Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
We haven’t celebrated Father’s Day around here in a very long time. Why?
When my father died on that March day in 1973, my world changed in ways good and bad, in ways I will never fully grasp.
As for his world and this country, things were so different then that it is almost impossible to explain to a young person just how far things have come.
In many ways, however, the 20th century world of my father has not changed that much in my native Alabama. The more things change, the more they stay the same, they say…
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| Eschol Wilson, Fort Sam, Texas, 1944-46 |
My dad was a man of science who got out of rural St. Clair County and migrated to work in downtown Birmingham in the 1940s and ’50s, after a stint in the Army in Texas. He was keenly interested in machines, tiny machines, mainly clocks and watches. The Bunker space which now houses my online newsroom was his clock making and watch repair shop. But it was mostly a hobby, since he made his living working first for Western Electric and then as a supervisor for the old Southern Bell telephone company. He designed and built analogue telephone substations, including the ones in Pinson, Center Point and Roebuck.
You can still drive down that rural road in Shoal Creek Valley where he was raised and find a few people farming the old fashioned way, and you can run into them at farmer’s markets around here on almost a daily basis. According to a recent survey, research shows a majority of Alabama residents are still not connected to the Internet, at home or work. In other words, it is still possible to live in the past here in a way that is unfathomable in a place like New York.
Birmingham is a much different place today. In those days truckers called it “The Smoky City,” the Pittsburg of the South, where the haze from the steel mills hung so thick on some days you could barely see the skyscrapers.
Some of the attitudes of that era still survive, though, along the country roads and in the city. Racism, religious dogma and anti-intellectualism will still effect the outcome of the Alabama governors race in 2010, whether certain people want to believe it or admit it or not.
This would be hard to grasp for a New York born writer and director such as James Toback, whose discussions with author Norman Mailer I caught on cable recently contained a keen insight I would point out to writing students today — if I still had a desire to teach at the university level.
Since the world and the Web are still a long way from perfect, I can’t seem to find a single YouTube video clip to show you, unfortunately. But the upshot is this. In my father’s time and the era of Norman Mailer, the mass circulation daily newspaper was the primary medium of communications for news, and the hottest literary art form was the novel.
Today, most people get their news from television, although the Web is on the rise, and as Mailer said, the film is the art form where most creative types turn with stories to tell. I mean, with access to the Web through the Net, who takes the time to reads books anymore? And now TV news is even threatened, as least the nightly broadcast news.
On The Daily Show with John Stewart recently, Katie Couric said the average age of a CBS Evening News viewer is 62. Do the math. As you can see, there is not much of a growth future in that, just as newspapers will never be a growth stock ever again.
Mailer said he loved being a movie director, because it appealed to the Army general in his ego. Novel writing is a solitary practice between the writer and the page. Making a movie involves ordering a lot of other people around, he said, with a big laugh. Plus, the potential is there to reach a massive audience, much larger than any novel ever published.
When Toback interviewed Mailer for V Life, Variety‘s consumer magazine, in 2004, the author lamented the state of communications.
“There is too much communication now. Mediocrity has prevailed,” he said. “And all these new forms of communication often depress me rather than excite me.”
I guess he was talking about e-mail passed over the Internet and Web pages and text messaging by cell phone, because the world is changing so fast that Facebook and Twitter had not even been invented a mere two years ago when Mailer died in November, 2007.
Toback, who is one of the most insightful alternative filmmakers on the scene, began a friendship with Mailer in 1967, based on an essay he published in COMMENTARY magazine.
I only met Mailer that once on the subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn, but I tend to agree with him and would like to have the chance to make movies myself. I doubt if there is a best selling novel in the future, although a writer these days can build an audience on the Web.
So what are today’s aspiring writers to do? Education is key, of course, although even universities are becoming antiquated places, where some scholars now say there is “a huge clash between the model of learning offered by big universities and the natural way that young people learn who have grown up digital.”
According to a recent piece reprinted by Alternet:
The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture.
What do I say?
I think you can keep up with what’s going on and learn and create by turning to a variety of news and literary sources, catching snippets from the Web, cable TV and from some reading. After you have lived long enough and experienced enough, the Web may be all you need.
I suspect my dad would have loved the Internet. He would have been 83 now if he had lived. I still have a set of Science Encyclopedias he collected from the 1950s. They are so obsolete now it would be a waste of time to read or cite them. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away.
In think my dad would have been proud of the person I’ve become and what I’ve been able to accomplish already in my life, even though there is no doubt my path would have been different if he had lived.
I say long live the Web Press, where among other things, I can document one small memory of him on this day.
Edith Love-WilsonEschol Wilson on his horse Old Jim on the farm in St. Clair County, Alabama, 1942
