What Are You Reading

[Touchofevil]

Just finished Brett Halliday’s Dividend on Death (1941). The first time reading anything by Halliday. Entertaining enough to want read another in the series. Described as a tall long legged redhead the main character (Mike Shayne) was, I could not help picturing Conan O’Brien for the first half of the story. Happily, I now have a better image in my mind for the lead character since he is the protagonist for the whole series.

 

[Fading Fast]

Although I gave you a “like” I had to skip your review of The Case of the Velvet Claws as I am trying decide if I should read Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress or the aforementioned. I have wanted to read a Perry Mason story since watching the HBO series, but I really would like to read something by Mosley as well. Such a difficult life I have.

If it helps, the Perry Mason book is a fast read.

Also, if it helps, I noted this in the review, the book's Mason is somewhat close to the Warner Bros 1930s movie version of Mason, is less close (from what I've read) to the '60s TV version and is not that close at all to the HBO version (a show I enjoy very much).

So, while a fast read, the original-book Mason and super-cool Della Street are very different from their HBO versions.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture -- 1920-1945," by Kelly Schrum.

If there's one "everybody knows that" thing that simply isn't true, it's the widespread belief that the idea of a distinct "teenage culture" is a product of the postwar era, inextricably tied to the rise of "rock 'n' roll." This idea was burned into the public consciousness in the 1970s, by the rise of the "Fifties Nostalgia" craze, and was perpetuated by a generation of Boomer cultural critics who seemed completely unwilling to consider the possibility that the experiences of their own particular generation were not, in fact, in any way unique or definitive. But it is, as I've argued many times here on the Lounge, Simply. Not. True. So I was very pleased to come across this academic study from 2004 that very neatly and very thoroughly proves the point.

This is not a nostalgia book, or a coffee table picture book. It's a thoroughly researched analysis of the rise of American teen culture in the years between the two World Wars, with a specific focus on the experiences of high-school girls. Ms. Schrum interviewed dozens of women who grew up in that period, born between 1906 and 1930, and analyzed an impressive collection of diaries, scrapbooks, yearbooks, letters, and other original materials these women had preserved documenting not just what they remembered but what they actually experienced, felt, and believed and how they interacted with the world around them.

And what she uncovers here is a distinct, cohesive teenage culture that was as well-defined, and as replete with its own specific subcultures and subgroups as that of teens today -- a culture with its own specific approaches to fashion, to social and romantic relationships, to media, and to music. Long before anyone ever heard of rock, jazz and swing music were integral to teen culture and Schrum places that culture in the greater context of the period: both adults and teens enjoyed jazz and swing, but she documents how they did so in very very different ways that reinforced the individuality of their respective cultural groups.

It's also been argued that, well, yeah, pre-boomer teen culture was a thing, but it was in the Boomer era that marketing really discovered the teen market. No, no it wasn't. Schrum thoroughly documents how actively The Boys were pursuing the teen-girl market as far back as the twenties, and how, by the turn of the forties, teen girls had already emerged as a significant, distinctive consumer group with their own disposable income, their own tastes, and their own vulnerabilities to advertiser manipulation. Anyone who's ever read the "Sub-Deb" column in the Ladies Home Journal of the 1920s and 1930s already knows how teen girls were being groomed to be good American consumers, but Schrum really puts a spotlight on how thoroughly and how carefully the Boys were going about that process. I'm a bit disappointed she didn't look up Elizabeth Hawes' blistering indictment of commercialized femininity, "Anything But Love," because it's an excellent contemporary analysis of this problem that's well worth a look for anyone interested in such matters.

Of course, a book like this can't represent all teens of the period -- it's primarily a study of white middle-class teenage-girl culture and doesn't necessarily reflect the realities of working class/non-white teen culture. Those cultures existed too, but they were of little interest to the Boys, and therefore are far less documented in the surviving materials of the time. But with that shortcoming noted, this is an excellent examination of a topic that was long overdue for a serious study, and it's not so academic in its writing style that it can't be appreciated by a casual reader.

My copy is ex-college library, and I was very disappointed to see that it was only checked out twice, once in 2005 and once in 2009, before being scrapped. It deserves wider notice.

 

[Fading Fast]

Consistent with Lizzie's comments above, the books, movies and comic strips of the '20s, '30s and '40s also show a well-developed teen culture for middle-class white boys and girls.

Overall, it's the similarities and not the surface differences that become apparent in the teenage culture of any twentieth century decade. The '20s teenager isn't all that different from the '50s one or even the '70s one that I grew up with.

To be sure, the bigger changes in our culture over those decades were also reflected in the teen cultures, but I still see more similarities than differences in teenagers from various decades of the twentieth century.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Schrum's book is its frequent quotation of the diaries it uses as a major source -- you don't get the voices of elderly women nostalgically remembering their youth, but the actual in-the-moment voices of actual teenage girls speaking to you direct from the 1920s and 30s. And those voices, with allowance for differences in dialect and slang, are pretty much the same voices I hear from the teen girls I've known in the 21st Century. There's one particular young woman, a girl named Beth, who went to high school in the late 1920s in upstate New York, who, with her excellent taste in music and movies, and her way of snapping the language to express a sardonic view of the world around her, comes across as someone I would have very much liked to have known.

 

[Harp]

^^^Very intriguing, I'd like to read Hawes first as primer before the Bobby Soxers.
Check out Amazon, just ordered The Queen's Gambit which captivates. Every so often, lightning strikes.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Finished 1984, two days ago. Still great, but just too long, from todays view! 100 sides less would be fine.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Anything But Love" is the most difficult of all of Hawes' books to find -- it was the one that got her red-baited out of the country because it was seen as a bit too critical of the postwar back-to-the-kitchen-girls movement promoted by the National Association of Manufacturers. I looked for years for a copy, and when I did find one -- I was astonished to open the cover and find that it was a signed copy. There can't be many of those floating around.

For those who've never read Elizabeth Hawes, she was originally a high-fashion designer in the 1930s until she got fed up with kowtowing to "les riches bitches," as she described her clients, and gave up the entire fashion industry to become, in turns, a muckraking columnist for PM, a machinist in an airplane engine factory in New Jersey, and finally, an organizer for the UAW. She was a brilliant writer on any topic she chose to consider,and was about fifty years ahead of her time on just about any issue one cares to mention. A full profile of her here.

 

[Harp]

Finished 1984, two days ago. Still great, but just too long, from todays view! 100 sides less would be fine.

Length aside, draw any parallels with the present tense as seen over there?

 

[Trenchfriend]

Length aside, draw any parallels with the present tense as seen over there?

SARSCov2 = Eurasia?

 

[Harp]

"Anything But Love" is the most difficult of all of Hawes' books to find -- it was the one that got her red-baited out of the country because it was seen as a bit too critical of the postwar back-to-the-kitchen-girls movement promoted by the National Association of Manufacturers. I looked for years for a copy, and when I did find one -- I was astonished to open the cover and find that it was a signed copy. There can't be many of those floating around..

Amazon listed as unavailable. Will look around town. Somewhere ABL awaits discover.

 

[Harp]

SARSCov2 = Eurasia?

Orwellian glimpse is quite prescient.

Guess Angela erred with her prolonged Easter vacation plan.

 

[Harp]

Amazon listed as unavailable. Will look around town. Somewhere ABL awaits discover.

Found Schrum's Some Wore Bobby Sox on Amazon this morning but that site "failed" to find my mobile tel #...
Later, another fixit to attend.

 

[Fading Fast]

Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells originally published in 1909

It's always an interesting read when you don't really like a book's main character, especially when, I think, the author wants you to like him or her.

Ann Veronica Stanley (props for the name) is a middle-class English woman in her early twenties who rebels against the social and legal constraints put on women at that time. Good for her as it's the rebels - the ones willing to break things and take the social and legal blowback that ensues - who expand the Overton Window for the next generation. Still, I didn't like her.

Living at home with her father and aunt (her mother passed away years ago), at a time when a father's word was all but law, even to a daughter in her twenties, Ann Veronica, "Vee," chafes at the social and cultural restraints and limited career opportunities for a woman of her class in early twentieth century England.

Vee has been listening to and discussing with friends the "radical" ideas of the time propounded by the Suffragettes and similar liberal ideologues, including the socialists. While her personal philosophy is incipient, she "feels" the restraints and intuits that economic freedom is as necessary as the vote (the Suffragettes argue the vote will lead to economic freedom).

Precipitated by her father's refusal to let her go to a dance in London and then stay the night with friends, Ann Veronica leaves home and moves to London without much thought or money and with only the vague outline of a plan.

Once there, reality quickly sets in, so Ann Veronica borrows money from a middle-aged, married man, Mr. Rampage. She knows him from her hometown and borrowed from him believing (hard to tell if she was lying to herself or truly ignorant) that he was simply a friend who wanted to help her.

Now with brass in pocket, Ann Veronica continues her studies in biology, but at a real university and not at the woman's college her father had sent her too. She also becomes deeply involved in the Suffragette movement, while her platonic friendship with Mr. Rampage expands to include dinners out and long conversations, but no nooky.

All of this gives author Wells much opportunity to explore the Suffragette movement, socialistic ideas (a Wells tic), sexual norms for a young woman in London and traditional societies' views of these rebellious ideas. While Wells is sympathetic to these new views, he is willing to harshly point out their advocates' foibles and inconsistencies in a way that most modern progressive shrink from doing in their period novels.

Ann Veronica is unable to find work as she views the jobs she's qualified for - secretarial or domestic - as being unworthy of her; some would say her bougie slip was showing beneath her leftist skirt. She also begins to recognize her own sexuality, via Rampage's aborning unwanted advances and her growing crush on a married college professor. A sexuality that had been suppressed by the Victorian mores of the day.

Vee's London adventure is shattered when, owing to her growing involvement with the Suffragette, she participates in a protest that sends her to jail. She uses her time in the clink to recognize that some of her own failings - her complete dismissal of her family and borrowing from Rampage - were because she was arrogant and lazy. In a moment of true introspection, she sees that just because she wants something - even if she is right - it doesn't give her carte blanche to roll over anyone in her way.

Ann Veronica emerges from prison a little more thoughtful, especially when, perforce, she returns home to survive, but her new perspective only lasts for so long. After a compromise with her father leads to her return to college, she begins an affair with the married professor she had been pining for.

Ms. Veronica proves to be less of a committed rebel as she's dropped the Suffragettes and more about her simply getting what she wants, in this case, an unhappily married man. So, Vee, for a second time, obnoxiously bolts unannounced from her home - a home that took her back in after prison - to run away with her married boyfriend.

We then jump four years ahead to find Ann Veronica happily married to the former college professor who is now a successful playwright. All that's left is a joyous reunion with her father who learns that now-domesticated Vee is going to make him a grandfather. The rebel Ann Veronica effectively became what her father wanted her to be all along: a respectable wife and mother.

While Wells is clearly and rightfully sympathetic to both the Suffragette movement and equal economic opportunities for women, he created a character who basically hitched her sails to those causes only when it suited her and, then, jumped ship when it didn't. Ann Veronica is an antecedent to many "radical" 1960s college students who took up leftist causes in their early twenties only to settle down into middle-class lives as lawyers and stockbrokers by the 1980s.

A more sympathetic echo of Ann Veronica can be found in Edith Wharton's 1905 House of Mirth. Wharton's character Lily Bart finds, like Ann Veronica, that her only economic opportunity is borrowing from wealthy men - with an implied sexual obligation, understood or not - or menial labor.

Lily Bart, once she realizes the obligation borrowing created, makes a sincere effort to repay her debt even taking those low-pay and low-status jobs that Ann Veronica dismisses. Lily Bart is a real heroine, not for her political views, but for her personal character and integrity.

Ann Veronica is, like many of us, a rebel with one cause - whatever is good for herself. It's not heroic, but is a more-honest look at some of the supporters of causes and social change than the pure-of-heart and fearless heroines that modern period writers so adore creating.

Wells seems to have been a sorta fellow traveler with the rebels, but one that plowed his own intellectual path and didn't hesitate to highlight the contradictions and hypocrisies within those progressive movements. A view he imputes in Ann Veronica, both the novel and the character.

 

[AmateisGal]

Starting a new novel, The Rose Code by Kate Quinn. Historical fiction.

 

[Harp]

The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky; on the philosopher's record of defending authoritarian regimes.
Keith Windschuttle, The New Criterion

 

[Harp]

Found Schrum's Some Wore Bobby Sox on Amazon this morning but that site "failed" to find my mobile tel #...
Later, another fixit to attend.

Fixed. Bought a used in good condition for $6, enroute. My mother, aunts, and their friends were all sox
and together part of this gender demographic bunch I always found intriguing.

 

[Harp]

New York Times culled for commuter train reading: antitrust, diversity for district and appellate courts;
and how SCOTUS is to be played by the opposition. Considering the Roberts Court recusal of responsible
jurisprudence, ain't lookin too good for all those rascally backbenchers nohowyze. Nobel laureate
Paul Krugman lashes out against economic orthodoxy in a rather surprising tirade considering stratospheric federal
debt and dismal monetary velocity, but that's par for the course for Super K, and a seeming rational book review
of The Gun, The Ship, and The Pen by Linda Colley titled Why Constitutions Are the Safeguards of Freedom.
This might actually be a lucid review. And there is the predictable tirade against the Election Integrity Act of 2021.
The inside baseball is all over the paper.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"How America Lives," by J. C. Furnas and the staff of the Ladies' Home Journal.

One of the most fascinating documentary series ever published in an American mass-circulation magazine began in the Ladies' Home Journal in its issue of February of 1940. "How America Lives" was an ambitious attempt to describe and document the real everyday lives, household routines, and economic status of American families from every walk of life. The Journal, under editors Bruce and Barbara Gould was much more than just a women's service magazine -- it was an ambitious, investigatory publication determined to get at the root of many of the problems and issues in the country in the years before WWII, and this series of articles was a landmark in American magazine journalism -- presenting its findings without sensationalism or overt propaganda. In 1941, a compendium from the first year and a half of this series was published in hardcover by Holt. Some of the material presented was condensed from its original magazine form, but the substance was carried over unchanged. I don't exaggerate when I call this one of the most important books ever published in the area of 20th Century social history.

The Journal editors went out of their way to recruit families covering the full breadth of what America was in 1940-41. The magazine's readership was primarily upper-middle-class white women, but the series went out of its way to present a full range of class experiences. You'll find articles on wealthy families of lawyers, doctors, and company executives -- and you'll find them right alongside the story of an unemployed sign-painter in Brooklyn and his wife, who are trying to raise six children on a $66 a month home relief check, and a family of black Mississippi sharecroppers who are raising seventeen children in a plantation shack under conditions little removed from the days of slavery. The contrasts are stark and thought provoking, and this was the purpose of the series -- to force readers to come to grips with the essential contradictions inherent in the "American Way."

There is also a chapter devoted to reader response to the original articles -- which was, as you might expect, decidedly mixed. The article about the sharecropper family generated the most outrage -- much of it from white Southerners who insisted "we don't treat our colored like that," or who were offended that the Journal chose to describe the mother of the family as "Mrs." instead of calling her by her first name as "southern etiquette" demanded. But there were also a good number of complaints about the article from Black readers -- who demanded to know why the portrayal of illiterate, medieval poverty in the sharecropper article wasn't balanced by featuring a middle-class Black family as well. The author admitted that he had no good answer for that question.

There are pictures accompanying each chapter, taken from the original magazine features -- but you'd do better here in trying to locate the original magazine copies for these, because they were presented in larger, clearer format.

This is a book that every person interested in the reality of the Era -- as opposed to the nostalgia or Hollywood versions of the Era -- needs to have on their shelf. It's not a common book -- it was printed on lesser-quality stock, and copies in good condition aren't all that easy to come by -- but it's one that's well worth the search.

 

[Harp]

-- it was an ambitious, investigatory publication determined to get at the root of many of the problems and issues in the country in the years before WWII, and this series of articles was a landmark in American magazine journalism -- The contrasts are stark and thought provoking, and this was the purpose of the series -- to force readers to come to grips with the essential contradictions inherent in the "American Way."

Of interest and a must need read investigative piece.

Begs the question though: what are the essential contradictions inherent in the American Way?

Ancillary to this foray is the present 1776 Commission Report released January 18, 2021 which the current
administration via executive order dissolved January 20, 2021; philosophic truth holds fast
despite partisan enmity, or avoidance of conceptual meaning whether individual or constitutional.

Moral equality before the law does not equate individual equity but is a bulwark against tyranny and oppression.
The commission investigated various beliefs opposed to the liberty of the individual in preference to collective
dictate as its findings supported the former and issued warning to divisive ideologies found today.