Now . . . This
I greatly enjoyed and felt enlightened (as well as disturbed) by recent reading of Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death." His thesis is that the saturation of television in our world has caused the decontextualization and fragmentation initiated by technologies like the telegraph and photography to become the abiding and oh-so-disturbing zeitgeist of our culture.
Because my read was a library copy, it was impossible to avoid knowing that this is not a new book. The copyright is 1986 or so. As a consequence, one incidental bit of education was the reminder that while I (we?) have recently developed an increasing (and appropriate) scorn for the role of mainstream corporation-monopolized pro-administration media, there's more to it than appears. Postman makes a very convincing case ('86, mind you) that the momentum for the mass media has been for quite a long time totally at odds with actual news-sharing. They're in the entertainment business. So this whole topic of ineffective or actually destructive media performance is ironically yet another example of the sort of complex nuanced issue that our beleaguered appointed/cheating but never-legally-elected president finds flummoxing.
Another aside. The excerpt I am sharing cites H. Allen Smith, a humorist with far more authentic Texas roots than some. Backstories I know a little of include some highly disputatious behaviour connected with chili cookoffs and something in the way of unenlightened politics too, but details escape me. I have a simpler connection. I became enamored early on (grade school, I believe) with an H. Allen book called "Don't Get Perconel with a Chicken." In hindsight both HAS and I could be critiqued for a certain condescending or supercilious attitude - this book profits from the literary stumblings of the young. And his work as I look on it now prompts some suspicion as to authenticity in some cases. It's sort of in the Art Linkletter vein but perhaps with a tincture of (nubile??!) Hunter S. Thompson. In any case, this was one of those books I devoured on first read and then re-devoured repeatedly (Swiss Family Robinson I regret to admit was also in this category of abuse).
But here's the titular essay from that book (c. 1957):
On my vacation I visited with my gran parents in Iowa and my gran father learned me dont get perconel with a chicken. My gran father has a few chickens and one was a chicken I got perconnel with and gave the name Gene Autrey. One day my gran mother deside to have stood chicken for dinner and says Orf you go out and kill a hen meening my gran father. I went with him and low and behole he took a pole with a wire on the end and reeched in the pen and got Gene Autrey by the leg and pulled him out and before I cood say a werd he rung his neck wich pulls off his hed and he flops around on the grond back and forth without no hed on and I cryed. He was a brown one. Then he scalted him in hot water and picket the feathers of and saw me crying and says dont ever get perconel with a chicken. When we are at the dinner table he says it again so I ate some, a drumb stick. I dident say anything but it was like eating my own rellatives. So dont get perconel with a chicken, also a cow if you afe going to eat it later on. Also a caff.
But without further distraction, here is a brief excerpt from the exceptional, far more topical and instructive than Smith, and highly recommended "Amusing Ourselves to Death," the opening paragraphs to a chapter entitled "Now . . . This":
The American humorist H. Allen Smith once suggested that of all the worrisome words in the English language, the scariest is “uh oh,” as when a physician looks at your X-rays, and with knitted brow says, ‘Uh oh.” I should like to suggest that the words which are the title of this chapter are as ominous as any, all the more so because they are spoken without knitted brow—indeed, with a kind of idiot’s delight. The phrase, if that’s what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything. As such, it serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-day America.
”Now . . . this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now. . . this.” The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.
Television did not invent the “Now. . . this” world view. As I have tried to show, it is the offspring of the intercourse between telegraphy and photography. But it is through television that it has been nurtured and brought to a perverse maturity. For on television, nearly every half hour is a discrete event, separated in content, context, and emotional texture from what precedes and follows it. In part because television sells its time in seconds and minutes, in part because television must use images rather than words, in part because its audience can move freely to and from the television set, programs are structured so that almost each eight-minute segment may stand as a complete event in itself. Viewers are rarely required to carry over any thought or feeling from one parcel of time to another.
Of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may see the “Now . . . this” mode of discourse in its boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.
Because my read was a library copy, it was impossible to avoid knowing that this is not a new book. The copyright is 1986 or so. As a consequence, one incidental bit of education was the reminder that while I (we?) have recently developed an increasing (and appropriate) scorn for the role of mainstream corporation-monopolized pro-administration media, there's more to it than appears. Postman makes a very convincing case ('86, mind you) that the momentum for the mass media has been for quite a long time totally at odds with actual news-sharing. They're in the entertainment business. So this whole topic of ineffective or actually destructive media performance is ironically yet another example of the sort of complex nuanced issue that our beleaguered appointed/cheating but never-legally-elected president finds flummoxing.
Another aside. The excerpt I am sharing cites H. Allen Smith, a humorist with far more authentic Texas roots than some. Backstories I know a little of include some highly disputatious behaviour connected with chili cookoffs and something in the way of unenlightened politics too, but details escape me. I have a simpler connection. I became enamored early on (grade school, I believe) with an H. Allen book called "Don't Get Perconel with a Chicken." In hindsight both HAS and I could be critiqued for a certain condescending or supercilious attitude - this book profits from the literary stumblings of the young. And his work as I look on it now prompts some suspicion as to authenticity in some cases. It's sort of in the Art Linkletter vein but perhaps with a tincture of (nubile??!) Hunter S. Thompson. In any case, this was one of those books I devoured on first read and then re-devoured repeatedly (Swiss Family Robinson I regret to admit was also in this category of abuse).
But here's the titular essay from that book (c. 1957):
What I Learned On My Vacation
Don't Get Perconel with a Chicken
by Eloise Coleman
On my vacation I visited with my gran parents in Iowa and my gran father learned me dont get perconel with a chicken. My gran father has a few chickens and one was a chicken I got perconnel with and gave the name Gene Autrey. One day my gran mother deside to have stood chicken for dinner and says Orf you go out and kill a hen meening my gran father. I went with him and low and behole he took a pole with a wire on the end and reeched in the pen and got Gene Autrey by the leg and pulled him out and before I cood say a werd he rung his neck wich pulls off his hed and he flops around on the grond back and forth without no hed on and I cryed. He was a brown one. Then he scalted him in hot water and picket the feathers of and saw me crying and says dont ever get perconel with a chicken. When we are at the dinner table he says it again so I ate some, a drumb stick. I dident say anything but it was like eating my own rellatives. So dont get perconel with a chicken, also a cow if you afe going to eat it later on. Also a caff.
But without further distraction, here is a brief excerpt from the exceptional, far more topical and instructive than Smith, and highly recommended "Amusing Ourselves to Death," the opening paragraphs to a chapter entitled "Now . . . This":
The American humorist H. Allen Smith once suggested that of all the worrisome words in the English language, the scariest is “uh oh,” as when a physician looks at your X-rays, and with knitted brow says, ‘Uh oh.” I should like to suggest that the words which are the title of this chapter are as ominous as any, all the more so because they are spoken without knitted brow—indeed, with a kind of idiot’s delight. The phrase, if that’s what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything. As such, it serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-day America.
”Now . . . this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now. . . this.” The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.
Television did not invent the “Now. . . this” world view. As I have tried to show, it is the offspring of the intercourse between telegraphy and photography. But it is through television that it has been nurtured and brought to a perverse maturity. For on television, nearly every half hour is a discrete event, separated in content, context, and emotional texture from what precedes and follows it. In part because television sells its time in seconds and minutes, in part because television must use images rather than words, in part because its audience can move freely to and from the television set, programs are structured so that almost each eight-minute segment may stand as a complete event in itself. Viewers are rarely required to carry over any thought or feeling from one parcel of time to another.
Of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may see the “Now . . . this” mode of discourse in its boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:13 PM
1 Comments:
I remember you reading that to me some years ago...
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