in a subterranean chamber

 One of the people on that Kennedy Library panel discussing Jackie Kennedy's "literary life" is Greg Lawrence, author of Jackie As Editor, copyright 2011, Thomas Dunne Books - St. Martin's Press.

------------------------ [excerpt] ------------ {the narrator here is Eugene Kennedy (no relation to the Massachusetts Kennedys); he's a Catholic priest from Chicago who worked with Jackie on a book about Mayor Daley} -------------------- "I was her escort at the Democratic Convention in 1976. ... She had talked to me in advance about going with her and whatnot, and it was quite an experience.  

I was traveling with Mike Royko and a group from the Chicago papers.  What occurred that night, first, of course, we came into the hall, and it was mayhem as soon as she entered.  

        She was extremely calm, and I walked with her, and I didn't have my collar on or anything like that, and I went to these seats that had been reserved for her.  And her sister was there.  And then all these people came streaming over to say hello to her - the actor Lorne Greene and the Carter family came down.  Everybody wanted to be seen with her.  It was highly amusing, in a way, because you could see why she did want to walk fast....

"Here we were at the heart of the Democratic Convention, and she had asked to meet Daley, who was a delegate.  We talked to the guy that was the chairman of the party then, Robert Strauss, from Texas.  So he set up this meeting, in a lower level of Madison Square Garden, in some subterranean chamber.  

And here's Dick Daley in his blue suit, and I knew the way Daley would react.  She went over to talk to him, and he just listened, very happy to see her.  But even to her...as far as a book, he was very self-protective and protective of his family.  

She wanted him to know she was having a book written about him.  She was very straightforward.  She told him that she had commissioned a book, and he said something like, 'We'll look into it.'

        "He died the next December.  Now while he was alive, nobody would talk.  They feared for their lives and their jobs and so forth.  It was very interesting, the control he exerted.  After he died, I ended up talking to dozens and dozens of people, who knew him in various ways, some of them in a very intimate way, and they were very helpful.  

Jackie was fascinated by all this, and her support never wavered.  

Before Daley died, it didn't matter to her that he wasn't going to give any direct support.  She understood, if you were on to something, if she felt you were on the right track, she would encourage you to keep going along that track.  If she thought you were diverging from it, that's when she would intervene and say, 'Well, I'm not sure about that.'  She did it so nicely."

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On You Tube:

World Turning

> Fleetwood Mac

...and play

Lorne Greene

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"I'm a senior editor at Doubleday"

 Oh! - you can find this on You Tube, video titled:

The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

channel / uploader:  John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

------------------------------------- I've never seen this, before.  It's an hour and 38 minutes, so if you put it on when you have some work to get done, it will last for a bit - you don't have to keep stopping what you're doing to find something else to play.

        One panelist tells the story of getting invited to dinner at the home of New York City Mayor Ed Koch.  The guy arrived at the mayor's apartment and the 20 people who were there didn't seem to know each other.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was one of the guests.

        When they all sat down at the dinner table, Mayor Koch asked everyone to go around the table, each person introducing themselves.

        ("I'm Jacqueline Onassis; I'm a senior editor at Doubleday.")

I think people for whom English is a second language will enjoy this video, as well as people whose first language is English.

        In our economy, I cannot help but notice, there are many things that aren't good and are expensive, while at the same time there are things like this "literary Jackie" video that are really good, and - free of charge - !  LOL.  It's like some kind of absurd, unexpected miracle....

Ed Koch, mayor of New York City, 1978 - 1989

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...when the conditions are right...

 One time at work a few years ago, I was telling a guy about a book that I thought he might find interesting.

        He said, Yeah, that sounds good - it would have to be raining out, for me to read it.

I hadn't thought about activities as being able to be participated in only if the weather conditions are right.  Although, yes - it can be that way.  We cannot ski if there isn't any snow... what other examples are there?  ...

        I was reminded of that convo recently when re-reading a passage from Chronicles, by Bob Dylan:

------------------------ [excerpt] ---------- I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment, to turn on the black-and-white TV.  Wagon Train was on.  It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country.  

I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door - a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library.  

I switched on the lamps.  

The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.  Up until this time I'd been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.  

Brando.  James Dean.  Milton Berle.  Marilyn Monroe.  Lucy.  Earl Warren and Khrushchev, Castro.  Little Rock and Peyton Place.  Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio.  J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse.  

        The Nelsons.  Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys.  Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy.  Levittown.

        Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke.  There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies....Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus.  Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General - a narrative which would give you chills. ...

Endless rows of books - Sophocles' book on the nature and function of the gods.... Alexander the Great's March into Persia.... There was Simon Bolivar's biography, too.  I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that. ----------------------- [end / Chronicles excerpt] ----------------------

Bob would have to be in a rest home ... my former co-worker would need some rain....

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a thin, translucent coating

 That gossip columnist we wrote about here in the last post, Nigel Dempster (that's  his photo at the top), was quoted saying, "There is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breakup."

        Nice guy.

----------------- ...the sentences and phrases that Tina Brown writes tend to fascinate me:

the two tabloids that have "a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability"

"sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced"

"screaming populist tabloids"

"daily blizzard of headlines"

"from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity..."

"a swashbuckling editor"

"fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal"

..."scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes" - and here, of course, she isn't even talking about actual weather, she has made a series of metaphors to describe escalating media intrusion on people whose images grab attention....

        Such prose could knock you flat.   It's a plush, dynamic writing style.

        Tina Brown sort of does with words and language what Julia Child did with food.

One thing to bear in mind - Ms. Brown's description of print media in Great Britain, which is quoted and excerpted here in this blog, was from a book that was published in the year 2007.

        We had the Internet back then, but social media had not yet "taken over" to the extent it has now, so all that information about Britain's "voracious" readers buying newspapers might need updating here, nearly 20 years later.

Fleet Street - the heart of the British newspaper and printing industry for nearly 500 years

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total recall

 

[excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown] --------------- Lady Diana Spencer took her bow at the nexus of a national malaise.... The plebeian tabloids - The Sun, the Mirror, and the Star - no longer had the field to themselves.  

Under a swashbuckling editor, David English, the Daily Mail converted itself to a tabloid format in 1971 and quickly eclipsed a wilting Daily Express as the enduring bible of middle England; English's successor, Paul Dacre, has only increased its power.  

(By 2006, the Daily Mail was selling more than two million copies a day.)  

        The magic formula of the Mail was a combination of curtain-twitching class envy and strident rightist politics, with the added spice of the most waspish gossip columnist in London, Nigel Dempster, whose scoops from the highest circles of the Establishment were read at every upper-class breakfast table like a ransom note.  

Dempster had a thirty-year reign of terror until he was felled by ill health.  He was a miniaturist in tabloid takedowns.  His demonic social energy seemed to take him everywhere at once; in a car he always drove at a hundred miles an hour with the horn blaring.... He was dapper, fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal, and blessed with total recall.

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so much good writing

 ------------------ [excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown.  Copyright 2007, Broadway Books / Random House - paperback.  Hardcover - Doubleday.] -------------------------- In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world.  

Their relative positions along the spectrum of sensation have remained consistent, but the entire spectrum has shifted sharply toward the garish, a trend accelerated by the resort to checkbook journalism - a practice of buying sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced.  

Three of the nationals - the "red tops" of The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star - are screaming populist tabloids, on most days almost entirely devoid of anything resembling serious news.  Two more tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, compete in the same mass market but with a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability.  

        The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian, and now the Independent, are supposed to occupy the high ground.  Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper.  

That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television.  

When all the papers are on a rampage against some public figure, which nowadays is always, they invade your life.  They are billboarded at every newsstand.  They leap across your screen.  

They buzz around in your head all day like a low-grade fever.  

Paradoxically, it is the flair of the British tabloid press, its superb professional elan [the "e" in the word elan should have an accent mark over it, I don't know how to do that on my Chromebook, begging your pardon...], that makes it so feared by its subjects and targets.  

        So much good writing and theatrical presentation goes into mounting the daily crucifixions.  So much competitive professional pride goes into finding just the right killer adjective.

        The Royal Family used to be exempt from routine abuse.  But in thirty years the tabloid view of royalty moved from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity in between. ----------------- [end / excerpt]

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much ado about nothing?

 Harry and Meghan moved back to England several weeks ago, and the ongoing, relentless talk-and-commentary about the move is unbelievable.

        But then, I think, well of course it's believable - this is what British newspapers and chat-videos always do constantly.

I guess the word "unbelievable" is a word that comes to my mind when I see some phenomenon as being kind of "a bit much."  Or - as The Bard would call it, "much ado about nothing."

So - not literally "unbelievable."  Rather - a lot.

 

        Royal commentators and experts talk and talk, and then the listener finds herself or himself wondering, OK, what did they say??  What is the substance of all this?

Some critics say the various forms of media just take famous names and images, splatter them on paper or video or whatever, and build stories around them.

The stories come in several forms:

--  true, but exaggerated

--  there's a grain of truth, but the rest is made up

--  completely made up.

        It would be like if I made up a story, right this minute, about someone famous:  U.S. President Donald Trump is buying a library in China, and its shelves are going to be filled with books about him.  (All complimentary, of course.)

        Grains of truth:  1) The president of the U.S. is currently Donald Trump; 2) China is a country that exists.  

        The rest of that - I just made up.

        This is an example of what they do. ...

And that is what a lot of what is published and recorded in England is: made up and put out there because people watch it or buy it.  It's catering (pandering?) to an audience, for profit.

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Listening to a video on You Tube titled "Why have the Sussexes suddenly decided to move back to the UK?" - one person on the panel spoke about the nature of the British press, saying -

"I think, if anything, the reaction from certain sections of the press who may have been sued in the past, some successfully, some unsuccessfully - it's going to be even worse.  

        You know, and that is an issue I'm not sure that they've completely taken on.  Because, trust me, the U.S. media is extremely tame, compared to the U.K. press.  So I don't know how that's going to be managed...."

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        In order for us to contemplate the media in England, I want to have an excerpt, here, from The Diana Chronicles, written by Tina Brown.

----------------------- [excerpt] ------------- Just before Diana Spencer began to emerge so vividly into public life, a kind of journalistic global warming was altering the eco-balance between the British press and the British Royal Family.  

The sunshine of publicity in which Diana would at first be happy to bask, posing and smiling for the cameras, grew steadily hotter and harsher.  

As the superheated imperatives of an invasive press bumped up increasingly against the milder human necessity of privacy, scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes.  

        The ultimate tragedy of the disaster in the Paris tunnel in 1997 was that Diana herself had accelerated the climate change that ended up making her life literally impossible.

        For Americans used to local newspapers homogenized by the stingy monopolies of big chains and no national newspapers except the inoffensive USA Today, the staid national edition of the New York Times, and the staider Wall Street Journal, the volume and variety of the British print press feels bewilderingly promiscuous.  

In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world....

Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper.  That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television. ---------------- [end / excerpt]

        

Tina Brown

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