Terkel's an American legend who's career has spanned decades. The latest book is entitled And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey.
Participating in this discussion are The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim, Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Betty Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man, C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review, Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills), Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Mike of Mikey Likes It!, and Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz.
Jim: We'll let C.I. kick this off since it was C.I.'s pick.
C.I.: Well, it has to do, the format of the book, with something that periodically comes up. Most recently, a poll summary was run by the Times and it was treated sacrosanct. I'm not ready, having sat through research & methodology as well as demograpy and statistic classes, to take a poll's "summary" as authentic or genunine. I prefer to hear voices speaking for themselves. Terkel's latest book is both an oral history and a survey. I'm predisposed to enjoy those types of books. I have problems with summaries of polls and with research being badly summarized. I'm think of [Robert] Bellah, et al and their Habits of the Heart where, at one point, they tell us what "Wayne" would have probably said. They spoke to him. At length. They have to "probably" it?
Every word that the Bully Boy utters and mangles is potential Times' coverage, to get back to a better target, but you have a damn hard time finding a citizen, as opposed to an official source, speaking for any length of time in the majority of articles. Adam Liptak's doing his prison series and when it's a series, non-office holders, non insiders, can get a word on but in the day to day coverage they are as far removed from the articles as is perspective.
Dona: Devil's advocate, the argument would be you are speaking of the leader of the free world and his words matter.
C.I.: My reply to that is unprintable. However, picking up the thread, a sentence from a "real person" here and one there, think Forero or Nagourney, and calling that reporting is embarrassing. The Times wants to be the paper of record. By that, they want to be the paper of record to an elite group. That's not reality and it's not reflective of America. Opening a bureau in a so-called "red" state won't bring reality to the paper. They bungled the protest coverage and it goes to a lack of interest in the average person. People only really register in the Times as "polls" and when Bully Boy's dismissive of the press, he does have a small point. I don't think it's the one he intends to make, but a point can be made of, "Don't tell me what the people think, you don't quote the people, you don't cover them." The Times, at other times, was able to do what they do and still provide a sense of the mood of the country due to the fact that they would cover labor, they would cover academic confrences, etc. Now they're just taking dictation from an ever increasingly narrow pool of "official sources" and the world in the paper of record and the world we live in are two different worlds. Liptak's series has been strong, but past series seem to work under the premise of "Oh my God! Who could have known!" Well the people living in poverty, or whatever area you've decided to give a little, tiny sliver of coverage to absolve yourself of the guilt from not covering real issues.
Dona: Just to clarify, I'm in agreement with C.I. but I wanted that tossed out because we have a new reader, a reporter, who reads just to disagree and I know he'll e-mail on this. But I agree and the editorial we did last week reflects that and has led to some in depth conversations in our journalism classes.
C.I.: Terkel's made his name doing that sort of reporting, speaking with actual people. In this book, the focus is music and specifically conversations with musicians.
Jess: Bob Dylan is one of the musicians and I'll note that conversation because listening just now, that's what I thought of. At one point, Dylan's speaking of a book written by a friend of his and how it alternates chapters with one character's perspective and then the others. Listening, what I flashed on is that the Times is the perfect paper if you're over fifty, white, male, gearing up for that cushy retirement and you're going to escape in that retirement. Because you're going to have to. The Times isn't telling you anything to prepare you for what's coming down the line because it's so caught up in a perspective that's dying out. You can take that to mean the silly nonsense they pass off as "balance" but I'm thinking specifically of trends that are emerging, in thoughts and actions and not all having to do with politics, that the Times is completely unaware of because their D.C. insider class is also unaware of them. In a class that Ava, Dona and I are taking, our professor was speaking of how the sixties caught most of the media by surprise and they were left to bring on "voices" that were supposed to explain it. The "voices" were treated like talking dogs, "Look at the strange creature bark." I think we're back in a similar situation where there is the world we live in and then there's the view of it from the media which is not what you're experiencing if you're not a white male, over fifty, in the boardroom. "Snazzy writing" won't fix that problem. It's an issue of perspective and awareness, not just of "updated lingo." No one's addressing that at the Times.
Jim: This is turning into a media roundtable, which is fine with me. Hopefully, it will demonstrate to those considering reading And They All Sang that the book is a great starting point for conversations.
Ty: Well it is. And I would argue the book backs this up. Take the section on Louis Armstrong where he's talking about jazz coming in. He's speaking of the people who could play the notes they were trained to play but were completely lost by the emerging jazz genre. And you could argue that a paper like the Times knows the notes to hit and has hit them over and over, in the same way, for years now. But something new is developing and it's jazz to them. They're classically trained and have no idea how to play jazz. Armstrong talks about Joe Oliver and how he'd hear a note and be able to play a second note to Oliver. The media should be able to do that. A paper isn't a novel. It should be much more on it's feet and able to incorporate the moods and realities. Instead, they want to drum out their trained parts. Something like Hurricane Katrina took them by surprise and left them scrambling. The initial coverage won praise not because it was the best, most polished, but because it was alive and responding to the the world we live in.
Ava: Let's hear it for Ty on that one. Strong points.
Jim: Yeah, that did tie it all together. I'll toss to Kat here. What did you think of the conversation with Janis Joplin?
Kat: Pop quizzes? I was actually planning on talking about Jean Richie, but that's fine. Okay, to relate it to the topic that seems to be shaping up, I'll note that Terkel makes a comment to Janis that no one's made to her before. She's speaking of her father's reaction which is "not my bag" basically, to her singing. And Terkel makes the point that "prettiness" is what's expected of and from female singers. That leads to a riff by Joplin. The year of that interview is 1968. And in many ways, we can argue that's still true. A lot of the negativity towards Courtney Love's music for reasons that have nothing to do with what she's doing in front of microphone. But to pick up that theme, a group saw Joplin and embraced her and a larger culture was shocked by that. This isn't an issue of predicting a trend, it's an issue of being so far removed from the realities that even afterward you're still scratching your head.
Elaine: Let me add to that by noting a passage. This is from Terkel's interview with Pete Seeger, p. 219, Seeger's speaking:
Rosa Luxemberg was a German socialist who spent World War I in the kaiser's
prison. She was against the war. She writes a letter to Lenin in
January of 1919, and said, "I hear that you have instituted press
censorship and you have restricted the right of people to freely assemble, to
address grievances." She said, "Don't you realize, in a few years,
all of the decisions in your country are going to be made by a few elite, and
the masses will only be called in to dutifully applaud your decisions."
Boy, wasn't that exactly what happened? If it hadn't been Stalin to take
over, it would have been somebody elese. Because if you don't have freedom
of the press, if you don't have freedom of the airwaves, and freedom of speech,
inevitably things go from bad to worse. The USA would not be here if it
had not been for our Bill of Rights. Thanks to Bill of Rights, the
abolitionists could agitate and agitate until we got rid of slavery. And
women could agitate and agitate until they got the right to vote. And
black people could agitate and agitate and finally Lyndon Johnson signed the
Voting Rights Act.
Betty: And the reality is that now we have Republicans saying that the Voting Rights Act doesn't need to be extended. Our Bill of Rights appears headed for the trash can and we're becoming the USBB, United States of Bully Boy. I'm going to get depressed so let me note Marian Anderson, from page 64:
Awareness is very important in any and everything we do. There happens to
be sometimes a period of awareness in children, or lack of awareness in
children, which will permit a person to play the piano in a fashion which, after
they learn certain rules and regulations, she'll feel certain fingers don't
belong on certain notes in relationship to other notes that she has to do.
And when she doesn't know this, the finger works, but the minute that she knows
it shouldn't be there, that same finger feels that it's committing a crime to
act in the way that it had before.
Cedric: Which can carry it back to the point we keep coming back to. Awareness, trained, as opposed to natural can prevent the media from hearing the voices they need to hear. The keys they play are the accepted keys but the "accepted keys" change with the times. I enjoy the book. I carried it to the nursing home thinking I'd just show it to my friends and they'd think it was interesting and maybe want to talk a little about some of the people in it. We ended up talking about the people for hours and I ended up leaving the book with them because they were so jazzed on it. I found Betty Carter's interview interesting. How she felt it was important for the audience to see a mixture of ages onstage and how seeing that would also help the audience be a mixture. Rebecca?
Rebecca: I enjoyed the interviews. Probably Woody Guthrie's the most. I'm sick of Dylan and the myth amplified by the myth making [Martin] Scorsce so I wasn't impressed that "Big Bob Dylan" was in the book. But I enjoyed the book and you can pick and choose which sections to read. It's not required that you start on page one and read page by page until the end.
Ava: We did that too. Jim, Dona and myself. We were all reading from the same copy so one of us would set it down and someone else would grab it. There wasn't time to read straight through since we were sharing the copy. Early on, Jim started reading sections aloud and, as a result, Dona and I joined in. It works that way as well. I think Rebecca's point is a good one because some may see the book as history, which it is, and think, "It's going to put me to sleep."
It won't. And if you come across someone you're tired of, the way Rebecca is of Dylan, you can move on to the next section and not be lost.
Mike: I didn't mind the Dylan section or the Joplin. I knew those names. And I knew Louise Armstrong's name, Woody Guthrie's and Pete Seeger's. But that was pretty much it for me. So I was reading for the conversations and the impressions the guests were sharing, not for who they were. On that level, I enjoyed the book so I don't think you even need to know the background on the people or their music to enjoy it. You might end up, like I did, asking more about the people. Dad pulled down some Pete Seeger records after I mentioned Seeger was in the book and we listened to those. But just the wealth of the experiences and the times the guests have lived through make the book interesting enough to read.
Dona: So what we've got is a book that will delight music lovers, will interest casual readers and can be read in any order the reader determines. A very user friendly book packed with details and recollections.
Jim: Good summary. And when you jump in with a summary, it usually means that we're out of time. So I'll add that, as evidenced in this discussion, the book also provides a great jumping off point to explore and discuss the themes in it. The book, again, is And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey by Studs Terkel.
