending weekly posts on a temporary basis to pursue a print project requiring our time and attention. We will continue to answer messages, curate comments, and post news of conferences, publications, and opportunities when brought to our attention. Guest-author submissions will be considered in the order they are received once we resume the weekly schedule maintained since SteinbeckNow.com began five years ago. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.—Ed.

Filed Under: Justice, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

An Essential History of John Steinbeck’s American West

December 27, 2017 by 2 Comments

Image of "Boomtown," 1928 painting by Thomas Hart Benton

Like Jackson Benson’s 1980 biography of John Steinbeck, the essential book on Steinbeck’s storied life, David Wrobel’s new history of the American West in Steinbeck’s formative period is an essential read for fans of the writer whose fiction brought the region to life for audiences everywhere. Designed for use by students and published by Cambridge University Press as part of the Cambridge Essential Histories series, America’s West: A History, 1890-1950 is compact, comprehensive, and compelling, organizing facts and creating patterns the way Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, historical novels written in part to educate readers about movements of people, power, and ideas that made the American West first a beacon, then a bellwether, and finally a warning. Like Steinbeck, Wrobel presents the region’s history as a morality play we’re invited to watch about the sins of exceptionalism, expansionism, and economic domination.

Like John Steinbeck, David Wrobel presents the region’s history as a morality play we’re invited to watch about the sins of exceptionalism, expansionism, and economic domination.

Steinbeck’s history in this regard began before he was born. The economic cycles and social problems of of the 1890s affected his young parents, who settled in Salinas, where he was born in 1902, the year Teddy Roosevelt became president. The remedies for Gilded Age corruption put in place under Roosevelt, a New York blue blood who reinvented himself as a Dakota cowboy, brought good government to Washington and new attention to the West. Places like Salinas prospered, but they typified the paradox of progressive politics in America between the two Roosevelts. The same movement that broke up corporate monopolies, created national parks, and enfranchised women also imposed draconian social controls, including Prohibition, union-busting, and mass deportation. The Red Peril paranoia that became federal policy following World War I eventually led Salinas to experiment with what Steinbeck called fascism. He tore up the novel he wrote about the militarization of local government during a strike by lettuce workers, but by 1935 he had discovered his subject and set his course, reporting on migrant labor for the San Francisco News and writing The Grapes of Wrath, the protest novel that put into words the suffering and shame shown in Dorothea Lange’s photographs of migrant mothers and children.

Steinbeck tore up the novel he wrote about the militarization of local government during a strike by lettuce workers, but by 1935 he had discovered his subject and set his course.

Roosevelt progressivism at both ends of the period covered in America’s West gave Steinbeck the ideals, and events in California the ideas, expressed in The Grapes of Wrath. His upbringing in Salinas gave him the sense of empathy for people, animals, and nature that sympathetic readers recognize and respond to on first reading. When examining the beliefs and behaviors at work in the background, however, it’s also helpful to understand the sense of detachment from events and emotions he had to develop, with changes of subject and venue, in the novel’s aftermath. When he wrote about marine biology or war or the history behind the legend of King Arthur, he had the benefit of distance from his personal past and perceptions. Europeans since De Tocqueville have written about the United States with the same outsider’s advantage that Steinbeck enjoyed in England and David Wrobel has in writing about Steinbeck’s America.

Europeans since De Tocqueville have written about the United States with the same outsider’s advantage that Steinbeck enjoyed in England and David Wrobel has in writing about Steinbeck’s America.

Image of David WrobelA native of London with a yen for America, David Wrobel brought his coals to Newcastle by enrolling at Ohio University, where he immersed in Steinbeck under Robert DeMott and received his PhD in American studies. His understanding of the history behind The Grapes of Wrath and the intellectual currents of Steinbeck’s time has benefited immensely from his tenure at Oklahoma University, where he teaches, researches, and writes about Steinbeck and the American West and was recently appointed acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Oklahoma and California are his coordinates and Steinbeck is his moral compass in the case he makes for America’s West to 1950, the first of two volumes planned by Cambridge University Press. He has the English virtue of  readability, along with Steinbeck’s eye for victims and losers, and Cambridge University Press designed the book to last, with just enough charts and graphs and not too many footnotes, placed at the bottom of the page where they belong. Its value is enhanced for followers of Steinbeck’s thinking by the author’s focus on the hidden costs of the West’s ascendancy and the line leading from the triumphalism of the past to the politics of the present. Five stars.

Cover image from America's West: A History, 1890-1950The cover illustration is Thomas Hart Benton’s 1928 Western Regionalist painting “Boomtown.” Of special interest is the section on the Great Depression and the demographic shifts, racial divisions, and labor unrest dramatized in The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and In Dubious Battle. It recalls the contributions made to the cause by Steinbeck’s co-workers Dorothea Lange, Carey McWilliams, and Pare Lorentz and explains the epic campaign of Upton Sinclair for governor in 1934 against the same forces that later waged war on The Grapes of Wrath. The author’s essay on California social protest literature, Steinbeck, Sinclair, McWilliams, and the WPA Guide to California appears in American Literature in Transition: The 1930s, an anthology edited by Ichiro Takayoshi.

Filed Under: Books, Cultural History, Featured Tagged With:

Why The Grapes of Wrath Still Matters in Oklahoma

November 28, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Image of Ma Joad from Grapes of Wrath movie

“Legislature may be working toward ‘Grapes of Wrath’ revision,” a November 16 editorial in the Enid, Oklahoma News & Eagle, used this image of Ma Joad from John Ford’s film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel to remind readers that Steinbeck’s angry portrayal of preventable poverty in the Dust Bowl still resonates for residents of a state where education spending cuts have forced some communities to reduce the school week to four days in a region dominated by the wants and needs of the billionaire Koch brothers. The state’s Republican governor recently vetoed the budget delivered to her desk by the anti-tax Republican legislature, which included $60 million more in cuts to health and human services, and the three-term Republican mayor of Oklahoma City has made education an issue in his campaign to succeed her. Like the author of The Grapes of Wrath, the editors in Enid employed dark irony to highlight the human cost of poor public policy, particularly when motivated by willful ignorance and corporate greed: “Perhaps the Legislature is hoping that a modern revision of the John Steinbeck classic ‘Grapes of Wrath’ will be the secret to our state’s future success. Only this time instead of impoverished Dust Bowl-era farmers moving out of state during the Great Depression, it will be school teachers and health care providers leading the exodus.”

Filed Under: Justice, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

Donald Trump and Ajit Pai’s Plan to End Net Neutrality

November 21, 2017 by 1 Comment

Image of Ajit Pai, Donald Trump's pick for FCC chairman

Ajit Pai, the former attorney for Verizon who was appointed by Donald Trump to chair the Federal Communications Commission, recently announced that the administration’s plan to deregulate internet providers and end the policy of net neutrality are on the agenda of the next FCC meeting. Pai, a Republican lawyer-lobbyist of Indian heritage who has long advocated the idea, is likely to have his way when the board meets on December 14. Deregulation is a Republican mantra, and Republicans are a majority on the five-person commission, created in 1934 to insure fairness in interstate communications through regulations such as net neutrality, which prohibits internet carriers from making accessibility to some websites faster than others.

Net neutrality prohibits internet carriers from making accessibility to some websites faster than others.

If you’ve ever exceeded the monthly minutes on your iPhone, you already know what ending net neutrality will mean when you sit down at your computer and type SteinbeckNow.com or CommonCause.org into the search box. Once Verizon and other internet providers get the go-ahead to reserve the digital fast lane for commercial sites with cash for the gate keeper, or the right political views, accessing nonprofit websites and those with opposing opinions will be like calling your grandmother back in the old country when pay phones and long-distance operators prevailed: slow, frustrating, and conducive to the infrequency and ignorance that isolates families and cultures. Without net neutrality the online interstate open to all will become a toll road with a fast-lane fee.

 Without net neutrality the online interstate open to all will become a toll road with a fast-lane fee.

Who stands to benefit? Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, and other internet providers with the power to charge websites a premium for access, like minutes on your iPhone, plus corporate-friendly politicians like our current president, who is delivering on his promise to reverse the policies of his predecessor, including net neutrality. The surge in online pay-for-placement ads supporting internet deregulation since the 2016 election is unsurprising to close observers. So is the volume of computer-generated bot traffic timed to overwhelm the FCC’s inbox and block complaints about the proposal from actual Americans. Pay-for-play politics produced Ajit Pai, whose chairmanship of the FCC ends in five years, and Russian bot traffic helped elect Donald Trump, whose time as president seems certain to end sooner. But their joint legacy—FCC deregulation and pay-to-play internet access—has lasting potential to harm the free flow of information and ideas along the digital highway. It will certainly hurt this website.

Photograph of Ajit Pai courtesy of The Washington Post.

Filed Under: Justice, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

John Steinbeck’s Warning in Playboy about Donald Trump

October 23, 2017 by 7 Comments

Image of Donald Trump with Playboy magazine

The long relationship between Playboy magazine and Donald Trump, America’s playboy-in-chief, is old news. But the recent death of Hugh Hefner unearthed some surprising Playboy connections, including a list of major authors—among them John Steinbeck—who wrote for the serious men’s magazine that paid well and reached readers otherwise untouched by serious literature. In light of our president’s tweets and threats to bomb America’s enemies back to the Stone Age, Steinbeck’s satirical “Short Short Story of Mankind,” first published in the April 1957 issue of Playboy, has a message as relevant today as it was 60 years ago, when the golf-loving Dwight Eisenhower was president and the Cold War was on in earnest.

Image of John Steinbeck's Short Short Story of Mankind in Adam magazine

An allegory in the style of Mark Twain, Steinbeck’s account of human progress from savagery to civilization has a cartoon quality picked up by the illustrator for Adam, which republished Steinbeck’s Playboy piece in 1966 (images above and below). But like the “poisoned cream puff” of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row fiction, the mirth of “A Short Short Story of Mankind” is meant to be sobering. At every step, Steinbeck suggests, our progress as a species has faced resistance from a constant and terrifying tribal stupidity which, unchallenged, would lead to our extinction. “It’d be kind of silly if we killed our selves off after all this time,” he concludes. “If we do, we’re stupider than the cave people and I don’t think we are. I think we’re just exactly as stupid and that’s pretty bright in the long run.”

Image of John Steinbeck's Short Short Story of Mankind in Adam magazine

To my knowledge “A Short Short Story of Mankind” has never been anthologized, but it’s time it was. Living in the daily shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, we need its dark warning and its ray of hope, the somber and uplifting counterpoint that echoes Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and later writing. Today, six decades after Playboy magazine published John Steinbeck for the first and only time, it’s useful to remember that the author died a month after the election of Richard Nixon, whose dishonesty and demagoguery he deeply distrusted. It’s easy enough to imagine what he’d have to say about Donald Trump if he were still alive. The warning he’d have for a nation under Trump is implicit in the imagery and tone of his Cold War admonition to America under Eisenhower—an incurious president who also preferred golf but, unlike Trump, read the occasional book and avoided Stone Age rhetoric. Read the piece and judge for yourself.

Filed Under: Belief, Featured, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

Curing Verbal Tic Disorder On MSNBC’s Evening News

May 16, 2017 by 3 Comments

Image of Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Chris Matthews

Last week I channeled my inner English teacher by urging greater attention to grammar in blog posts about John Steinbeck. As with Steinbeck, however, I had issues with my high school English teacher. Like Mrs. Capp, the Salinas High teacher who underestimated Steinbeck’s need for praise, a teacher named Margaret Garrett used negative attention against adolescent error at Page High School in Greensboro, N.C. Once a month in our senior English class each of us had to give a short speech without notes, facing the class and Mrs. Garrett’s gorgon gaze. Filler words—I mean, like . . . umm, you know—were sharply received. Uh . . . kind of, sort of, in any event—mumbling, cliché, butchered syntax produced a steep frown, and the noisy clap! clap! of Mrs. Garrett’s hard, red hands. The technique she used to cure teenage verbal tic-disorder was practiced and perfected and frightening. In my case it was effective, engendering a hypersensitivity to sloppy speech that makes the talking heads on MSNBC, my preferred purveyor of cable news, increasingly hard to watch and hear.

Composite image of Chris HayesCompare the slow legato of John Steinbeck’s archived radio voice with the rapid staccato of Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes, who may be the most extreme example of stop-start arrhythmia on mainstream cable news. Close your eyes and count the filler words, clichés, and redundancies uttered by hosts and guests in an average on-air minute: I mean, you know, sort of, kind of, like . . . um, take a listen, tweet out, frame out, report out, break down, knock down, at the end of the day, now look . . . . Try to diagram the sentence that begins with this typical guest response: “Yeah, Chris, you’re absolutely right, yeah, but look [or take a listen to] . . . .” Imagine what John Steinbeck—a political sophisticate who thought bad syntax disqualified Dwight Eisenhower—would make of Donald Trump as president today, or of the contagious verbal tic disorder that has become the broadcast norm, corrupting discourse and advancing group-think. It’s the oral analog of thoughtless writing, caused by three attitudes Steinbeck abhorred: haste, inattention, and lazy following.

Image of Catherine RampellExceptions stand out because they’re both rare and promising at MSNBC. My favorite example is a young Washington Post opinion writer named Catherine Rampell, a frequent guest on Hardball with Chris Matthews and The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell’s marginally more listenable show in the slot behind Matthews, Hayes, and Maddow. As a communicator Catherine is like John Steinbeck: she speaks as she writes, clearly and carefully. I’m thrilled with her because she tickles my testy inner English teacher—and because I first met her when she was a high-achieving high school student in Palm Beach, Florida, where her father Richard Rampell, a culturally-attuned accountant, was my friend and fellow in the fight for local arts funding. In the past I’ve complained about Palm Beach, about the Trumpettes of Mar-a-Lago who worship Donald Trump and his dumbing down of everything. Now it’s a pleasure to praise the place for producing his opposite: a splendid writer and speaker with a career in journalism that John Steinbeck would admire and probably envy. Look for Catherine Rampell on MSNBC. And listen. You’ll be hearing about her.

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With:
« Previous Page
Next Page »