I'll be hosting an online colloquy with Michael D.C. Drout, co-editor of the journal Tolkien Studies, next Thursday at noon. Questions and comments welcome here.

 

 

 

 

 

Slavoj Zizek weighs in on Abu Ghraib. To go by the contributor's note, somebody at In These Times thinks Zizek is actually a psychoanalyst. Well, only in the sense that Freud called "wild" (the sort of thing that worried him).

 

From The Guardian, a smart unpacking of some implications of Susan Sontag's essay on the torture photos.

 

For what it's worth: Over the past few months, I've probably had as much traffic for my review Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others as any other piece in the Archive. 

There is a politics to the affect elicited by these images -- an ideological component to whether you feel disgust or shame.

 

Of course, there are also, undoubtedly, viewers who experience only vicarious gratification. Or the special thrill of self-righteousness at ammouncing that they can see the "truth" of America, caught on film.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the latest issue of The Nation, my friend Scott Sherman has an article about the New York Review of Books. I read it in manuscript, and need to look it over again to see what changed in the meantime.

 

Sorry, no more discussion of it is possible at the moment. I started writing at about 6 a.m.,  finished an article for the Chronicle, and so am, at present, capable of little besides contemplating this inspiring image.

 

Big weekend: I've got the lead review in Newsday (on a much-hyped book on Stalin and the Stalinites) and an itty-bitty piece in the NYTBR.

 

Payment for the latter arrived yesterday. That can only mean one thing: More hillbilly music for the portable CD player.....I'm sorely tempted to track down a boxed set of (mostly) instrumental cuts by Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, whose stuff from the early 1950s is some amazing fusion of swing, proto-rockabilly, and bebop. Check out this review of a recent selection of their work. Very highly recommended. Some of the playing will make your eyes pop out of your head.

 

Stalin.....the New York Times Book Review....and the creativity of displaced white folks at midcentury, determined not to work for a wage if it could possibly be avoided. 

 

Well damn. No need to write an autobiography now (as a couple of friends have been suggesting, tongue evidently not in cheek). That about covers it.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, wait, now I get it.... It took long enough. But finally the little light bulb has gone off over my head, and it now seems clear what has been missing from this site, throughout its first half year.

Check out The University Without Condition....

We've joined the UwC's "alliance of weblogs." (We = me + my book-devouring tapeworms)

This week, discussion begins on the chapter on Dostoevsky in Julia Kristeva's Black Sun. The text of which is available in PDF here. If for some reason you can't download it, drop me a line and I'll forward a copy.

Also worth checking out, for basic orientation, is the discussion of Black Sun in the collection of interviews with Kristeva that Columbia University Press brought out a few years ago.

The series New French Thought is winding things up....The challenge of writing this Hot Type column for the Chronicle didn't just come from squeezing a set of longstanding preoccupations into the very tight strictures of a short, reported article (one that had to be fully comprehensible to someone unfamiliar with anything involved). I also wanted to use the space to alert people already interested in this stuff to some worthwhile projects. Christofferson's book is fascinating. And I really hope an anthology of Rosanvallon happens. His talk at the conference was a high point. Made me wish I could read French without pain.

My review of a book on secularism appeared in yesterday's issue of Newsday.

According to an essay appearing in Slate this week, the situation comedy Friends embodied and defined a generation. Okay, sure. As the credit-card wielding hipster with no meaningful sense of irony, but plenty of "irony," might say: "I'm willing to buy that." 

 

Well before the whole "Gen X" concept/brand made its big debut in the early 1990s, I was trying to come to some kind of understanding of the notion of generational identity by reading Karl Mannheim's big essay. Just tried to find it online, with no luck. But it made a strong and lasting impression, in that Mannheim dealt with really strongly defined cultural and political cohorts. To translate his argument into terms not ordinarily used in the sociology of knowledge: When historical changes are so massive and intense that they whack an entire society upside the head, it's going to make some difference whether you have a clear memory of the pre-whack world order, or if you are relatively new on the scene, so that you are not so much absorbing the shock as living with its aftermath.

 

Mannheim was writing in 1928. A primitive era, before the sitcom had been invented. And yet his ideas speak to us today!

 

Or maybe they don't. When I read "The Problem of Generations" sometime around 1990, it was while trying to work out some understanding of how certain left-wing groups of the 1930s through the 1950s took shape. I wasn't especially interested in my own generational identity -- perhaps because these old guys seemed so much more interesting than any of my peers.

 

Sometime around 1992, the culture industry began working very hard to manufacture a generational identity for people in my age cohort and younger. I was invited to purchase a baseball cap, and to wear it backwards. Having listened to certain bands throughout the previous decade, I was supposed to list my music preferences as "alternative," and to spend a fair amount of energy (not to mention money) making sure that the CDs in my CD player were of a kind probably not known to other people. Later, it was obligatory to know who somebody named "Dave Eggers" was, and to have opinions on him.

 

Unfortunately, I still don't know who he is. Heir to the Better"N Eggs cholestorol-free egg substitute fortune? Is he an "indie rocker"? There are so many points of confusion now, whenever I try to follow a conversation.

 

Part of the problem was no doubt the fact that, just about the time all this stuff was happening (the whole generational-identikit being put together) I fell in love with someone who, to the best of my knowledge, has never in her life made that quotation-marks gesture in the air, or joked about how cliched something was. And when we got married, nobody gave us a CD player.

 

In retrospect, having passed 1992-1999 without spending more than around a hundred bucks on new music may have accounted for just how anomic I became after starting to write full-time. The implicit rules of my social milieu held that I should either like Stereolab or be in a position to say "throw away all your Stereolab CDs and listen to this!" But I could never do so, thinking, as I did, that Stereolab was a manufacturer of stereo equipment. 

 

Given my income as a freelance writer, I was more or less completely disqualified to participate in consumer culture. But that was only "the final determining instance of the economy" ratifying a deep indifference that, with hindsight, looks like social retardation.

 

Since early 2001, when I began having a disposable income, I've certainly pumped a lot of money into the used CD market. Despite which, full participation in "my generation" proves elusive. For example, I have never watched an entire episode of the show Friends. That Lisa Kudrow is sure cute as a bug's ear. But while channel-grazing, I have never been tempted to keep watching. If a sitcom can define a generational identity, I'm afraid that in this case, it does so indirectly, by excluding me from the communion of the laugh track.

 

In Slate, Caitlin Macy writes: "What the show brilliantly identified, in its palatable, mainstream way, is that we are—perhaps more than any before us—a generation that defines itself by its friends." 

 

At one level, this statement embodies the logic best exemplified by Ike's line about how "things are more like they are now than they ever were." My recollection of Mannheim's paper was that it took generational conflict as a decisive factor in the shaping of cultural style. Identity emerging from difference. A clash of worldviews, made inevitable by the incompatability between ways of grasping social experience. And so on. But what Macy is pointing to is not a conflict so much as a continuation.

 

What the Boomers and the Generation X brands ... wait, make that "generations" .... have in common is an insistance that adolescence is not something to endure and get out of the way, but rather an option that can be kept perpetually available. America's sanctioned norm of adolescence is that it is a time when the self can be produced (defined) through conflict with authority figures -- in part as a process of assimilating those authority figures. But come on, that notion is now (to use the ultimate term of contempt) history.

 

What defines authority? According to Richard Sennett, whose book on the topic I reread every so often, authority embodies the combination of power and legitimacy. And he only agency embodying authority now (in the lifeworld of the cohort under discussion here, anyway) is the credit card company.

 

A guess about the future: In the next decade or so, a real generational difference will begin to crystallize out. Why? Because history has indeed been whacking the entire society upside the head. Lots of people haven't noticed. I mean, they saw the TV reports and all. But that's not the same thing. Anybody now at home in the gemeinschaft of a sitcom is going to be on one side of the generational divide. Let's go ahead and call them the clueless farts who are forever young.

 

Not me. Tomorrow I turn 41. And the thought of living in a big old apartment where all my friends stop by uninvited to talk about their romantic lives strikes me as a scene from hell itself.

On Monday, I was interviewed by Rachel Donadio of the New York Observer, who had just learned that the "Arts and Ideas" section of the Times would be shutting down, come September. Her first question was something like: "Did A&I set the pace for intellectual coverage?" There might have been somebody in the world who could have answered "yes" to that. But I honestly have no idea who it would be.

 

My guess is that Ms. Donadio is getting some sleep right now, because she must have been mainlining the coffee to finish her article, which just appeared. Quite the triumph over a killing deadline. (Still, I do wish she had quoted my remark about how many weekends I searched A&I, trying to figure out where the Ideas were hidden.)

 

I've been thinking a lot, for rather a long time now, about the problems involved in what we could call (for want of a better term) the journalism of ideas. Have done a very little writing and speaking in public about it. But if somebody wants to throw some fellowship money this way, I probably have a book on the topic in me, waiting to be unveiled. Or at least a few months' worth of pondering the matter in some writers' colony, or think tank, or something.

 

Anyway, it's interesting to see that others, too, have pondered the mystery of why A&I was so lame, so much of the time. I love the headline that Romenesko gave for its link to the article: "Brainy journos cheer demise of NYT's Arts & Ideas Section." (For those readers who are not "journos," it bears explaining that Romenesko's Media Watch page is the clearing house for professional news, gossip, etc. -- something most journalists check at least once a day.)

 

One aspect of the problem is what I tend to think of as "news desk epistemology," which holds that, in principle, any reporter can "cover" any given development using certain techniques that are more or less equally valid, or at least transposable, from one situation to the next. Whether it is a philosophical debate or the election of a dogcatcher, the journalist brings the same tool-kit to the task of reporting it.

 

Now, there are things about this approach that I do like, at least in the abstract. But it creates all kinds of problems when the "beat" is something less tangible than a war, a scandal, or some other event that is simply "out there," happening in the world, in some relatively unproblematic way. 

 

For one thing, it means that there will be a very strong tendency for cultural coverage to be influenced by the work of publicists. It also means that any given development will be framed in terms of conflict and/or "the hot new trend." (How much do I loathe that expression? More than words can express.) The cumulative effect is stupid-making.

 

Obviously it doesn't have to be that way. A look at some of the cultural coverage in British papers shows that. The readership of, say, The Guardian  is probably not that demographically distinct from the kind of people who read A&I -- but the difference is, as Mark Twain put, that between lightning and the lightning bug.

 

I've got plenty more to say on all this, but it must wait until the sabbatical.

Last night, we're watching that show where Roger Ebert reviews movies alongside some not-terribly-bright guy who writes for the same Chicago paper, and they run some clips from a new film that looks so lame that I can't even remember its title or premise.

Anyway, one clip shows Christopher Walken in a phone booth, playing one of those, you know, Christopher Walken-type characters. And the scene is just riveting, the way they almost always are. (Despite which, the thought of seeing the film itself remains utterly without appeal.)

 

With hindsight, it appears that Rita and I had the idea simulataneously. One of those moments when you Become As One Mind. Don't know if this sort of thing can be patented, but if so, we want to claim joint ownership. Here goes:

 

Somebody should compile a series of videos/DVDs consisting entirely of Christopher Walken scenes. As things now stand, you would have to watch a lot of terrible movies just to get to them. And quite a few of them were direct-to-video releases that might not ever be rereleased. So we're talking potential loss of cinematic heritage, here. The way to slice through this Gordian knot is through an anthology, for which I want to propose as a title The Walken Monologues.

 

If you are reading this, Christopher, have your people contact my people. Make that "our people."

 

**

My article from this week's issue of the Chronicle on the conservative thinker Russell Kirk and his followers has just appeared online. On Thursday, I'll be hosting an online colloquy with W. Wesley McDonald, whose book Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology has just appeared. 

 

This discussion might well get an unusually large readership, including folks who don't ordinarily see the Chronicle. (Afterwards, a link to the transcript will be archived here, along with the others.) 

 

Until starting to work on this piece a couple of months ago, I knew of Kirk only at second hand -- from accounts of the history of American conservatism in general and William F. Buckley and The National Review in particular. My vague impression is that Kirk was probably sort of like George "I'm not an intellectual but I play one on TV" Will.

 

Just for the record, that is totally unfair. (To Kirk, I mean.) As a study in the history of ideas, The Conservative Mind is quirky, but utterly absorbing. The same is true of Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (1971). There is a monograph to be written on the Eliot-Kirk connection. For that matter, it would be good to have an edition of their correspondence.