Martha Moran

Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing.

I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about a time when book reviews in that paper were important to me.

Something over 40 years ago (wow!), I was an undergraduate at UCLA fortunate enough to take a bunch of courses from Robert Kirsch, who was then both the Book Review Editor of the LA Times and the daily book critic. Kirsch wrote six daily book reviews a week and edited the Sunday section. He also taught a course or two each quarter at UCLA, assigned more writing than any professor I ever had, and put more editing and commentary marks on the stuff we turned in than any other professor did too. He also clearly had plenty of time to have fun.

Obviously, there had to be a trick to it.

Kirsch explained to one of our classes that he had invented a speed-reading technique for himself in the early 1950s before he had ever encountered Evelyn Wood. The key, Bob said, was that you had to stop “silently reading aloud”, effectively articulating each word to yourself (as we all did, he said) as you processed it. He said if you put your hands to your throat you could feel yourself doing it. Avoiding that, he claimed, allowed you to pull in whole sentences and paragraphs at a time.

I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me. I always read “word by word” and still do. But Kirsch read at a speed that I would call “scanning” (his eyes moved over the page) and he turned pages like a person who was looking for something that would stand out. (Let’s say you were looking for a series of capitalized words on a written page: “United States of America” or “American Civil Liberties Union” and think about how fast you could scan text and be sure you weren’t missing that.) But he remembered everything he’d read.

(Years after I left school, I met my wife who reads in these chunks the way Kirsch did. I always finished every reading test I ever took before time was up; Martha reads narative books about 2 or 3 times as fast as I do. She’s not as fast as Kirsch and she didn’t consciously “teach herself” the way he did, but she also does what I just can’t get: she reads in chunks, rather than word-by-word.)

Kirsch loved writing those daily book reviews and teaching the classes, but he hated the admin involved in being the book editor. So around the time I graduated from college, he took his best student from UCLA, Digby Diehl, and made him the Book Review Editor. (I am deliberately not checking this story with Digby — with whom I have a friendship that goes back to those days — prior to posting but I’m going to tell Digby about the post and invite to “revise and extend” my remarks as he sees fit as a comment.) Kirsch once, in a weak moment, said I was the best (or maybe he said “one of the best”; I didn’t have hearing aids yet back then but needed them) student he’d had, but I wasn’t old enough to be considered for the job. I wouldn’t have been as good at it as Digby was anyway.

The first course I took from Kirsch was on “Criticism” and the first assignment he gave us was to write “Your Critical Credo.” What are your rules for yourself when you write criticism of literature or movies or art? What are your standards? This was typical of Kirsch, assigning you something that forced you to think about how you think.

Another assignment that stands out in my memory was a movie review we did for his class. Bob arranged for us to see a movie screening of a Campus Christian Crusade film called “Up with People”. We saw the film in an evening screening and had to turn it our reviews at class the next day, just like real film critics!

A number of us stayed in touch with Bob Kirsch after our college years. I remember an assignment he had in London in the early 1970s and recall his pretty and youthful and blonde wife wearing a leather skirt she had bought on Carnaby Street in London (according to Bob.) We lost him far too young; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the late 1970s. Even the nature of his death, as it was told to me, bore his special stamp. When he got the diagnosis, he and his wife moved to a beach cottage in Santa Barbara where he lived out his few remaining weeks without treatment or any fanfare. He accepted reality. I think that was a hallmark of his intellect.

Of course, the realities of Kirsch’s time didn’t include disappearing newspapers and disappearing book review sections covering a disappearing trade book business. But I can only begin to imagine what he would have done with digital reading. Plenty, I’ll bet.

Share this post

My wife, Martha Moran, and I managed a rock and roll band 25 years ago. They were called The Drongos. They were four intrepid young New Zealanders who had come to America with an itinerant theatrical troupe and stayed when the itinerants moved on. They made pretty close to a living playing on New York street corners through little Mouse amps and passing the hat. They’d been a band for a couple of years when we started to help them in 1981.

There were four Drongos. Stanley John Mitchell, the drummer and principal songwriter, now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Alice Barrett, a film, TV, and commercial actress. Richard Kennedy, the lead guitar player and a lead vocalist, has stubbornly made his living as a solo performing guitarist and singer, based in Frome, England. Tony McMaster, the bass player, and Jean McAllister, keyboards/guitar/vocals, are the married parents of four children in Auckland, New Zealand, and still very much involved in music there. 

The Drongos were established performers on a circuit through upstate New York: Woodstock, Albany, Ithaca, Rochester, Binghamton over the 4 years or so we worked with them. We never made the match for a record deal with a major label — there was a lot of conversation but it never quite jelled. So we put out our own records.

Fortunately, but quite coincidentally, I was consulting at the time for a UK-based company called Proteus Books, which had bought into my idea for a niche strategy. We published books, mostly bios, on pop music and film. Only. The idea was that we’d do books in an assembly-line way that could sell in all English speaking markets and through bookstores, music stores, and record stores. That allowed us to have an integrated, rather than a book-by-book, marketing campaign. It also gave me a passable front for our self-produced, self-delivered records (and they were, primarily, vinyl records at that time.)

There are two reasons I’m telling you about The Drongos.

One is that I am proud of the promotional flyer I slipped onto the back cover of every copy of their first record. At the top it says, “If you like this record be sure to call your local radio station. It helps.”

And below it says, “The very best sound qualify of The Drongos Album is available only on Proteus Records or Tapes. No home taped version may lawfully be offered for sale. However, home taping to spread the word about this album is encouraged. Please buy your blank tape in a store carrying this album.”

That was my doing. How many of us have such a well-documented record of seeing through the folly of self-defeating copyright protection before there was digital distribution? (And this is documented. Our old friend and major Drongos fan Ira Nonkin has a reproduction of the flyer on his Facebook page. I’m not hip enough on Facebook to know what deal you have to make with Ira to see it, but it’s there!)

Here’s the other reason.

Richard Kennedy is an amazing guitarist. He’s a lefty who plays a normally-strung guitar upside down. You have to see it to fully appreciate it. I just discovered this YouTube video of him playing and singing Don’t Touch Me, which was probably the Drongos’ most popular song. It was a rocker back then; it isn’t in this version, but it sure is amazing. I hope you’ll enjoy it. (If you do, here’s a bit more.)

Share this post