Tethered to the Past

REVIEWS 107 I began by citing Todd Gitlin's essay. I want to end by citing another piece of radical criticism from the 1960s, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "The Industrialization of the Mind," in which he describes problems of both the esthetic and political approaches to the media: The mind industry can take on anything, digest it, reproduce it, and pour it out. Whatever our minds can conceive of is grist to its mill; nothing will leave it unadulterated : it is capable of turning any idea into a slogan and any work of the imagination into a hit. ... to criticize the industry from the vantage point of a "liberal education" and to raise comfortable outcries against its vulgarity will neither change it nor revive the dead souls of culture: it will merely help to fortify the ghettoes of educational programs and to fill the backward, highbrow section of the Sunday papers. At the same time, the indictment [or, in Newcomb 's case, "analysis," since he does no "indicting"] of the mind industry on purely esthetic grounds will tend to obscure its larger social and political meaning . On the other extreme we find the ideological critics of the mind industry. Their attention is usually limited to its role as an instrument of straightforward or hidden political propaganda, and from the messages reproduced by it they try to distill the political content. More often than not, the underlying understanding of politics is extremely narrow, as if it were just a matter of taking sides in everyday contests of power. (The Consciousness Industry, Seabury Press, 1974, pp. 5-6.) Or, in Cirino's case, as if it were just a matter of rewriting Kojak to give it a socialist, or liberal, or libertarian slant. Fair representation of his four main political perspectives is all Cirino seems to want from television. Clearly that won't be enough to counteract what Enzensberger calls "the far-reaching effects of the industrialization of the mind," let alone to get the monolithic "mind industry" to dismantle its awesome machinery for the sake of mere people. What Cirino wants is much more modest: to arouse critical consciousness in the minds of a few "young people." Yet it is only through critical consciousness that society can be changed for the better. And, though imperfect, it is the kind of teaching that Cirino does rather than the kind that Newcomb does that has some chance of yielding such consciousness. Patrick Brantlinger TETHERED TO THE PAST Norman Macleod, The Distance: New and Selected Poems (¡928-1977), Ed. Liam Hunt. Pembroke, N.C.: A Pembroke Paperback, 1977. 120 pp. $3.00. In The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (1 946), Frederick J. Hoffman and his coauthors present a composite portrait of the avant-garde literary personality. They describe the little magazine editor and contributor as animated by a rebellious discontent with the unjust, boring, or ridiculous features of the publishing institutions perpetuating the status quo: "He views the world of publishers and popularizers with disdain, sometimes with despair." Hoffman et al identify Eugene Jolas, Norman Macleod, Ezra Pound, Ernest J. Walsh, and William Carlos Williams as the models from which the portrait is drawn. Norman Macleod is the sole surviing member of this group, and, at seventy-two years of age, a rebellious discontent remains a distinguishing trait of his poetry and literary activities. From beginning to end, his writings retain a characteristic dysphoria 108 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW concerning the human condition. This volume of new and selected verse demonstrates the refractory poet's relentless struggle over five decades to extract his personal satisfactory meanings from the elementary experiences of life and death. Continuity in Macleod's literary activities is also shown through his editorship of Pembroke Magazine, in which some of the more recent poems first appeared. When he received a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council to initiate the journal in 1968, Macleod put an end to the twenty-year hiatus from the public view during which he worked in total obscurity. A successor to his earlier experimental publications-The Morada (1929-30), Front (1930-31), and BriarcliffQuarterly (1944-47)-this international journal of the arts features tributes to...