Culture

Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the world, did not then make a call to his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev; nor did he confer with aides, or have his secretary place calls to the leaders of Congress, or issue an executive order. Instead, Johnson’s initial action was to phone, himself, the offices of the US Senate and order the desk he used as Senate Majority Leader to be delivered to the White House to replace the government-issue model installed the night before.

Do great novelists make great essayists? Not in the case of Jonathan Franzen, at least according to Phillip Lopate, who reviewed Franzen’s new essay collection Farther Away for the New York Times. Lopate is a fan of Franzen’s but feels his non-fiction pieces – though entertaining and interesting – are ‘not nearly as strong as his novels’. He sets out some reasons why: ‘While his prose is always cogent, he is not that consistently stylish a sentence writer. Essays put a different kind of pressure on the sentence, calling for more aphoristic compression and wit. His novels work best through patient accumulation of social detail and character development. By contrast, the I-character in his essays is not as strongly developed, nor as vivid.

E-books are going to win. Anyone who’s seen a bus or a train carriage or a café lately knows that: Kindles everywhere, as though they’re breeding. And that’s as it should be. Stand in the way of convenient technology which people want, and you’re in the same position as every refusenik from the Luddites to the newspaper unions of the 1980s. But before the printed book takes its final bow, and retreats to its status as endearing novelty, let’s take a look at the sort of experience we’re going to miss. A friend recently came across a single volume from an 18th century Spectator series, and knowing of my scribblings for said organ and its website, gave me the book as a present.

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest means to attain his ends, Pat’s adventures invariably end in failure.

‘Now most lobbyists spend their days clicking through PowerPoint slides about obscure policies while bored junior congressional staff check their BlackBerries under the table. Those guys are the rabble. Comparing them to the folks at the Davies Group is like comparing Zales to Tiffany and Cartier. Davies is among a handful of strategic consulting firms that do very little formal lobbying. These outfits are run by Washington heavies—ex–House Speakers, ex–secretaries of state, ex–national security advisers—and they exert a far more powerful and lucrative influence through the Beltway’s back channels. They’re not registered as lobbyists. They don’t do volume. They don’t advertise. They have relationships. They’re discreet.

‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle tame and meek That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they have put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise Twenty times better: but once in special In thin array after a pleasant guise When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithal sweetly did me kiss, And softly said ‘dear heart, how like you this?’ It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

The rallying call to save libraries – about as unifying a topic as the monarchy at the moment – was taken up by Michael Morpurgo in his slot at cultural juggernaut, the Hay Festival, last week when he called the closures a form of child abuse and tantamount to inciting more riots.  During the Hay interview, timed to promote his memoirs and accompanying short story collection, the former children's laureate, in typically self-deprecating style, did not attribute his success to talent so much as to the joy his mother took in reading aloud to him. The reader rather than author is at the heart of Michael Morpurgo's art of fiction, which explains his enduring place on children's bookshelves.

You are reading this article thanks to the greatest invention of the last 50 years: the internet. The web is often regarded as a panacea for absolutely everything. It is revolutionising the world’s economy. It is changing leisure and entertainment. And it is also a political tool that can liberate oppressed people. Jared Cohen, a former internet guru at the US State Department, once remarked: ‘Any combination of these [digital] tools [Facebook, Google etc.] allows for a greater chance of civil society organizations coming to fruition regardless of how challenging the environment.’ There is nothing that this incredible device can’t do. It is the greatest ever democratiser. But, a few dissenting voices have risen above the fevered chorus.

Paul Daniels, whose first name is actually Newton, is this week's Shelf Lifer. He tells us what he's reading at the moment and what he thinks about Janet Street Porter. His website is found at pauldaniels.co.uk 1) What are you reading at the moment? Charles Dickens by Michael Slater 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Water Babies by the Reverend Charles Kingsley 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? No, never 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? This is an old survey! I'd take an iPad, a Kindle and a charger.