The Radical Imperative
Bennett, John C.
stitution "above" political criticism and activity is to insulate it from change. Had Novak's logic been applied retroactively, blacks would have never entered major professional and...
...A Canadian physician estimated tha~ the average professional footbaU player can expect to live 58 years, 12 less than an average American male...
...JUCttARD J. NEUI~US, pastor of the Lutheran Church of St...
...The Re/ormation Debate, Rev...
...Why is it that the majority of non-voters watch television and read newspapers daily but could not name the President and their governor...
...We had the first legal abortion on television...
...No serial novel was ever intended, as part of its innate purpose, to go on forever (with the exception, perhaps, of Tristram Shandy), and no serial novel ever suffered the physical restrictions of acted dialogue performed in interior studios...
...Wakefield's main target is the snobbery and intellectualism that he sees as responsible tor stigmatizing the soaps and relegating them to their fourth-rate status of cultural banality...
...he sees in his material what he wishes to see, and what he wishes to see is not necessarily what is there...
...For aduR education groups it is an informed but relatively unalarming introduction to how some Christians are trying to think through their moral responsibilities in a rather alarming world...
...And it fails for the same reason that the majority of the "soaps" themselves fail: because they are born in the shallow nostalgia-chambers of the heart and take little or nothing from the brightening quickness of the mind...
...All this compels Bennett to "a return to economic ethics" that edges up to a kind of socialism that is only ambivalently Marxist...
...Early Children's Books is, then, a fragmented account of the development of children's literature of which the picturebook, in Bader's sense, is only a recent step...
...Details: Apdo, 410, Cunrnaveca, Mexico...
...In one of the few sharpedged criticisms, Bennett scores the black theology of James Cone for not preparing black people "to discover their own sins...
...The trouble lies in the author's looking too narrowly at his subject...
...At the moment the fantasists are in the ascendant with Bruno Bettelheim riding shotgun for them in the pages of The New Yorker, but--a ponent?---Sendak, who took us gloriously to Where the Wild Things Are in 1963 is ponderously preaching at us in Some Swell Pup...
...Anyone who Commonweal: 121 can express "shock," "amazement," and "astonishment" at some new thing on almost every page hardly seems on the verge of retiring to tend his garden...
...7c, three tinuu...
...A viewer writes, and Wakefield quotes with profound approval, calling it a "pure testimonial": "I must say this show to me is like when one is hooked on drugs and can't give it up...
...This is because, Wakefield reasons, "Los Angeles, or at least its national image among people who don't live there, is a corrupt and sinful place bereft of the very values embodied in the history and spirit and, as Agnes says, the very 'soil' of Pine Valley...
...And an explanatory sentence or two is not enough to clear up the difficulties in a statement such as, "Decisions that lead toward such moral catastrophes as Auschwitz or Hiroshima are always wrong...
...and of printing, as new techniques make color reproduction simpler and, in some cases, more simple than true...
...but we have looked at books about bunnies and Sr and 1Rtle bighorn sheep with perfectly appropriate seriousness," she says and with renewed assurance she plunges on, polishing off the puppy as a step toward a discussion of its illustrator, Gustaf Tenggren, as "a byword for popular hokum," and a consideration of the Golden Books as a marketing phenomenon in which title and cover picture, promising both vivacity and safety, were designed to pluck at a mother's sleeve as she moved through a ten-cent store or along a supermarket line...
...Apropos Lydia and Don Freeman's Pet o/ the Met, an unlikely idea for a children's picturebook, she says "there are no good or bad subjects, only good or bad treatments," a phrase that sounds like a platitude but in the world of children's books is, in her words, "unconventional wisdom...
...But," Wakefield writes, in a metaphor almost as confused as his thought, "there is also the feeling that somehow behind all that [the "abortions and divorces" and so on], propping up and providing a floor for the people of Pine Valley, are these big solid pillars of tradition, and behind them, protected by them, a huge vat of Grandma Kate's vegetable soup that will ease all sorrows, cure all ills...
...Novak also fails to examine the impact of the American approach to sports in the health of participants...
...Wakefield's reputation as a perceptive political journalist of the 1960s is apparently secure with his earlier books on civil rights and the Puerto Rican ghetto in New York (Revolt in the South and Island in the City...
...Ilrown, Collins, MacKen,zie, Mowry, Pritchard...
...We see the expanding market for children's books, the growth of publishers devoted to children's literature, nineteenth-century illustration in its glory, the continuing conflict between the moralists and the story tellers...
...One sincerely hopes that, as a last testament, it is very premature...
...For this offense, again and again, snobbery itself has been stigmatized...
...My injection of "All My Children.' . . . . When, over the years, the endless, self-engendering plot of All My Children grows too cumbrous, when "what inevitably becomes a growing cast of characters . . . and all their relationships" grows too complex for the writers to handle, then the story is deliberately "simplified...
...June/9.24...
...The survey also picked up strange trends which do not augur well for democracy...
...The books change as the concept of the child alters from that of miniature adults to be drilled into knowledge to---after John Locke---that of person in the making who can be seduced into learning...
...It is not an easy line to follow since every revolutionary breakthrough seems to have an antecedent before the preceding one, as in Maurice Sendak's conscious debt in In the Night Kitchen to Winsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland...
...Write: Director...
...Los Angeles, in short, is too "real...
...Jon Nihon...
...She is forced into mini-histories of ideas, educational and psychological, as she shows pedagogy--the growth of the nursery school, for instance affecting the picturebook...
...Contact Sr...
...Funds should be sent to: FL PAUL EWEtS, MISION COMBONIANA |ORION, CASILLA 6S...
...When residents of Pine Valley disappear on trips, they go most often to quiet, decent Seattle, never to Los Angeles...
...Sadly, this approach to sport is most popular among the educated middle class, who have the time and energy to pursue it when they get home from work...
...For bcm numbers add S0c per Imortio m Classified payable wltit order...
...Three graduate credits each...
...Only the drama functions this way, not prose narrative...
...At first, there was no such thing as a children's book, and the earliest examples among the Morgan holdings are bestiaries and collections of fables and tales which--like Valentin et 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 REVIEWERS SAUL MALOFF is the author of Happy Families and Heartland (Scribner's...
...program or as unclassified students...
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...Bader gives chapters or extended sections to major figures, both artists and writers...
...Reeommtruetion To rehabilitate an area stricken byth4 flooding of the Santiago River in Ecuador, rite 9QvQrnment, the Red Cross and private aqencles I~lve |n.~'ograss din 4Mective reConstruction I~oqrem...
...S4c, seven times...
...and to me the Golden Book cover come-on seems a standard trade-book technique, if in a new setting...
...With his usual innocent and earnest good cheer, he quotes Agnes Nixon defending the significance of All My Children: "We have done the story of a young college couple living together without benefit of clergy...
...Old elements of the story, preferably those forgotten by the audience anyhow, are simply "lopped off...
...Underlying American Picturebooks is a distrust of what I think of as the children's-book maim, that combination of librarians and educationists who, with their pubNow in Paperback EUGEHE C. KENNEDY BELIEVING The Nature of Belief and Its Role in Our Lives By the author of The Joy of Being Human, a timely book that is "personal and candid, honestly reassuri n g . . . " - - Commonweal An Image Book, $1,95 dDOUBLEDAY Commonweal: 125 I ! | | 0 = "-3 *mr t . w...q lishing allies, set the standards, make the lists, rule the roosts and banish the ill-fitting eccentrics to the limbo of poor sales ("the books that got on the lists persisted, those that didn't faded away...
...This book, subtitled "From Theology to Social Ethics," is offered as a kind of summing up of a distinguished career spanning more than forty years...
...The point is that in his own book Wakefield himself is unable to provide evidence and argument to support his own premises...
...three distinguished re,says $1...
...soap opera is significant (it imitates important aspects of life...
...His later confidence in the "mixed economy" of Western democracies has been "shaken" by a new awareness of global poverty and by the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez and others who tend to see advanced capitalism and the social systems associated with it as an almost unmixed curse...
...What Gottlieb's catalogue makes clear is that the children's book has multiplied and changed form, style, intention as entrepreneurial greed joined hands with educational theory to reach children wherever they were or wherever experts and parents thought they were (or should be...
...Al~nericou Cas~nnse Federation, Saint Mary's Abbey, k4orrlstowm, New Jersey 07~40...
...What's happened is that Wakefield has attempted to make a comparison, even if a comparison only of technique, that is untenable...
...Why, for example, do fewer Hispanic, Irish and French Cathlic citizens vote than their proportion of the general population...
...McKenzie's prose style is clean and his grasp of the ideas that matter masterful, Absorption in his recent published work on the Hebrew Bible (1968 and 1974) may account for an overall inattention to the enriching findings of current redaction and composition criticism...
...Soap opera," he writes, "is one of the few media [sic] that critics don't have to watch in order to feel justified in despising...
...Had Novak's logic been applied retroactively, blacks would have never entered major professional and collegiate sports, women would have never gotten their still limited access to community and school facilities, and sportwriters would still live in fear of raising political issues on the sports page...
...They are jogging, hiking and swimming, learning sports like tennis which can be played into old age, and adjusting their diets to increase the possibility of long and healthy lives...
...Although Bader can be sharply critical, even about the work of artists and writers she admires, the book is essentially celebratory and blessedly open...
...Wakefield is moving psychologically and emotionally...
...The comment prepares us for the final escape from truth into nostalgia-into the true heart of the soaps...
...monthly in advance for more th*n three rims...
...New York...
...I've got to have my fix every day...
...Having read a copy of The Saggy Baggy Elephant to pieces to please a demanding nephew, I may be less hard on the Golden Books "subgenre of animal hanky-panky" than Bader is (she relents to praise The Big Brown Bear...
...512-274-3000...
...So strong, apparently, is the desire for vanished Pine Valley, for lost tradition, for the blasted myth of "Grandma Kate's vegetable soup that will ease all sorrows, cure all ills," that only the metaphor of heroin addiction can describe it...
...OOOOOOOOO IM BRIEF L[otrr ON TIlE GOSPELS: A Rv.AVBX's Guxm~, by John L. McKenzie, Thomas More Press, $9.95...
...Certainly here he has a potential claim...
...Nor perhaps among some friends in Berkeley who think him much too straight...
...We have dealt dramatically with the subject of male infertility . . . . A five-month campaign to inform women of the efficacy of the pap smear test in detecting uterine cancer in its early stages brought a bonanza of mail from appreciative women across the country . . . . " Wakefield seconds Nixon's thoughts, then makes the understandable and all-important jump from vacuity into nostalgia...
...GERALD WEALES'S children's books are, regrettably, out of print in this country, but Miss Grimsbee ls a Witch is available in a new edition in Italy as lncantesimi in citta...
...The book is in large part a recounting of the ways in which Christian ethical thought has responded to the problems of each period, with special focus on ecumenical responses, notably by the World Council of Churches in which Bennett's contribution has been so very formative...
...Even so jagged a line might he easy to follow if the referential jumps were as simple as the Sendak-McKay connection, but the movement is interrupted by the mechanic~ of the book...
...The trouble does not lie in any absence of Wakefield's good intent: the book is candid, good-natured, earnest, lovingly detailed...
...Bennett thinks cautiously upon alarmist premises...
...Sic, thirteen times, Twelve worcb minimum...
...Every once in a while someone will say...
...Thus a college student says that "The show is one of the few constants in our lives...
...The fourth poses new "global threats to humanity"--ecological, demographic, etc.--not previously imagined...
...Frost was a 'children's illustrator' must he decided by those more interested in strictly speaking," I will assume that Bader, not a strict speaker in Lawson's sense, will allow me to jettison her "absolute" and find a connection between the picturebooks she writes about and the works catalogued in Early Children's Books and Their Illustration...
...Almost everyone has cocktails before dinner, and some imbibe a fine wine at one of the local gourmet restaurants...
...It is one of the recurring subjects in Bader's book...
...Fdmays knedictlne Monachism and Contuml~rery Culture...
...MARK NAISON, WhO teaches Afro-American Studies at Fordbam, was captain of the Columbia College tennis team and is currently active in Sports for the People...
...Novak would have us accept violence and suffering as a given, something immune to human effort that can be only exorcised through ritual...
...A writer tells about it, explaining that "one night Bobby went upstairs to polish his skis--and he's never been heard from since...
...Yet Bader recognizes that Moore and her associates, who were genuinely concerned for children, helped provide an educational context in which the American picturebook could grow...
...Unfortunately, the book fails to be convincing...
...The first was the social gospel movement of highest liberal optimism, the second the realist response appropriate to the era stretching from Hitler-Stalin through the first phase of the cold war, the third beginning with the civil rights movement here and including "the Third World [rebellion] against the tired Western 'realism' that seemed to deny them a good future...
...Since she quotes with apparent pleasure Robert Lawson's remark, "The question of whether, strictly speaking, A.B...
...Brendan McGrath, O.S.B...
...89 per credit...
...the Synoptic Gospels, Rev...
...If yc~ really went tO learn Spanish quickly, fluently end correctly, and if you have the courage and stamiou for intensive and dis~:lpll~d study, come for at least o~e montk to Cuernaveca Language School of CIDOC...
...One might want him to be more adventuresome, less hospitable to received opinion, more prepared to suspend the constraints of civility and push arguments--his own and others--to their conclusion, but then he would not be John Bennett nor would he so admirably represent the mainstream liberal Protestantism whose partnership we need if the moral energies of America are to be gathered for the work ahead...
...But not all societies, or all sports, are equally violent...
...A chronological study of sorts, the book traces the development of the picturebook "from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within," as ehe rest of the title says, from the exterior to the interior, from the presentational didactic to the participatory experiential, from "literal realism" to "a larger imaginative reality," as she says in her discussion of Charles G. Shaw's It Looked Like Spilt Milk...
...Mary Peter McGinty, C.S.J., LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 6525 North Sheridan Road, Chicago, lllinois 60626...
...to groups who seem to have something in common...
...A l l l l e r Children DAN WAKEFIELD Doubleday, $6.95 ERIC LARSEN Dan Wakefield has produced a book on a narrow slice of contemporary culture that might, with greatest accuracy, have been sub-titled A Defense of the Soap Opera Against Its Various Critics and Maligners...
...O]ERARD S . SLOYAN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 AbigaU M~arrkg (Cent...
...First month $300...
...It was "not suppression but orientation" that dictated the hated "suitable" label, she indicates at one point, and elsewhere she suggests the potential limitation of each new development since "One orthodoxy is only succeeded by another...
...Through this show I even turned down a betterpaying job, for I was certain I could not have been able to watch 'All My Children.'" And another: "'Sometimes,' he says rather wistfully, 'I feel it must be an illness with me...
...roLL Bnu~mot~M Classified RATES: 60c _9 word, nee time...
...OOOOOOOOO CORRESPONDENCE (Continued ~tom page 99) that called for dismantling the state "security" apparatus, deregulating (and desubsidizing) the economy, and establishing a non-interventionist foreign policy...
...Despite the undeniable power of this imagery, the argument that underlies it is not persuasive...
...Again and again, without batting an eye, Wakefield refers to the huge and growing popular appeal of the soaps in the metaphors of secrecy, closet homosexuality, drug addiction, and once even in the metaphor of the "stranglehold...
...Among advanced industrial societies, the Urrited States has a peculiarly high level of violent crime, a high incidence of industrial accidents, and a relatively short life expectancy (34th in the world for men...
...To many who call themselves radical The Radical Imperative will seem Mtogether too moderate, although nonetheless welcome as a half-way accommodation to their views...
...And that is one of the deep appeals of the place...
...For the most part, however, her only unbending critical rule is that pictures and words work together and that both work for the assumed audience...
...Is it really true that the World Council of Churches is a "sounding board" for the poor of the world, or do its ideological prism and political entanglements get in the way of hearing the wretched of the earth7 What are the implications for ethical reflection and for human solidarity if Bennett is right in saying, "I may have no right to an opinion as a man [about the liberation of women...
...The commentary contained in the latter is done by biblical chapters and clusters of verses (pericopes...
...The Radical Imperative JOHN C. BENNETT Westminster, $4.50 RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS The phrase "mainstream Protestant liberal" is seldom used today except as a put-down...
...As if this weren't potential for trouble enough, Wakefield ups the ante by comparing the soaps again and again not to the drama, their natural origin, but to narrative prose...
...Charles Brannen, S.J...
...Primarily a history and behind-the-scenes guided tour of a single highly successful daytime television serial (All My Children, written and created by Agnes Nixon), the book is in reality a strangely quixotic attempt to redeem and defend soap opera in general as an important and perhaps even indispensable contemporary narrative form...
...Bennett describes "four different periods" in which he has worked on social ethics, most of the time as teacher or president at Union Theological Seminary, New York...
...It is not surprising that Wakefield's Commonweal: 123 defense of his second premise, regarding the "significance" of soap opera, comes to little more than praise of this very characteristic (the genre as public service message), and, in the end, becomes praise not of truth but explicitly of nostalgia...
...Private tutor available nt $3S0 for H hours...
...Our sins are no doubt many, but their remedy would seem to depend less upon inducing guiR feelings than upon a new sense of responsibility that marshals whatever may be our strengths for the tasks of justice we say we affirm...
...The judicious reader, working from the index or the table of contents, will be immeasurably helped by the more than six hundred illustrations, although it is well to expect in advance that there will be a noticeable loss of values in the reproduction, particularly in the color pictures...
...And why do they long to put their trust in "a few courageous, tireless, devoted leaders...
...The "breakup of the extended family, and the isolation that comes as a result of that," Wakefield writes (shattering at one blow a huge part, perhaps most, of his previous argument, that the soaps portray the truth of our lives), has a lot to do with the appeal of the soaps...
...Inevitably, in so many pages of critical history, Bader herself gets a bit too definitionally dismissive, and I am not at all sure that I can tell her "rinkydink rhyme" (negative) from her "lippety-lap rhyme" (positive...
...Follow|ng four weeks, S~0...
...Richard Smith, S.J...
...And Wakefield goes elsewhere...
...Why do they generally believe that they cannot trust the ordinaxy sources of information...
...EmC LARSV.N is a free-lance writer and teacher at City University of New York...
...ESMERALDAS, ECUADOR (Airmail 31r Commonweal: 127...
...One wishes for a more robust skepticism, and misses the exploration of troubling doubt about what pass for ~tatements of fact...
...It is not Bennett's manner to challenge radically the going definitions of radicalism, nor to quest/on the questions posed by enlightened opinion...
...Here, though, with this strange turn from the heights of cultural politics to the emotional swamps of soap opera, one feels simply confused, maybe abandoned...
...Perhaps so, and yet that is not really the point...
...Throughout this country, more and more people are seeking new ways of participating in sport that veill lengthen, rather than shorten their lives and enable them to feel a greater sense of harmony with themselves and nature...
...Whatever the issue, Bennett seems excessively credulous toward all aspirants to victim status who would put uswpresumably white, educated, middle-class Americans - - " o n the moral defensive...
...A student of art history turned children's librarian turned reviewer for Kirkus, she is willing to discuss text and pictures with a seriousness which their subjects might seem to deny, at least to more solemn and trivial minds...
...Does that lust not speak of a people tired of the burden of citizenship, or reluctant to carry it...
...These courses may be taken in the M.A...
...In some respects the book is a survey of crises, real or alleged, conventionally invoked in support of this current movement of opinion among intellectuals...
...This simple book is of great worth...
...In All Her Children, though, the difficulty lies in the simple 18 February 1977:122 fact of Wakefield's inability in the end to summon convincing evidence that the intellectuals and snobs are not in fact, in this case, right...
...to experimental publishers or imaginative editors with lists which reflect their own tastes and personalties...
...John the Evangelist, Brooklyn, and an editor of Worldview Magazine, is the author of In Delense oJ People and Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation (Seabury...
...American Picturebooks is a rich book, then, and a valuable one, but not one that most people would want to read straight through, as I did, occasionally finding myself, like The Easter Bunny That Overslept, with the right equipment at the wrong time, having slipped back to the 1940s after an earlier chapter had carried me into the 1970s...
...Moreover, the financial chaos in sport today is so greatwwith franchises collapsing, star players being shifted from team to team, and colleges being forced to drastically cut their athletic programs---4hat it is impossible to pretend that everything is all right and return to" the "pure" sports reporting of 20 years ago...
...Nineteenth.Century Roots o/ Contemporary Theology, Dr...
...often enough, unawares, he undercuts them...
...Over and over, the reader is frustrated by ,,Ill Her Children, by its failure to go /ar enough into things...
...A beautifully made book, Early Children's Books is essentially a heavily illustrated catalogue of the exhibition of children's books held at the Morgan Library in late 1975...
...I f this is the real world, this pathetically uneducated public, this low-level informative emptiness, catch-phrases in place of meaning, then one may as well go elsewhere...
...when kouses are mov';d to higl~r, safer 9round or built on goverament-specifled sites, fin r~xtas ate turnished to those who build their own haines...
...Wakefield tells an amusing anecdote about this happening once "by accident," when a child character named Bobby simply disappeared from the story as if by his own accord...
...There is no absolute connection between picturebooks and illustration as it is generally understood," Bader says, and the book regularly differentiates between the use of art as a part of the book as total design and the use of illustration to decorate a work...
...But, as we know, fantasy and fable win out," writes Ryskamp, but, as we really know, that battle has never been won...
...American Pictureboohs From Noah's Ark t o t h e B e a s t Within BARBARA BADER Macmillan, $45 Earlg C h i l d r e n ' s Books and Their I l l u s t r a t i o n The Pierpont Morgan Library in Association with David R. Godine, $45 GERALD WEALE$ In the middle of a detailed and austere critical analysis of The Poky Little Puppy, "the most popular original story Golden Books every published," Barbara Bader pulls up short, momentarily startled r see herself using so big a stick to heat so small a book...
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...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance o/ being published...
...But in a more equitable and humane society, it would be open to the secretary as well as the hwyer, the factory worker as well as the teacher, and the truck driver as well as the engineer...
...lmtOtute |ISLICAL INSTITUTE, Trinity College, krlingt(m, Vermont 0S401...
...GO) Graduate Courses in Theology, Sunnner Session: June, 1977-July, 1977: The History o/ Israel, Dr...
...The joys of a lifetime of athletic activity are too precious to be confined to an elite...
...The last premise, which follows logically here, is the most painful of the three, and inadvertently it is the most revealing of some of the deeply important truths of our national life...
...The essential premises are three: soap opera is true (it imitates life...
...numerous books and articles have documented extensive drug use in professional sports...
...I guess the writers 18 February 1977:124 forgot, and he wasn't important in the plot anyway, and it was more complicated to explain his disappearance than to just forget it...
...He goes in fact to Pine Valley, the pastoral, cozy, small town setting of All My Children...
...Thomas Ranck...
...The strength and the weakness of the book is that it fairly represents the Respectable Opinion in a very influential sector of religious and social thought...
...Despite a handicap that only the author's peers will be alerted to, he has written an introductory volume at a level of exposition where he has few peers...
...Although there are genuine picturebooks in Early Children's Books-ABCs, rebuses, the Orbis Pictus, which Bader mentions in her discussion of Antonio Frasconi's See and Say--the connection has less to do with illustration than with intention...
...One of the most devastating revelations of the new sports journalism has been the toll that big-time sportsmfootball in particular-take on the bodies and psyches of those who play them...
...100It...
...That "real" is placed in those allimportant apologetic quotation marks suggests exactly the direction in which LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHIC.A...
...MacBride got about 172,000 votes, heating out Lester Maddox though not Eugene McCarthy, and the LP plans to field more candidates in 1978...
...Intellectual snobbery more than once has attempted to ridicule out of existence those unpedigreed art forms that in the end have proven to be the real possessors of the energy, truth, and vitality of their age...
...he describes it for wl)at it is, and in the end one feels as one did at the beginning-that the status soap opera has earned is in fact the one it deserves...
...another study estimated that 86 percent of high school football players suffered a serious injury each year...
...He is more interested in celebrating and defending what we have than seeking something better...
...Why are they conspicuous non-joiners...
...Hey, where's Bobby...
...in this vale of tears, in this world of struggle and strife, football is an almost revelatory liturgy...
...An eight-page introduction to the genre gospel and its four canonical expressions is followed by interspersed introductions to the individual gospels and four chapters on each of them...
...The Christian God, Rev...
...One .attempts to give Wakefield the benefit of the doubt: one does not wish to be, after all, the intellectual snob who castigates the serials out of hand, offering the automatic response that he justifiably condemns...
...Universal registration is one remedy but the national illness seems to require patient care, study and attention and the discovery of many mote...
...Wakefield does not vindicate soap opera...
...It is the tradition that has produced--and is today most singularly represented by --John C. Bennett...
...Occasionally Bader's distaste for ruling convention surfaces, as when she reports that Anne Carroll Moore, longtime Godmother of the c's-b m, dismissed the first imaginative Scott list (1938) as "Truck," and Bader plainly admires Ursula Nordstrom's retort to Moore's question about her qualifications to be children's book editor at Harper's, since she was neither teacher nor librarian: "I was a child...
...For these things are gone, if they ever were...
...It is for this reason that soap opera, unlike genuine drama, is so notably susceptible to the fatal malaise that threatens any of the arts when they exist in their most weakened forms: namely, a degeneration into "message...
...While they continue to attend sports events and watch sports on television, their primary sense of satisfaction comes from their own activity, the physical creativity they experience rather than observe...
...W, hat people love in football, Novak declares: is what the soft part of the liberal world will not admit to consciousness, that human life, in Hegel's phrase, is a butcher's bench . . . . Football is an attempt to harness violence, to formalize it, to confine it within certain canonical limits and then to release it in order to wrest from it a measure of wit, beauty and redemption...
...Novak is aware of this information, but refuses to take it seriously...
...As such, it is "not a history," as Charles Ryskamp, the director of the Morgan, says in his preface, although the reader will find, once he struggles through the non-chronological presentation, that it has a story to tell, implicitly in its catalogue and explicitly in J. H. Plumb's introductory essay (wily old professional that he is, Plumb constructs a unified and knowledgeablesounding essay out of Gerald Gottlieb's descriptive catalogue...
...Many Americans disagree with him...
...and soap opera is meaningful (it helps people...
...He pins everything on the appeal of "story," not the appeal of drama, and moves himself into an aesthetic and argumentative cul de sac by repeated comparisons of daytime television serials with the great serial novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky, James, and Trollope...
...Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...American Picturebooks is a detailed extension of the general history of children's literature growing out of the happy discovery in the twentieth-century that the child was ready for the book long before she was ready to read it...
...But to a representative cross-section of "church and society" people in the several denominations, The Radical Imperative might suggest itself as a standard text...
...Yet over and over the summoned evidence suggests, by and large, that the soaps are meaningful to people precisely because they give them the opposite...
...to genres...
...It's another striking metaphor, one that invites conjecture about fiction, illusion, and reality...
...In a mo~ bile and constantly shifting society, often without roots or ties, a serial like 'All My Children' is something to hold on to, to depend on...
...Care to join...
...Pre-reglstsatlou necessary...
...in melodrama it becomes, and quickly indeed, a vice, and with this one innocent concession we find ourselves drifting rapidly from the premise that the imitation of life in soap opera is innately "true...
...of art, as first modernist art, then modern design invades the children's book field...
...Bennett finds himself moving back to the stance struck in his first book of almost forty years ago, Social Salvation...
...Perhaps Bobby, secretly hungering for a richer brand of truth, or even just a breath of fresh air, jumped out the window of his room and went back to the real world...
...His own qualification of the first premise shows the difficulty: "no one has ever denied that soap opera is at least an imitation of real life, if an exaggerated one . . . . " Exaggeration can be a virtue in satire or tragedy...
...One result is that the treatment of a saying or incident by two or more evangelists will be handled in reasonably satisfactory fashion but within a particular evangelist's total framework less well or not at all...
...Novak views the brutality of our games (as well as our industrial and communal life) as products of universal laws of human history rather than specific social circumstances and values...
...In the absence of 'real' homes and families, and often in big cities [with their] lack of 'neighbors' . . . the daytime television serial can provide at least a fictional substitute...
...Additional courses are available through the Loyola Institute of Pastoral Studies...
...One-room schools and small chapels m~d to bu constructed...
...Dramatic in form alone, but dependent on indefinitely extended story for their life, the soaps are, quite simply, not dramatic...
...18 February 1977:126 Orson, Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver's Travels in later years--were at first "adopted" by children and later, when a market for children's books became apparent, adapted for them...
...It's a standing joke among the cast...
...The result of placing them in such august company is that Wakefield finds himself praising the soaps no longer so much for their content or "truth" as for "the professional skill and imagination [of their creators] in turning out a continuous story five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year," while assertions of "truth" and "imitation of real life" are forgotten and left behind...
...To him, the violence in sport is no worse than the violence many people experience in the workplaces, neighborhoods and homes, and is therefore hardly a cause for indignation...
...and several TV documentaries have been produced questioning the value of little league sports...
...FATHER GERARD S. SLOYAN is professor of religion at Temple University...
...The premise is that the soaps are meaningful to people, help people, because they give them reality...
...The task that Bader has set for herself, a study of the American picturebook from E. Boyd Smith to the fantasists o f the 1970s, is an almost impossible one in organizational terms...
...Tentatively, since the history of publishing is uncertain in its beglnnngs, Gottlieb points to a first printed book for children apart from Latin grammars (a fifteenth-century courtesy book), a first illustrated textbook in the modern sense (Louis Couvay's Latin grammar of 1649...
...I opened with The Poky Little Puppy not to differ with Bader on individual points--although one of the virtues of American Picturebooks is that its author has strong enough opinions to arouse quarrels and quibbles all along its almost six hundred pages of text--but to indicate that she has the most important qualification for a historian of children's books...
...There are abortions and divorces, mental hospitals and shock treatment, drugs and betrayal, wars and unemployment, just like in our 'real' world...
...To make them available to all people is the major objective of sports activists and an important component of the socialist dream...
...That is unfortunate, for it refers to the tradition that has largely shaped the religious understanding of American culture, that has exercised persistent care and responsibility for this social experiment, that has resisted myriad temptations to despair, and that has, for the most part, sustained a moral discourse marked by a sense of fairness and style of civility...
...Bennett's is not the Respectable Opinion in Zion, Illinois, or Cisco, Texas, where he might be viewed as dangerously subversive...
...The people of Pine Valley are up-to-date, if not on the latest headlines, on the general customs and attitudes and concerns of contemporary life...
...The truth is, in fact, that the banality of the soaps probably first originated in precisely this aesthetic confusion: they attempted to do in dramatic form what the extended serial narrative pointed toward in prose...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 4
