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| [a] World RF |
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We're making good progress here, so let's keep up the momentum. Turn to Week One on the syllabus, and take a look at the structure of the readings. Pay attention to the "magazine plus book" organization that week, because it will carry through the entire semester. Every single week we'll get to know four consecutive issues of the magazine that were published in the aftermath of a pivotal event or period of interest. Then we'll read a book. Most weeks, we'll actually read half a book, spreading the goodness out over two weeks. I usually don't do this in other classes, because I have found that it is often difficult to keep the analytical momentum from one week to the next. The combination of magazine readings and book material makes it quite workable in this course, and we'll get underway in earnest during the first week of classes with an investigation of the first month of The New Yorker. Then we'll read the twentieth century coverage in a popular book of American history.
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| [b] Eustace RF |
It all begins with 1925.
There is a problem here, and you might have been thinking of it for the entirety of the last paragraph. Anyone who has ever read through a few items in the Beloit College Mindset List knows that the pace of change in the last century has been enormous, and has quickened to warp speed in the last few decades. My favorite story that speaks to the pace of change comes from my first semester at Beloit College back in 1998. I was driving lonely roads in southern Wisconsin one autumn day and tuned in to the top-of-the-hour news broadcast by WBBM Radio in Chicago. It seems that there had been a jailbreak somewhere in downstate Illinois, and that the escapee had just been apprehended. He had never been particularly dangerous, the story implied, and the way he was caught underlined that notion. You see, the inmate crafted an escape plan, burrowed his way under and beyond the prison walls (this is how I imagined it), stole a car, and drove across the country roads of the Midwest, with the winds of freedom blowing through his hair like the tender licks of a well-fed mother cat.
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| [c] Tanked RF |
Into a station he pulled, drove up to to the pumps, and waited. And waited. He had been incarcerated in the late-1970s, and figured that someone would come out and fill 'er up for him. Maybe even wash the windows and check the oil and tire pressure. He had cash; no problem. He pulled his cap low over his brow—to discourage recognition—and waited some more. In time, he got out of the car, looked around, and started to examine the newfangled machines. To make a long story short, he then marched through the doors and up to the counter, asked for a phone, and called the police. Come and get me, he told them. I want to go back to prison.
He was defeated not by panoptical surveillance or police radar. He met his match with pay-at-the-pump.
Times change, you see, and the first lesson for students in The New Yorker and the World is that 1925 ain't 2012. If that seems trite, maybe you need to think about the nitty gritty of historical and cultural details, and all of the exhilarating and annoying ways that the world was different from the one we now live in. It is as though the course itself is an elaborate version of the Mindset List, and our goal is to understand better the world of Mr. Harold Ross's New Yorker.
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| [d] Flushing flourish RF |
If you look again at the syllabus, you will see that we begin the task during the first week of the term with Paul Johnson's A History of the American People. It is a big, thick, almost-thousand page book, and it covers more than three centuries of "American" history. When ordering books, I could have chosen slender volumes that cost more than the surf-and-turf special at the local steakhouse or a book that costs just about the same as a two-topping medium pizza. I chose the latter, and we'll be reading the twentieth century narrative to give us a picture of the changing world behind the publication of The New Yorker.
Before we finish today's post, I should address one more matter. You might have noticed that we are covering a century of history (pretty much 1912-2000) in just one week. 250 pages. As we'll see tomorrow, however, it will take us fully fifteen weeks to cover the primary source material in The New Yorker for those same years. Why then are we racing ahead in utterly breathless fashion with the historical background when we will be moving quite methodically through the core texts during the heart of our seminar?
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| [e] Big RF |
As you will see tomorrow and the next day, our "secondary source" pace will be just as methodical as our magazine reading...after the first week. Over the many weeks of the term, we will work through half-a-dozen books on The New Yorker, its editors, its staff writers, and its readers, almost all at the pace of a book every fortnight. Our "big read" of twentieth century history in Week One is intended to give us a birds-eye view of the twentieth-century before we turn our gaze directly to the history of the magazine itself. Students will have to do their first bits of serious college reading on Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week—the bulk of it before they have even attended their first classes.
They will have to "become acquainted" (this is how I like to put it) with all 250 pages of the material, and looking at the chapter breakdown on the syllabus is a terrific way to start. Go back to the syllabus one more time and scan the table of contents I have included as a learning cue for students. Go ahead. Give it at least a quick skim. The chapter subheadings in themselves tell a fascinating story, from "The Age of Coolidge and Government Minimalism" to "The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Aid, and NATO," and "Carter, the 1980 Watershed, and Reaganism." Just those three titles, chosen at random, tell how profoundly the nation and the world changed over the course of just six decades—from Coolidge through Reagan, if we use presidencies as a backdrop. Giving students the tools to think about that background from the first week onward is essential, and that's what we will be doing in class. I will tell them to "circle this" and "underline that," as we paint the twentieth century first with broad brushstrokes and then begin adding details. By the time the first week is over, their history book—their first secondary source of the term—will be a resource that they can use all semester long.
Let's conclude by thinking again about the chapter titles above. Through that entire period—from Coolidge to Reagan—The New Yorker had two editors. Just two. The United States had eleven presidents during that period, but The New Yorker had the literary equivalent of two mega-FDRs: Harold Ross and William Shawn. That is what we will consider tomorrow, as we examine the syllabus from Week Two until the midterm break.
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| [f] Environs RF |
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