Word: arlen
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...Michael Arlen's immediate subject in The Living Room War is not the staggering charnel house we live in and which lives on us. It is that small, luminous, oracular, electronic avatar called television. Arlen is in passionate agreement with Richard Goodwin who writes: "We pass through all this tumult seated before the inexorable shadows of a TV set-certainly the greatest psychic disturber ever created...
...reason Michael Arlen bothered to produce two years of weekly columns on TV for The New Yorker, and then publish the best of them as The Living Room War, is that one hundred million or more people feed on television daily. It hammers them like malleable gold; it takes and does not give; it bludgeons man, and voraciously relieves him of whatever sensitivity he timorously guards. Television has been described with varying enthusiasm as the great galvanizer, tranquilizer, hypnotizer, pacifier, stupefier, paralyzer, agitator, commentator, activator, adjudicator, erupter, corruptor. It provides a daily vindication of American technological genius, a daily spectacle...
...principal argument of Arlen's book is that: "Television is not merely a box dispensing such commodities as 'information' or 'entertainment,' but something we are doing to ourselves." You can't simply praise or denounce the dissemination of information. But TV viewers extract their satisfactions in the pains of paranoia, and less dramatically, in an inexplicable feeling of frustration. Television may show us things we have never seen, sounds we have never heard, faces only imagined and opinions hardly imagined, but it makes its offering stillborn, draining off the wonder or outrage. We are made poorer by its dilating cosmopolitanism...
...FIRST impression about The Living Room War is that Arlen writes around his subject with stunning circumlocutory adeptness. But the persevering reader discovers that the essence of the matter is precisely this elusiveness. We sense the devil, all right, and know he is traducing our life, but how he pursues his subterranean mischief is maddeningly invisible...
...Circus--Not among the Marx Brothers best, but still funnier than anything else around, save their "Night at the Opera." Before this movie is over, Margaret Dumont is shot out of a cannon, and Groucho gets to sing an Arlen-Harburg number about a tattooed lady. At the SYMPHONY II, Huntington at Mass...