Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, and later discussing the article on NPR, Jonathan Zimmerman analyzes the appeal of the stoic masculine stereotype that's a staple of any contemporary 50s dramatization.

In a culture saturated by public displays of intimate information, there's something very seductive about a man who keeps everything bottled up inside. But there's more. Behind the cult of the '50s man lies the fallacy of progress: the idea that the present must always be more advanced, sophisticated, and insightful than the past. And that's the real seduction. By gazing backward at the repressed '50s men, we can congratulate ourselves at how far we have come. Only, we haven't. And here's how I know: A few years ago, I read my mother's love letters from the 1950s. It was a strange experience, to say the least, but it made me reconsider what I thought about '50s men. Other historians have been doing the same. Most recently, University of Maryland historian James Gilbert showed that men of the 1950s were much more complicated – and much more expressive – than our stereotypes would suggest.

The piece is very sweet, and from a personal perspective, I'm sure the exploration was a fascinating look into the author's past. Quotes like "I really want to just let myself go – and write what I feel – that's perhaps one of the hardest things to do in life," or "I sometimes think the word love is inadequate to express all the tender and stirring emotions I feel – it's the little things – the sound of your voice – the way you walk – your eyes. I can't stand being alone" are beautiful, but does it really take reading people's private letters to make us realize that people were always people, with emotions and feelings?

I remember once, years ago, asking what the 1950s were like. "They were like now!" he said. "People got up, we talked like normal people, we went places, we ate. If everything was seething with tension, I didn't feel it." Now, while it's true that as the child of Jewish progressives who worked in theatre he was probably somewhat insulated from what we think of as "the 50s" of men in gray-flannel-suits, I think he had a point: in some ways we're so inundated by the stereotype that we actually begin to believe people were less complicated. Were mores stricter? Were gender roles and the standards of masculinity more stringent? Of course. But because things were more private, less expressed, does not mean they didn't exist. I think it's important to remember that the accounts we have of any time tend to be the most dramatic, the most static. It's an era that lends itself to easy categorization - and in many ways that accurate - but where does it say that every cake a homemaker baked had to be an act of drudgery, whereas we, more enlightened, can take pleasure in the same tasks and skills (crucially, ironically!)? Should we really need historians to tell us that life was more nuanced than Smallville? I hope not - but it's also nice to be reminded of the lost art of letter-writing.

Touchy-Feely 'Mad Men' ? [Christian Science Monitor]

Loving The "Unlovable" Men Of The 1950s [NPR]

Although Wharton is known to have been a prolific correspondent, most of what biographers know of her early years has come from her own, sometimes revisionist, accounts. And she wanted control of her history: she directed that the correspondence she maintained throughout her teenage years with her former governess be burned. They weren't, instead sitting in an attic for fifty years, them locked up in a safety-deposit box, and now, finally, going to auction and made available to scholars. According to Rebecca Mead's profile, they show her to have been a pretty remarkable teen.

No one should be surprised that young Edith Newbold Jones had a way with words, an eye for observation and a keen wit, but the sheer maturity of her writing is impressive. Not only had she turned out a (pretty good) comedy of manners and a wide body of poetry by 14 ("I don't know whether they are very bad or quite good...I think they will admit of both constructions, so you may choose"), but she had strong opinions about any number of literary sacred cows. Of Longfellow she wrote, "His characters want vigour. They are passionless and collected as if they were walking in a trance." Of Middlemarch, "Will Ladislaw is charming, but somehow although a great deal is said of the passion between him & Dorothea one fails all through to feel its power. When it was so dangerous to love at all, they might have loved a little more!"

A lowbrow - okay, resolutely post-modern - reader like me might wonder what the teen Edith would have thought of Gossip Girl, which author Cecily Von Ziegesar has cited as an inspiration, especially now that the TV show has made the parallel so cheekily plain in that play episode. Maybe she wouldn't have minded: Despite her incisive tastes, Mead mentions that she was a fan of popular fiction of the time, describing it in terms that cry "guilty pleasure." Certainly both deal with the manners of rarified New York society. And the relationship Wharton maintained throughout her life to the apparently devoted governess is reminiscent of Blair and her long-suffering servant Daroda. But what's so striking, reading about young Edith Wharton, is how incredibly impressive she was: while she may have played up the anti-intellectualism of her childhood home for dramatic effect, it's still true that she was undoubtedly self-motivated, ambitious, self-confident. In an era where conformity was encouraged, she flouted it, seeking her own success and later a divorce in a time when both were unusual and neither was regarded as necessary to a wealthy woman's happiness. Wharton's novels dealt with a world trapped by convention, something she recognized even as a young girl. What would she have made of young women limiting themselves to the same conventions in a time when they have more options? It's funny: Edith Wharton found the drama by exposing the passions below the surface. Gossip Girl imposes artificially archaic structures on its characters because we take the freedom of emotional drama for granted. Gossip Girl's a fun show, but teen Wharton shows the futility of comparison, methinks. Or to quote The House of Mirth, which Von Ziegesar calls the show's basis: "No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity."

The Age of Innocence [New Yorker]

Writes the guy whom we'll call "Get Off My Lawn, Tramps!" :

Just from attending Riverbend on Friday night has confirmed to me the way today's youth is either allowed to act, or chooses to act behind parent's backs. The amount of females between the ages of 12-17 that were dressed like street walkers was amazing. I have never seen such young girls looking like tramps in my life. I can only imagine what the repercussions would have been if I were a girl of that age, dressing in that manner, that I would have felt if my parents' would have witnessed it. Even as a young adult, with no children, it was disgusting to me what these "girls" were wearing. Parents, pay more attention to how your children are acting, and maybe the headlines would read a little less disturbing. All America needs are more pedophiles preying on your under-aged children who dress like sluts, and put themselves into vulnerable situations like Riverbend.

Fellow Chattanoogans were quick to join in the discourse. Writes one woman, whom we'll call Teen Rambler, it's not just the alleged "girls" fraying Riverbend's moral fiber!

Some people are writing in complaining for different reasons on the behavior or character of the teens they have seen down at Riverbend. For the record, no, I don't approve of some of the things these children are doing or the way some are dressed. But they are not the only ones showing inappropriate behavior. The majority of adults down there are smoking (and not just cigs), drinking and getting wasted, and a lot of them are dressed worse than some of the teens. So before you start rambling on about the teens, make sure you include all who apply.
...Oh yeah, the kids aren't the only ones fighting either. Everyone that goes to Riverbend needs to act right instead of looking and acting like a bunch of idiots. And one more thing, people get some manners because no one uses any down there.

Luckily, "Good Mom" provides a voice of reason. Well, until she gets onto the "rolls of fat galore" issue.

I am a mother of two teenage girls, and when they went shopping for their outfits to wear to the Strut, I was right there. I would even trust them going by themselves because they know what is appropriate for their age. Now to call these young ladies tramps and sluts is going a little bit too far. They may not have the guidance like others girls. We have to also look at the clothing that is being made today...I saw women and girls who were over weight and had rolls of fat galore (which I have myself) who where inappropriately dressed as well. I get disgusted when I see women who wear low rise jeans showing their butt cracks, tarts, and fat rolls, but I don't call them tramps. They just need some guidance on what is the right thing to wear for their body types...It is true, mothers should pay attention to what their daughters are wearing, but not because of some pervert - if a man is going to rape you, it is a psychological thing. It is not because of how you are dressed. It is about respecting yourself and being presentable. I'm just glad they weren't getting busted for carrying drugs and shooting people.

But then, thank goodness, the citizen whom we'll call "Sonofa" puts his finger on the real culprit.

I blame a lot of the immodesty problem on preachers. Most preachers never open their mouths anymore about sinful immodesty, yet I Timothy 2:9 and Deuteronomy 22:5 are still in my King James Bible. When preaching declines, morals decline. Too many preachers now are more concerned about their paycheck, prestige and popularity than they are about telling the truth. May God give us preachers who aren't afraid to name sin specifically and not just in general.

Well, now that that's resolved! We'll see you at Riverbend - because someone needs to find himself on the a little educatin' - and apparently he'll be there, watching judging the tramps!

Young Tramps At Riverbend - And Response (3) [Chattanoogan]

So in this piece in the Telegraph, Christopher Howse notes that the digital age is doing a number - not shockingly - on snail mail, and as such love letters are an endangered species. Which, he adds, is awesome. Because other people's love letters are embarrassing, and in any case good correspondence provides perfectly adequate reading-between-the-lines proof of affection without the slop, thanks very much. Quoth the curmudgeon,

perhaps love letters will be the last to disappear, for being in love preserves antique behaviour: dining out, dressing up, being polite, even writing poetry. The poetry will be bad, not for lack of feeling but for lack of skill, and so will the love letters. Like other people's holiday snaps, they suggest a whole world of shared experience that we outsiders cannot share. Digital cameras mean the death of old snaps and digitalia are killing love letters. And I, for one, shan't mourn them.

Unlike Howse, most of us are aware that the advent of email meant a resurgence in quotidian correspondence, and if there was a dry patch for a while there, well, now we've got as many revelations and day-to-day details and secrets as the biographers of tomorrow could wish for, at least as much of it preserved in perpetuity as the more ephemeral correspondence of yesteryear. Sure, stuff gets erased; but then, stuff used to get burned. But the man raises a good point: the internet doesn't really lend itself to love letters. For all the risks of drunk-emailing and the manifold indiscretions technology encourages, poetry doesn't tend to be one of them. Sure, there are unwise late-night confessions of interest, but is that really the same thing?

Weirdly, though, the breakup missive is flourishing. (See: Crap Email From a Dude...or that book Anna did!) I'm not even talking drunk, insulting ramblings, here, although I guess those are a sub-genre. Rather, we're discussing the antithesis of the love letter, a detached, deliberate statement of vitriol. Part of why breakups rate this, I think, is that such emails are often couched in terms of practicalities, like, "let's work out this rent issue, and by the way, here's why you suck as a human being." Email is also particularly well-suited to snideness; as everyone knows, it takes a ton of exclamation points and one smiley face more than you mean even to convey warmth; passive-aggressive curtness is so much easier. If you're a communal type, you can read it over, even get second opinions - something one would not do with a love letter. Most of all, email is casual: a dismissive email has the double effect of showing that you don't really care, whereas a letter would imply a telling expenditure of effort.

Best part? As a recipient, you can erase instantly. And without the risk of setting off the smoke alarm.

A Fond Farewell [Telegraph]

Perhaps best known for his tetrology of Rabbit novels, the Pennsylvania-born Updike was famed for his distinctive, stylized portrayal of contemporary America and a body of work that included 25 novels, 12 story collections, children's books and a wide body of criticism. Updike was known for his mordant observation of suburban mores - particularly adultery - and his political outspokenness. For the latter part of his life, Updike lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, fictionalized in the 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. While he'll leave a gaping hole in the literary landscape, he'd probably appreciate our quoting his own words: "The great thing about the dead, they make space." [CNN, Academy of Achievement, New York Times]