Word: arlene
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Arlen wrote me that he was not at all certain that his pieces were about TV. Perhaps they were about a great, white, ultratechnological superpower picking an out-of-the-way closet of the world in which to have a nervous breakdown- "like sending one's crazy aunt to Pernambuco... but Jesus, now the nervous breakdown seems to be here." His primary concern throughout the book is to present television as a dynamic power capable of fashioning human dreams and fears. He writes...
While this is not a surprising statement, it has serious implications. The most significant is that television programming is not a benignly vapid mess. In fact, the vapidity of television's material is responsible for its deleterious influence, which is primarily the enervating substitution of inoffensiveness for reason. Arlen writes of the most obvious example...