The Internet of Remembering

Trinidad Head June 30, 2016.  Unfiltered, here to stay.

Reposted from Thursday, so it might last the whole weekend!

In the New Yorker this week, Casey Johnston wrote  about various social media platforms that wipe away photos and text after a brief period, like 24 hours.  Now you see it, now you won't.  This is much prized, Johnston writes, especially by younger posters whose identity is formed in the moment, and may be obsolete and even embarrassing before long.  This "satisfies a craving for immediacy and ephemerality, one that has lately grown to encompass all of social media." Johnston calls this the Internet of Forgetting.

Well, I am not young and that is not my Internet.  Time and its contents helplessly obsess me.  I crave scope, so I can maybe make some sense of it. The past has a different reality now that I have more of it myself. Rediscovering elements of the past and reflecting on them, connecting and reconciling, all add something necessary to my present.  Besides, these discoveries as well as re-discoveries in both their original context and in mine now, also constitute much of my entertainment.

So fortunately for me, there is also an Internet of Remembering.  There are search functions to vast data, various Wikis and especially YouTube.  On YouTube I can access (as I have recently) radio broadcasts from the 1940s, particular baseball or basketball games from--well, I haven't even explored how far back.  Interviews from the 50s, movies from the 30s (ever heard of the Torchy Blane series?  Neither had I. It's pretty good. Besides which, it may have been an inspiration for Lois Lane.)

Reading about past events in historical context, I can find documents and publications of the time online.  I can even see the faces and hear the voices, from at least FDR on.  The real stuff, including photos, not a description, reaching a hand back in time.

 There are surprising snippets of performances by legendary actors, though unfortunately not so many whole plays.  Can't find in any library an obscure treatise on ethics and psychology by one of the greatest classic science fiction authors (and least known outside the s/f community), Olaf Stapledon?  Search online, and ye shall find the entire text.  And so on.

A recent instance of personal memory...I remember one Saturday morning when I was 8.  I was watching "Space Patrol"--an episode in which Buzz Corey and crew used their "time drive" to travel to 1956.  They mentioned that they were traveling from the 30th century, when "Space Patrol" takes place.

My mother caught some of this.  She asked me if I knew what century we were living in.  I don't think I did, exactly.  She said it was the 20th century, and the Space Patrol people were coming from the 30th.  She mentioned that she used to listen to Buck Rogers on the radio, and he had traveled to the 25th century. I probably remember this because I learned something about time.

I recall Saturday mornings when there was one outer space show after another--"Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger," "Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers" and "Space Patrol."  I researched these shows on the Internet in 2010 and discovered enough to figure out that they were probably all on during only one year: 1954.

  I was writing fiction based on my childhood, and for reasons having to do with other events in the chapter, I selected a certain October Saturday to revisit these shows, and how my friends and I used them in play.  Then I found a "Space Patrol" episode guide that described the show scheduled on the Saturday I had selected. From the description it seemed very likely it was the very one I remember, when my mother and I had that conversation.  (I blogged about this at the time.)

Well, it's 2016 and many "Space Patrol" episodes are now on YouTube, though not always under their original titles.  Also YouTube can be difficult to search systematically.  But the other night, I happened upon and saw this episode--the one I last saw with my mother in our living room in 1954.

But the Internet of remembering has more functions than revisiting personal memories.  Here's another YouTube show I watched recently.  I've been reading Arthur Miller lately--this latest Miller jag started when I read a roundtable discussion of contemporary playwrights, and one of them quoted Miller.  I then found on the Internet the interview with Miller that contained that quote, and more along that line.  That started me reading some of his nonfiction and lesser known plays, and re-reading his autobiography. So on a whim I went back and searched YouTube for television interviews.

I immediately found an interview he did with Charlie Rose in 1992.  When the conversation veered to that now historical moment--the 1992 election campaign and the rise of Ross Perot, a purported billionaire businessman outsider--I got chills, especially when Miller said: "When a leadership arises in a country that believes it can lead by using the darkness in men, it's probably unstoppable at a certain point."  He'd grown up watching Hitler's rise in Germany.

Does anybody--even those who lived through it, as I did-- remember what it felt like with Ross Perot in 1992?  I didn't.  From 2016, Perot now looks like an early and milder version of Trump, thanks to this interview.  There's precedent, a continuum of sorts perhaps. And people were worried then.  (Miller thought America was too diverse to fall completely for a dictator of darkness, which of course may be our salvation now.)  And to add to all this co-incidence (which means things happening at the same time, like the past in the present), Miller once described the function of playwriting as "remembering."

About many things, it doesn't pay to forget.  The Internet of Remembering is important to our survival, as well as the lives of "the olds" as Johnston says that tech folks call anybody over 30.  So in my case I guess it's "the ancients."

Not So Wild A Dream

Today the culture is dominated by social media, which multiplies the power of the fashionable and new, many times over. That probably includes new books, or an old book mentioned by a public figure, especially if it inspires a Twitter storm.

I understand the gestalt involved in the conversation on new books, having been over many years a book reviewer and at times a book review editor.  There's the journalistic agenda of focusing on the new, and the economic incentive for media of reviewing books that publishers are currently advertising. You want to participate in the main conversation, especially if you're looking to be a successful journalist, if not a cultural arbiter.  (Although I once actually persuaded a book editor to publish my review of a book that was not only old but out of print.)

But those days are mostly over for me, and my reading takes other patterns.  There are times--as in the past few months--when I'm aware that the book I'm reading is probably being read at the same time by very few people, perhaps no one else at all.

This is not a depressing thought, actually.  It sometimes has the feeling of discovering buried treasure.  But more times, I feel good about honoring the work of these perhaps forgotten authors, and learning what they had to say.

This has been especially true recently, as I found myself avid about getting a better feel for the first half of the 20th century, especially the 30s and 40s.  So these perhaps obscure books (which were often popular when new) were news to me, and I read them eagerly and with gratitude.  

This string of book was as usual the product of serendipity, my favorite research tool, along with selection.

One hand of chance was finding a 1968 first edition of The Generous Years by Chet Huntley, in a "free box" on the street (common in our campus town as students move out.) This particular volume had been a gift. Though the recipient's name is smudged, it appears to have been a birthday gift from "Mary Ellen & Lyle," when this book was new.

This is Huntley's vivid autobiographical account of his early years in the northern Montana frontier--literally a frontier, for his family was among the first to settle and attempt ranching and farming on this recently available government-deeded land.

It was incredible to me that this was Chet Huntley's early 20th century childhood--the newscaster on the Huntley-Brinkley report I watched in the 1960s, reporting on the space program.  He grew up when even radio was a novelty.  His writing is surprisingly precise, descriptive and evocative. (Surprising perhaps because his on-camera persona was so spare and matter of fact.) Through his recollections, the specifics of the land and the times as he experienced them says a lot more generally about America in the first 30 years or so of the 20th century.

Also by chance I happened on a video version of another TV journalist's autobiography (though it's likely that it caught my eye because I'd started reading the Huntley book.) It was so fascinating that I got a copy of the book itself--Not So Wild A Dream by Eric Sevareid. Originally published in 1946, it is a more lengthy autobiography covering more of his life. The edition I got (U. of Missouri Press 1995) includes an introduction he wrote for the 1976 anniversary edition.

I knew Sevareid from his reporting and commentaries on the CBS television news, and I have a vague idea I saw him in person once as I covered the 1972 McGovern campaign. His boyhood in North Dakota had definite similarities to Huntley's, though his book also covers his college years and early reporting in Minnesota, his pre-World War II reporting in Europe, and his war reporting in China, Africa, Italy, Paris and London (where he began and ended the war, working with Edward R. Murrow.)

It's a fascinating book, not only for the pith and depth of his thoughts but for his sharp scene creation and narrative. The book describes at least two outsized adventures, once when he was young, and another when he survived an emergency parachute jump and several weeks among a tribe of headhunters in remote Asian mountains.

The book has a shape as well. It begins describing the functioning democracy of his small North Dakota town of Velva, and ends with the end of the war that tied the world together as never before, with a new role for the US. "America was involved in the world, all its little Velvas were in the world, and the world was now in them, and neither the world nor America would ever be the same."

The bulk of this book about the late 30s and 40s is a window on that era, and on what the war meant to those close to it. Sevareid's title--Not So Wild A Dream--is a quote taken from one of the most famous radio programs to that date, "On A Note of Triumph," about the end of the war in Europe, written by Norman Corwin.

A separate stream of my reading had already brought me to Corwin. I came upon Gerald Nachman's Raised on Radio among books that Margaret had on her office shelves as she prepared to retire from chair of the theatre, film and dance department. From this book I learned how many more than I realized of the early TV programs I watched as a child were originally radio shows, and I learned about Norman Corwin.

I didn't know the name, but Norman Corwin was famous and influential from the late 30s into the 50s, but most prominently during World War II. As a writer, producer and director, he was variously called the Bard, the poet laureate, the Shakespeare of radio. Corwin's works, Nachman writes, "were sui generis, blending drama, history, journalism, verse, narrative, music, and sound into a kind of radio tone poem, using the finest actors, composers, poets and special effects available."

Yet as strange as they may sound now they were very popular programs, and CBS gave Corwin a free hand, never even asking to see scripts in advance. There are several of the actual broadcasts available on the Internet, including "Untitled" , and the more directly topical (and patriotic) "We Hold These Truths" and the aforementioned "On A Note of Triumph," probably the most famous of his many World War II programs. They still sound impressive.  (I did a post here back in June relating "We Hold These Truths" to the 2016 election.)

Scripts for a selection of mostly World War II programs comprise the volume Untitled And Other Radio Dramas by Norman Corwin (Holt 1947--available in libraries and ex-library used.) Especially with Corwin's explanatory postscripts, it is a document of the times, with insights well beyond the surviving cliches about WWII. Some of these scripts were subsequently done on stage all around the US and elsewhere in the world.

I suppose the chief surprises, especially in the postscripts, are a couple of cliches knocked down. We think of soldiers marching off to fight Hitler with a firm idea of what they were fighting for, and everybody on the homefront pitching in happily to do their bit for the boys in uniform. In fact, a lot of businesses and individuals groused about wartime restrictions, including businesses on the coasts that were irate about being told to turn out their lights so that American transport ships weren't sitting ducks for enemy submarines. And a lot of soldiers--and the general public--had no idea what the war was about.

So Corwin gave an American's perspective on England (the two peoples were not especially close at the time) with a series about an American's experiences visiting England. He made founding concepts contemporary--and gave them some flesh and blood--in "We Hold These Truths." And so on.

Another insight lost in the cliches was a purpose that gets ignored but that Corwin emphasizes--bringing the values of equality and cooperation that helped win the war into a lasting peace--not another debacle like the Great War's end. It meant in part sustaining international cooperation, raising standards of living, and breaking down old barriers like the class system. They weren't fighting just to defeat evil. They were fighting for a better future.

That was expressed for example in those final words of "On A Note of Triumph" that Sevareid quotes: "Post proofs that brotherhood is no so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend..."

Also (and not unrelated) in these months I read playwright Arthur Miller's collected prose pieces (Echoes Down the Corridor) and re-read his autobiography (Timebends.) He has a lot to say about the 30s, 40s and 50s. I'm currently reading the third volume of his Collected Plays (Library of America) which includes his unjustifiably neglected late plays and some early work, including--for the first time in print--his 1930s/40s radio plays, some of which were commissioned by Norman Corwin.