Am in the middle of reading Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, an account of the rise and fall of folk music during the sixties. Cantwell's language is sometimes scholarly, sometimes contorted, but mostly joyful. Some enlightening sociological meaty stuff in among the occasionally post-modernist prose (He does uses the phrase "always already").
In "The Lady and the Tramp" chapter, the author describes the homogenization of life in the fifties and sixties.
The nuclear family to which you belonged, bivouacked in the suburbs with other families more or less like itself, had effectively reduced the generational spectrum to the bipolarity of parent and child, while the consolidated public school you attended was strictly stratified by grade and, in some schools even more scrupulously, by less visible standards like "aptitude."
Then he writes about the resonant margins.
At the same time, though, intimations of a variegated and enigmatic world beyond the suburban street occasionally disturbed the tranquil surface of social reality. There were the desks in the old school building, for example, with their inkwells, and the elderly schoolmarms and schoolmasters, with their old-fashioned discipline. There were the old houses on Main Street itself, whose deterioration would not be complete until all the business had moved out to the shopping mall—a process requiring little more than a decade. Perhaps you had European-born grandparents, still in their stuffy East side flat or out on the farm; or knew a "colored man," born in Mississippi, who came to mow the lawn and played the harmonica; or an Amish farmer who delivered eggs; or had a schoolmate with a southern accent, whose father had come from Kentucky to work at the foundry or the auto plant—and who, to your amazement, brought a giant flat-top guitar to the fifth-grade talent show, playing and singing in a piping voice "Your Cheatin' Heart." Posted by mastr at June 2, 2005 09:48 AM