<<I just got done reading _The Fifties_, and it does
have coverage of
Spillane, albeit most specifically in tandem with McCarthy,
HUAC, and
Spillane's anticommunism. (In fact, it has as many pictures
of Spillane
as it does of Mamie Eisenhower, which proves. .
.something.)>
Thanks for refreshing my memory. Yes, he does mention
Spillane ("a
one-man industry"), adding that he sold zillions of books,
but (as you
say) he mainly concentrates on Mike Hammer's anticommunism.
There is no
discussion of the paperback revolution, of an entire
generation of
authors who helped shape culture in a nonnegligible way. Even
in the
treatment of HUAC and related calamities, Halberstam doesn't
really
stray from a bonhomie that hardly fits the topic. It's a
Reader's Digest
treatment - or at least, so it seems to me. To be fair,
Halberstam's
book isn't meant to be a treatise on popular culture or
literature but a
general overview. Still, I found it very shallow and often
ambiguous as
to cause and effect, for example.
<<Also, while there was not a comprehensive section on
the Hays code, I
thought that the section on Tennessee Williams, specifically
on the
changes that had to be made in _A Streetcar Named Desire_
before it
could be filmed (e.g. the studio wanted to cut the rape
scene) gave what
seemed to be a pretty good example of how the industry
worked.>>
He doesn't discuss censorship in any serious way. It's all
incidental to
this particular case, and the power to censor content seems
to be
implicitly accepted.
<<Further, it seemed to me that Halberstam went to
considerable lengths
to debunk "rosy Doris Day Hollywood", not only in his movie
& TV
sections (see, e.g., treatment of such iconic images as _I
Love Lucy_
and _Ozzie & Harriet_)...>>
While he points out the obviously unreal images of families,
the
genders, race, and so forth that were normal fare on TV, he
shows
affection for those same fantasies. This detracts a lot from
his
criticism - which, incidentally, never mentions
institutionalized
censorship. It's as if a few bad people did some misguided
things
strictly by themselves some of the time, but the overwhelming
majority
were good and wholesome and happy. That undermines his thesis
(which is
correct!) that the fifties paved the way for the great
changes in the
behavior of individuals that occurred in the sixties.
[snip on the Beats, so as not to bore everyone silly]
<<Did we read the same book? :)>>
I'm sure we did, but perhaps with different expectations
(??). In an 800
page history of the fifties, I expected *a lot* of nontrivial
and
previously unavailable documentation, but perhaps I'm spoiled
by Noam
Chomsky. As it is, I found the book trite, bland, and
ideologically
neutral.
The Denton regime imposes a strictly obligatory hardboiled
content to
each post. I'll thus end by recommending Cleve Adams (whose
1944 novel
"Decoy" I found by chance and asked about last year)... as a
prime
example of the racist and bigoted hardboiled author. Adams
can easily
compete with Spillane (and with the great Latimer). By the
way, my
reading confirmed Eddie Duggan's report on Adams following my
inquiry
here. I am not eager to extend further credit to Cleve.
Regards to all, and please excuse the length, quotes and
counterquotes,
and level of babble in this late-night post. It won't happen
again. It's
the damn blank page!
MT
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.