News: Inauguration Day

It's no surprise that the inauguration is producing mountains of digital comment. Where to start? The New York Times gives an account of Sunday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial - the event that kick-started the three-day inauguration celebrations - and Obama's activities yesterday, the Martin Luther King Day of Service. Thankfully, Slate gives you a breakdown of today's newspapers and their reactions to events. Slate has also been asking its readers to write their own inauguration speeches. Serious Eats lets you know what's on the menu at the inauguration luncheon - and gives you recipes to recreate the dishes at your own inauguration parties.

But how to watch the inauguration? Close to home, you can watch it in the Blue Bar - coverage from 4pm-6pm. Online, CNN gives you some tips about live-streaming and live-blogging here. But as our own loyal commenters have already told us, CNN's own streaming site is probably the most interesting pick, particularly because of its mash-up with facebook. The swearing-in begins at 11.30 (16.30 UK time), and Obama will be sworn in at midday. Once it's embeddable, we'll put it all up here. Enjoy. And goodbye, George.

News: Inauguration History

William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson

As excitement builds for Tuesday, the spotlight is being turned on inaugurations past. LiveScience has a run-down of its picks of the "Best Inaugural Addresses Ever." But perhaps unsurprisingly, it's two inaugurations from the nineteenth century that are getting the most attention. The first is the inauguration of William Henry Harrison, whose lengthy inaugural address in inclement weather in March 1841 led to his death from pneumonia (more here from the Library of Congress). More fun, however, was the inauguration of Andrew Jackson in March 1829. The White House was the scene of a public reception, and, as this eyewitness account from Washingtonian Margaret Smith demonstrates, things got a little out of hand:

The President, after having been literally nearly pressed to death and almost suffocated and torn to pieces by the people in their eagerness to shake hands with Old Hickory, had retreated through the back way or south front and had escaped to his lodgings at Gadsby's.

Cut glass and china to the amount of several thousand dollars had been broken in the struggle to get the refreshments, punch and other articles had been carried out in tubs and buckets, but had it been in hogsheads it would have been insufficient, ice-creams, and cake and lemonade, for 20,000 people, for it is said that number were there, tho' I think the number exaggerated.

Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses and such a scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe, - those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.

More available here from Eyewitness to History. And below, a contemporary print, "All Creation Going to the White House":

News: Inauguration Round-Up

Inauguration anticipation is building, and leeching into popular culture through a variety of avenues. Obama's on the cover of a special Inauguration Day edition of The Amazing Spiderman (via The Smoking Section), and it's already gone to a second printing. More interactively, Paste magazine is hosting the Obamicon.me, which allows you to turn any image into an Obama-style poster (see below). Meanwhile, Slate ponders how the Obamas will actually move into the White House, and the detailed answer is strangely compelling. The New York Times has an up-to-date list of the celebrities slated to perform at the "Neighbourhood Inaugural Ball", the first event that Obama will attend as President (confirmed: Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Beyonce and Stevie Wonder). It looks likely to be live-streamed, and we'll let you know where as soon as we find out.

UPDATE: Here's Dr Malcolm Mclaughlin looking suitably Presidential. Feel free to share your own Obamicons with us in the comments.

Profile: Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates

To mark the cinematic release of Revolutionary Road, Professor Christopher Bigsby profiles author Richard Yates and his 1961 novel on which the film is based:

There are some writers who, whatever their initial reputation, drift from the public consciousness, the flame kept alive by readers and fellow writers who feel honour bound to introduce friends into what can quickly risk becoming a priesthood of the initiates. Richard Yates was one such. His first book, Revolutionary Road, appeared in 1961 and was nominated for the National Book Award. Later in the 60s, recommended by William Styron, he became speech writer to Robert Kennedy, a distraction, he realised, and a disillusionment. In a last novel, never finished, he would lament the dishonesty of public life even as, at the time, he had been dismayed at the loss of a man who he had felt could change America.

There were other books, including the impressive The Easter Parade (1976), but print runs were usually abbreviated. Magazines showed little interest in his short stories. His work went out of print, was resurrected, faded away. He suffered from depression, smoked, and fuelled himself with more alcohol than was good for him. When he died, in 1992, he was reduced to carrying a portable oxygen tank because of lungs ruined by TB and emphysema. There were writers for whom such a history would have been a principle recommendation, providing a satisfying myth in which life was traded for art. It never quite worked that way for Yates. By the time of his death he was largely forgotten. But not by everyone. Kurt Vonnegut was an admirer while Richard Ford declared a debt to him. In this country David Hare waved a banner. Nor were they alone. Today, he is back in print, and now Sam Mendes has made a film version of that first, great novel. Good writers never really fade away. They just wait for people to come to their senses.

New readers should start where his first readers started, with Revolutionary Road, though prepare to have the air sucked out of your own lungs because the world he describes there – suburban America as the 1950s edged into the 1960s – is hermetic. Yates acknowledged it to be his best book, itself, of course, tinder for a depressive. He lost out to Walker Percy who won The National Book Award for The Moviegoer, but in the end it is not prizes that are the mark of a book, though I suspect he would have liked one.

Revolutionary Road is set in suburban New England, in one of those modern developments which never quite assure those who live there that they have arrived at whatever destination they imagined themselves to aspire to. The central characters are the Wheelers, moving grudgingly into their thirties, aware at some level that they have failed while unable to identify the precise nature of that failure. Frank thinks of himself as a ‘kind of Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man,’ as well he might as beneath him is an existential void. He has enough awareness to be conscious of inadequacy but not enough to understand his responsibility for it. His wife sees herself as a support operation until, suddenly, she does not and their world begins its slow collapse.

There are hints of Sinclair Lewis here, as there is of the Ernest Hemingway of the short stories (Yates uses the word ‘brilliantly’ as only Hemingway had done to convey a sense of an inappropriate emotional response). These, though, are no more than nods of acknowledgement. The world Yates creates is his own. He draws a portrait of a society which lacks transcendence, lacks even an awareness of what that might be. His are characters who perform their lives but they are no better at doing so than April Wheeler is when she appears in the amateur dramatics which open the book.

Both of them hazard an affair, though without passion which is altogether too positive a feeling. They are adrift. They have children but make no real connection with them, shipping them off to acquaintances so that they can indulge themselves in the rows which are a substitute for contact. A neighbour’s adult schizophrenic son is one of the only characters to names things as they are, to ignore the curious decorum which passes for sociability, and he is incarcerated for his pains.

They are aware that they are trapped, that the grace of their bodies is beginning to fade, that their ambitions have been compromised and their visions dulled. They are not so much living their lives as waiting them out until April takes it into her mind to kill her child in the womb, though whether that is a gesture towards freedom of a sorts or some final act of capitulation is not clear, especially, it seems, to her.

The book ends as a character turns off his hearing aid, choosing silence over the vapid chatter which passes for communication in Revolutionary Road. And if the rest is not silence then it is no more than a suspiration, a prolonged sigh over an America which seems to have lost any sense of purpose or direction. As Yates himself explained, the title was intended to invoke the revolutionary spirit of 1776, the best, brave spirit of change and possibility now come to a dead end in 50s America.

Well, that is nearly half a century ago. So does Yates’s novel offer anything more than a footnote to an American complacency and conformity that has surely long since disappeared? You will detect a rhetorical question when you read one. Nearly a decade deep into the 21^st century, with capitalism in freefall and no one confidently stepping forward to explain what has gone wrong or how we might proceed, that same lack of direction, that same absence of transcendence, that same sense of an obdurate failure mocks us all. Yates was something more than a poèt maudit. He was a moral surgeon dissecting the world we still inhabit.

And here's the trailer:

News: 100 days

This is neat: in preparation for the inauguration, Good Magazine has put together a pictorial representation of the first 100 days of every American president since FDR, marking off the significant moments of that crucible time. Here's their own blurb:

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” Franklin D. Roosevelt told supporters in 1932 while accepting the presidential nomination. When he took office the following year, he spent his first 100 days enacting a dizzying number of reforms designed to stabilize an economically depressed nation. Since then, a president’s first 100 days have been an indicator of what he is able to accomplish. In January 2009, the clock starts again.

News: Inauguration Buzz

We waited until the second post of the year to mention the "O" word, but it doesn't look like Obama-mania is going anywhere fast. Above, you can see his official inauguration poster (as reported by the Huffington Post) which goes on sale tomorrow. Get it while you can. Inauguration buzz is widespread and only set to grow: Wired gives details of the presidential limosuine (5 inch windows, no less) whilst GoogleWatch reports on Google / Youtube's plans for an inauguration party. More crucial updates as they emerge.

Elsewhere, the New York Times political blog The Caucus reports on yesterday's living presidents meeting (see below), whilst others (here, the BBC) spend a final few moments mocking the out-going president.

Captions, anyone?

News: Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all our readers - and to begin the semester in provocative fashion, two "endings" from this month's Atlantic Monthly:

First, Michael Hirschorn's "End Times" writes the obituary for the print edition of the New York Times - and, by association, all print journalism. And it might be coming sooner than you'd imagined:

But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May? It’s certainly plausible.

Second, Hua Hsu calls "The End of White America":

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.

Enjoy - and let us know what you think.

Breaking News: AMS 2nd in 2008 RAE

As is currently being trumpeted on the UEA homepage, the School of American Studies has been placed second nationally in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. With this achievement, Containing Multitudes signs off for the year and wishes all our readers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. See you in 2009.

Research Seminars: Peter Boxall

At this semester's final research seminar, Dr Peter Boxall of Sussex University, author of the forthcoming Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (London: Continuum, 2008), will speak on "Slow Man, Dangling Man, Falling Man: DeLillo, Bellow and Beckett in the ruins of the future."

Monday December 8, Room A2.51, 5pm. All welcome.

Research Seminars: Catherine Clinton

In a change to the usual schedule, this week's research seminar is taking place tonight (Thursday December 4). Professor Catherine Clinton (Queen's University Belfast), author of Battle Scars: Gender & Sexuality in the American Civil War (OUP, 2006), will be talking about "Breaking the Silence: Sexual Hypocrises from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond." Next week, we're back to Monday.

Thursday December 4, 5pm, A2.51. All welcome.