Author: Michael Kammen File Type: pdf He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the enemy of Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway. He was so influential a critic that Edmund Wilson declared that he had played a leading role in the liquidation of genteel culture in America. Yet today many students of American culture would not recognize his name. He was Gilbert Seldes, and in this brilliant biographical study, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen recreates a singularly American life of letters. Equally important, Kammen uses Seldess life as a lens through which to bring into sharp focus the dramatic shifts in American culture that occurred in the half-century after World War I. Born in 1893, Seldes saw in his lifetime an astonishing series of innovations in popular and mass culture silent films and talkies, the phonograph and the radio, the coming of television, and the proliferation of journalism aimed at mainstream America in such venues as Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire. (His monthly column in Esquire was called The Lively Arts.) Seldes was more than a witness to these changes, however he was the leading champion of popular culture in his time, and a skilled practitioner as well. Kammen, the first scholar to enjoy access to Seldess unpublished papers, illuminates his immense influence as the earliest cultural critic to insist that the lively arts--vaudeville, musical revues, film, jazz, and the comics--should be taken just as seriously as grand opera, the legitimate theatre, and other manifestations of high culture. As he traces Seldess remarkable evolution from an acknowledged aesthete and highbrow to a cultural democrat with a passion for the popular arts, Kammen recaptures the critics prescience, wit, and generosity for a newly expanded audience. We witness Seldess triumphs and travails as managing editor of The Dial, the most influential literary magazine of its time, and read of New Yorks endlessly feuding publications and literary rivalries. Kammen offers wonderfully detailed accounts of The Dials introduction of The Wasteland in its November 1922 issue Seldess review of Ulysses for The Nation, one of the first (if not the very first) to appear in the U.S. and the complete story of the writing, publication, and critical reception of The Seven Lively Arts, Seldess most influential book. And Kammen also covers Seldess astonishingly versatile later career as a freelance writer (on every conceivable subject), historian, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, radio scriptwriter, the first program director for CBS Television, and the founding dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. One of popular cultures earliest and most eloquent champions, Seldes was nonetheless publicly worried as early as 1937 that the popularity of radio, film, and television would mean the demise of the private art of reading. By 1957 he was warning that with the shift of all entertainment into the area of big business, we are being engulfed into a mass-produced mediocrity. At a time when many thoughtful Americans despair of popular culture, The Lively Arts revisits the opening salvos in the ongoing debate over democratization versus dumbing down of the arts. It offers a penetrating and timely analysis of Gilbert Seldess pioneering conviction that the popular and the great arts must not only co-exist but enrich one another if we are to realize the innovation and intensity of American culture at its best. **

Author: Donna M. Sobel File Type: pdf This book is designed to guide and support preservice and veteran teachers, teacher educators, staff developers and administrators in their quest toward the education of all students in such a way to confirm that their lives matter. While there are no easy answers or solutions to solve the problems and challenges faced by teachers and students daily, there are powerful and reflective ways for us to use students cultural knowledge and frames of reference in order to maximize their opportunities to learn. The goal of this text is to assist teachers - both preservice and practicing - to meet the.

Author: Daniel Marcus File Type: pdf Ross and Lori Williamson are living the Boomer version of the American Dream. Ross is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, battered but still standing after the Internet collapse. Lori has quit her upscale corporate law job to make pottery, study martial arts, and start a family. Unable to conceive, they hire Annie Day as a surrogate to bear their fertilized egg to term. Annie has a few skeletons in her closet, including an ex-boyfriend desperate for cash and on the run from the Italian and Russian mobs.

Author: Ronald Hutton File Type: pdf This volume investigates the physical evidence for magic in medieval and modern Britain, including ritual mark, concealed objects, amulets, and magical equipment. The contributors are the current experts in each area of the subject, and show between them how ample the evidence is and how important it is for an understanding of history.