It is probably true of my readers that, like me, they seek a certain amount of intellectual stimulation. Working and other day-to-day pursuits have always seemed a little repetitious to me; in a way they seem like biding time, and I get a sense that I should be figuring things out better rather than plodding along mindlessly in a routine. There is a tendency in society to reward people for going with the flow and not thinking too much, as in "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous" (Julius Caesar). Life is easier for the employers of docile and compliant workers, and jobs keep people off the streets, where they might commit crimes, join gangs or foment political unrest. I see the American Dream as part of a thought control conspiracy that works better than communist propaganda ever did. In the 1960's, people used to jokingly say "America, land of the home, free of the brave." "Maggie's Farm," by Bob Dylan, has been my theme song ever since I first heard it in 1965. The song ends with these lines:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
Dylan's old rebelliousness still appeals to me, but I parted company with him long ago when it became apparent that he has no interest in ideas and in every way is an anti-intellectual. Although I didn't end up in a career that required much brainpower myself, I have always been interested in ideas and have found it somewhat of a challenge to get intellectual stimulation. Some of the difficulty had to do with living in places like Terre Haute, Indiana and Dixon, Illinois, but even college towns and urban areas seemed to have their limitations. My friends and acquaintances from college were more mentally alert than my co-workers, but you could hardly consider them stimulating conversationalists. Thus I turned to books, periodicals and trips to Europe for my mental health.
Since the 1980's, besides reading a variety of books, I've gone on and off the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, each several times. Currently, besides the Times Literary Supplement and Nature I get most of my journalistic reading from 3 Quarks Daily. I've now had it with the Times Literary Supplement again and am giving up on Nature because most of its articles have very narrow ranges and are extremely technical. I'm going to switch to Boston Review and Nautilus based on a few articles of theirs that I've read. I prefer reading printed pages to screens, and that isn't likely to change. Although I'm fairly happy with 3 Quarks Daily, it doesn't feature many in-depth articles and doesn't come in print. I've mainly given up on Internet discussions, but may still make posts from time to time. In addition to this I continue to read about astronomy, which is literally and figuratively a huge topic.
I seem to have a love-hate relationship with intellectuals. On the one hand they are the best-read people around and have the potential to enlighten you on a variety of topics, but on the other hand they tend to be careerist hacks who don't have an original idea in their heads and use whatever knowledge they possess to divert attention from the fact that they don't know anything important and in most respects behave like trained monkeys. After reading them for years, I find that the literary magazines consist mostly of obscure articles that function much like reality TV for PhDs, in which you might learn, for example, that such-and-such eighteenth century literary figure had a difficult relationship with his wife, which subsequently led to an affair with such-and-such contessa. Whether the literary figure's writing was worth reading in the first place doesn't often come up, and in most instances it probably wasn't worth reading then and is even less worth reading now. You begin to feel as if these articles are parlor games for the damned living in hell. I am lucky to find one in ten articles in literary magazines remotely interesting.
A topic that I tend to avoid is politics, which is quite popular among educated people. I quickly lose interest in these types of discussions, because, as I've said, I don't think that either democracy or capitalism are viable on a long-term basis, and most of this discussion takes them for granted. The so-called left likes democracy, and the so-called right likes capitalism, and there has been no progress on this in my lifetime. I had hopes that scientific people would be an improvement over humanities people, but, while as a group they seem more honest and more likely to find usable solutions to the problems facing mankind, they are locked into a constraining career hierarchy that limits their ability to effect change for the better. There seem to be stupid turf wars over money in research and academia that inhibit the production and implementation of useful ideas on all fronts. The literary and intellectual magazines seem as if they are offshoots of academia that share its weaknesses while adding some of their own, such as selecting articles that will keep them afloat financially whether or not they contain any good ideas.
My hope is that there are more Tony Judts and Czeslaw Miloszes out there who will one day eloquently address the issues of our time, but finding them now seems more difficult than ever.
Showing posts with label NYRB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYRB. Show all posts
Friday, August 28, 2015
Thursday, March 12, 2015
The False Allure of Commercial Writing
Almost everything that you read was produced in a commercial environment. Even if the intentions of an author are purely personal, artistic or altruistic, chances are there is someone in the infrastructure between the author's keyboard and your eyes who is attempting to make money. This situation dates back to the earliest days of publishing, and now, with technological developments, extends more broadly to "content." At this moment, thousands of companies are scrambling to fill the pages not only of printed publications but of online websites. The demand for all kinds of media has grown dramatically in the last decade, and streaming videos, for example, can hardly be produced fast enough to keep up. This creates challenges for discerning consumers of print and other media.
If I were less self-confident, I might be inclined to confess that many of the complaints that I have about writing amount to excessive pickiness. However, I am not making it up when I say that something that I just read seems like regurgitated filler that some editor squeezed out of a hack writer for a price. As I said in an earlier post, over a period of years I gradually became disgusted with The New Yorker, then The New York Times and then The New York Review of Books. Occasionally one might find something in one of these publications that strikes an intellectual or aesthetic chord, but increasingly that became a rarity for me. On the contrary, clickbait is used everywhere on the Internet and is simply a technological update of former sensational headlines in newspapers. What has been disappointing to me is that even the so-called reputable organizations engage in the same tactics, if only with greater subtlety.
The pattern toward disillusionment that I experience with printed or online publications usually goes something like this: initially the title of an article looks promising; the first paragraph or so looks good; as I delve further into it, a lot of extraneous information begins to emerge, often in the form superfluous name-dropping; and finally there is a vague conclusion that seems to leave you back where you started. The New York Times is ostensibly just a news source, but basic news actually takes up only a small fraction of its space. The rest is really filler designed to bring in additional advertising revenue. I don't think I've ever found any of their long articles satisfactory. The New Yorker attempts more thoughtful, in-depth articles and occasionally succeeds, but I find there such a strong emphasis on fashion, whether in ideas, clothes or writing, that it is difficult to take the magazine seriously on any level.
It took me the longest time to figure out The New York Review of Books, probably because it is less mainstream and its editorial policies are opaque. The NYRB is managed so privately that I have had to make guesses and seek outside sources to get a rough idea of what is going on there, and even then it is still hard to know with much certainty. My current theory is that most of the problems there reside in its editor, Robert Silvers. Although Silvers is highly intelligent, extremely well-read and quite discerning, he has specific expectations of what the publication should be and wields dictatorial control over everything that it encompasses. He is said to be the quintessential micro-manager. The impression I have is that his true vocation is editing the articles of writers and thinkers so as to improve upon them in a manner that suits his aesthetic tastes, even when they are better writers or thinkers than he is. What you end up with is a hodgepodge of academics, literary writers and journalists who are willing to put their writing through the Silvers sieve. The result, I find, is that their articles tend to be blander than they might otherwise be. The long essay format of the NYRB is impressive when you first see it, but it rarely produces ruffled feathers or changed minds. The articles leave one feeling that one has encountered a reasonably wide-ranging account of whatever the topic may be, that it is written competently, but that it serves little purpose beyond providing an overview of what the so-called cognoscenti happen to think about a topic at that given moment. Possibly the problem is that Silvers is too entwined with the status quo to rebel much. Thus, at a time when American literary culture is promoting one mediocre writer after another and holding them to the low standards of academia and the publishing industry, Silvers has advanced the careers of Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Marilynne Robinson, and Francine Prose. To be sure, there may be some entertainment value to be found in the works of these authors and others featured by Silvers, but I have never found any of their articles in the NYRB useful, insightful, provocative or thoughtful. In the end, Silvers is an accomplice to literary mediocrity. Part of Silvers' limitation as an editor must reside in his style, but perhaps a part also resides in his age: he's eighty-five.
The NYRB is not the best example of the point I'm making here, because most of its production seems to follow old-fashioned methods. They produce very few articles per month, and the only change in recent years has been their addition of the NYRblog. That is now looking like an afterthought: they wanted to go trendy to avoid looking like the fuddy-duddies that they are, and then decided that it was too much of a hassle to have a real, interactive blog and accordingly stopped accepting comments. So the NYRB is not as commercial as it might be and its true limitations may relate more to the fact that it is saddled to the preferences of one editor who has vested interests in a network of people and a bygone era that I just don't care about. My guess is that the typical NYRB subscriber is an eighty-year-old retired academic in the humanities.
An alternative to commercial writing is the writing in diaries and blogs. At least there you don't have to worry about the corrosive effects of money even when it remains hard to fathom the motives of the writer. Diaries can't usually be read in real-time, so they are comparatively inaccessible. In theory there could be lots of good blogs, but it might be difficult to find them, given their number. The Internet is already full of dead blogs that people gave up on. The advantage of a blog, like this one, is that the writer has no pressure to fit a specific format or please a wide audience. In my case I am writing about things that interest me and I can tell the truth without worrying about any financial ramifications. No one can fire me. If I get my facts all wrong, I would be delighted to have someone straighten me out, but that hasn't happened so far.
No doubt there are plenty of good books to read that are available, but they are increasingly difficult to find because of all the background noise. The commercial connections of the publications mentioned above make the books reviewed in them somewhat suspect. My conclusion is that nearly everything they have to say about American fiction is an obfuscation, a lie or a manifestation of poor literary judgment. In any case, the bright spot for me is nonfiction. I am less likely to become disgruntled about biographies or science books, because in their case it is easier to determine in advance whether a book is good or not, inasmuch as that depends less on subjective opinion than is the case with fiction. To me it is more than a little ironic that some of today's best science writers are better writers than those who are supposedly the best fiction writers. I actually enjoy reading E.O. Wilson, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg and even Richard Dawkins, because they write well. It is an unsupported myth that fiction writers have a monopoly on good writing. For this reason, the next book on my reading list is To Explain the World, by Steven Weinberg. Science writers and biographers may still have commercial motives - their publishers certainly do - but more often their love for their subject takes precedence over the venality one finds in commercial fiction.
If I were less self-confident, I might be inclined to confess that many of the complaints that I have about writing amount to excessive pickiness. However, I am not making it up when I say that something that I just read seems like regurgitated filler that some editor squeezed out of a hack writer for a price. As I said in an earlier post, over a period of years I gradually became disgusted with The New Yorker, then The New York Times and then The New York Review of Books. Occasionally one might find something in one of these publications that strikes an intellectual or aesthetic chord, but increasingly that became a rarity for me. On the contrary, clickbait is used everywhere on the Internet and is simply a technological update of former sensational headlines in newspapers. What has been disappointing to me is that even the so-called reputable organizations engage in the same tactics, if only with greater subtlety.
The pattern toward disillusionment that I experience with printed or online publications usually goes something like this: initially the title of an article looks promising; the first paragraph or so looks good; as I delve further into it, a lot of extraneous information begins to emerge, often in the form superfluous name-dropping; and finally there is a vague conclusion that seems to leave you back where you started. The New York Times is ostensibly just a news source, but basic news actually takes up only a small fraction of its space. The rest is really filler designed to bring in additional advertising revenue. I don't think I've ever found any of their long articles satisfactory. The New Yorker attempts more thoughtful, in-depth articles and occasionally succeeds, but I find there such a strong emphasis on fashion, whether in ideas, clothes or writing, that it is difficult to take the magazine seriously on any level.
It took me the longest time to figure out The New York Review of Books, probably because it is less mainstream and its editorial policies are opaque. The NYRB is managed so privately that I have had to make guesses and seek outside sources to get a rough idea of what is going on there, and even then it is still hard to know with much certainty. My current theory is that most of the problems there reside in its editor, Robert Silvers. Although Silvers is highly intelligent, extremely well-read and quite discerning, he has specific expectations of what the publication should be and wields dictatorial control over everything that it encompasses. He is said to be the quintessential micro-manager. The impression I have is that his true vocation is editing the articles of writers and thinkers so as to improve upon them in a manner that suits his aesthetic tastes, even when they are better writers or thinkers than he is. What you end up with is a hodgepodge of academics, literary writers and journalists who are willing to put their writing through the Silvers sieve. The result, I find, is that their articles tend to be blander than they might otherwise be. The long essay format of the NYRB is impressive when you first see it, but it rarely produces ruffled feathers or changed minds. The articles leave one feeling that one has encountered a reasonably wide-ranging account of whatever the topic may be, that it is written competently, but that it serves little purpose beyond providing an overview of what the so-called cognoscenti happen to think about a topic at that given moment. Possibly the problem is that Silvers is too entwined with the status quo to rebel much. Thus, at a time when American literary culture is promoting one mediocre writer after another and holding them to the low standards of academia and the publishing industry, Silvers has advanced the careers of Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Marilynne Robinson, and Francine Prose. To be sure, there may be some entertainment value to be found in the works of these authors and others featured by Silvers, but I have never found any of their articles in the NYRB useful, insightful, provocative or thoughtful. In the end, Silvers is an accomplice to literary mediocrity. Part of Silvers' limitation as an editor must reside in his style, but perhaps a part also resides in his age: he's eighty-five.
The NYRB is not the best example of the point I'm making here, because most of its production seems to follow old-fashioned methods. They produce very few articles per month, and the only change in recent years has been their addition of the NYRblog. That is now looking like an afterthought: they wanted to go trendy to avoid looking like the fuddy-duddies that they are, and then decided that it was too much of a hassle to have a real, interactive blog and accordingly stopped accepting comments. So the NYRB is not as commercial as it might be and its true limitations may relate more to the fact that it is saddled to the preferences of one editor who has vested interests in a network of people and a bygone era that I just don't care about. My guess is that the typical NYRB subscriber is an eighty-year-old retired academic in the humanities.
An alternative to commercial writing is the writing in diaries and blogs. At least there you don't have to worry about the corrosive effects of money even when it remains hard to fathom the motives of the writer. Diaries can't usually be read in real-time, so they are comparatively inaccessible. In theory there could be lots of good blogs, but it might be difficult to find them, given their number. The Internet is already full of dead blogs that people gave up on. The advantage of a blog, like this one, is that the writer has no pressure to fit a specific format or please a wide audience. In my case I am writing about things that interest me and I can tell the truth without worrying about any financial ramifications. No one can fire me. If I get my facts all wrong, I would be delighted to have someone straighten me out, but that hasn't happened so far.
No doubt there are plenty of good books to read that are available, but they are increasingly difficult to find because of all the background noise. The commercial connections of the publications mentioned above make the books reviewed in them somewhat suspect. My conclusion is that nearly everything they have to say about American fiction is an obfuscation, a lie or a manifestation of poor literary judgment. In any case, the bright spot for me is nonfiction. I am less likely to become disgruntled about biographies or science books, because in their case it is easier to determine in advance whether a book is good or not, inasmuch as that depends less on subjective opinion than is the case with fiction. To me it is more than a little ironic that some of today's best science writers are better writers than those who are supposedly the best fiction writers. I actually enjoy reading E.O. Wilson, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg and even Richard Dawkins, because they write well. It is an unsupported myth that fiction writers have a monopoly on good writing. For this reason, the next book on my reading list is To Explain the World, by Steven Weinberg. Science writers and biographers may still have commercial motives - their publishers certainly do - but more often their love for their subject takes precedence over the venality one finds in commercial fiction.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Internet Discussion II
Over the last year, most of what little writing I've done has appeared on this blog. Occasionally I've posted comments on other sites, but I've come to prefer posting here because it is more peaceful and I don't get the unsettling sense of looming chaos or confrontation that I often encounter elsewhere. My posting experience goes back almost nine years to mid-2006, during which time I've posted on a wide variety of websites, and I am now inclined to restrict myself to my own. The heavily-moderated sites such as the NYRblog once seemed promising, but the fact of the matter is that most of the articles and comments there were not particularly interesting to me and the time lag between posting, moderation and appearance of the post made the process painfully slow. Moreover, the editorial policies at the NYRB encourage a special kind of pretentiousness, and they have very little going on there that captures my interest, especially since Tony Judt died. In any case, they have now completely stopped accepting comments, which means to me that they don't really care about their readers and probably don't care much about the discussion of ideas either. I am privately hoping for the imminent deaths of Robert Silvers and his publisher.
Since leaving the NYRblog, I've regularly been reading 3 Quarks Daily. This is an improvement over the NYRblog, but it has its own set of limitations. Overall I think their selection of articles from across the web is quite good, but the commenting and discussion there are not noteworthy. On Mondays they feature their own authors, who, in my opinion, are substantially less interesting than those who appear on other days. Several Monday contributors seem to be second- or third-tier academics who are attempting to use the site to advance their careers. S. Abbas Raza, the founding editor, is doing a good job, but there is a disproportional representation on the site of his friends and relatives, which makes it seem insufferably cliquish at times. Very few people comment there regularly, and the regulars each seem to have different agendas that don't complement each other. One commenter regularly attempts to lure readers to his blog with links. Another commenter always presents a formal academic facade and lists references with each post; his avatar is a photo of himself wearing a jacket and tie, as if he were on his way to a job interview. As with all websites, any discussion tends to be weak and uninteresting, often with very little real communication between participants.
Another disappointment I've had has been with The Chronicle of Higher Education website. When I first chanced upon it about a year ago I was impressed. The level of discussion was better than most. The scope of the site is constricted by its focus on academic topics, but the articles are generally of good quality, and the comments, at least initially, seemed above average. However, the site apparently has little or no moderation, and in the course of a year the comments have turned into a free-for-all. The impression I get is that at any given moment there is an enormous pack of Internet hooligans frantically searching for an outlet to vent their frustrations and inform the world of their innate superiority. The presence of shrieking brats on an education-oriented site triggers a serious case of cognitive dissonance in me, and I have no reason to put up with it.
I used to think that it would be possible to construct a widely-read website that had good articles and good comments that were posted in a timely manner. It now looks as if there are forces working against that. Predictably, capitalism, particularly in the U.S., creates products that are compromised in design from their inception when the underlying goal is profit maximization. It is difficult enough to create a website that generates profits, but practically impossible to create a website that appeals only to a few discerning, well-behaved readers and still run a profit. In this general area you have at one end the NYRblog, which has clearly indicated its complete indifference to its web readers, probably because any money spent there is not money well spent, and at the other end you have The Chronicle of Higher Education website, which has caved in to a rowdy mob of web readers rather than make an effort to maintain a minimum standard of quality. I think it would probably be possible to design and manage a very high quality website that had excellent articles and comments, but no one has much incentive to do that because it would most likely lose money.
Therefore, for the time being at least, I intend to confine my writing exclusively to this blog. If you know of or come across a site that you think I might like, please let me know, and I'll take a look. Since I will no longer be posting elsewhere using my Disqus account, which shows this blog address, not many new people will find out about this blog, and it will probably remain very cozy indeed.
Since leaving the NYRblog, I've regularly been reading 3 Quarks Daily. This is an improvement over the NYRblog, but it has its own set of limitations. Overall I think their selection of articles from across the web is quite good, but the commenting and discussion there are not noteworthy. On Mondays they feature their own authors, who, in my opinion, are substantially less interesting than those who appear on other days. Several Monday contributors seem to be second- or third-tier academics who are attempting to use the site to advance their careers. S. Abbas Raza, the founding editor, is doing a good job, but there is a disproportional representation on the site of his friends and relatives, which makes it seem insufferably cliquish at times. Very few people comment there regularly, and the regulars each seem to have different agendas that don't complement each other. One commenter regularly attempts to lure readers to his blog with links. Another commenter always presents a formal academic facade and lists references with each post; his avatar is a photo of himself wearing a jacket and tie, as if he were on his way to a job interview. As with all websites, any discussion tends to be weak and uninteresting, often with very little real communication between participants.
Another disappointment I've had has been with The Chronicle of Higher Education website. When I first chanced upon it about a year ago I was impressed. The level of discussion was better than most. The scope of the site is constricted by its focus on academic topics, but the articles are generally of good quality, and the comments, at least initially, seemed above average. However, the site apparently has little or no moderation, and in the course of a year the comments have turned into a free-for-all. The impression I get is that at any given moment there is an enormous pack of Internet hooligans frantically searching for an outlet to vent their frustrations and inform the world of their innate superiority. The presence of shrieking brats on an education-oriented site triggers a serious case of cognitive dissonance in me, and I have no reason to put up with it.
I used to think that it would be possible to construct a widely-read website that had good articles and good comments that were posted in a timely manner. It now looks as if there are forces working against that. Predictably, capitalism, particularly in the U.S., creates products that are compromised in design from their inception when the underlying goal is profit maximization. It is difficult enough to create a website that generates profits, but practically impossible to create a website that appeals only to a few discerning, well-behaved readers and still run a profit. In this general area you have at one end the NYRblog, which has clearly indicated its complete indifference to its web readers, probably because any money spent there is not money well spent, and at the other end you have The Chronicle of Higher Education website, which has caved in to a rowdy mob of web readers rather than make an effort to maintain a minimum standard of quality. I think it would probably be possible to design and manage a very high quality website that had excellent articles and comments, but no one has much incentive to do that because it would most likely lose money.
Therefore, for the time being at least, I intend to confine my writing exclusively to this blog. If you know of or come across a site that you think I might like, please let me know, and I'll take a look. Since I will no longer be posting elsewhere using my Disqus account, which shows this blog address, not many new people will find out about this blog, and it will probably remain very cozy indeed.
Monday, November 10, 2014
A Poet's Anecdote
As you may have noticed from my selection of poems, I'm a fan of Denise Levertov. I know a bit about her history but am still in the process exploring it and will write more in the future. For the time being I thought I ought to mention a quote that I recently came across, because it relates to some of my other posts.
For an outsider it is a little difficult to see how the publishing industry works. Like any industry, there is probably a lot of "If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." You have to be chummy with the right people and do them favors. This applied to Denise Levertov as much as anyone else. One of her former students, Mark Pawlak, recounts this conversation he had with her in 1975:
I asked Denise why it is that I have never seen one of her books reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. "About ten years ago," she explained, "they used to regularly ask me to write reviews. I did it for a while but found such reviewing to be making catty remarks about other authors, and that became distasteful to me. I eventually made a pact with myself not to do so any longer and began to turn down the offers from the Times, until they realized what was up and they stopped asking me. I think the editors were offended that I would turn them down because they never once since have run a review of any of my books, which they always used to do.
This is interesting, because even though Levertov is not exactly a household name, she was then and still is recognized as a major poet and regularly appears in anthologies of twentieth century American poets. While it may be obvious to insiders, casual readers of the Times may never realize how biased it can be in the selection of books to review. As an observer of the NYRB, I get the sense that similar activities occur behind the scenes there too. The NYRB seems to seek something that resembles exclusive rights on celebrity writers and public intellectuals, and it then represents them like a record producer so that the author and the publication both glow in unison as icons of the literary elite. In the case of the NYRB, which deals with a much narrower range of writers and books than the Times, there seems to be a specific emphasis on increasing the prestige of the publication. From both the Times and the NYRB, and probably The New Yorker, the reader may get a false sense of the cutting edge. The underlying activities are ultimately those of smarmy businessmen plying their trades. Those who take it all in uncritically are not entirely different from rednecks in pickups who listen to Rush Limbaugh on their radios.
One of the things I like about Levertov's poems is their honesty. As an honest person myself, I have long recognized that there is a price to pay for it.
For an outsider it is a little difficult to see how the publishing industry works. Like any industry, there is probably a lot of "If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." You have to be chummy with the right people and do them favors. This applied to Denise Levertov as much as anyone else. One of her former students, Mark Pawlak, recounts this conversation he had with her in 1975:
I asked Denise why it is that I have never seen one of her books reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. "About ten years ago," she explained, "they used to regularly ask me to write reviews. I did it for a while but found such reviewing to be making catty remarks about other authors, and that became distasteful to me. I eventually made a pact with myself not to do so any longer and began to turn down the offers from the Times, until they realized what was up and they stopped asking me. I think the editors were offended that I would turn them down because they never once since have run a review of any of my books, which they always used to do.
This is interesting, because even though Levertov is not exactly a household name, she was then and still is recognized as a major poet and regularly appears in anthologies of twentieth century American poets. While it may be obvious to insiders, casual readers of the Times may never realize how biased it can be in the selection of books to review. As an observer of the NYRB, I get the sense that similar activities occur behind the scenes there too. The NYRB seems to seek something that resembles exclusive rights on celebrity writers and public intellectuals, and it then represents them like a record producer so that the author and the publication both glow in unison as icons of the literary elite. In the case of the NYRB, which deals with a much narrower range of writers and books than the Times, there seems to be a specific emphasis on increasing the prestige of the publication. From both the Times and the NYRB, and probably The New Yorker, the reader may get a false sense of the cutting edge. The underlying activities are ultimately those of smarmy businessmen plying their trades. Those who take it all in uncritically are not entirely different from rednecks in pickups who listen to Rush Limbaugh on their radios.
One of the things I like about Levertov's poems is their honesty. As an honest person myself, I have long recognized that there is a price to pay for it.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
The Meaning of Human Existence
I just finished reading the book of the above title by Edward O. Wilson. He is my favorite science writer because he writes well, has the perspective of a naturalist, tends to be honest, and is willing to address big questions. There is little new here, and several of the chapters appeared earlier as separate essays. However, this is a good summary of his views on humanity if you're unfamiliar with them.
Wilson's primary competence is in entomology, and he is a world expert on ants. This led him to study social behavior in the animal kingdom, and eventually he connected his findings to humans. He has noted the evolutionary advantage held by eusocial species and how it relates to us. Eusocial insects make up most of the biomass of all living insects, and humans have similarly come to dominate the planet.
As a writer of popular science books, Wilson has a history of running into trouble with both the general public and the scientific community. He has been accused of overgeneralizing ever since the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, in which he first drew the connection between insects and humans. People don't like being told that they have instincts similar to ants or how they evolved to their present state. In the early years, he was a victim of political correctness. He was accused of supporting misogyny, racism and eugenics, none of which was true, and a protesting Marxist once poured a pitcher of water on his head. More recently he has been criticized by the evolutionary biology community for discarding their sacred principle of inclusive fitness and replacing it with what he calls group selection or multi-level selection. In the appendix of the current book he summarizes research that supports his position.
Some chapters are more convincing than others in this book. While it is sprinkled with interesting facts about various insect species, the main subject is humans. One of Wilson's more recent ideas is that people tend to be both good and evil in the traditional senses in a predictable eusocial way. We are usually altruistic when it comes to defending our group against other groups, but within our own group we may act out of self-interest. This seems somewhat plausible to me. For example, some people travel to distant regions where they will be killed thinking that they are defending their own country, while at home they may lie on job applications, cheat on their income taxes and steal their best friends' girlfriends. Within the U.S. itself there are sub-groups that compete, such as the Tea Party and the Democrats. Wilson places a great deal of emphasis on the role that group affiliation plays in behavior, and it rings true. Perhaps the most convincing passages, to me anyway, have to do with religion. I completely agree with Wilson, who says that religious groups, insofar as they engage in destructive activities, are currently one of the most disruptive forces in the world. Basically, most religious ideas regarding the nature of the universe represent utter stupidity in light of the findings of science. Here, Wilson hopes that the differences can someday be talked out, but that seems highly unlikely. He laments, as I do, that all political discourse in this country requires respect for conventional religious views, no matter how ridiculous they are.
Wilson's newest ideas aren't necessarily his best. He devotes a chapter to what he thinks intelligent extraterrestrials are like. In this vein he assumes that the chemical and biological processes of the habitable planets within a few hundred light years from here will produce intelligent beings, if they do so at all, that are quite similar to us. Those that we may eventually come into contact with will not be interested in our science and technology, and he seems to think that they will be cultural hobbyists who will derive pleasure from finding out about us. Colonization would not be on their minds, because of the risks on Earth associated with organisms and ecosystems to which they are not adapted. Furthermore, he does not believe that it is advisable, either to us or to aliens, to physically enhance ourselves to excess. It is possible that Wilson is right about this, but he is so speculative that I put little credence in his views here. We seem to be approaching evolutionary crossroads, and do not yet know whether some humans will turn themselves into superhumans, which would contradict Wilson's expectations. Similarly, I think it is quite possible that intelligent extraterrestrials may have no interest whatsoever in humans; they may not want to visit Earth, remotely or in person. I agree with Wilson, though, that they probably do exist.
Another point that Wilson brings up that is of interest to me is the current dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities. This was the main topic in his earlier book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. As a scientist, he is most charitable towards the humanities and thinks that they are our future, because scientific knowledge is accumulating so rapidly that it will soon slow down and become less relevant to our daily lives. However, he doesn't give a free pass to those who study the humanities either. He traces, correctly I think, a schism between the two domains that dates back to the Romantics in the early nineteenth century. They diverted the path of the Enlightenment and created the "two cultures" described by C.P. Snow in 1959. From Wilson's point of view, scientists need to round out their perspective by studying the humanities, and those in the humanities need to understand science better. Although I have interests in both camps, in recent years I have been deeply disappointed by the lack of engagement with the real world by practitioners of various disciplines in the humanities.
I have to say that Wilson is one of the few public intellectuals for whom I have great respect. Although he has and admits to weaknesses as a human being, he rose to his current sphere of influence through honest hard work and a genuine sense of curiosity. Frankly I don't see anyone comparable in the conventional cohort of public intellectuals, including the contributors to the NYRB. Most academics are comparatively worthless when it comes to discussing the big-picture questions and problems facing humanity. Considering that this type of discussion rarely occurs on TV, and never among politicians or well-known public figures, the state of affairs is scandalous. It is appalling to me that so few people attempt to address them. When Wilson, who is 85, leaves the scene, there may be no one to replace him.
Wilson's primary competence is in entomology, and he is a world expert on ants. This led him to study social behavior in the animal kingdom, and eventually he connected his findings to humans. He has noted the evolutionary advantage held by eusocial species and how it relates to us. Eusocial insects make up most of the biomass of all living insects, and humans have similarly come to dominate the planet.
As a writer of popular science books, Wilson has a history of running into trouble with both the general public and the scientific community. He has been accused of overgeneralizing ever since the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, in which he first drew the connection between insects and humans. People don't like being told that they have instincts similar to ants or how they evolved to their present state. In the early years, he was a victim of political correctness. He was accused of supporting misogyny, racism and eugenics, none of which was true, and a protesting Marxist once poured a pitcher of water on his head. More recently he has been criticized by the evolutionary biology community for discarding their sacred principle of inclusive fitness and replacing it with what he calls group selection or multi-level selection. In the appendix of the current book he summarizes research that supports his position.
Some chapters are more convincing than others in this book. While it is sprinkled with interesting facts about various insect species, the main subject is humans. One of Wilson's more recent ideas is that people tend to be both good and evil in the traditional senses in a predictable eusocial way. We are usually altruistic when it comes to defending our group against other groups, but within our own group we may act out of self-interest. This seems somewhat plausible to me. For example, some people travel to distant regions where they will be killed thinking that they are defending their own country, while at home they may lie on job applications, cheat on their income taxes and steal their best friends' girlfriends. Within the U.S. itself there are sub-groups that compete, such as the Tea Party and the Democrats. Wilson places a great deal of emphasis on the role that group affiliation plays in behavior, and it rings true. Perhaps the most convincing passages, to me anyway, have to do with religion. I completely agree with Wilson, who says that religious groups, insofar as they engage in destructive activities, are currently one of the most disruptive forces in the world. Basically, most religious ideas regarding the nature of the universe represent utter stupidity in light of the findings of science. Here, Wilson hopes that the differences can someday be talked out, but that seems highly unlikely. He laments, as I do, that all political discourse in this country requires respect for conventional religious views, no matter how ridiculous they are.
Wilson's newest ideas aren't necessarily his best. He devotes a chapter to what he thinks intelligent extraterrestrials are like. In this vein he assumes that the chemical and biological processes of the habitable planets within a few hundred light years from here will produce intelligent beings, if they do so at all, that are quite similar to us. Those that we may eventually come into contact with will not be interested in our science and technology, and he seems to think that they will be cultural hobbyists who will derive pleasure from finding out about us. Colonization would not be on their minds, because of the risks on Earth associated with organisms and ecosystems to which they are not adapted. Furthermore, he does not believe that it is advisable, either to us or to aliens, to physically enhance ourselves to excess. It is possible that Wilson is right about this, but he is so speculative that I put little credence in his views here. We seem to be approaching evolutionary crossroads, and do not yet know whether some humans will turn themselves into superhumans, which would contradict Wilson's expectations. Similarly, I think it is quite possible that intelligent extraterrestrials may have no interest whatsoever in humans; they may not want to visit Earth, remotely or in person. I agree with Wilson, though, that they probably do exist.
Another point that Wilson brings up that is of interest to me is the current dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities. This was the main topic in his earlier book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. As a scientist, he is most charitable towards the humanities and thinks that they are our future, because scientific knowledge is accumulating so rapidly that it will soon slow down and become less relevant to our daily lives. However, he doesn't give a free pass to those who study the humanities either. He traces, correctly I think, a schism between the two domains that dates back to the Romantics in the early nineteenth century. They diverted the path of the Enlightenment and created the "two cultures" described by C.P. Snow in 1959. From Wilson's point of view, scientists need to round out their perspective by studying the humanities, and those in the humanities need to understand science better. Although I have interests in both camps, in recent years I have been deeply disappointed by the lack of engagement with the real world by practitioners of various disciplines in the humanities.
I have to say that Wilson is one of the few public intellectuals for whom I have great respect. Although he has and admits to weaknesses as a human being, he rose to his current sphere of influence through honest hard work and a genuine sense of curiosity. Frankly I don't see anyone comparable in the conventional cohort of public intellectuals, including the contributors to the NYRB. Most academics are comparatively worthless when it comes to discussing the big-picture questions and problems facing humanity. Considering that this type of discussion rarely occurs on TV, and never among politicians or well-known public figures, the state of affairs is scandalous. It is appalling to me that so few people attempt to address them. When Wilson, who is 85, leaves the scene, there may be no one to replace him.
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Critics
Not long ago I watched the Robert Hughes documentary The Mona Lisa Curse. I can't convey the extent of my affinity for Hughes; I grew up in New York during the period discussed and in fact first saw the Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963, which is Hughes's point of departure. The main idea of the film is that money has destroyed the art world by transforming art into an investment for the wealthy, controlled by dealers who are out to make a profit. To me, Hughes is a model critic: he knows his subject well, is passionate about it, and has the courage of his convictions. I can't say that I always agree with him, but, unlike most critics, he has useful knowledge to impart. At the end he directly challenges an ignorant, wealthy art buyer, which is not something that you often see these days. It is telling that this was not shown in the U.S. when it was released. Like Hughes, I am appalled by the art world, and I have completely lost interest in modern art. As far as I know, Hughes, who died in 2012, has no successor.
What strikes me is the apparent absence of critics like Robert Hughes. Not only do they seem to have disappeared from the world of paintings, but they seem to be in thin supply across all of the arts. Criticism seems to have become a self-serving job for whoever manages to obtain one. As mentioned in an earlier post, Lorrie Moore's short story collection, Bark, which documents her continued stagnation and decline as a writer, nevertheless received many favorable reviews. The book was shortlisted for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which, thankfully, it lost. I can't understand how anyone with good literary judgment could have recommended it. Where were the critics?
I don't follow architecture, but was gratified to see that Martin Filler, the architecture critic for the NYRB, recently got his comeuppance. He usually has little of value to say, and he tends to write biased articles. However, in this instance he was called out by the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, who forced him to make a retraction. Filler works under an editor who feigns intellectual substance but is more precisely a graying impresario presiding over a decaying literary publication. Though I don't know enough about Zaha Hadid to say anything in her defense, I appreciate the steps she took to bring accountability to Filler.
In recent years I have had to develop convoluted, time-consuming methods to determine what art, fiction, music or film I might enjoy partaking in. I have found that reading a review - or several reviews - is no guarantee that I will have sufficient information to determine whether I would find a particular work worth reading, hearing or seeing. Thus, after a concentrated effort over a number of years, I now refrain from wasting my time on reviews, except to read them for entertainment. My expectation is that if something of great artistic merit should materialize, I may only come across it by accident. What does this say about the value of critics?
Money has obviously corrupted the visual arts, but what about the others? It seems that it has done damage there too. If there is any good new fiction, I haven't seen it, though I must confess to liking Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, which, not coincidentally, is a satire of the art world; Houellebecq may have been influenced by Hughes. The same goes for music, which, as far as I can tell, is going nowhere. Film is a more problematic area to sum up, because it seems to have become the central art form of our time. Thus, auteur directors such as Éric Rohmer, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman have become de facto major artists, while mainstream directors such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron have enormous box office success and still gain the approval of most critics. Film critics are showing us their penchant for touting the blockbusters: that's where the money is. It is easy to understand why a critic might not be effusive about Éric Rohmer, yet in my opinion he is one of the best filmmakers ever, even with his limitations.
What strikes me is the apparent absence of critics like Robert Hughes. Not only do they seem to have disappeared from the world of paintings, but they seem to be in thin supply across all of the arts. Criticism seems to have become a self-serving job for whoever manages to obtain one. As mentioned in an earlier post, Lorrie Moore's short story collection, Bark, which documents her continued stagnation and decline as a writer, nevertheless received many favorable reviews. The book was shortlisted for The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, which, thankfully, it lost. I can't understand how anyone with good literary judgment could have recommended it. Where were the critics?
I don't follow architecture, but was gratified to see that Martin Filler, the architecture critic for the NYRB, recently got his comeuppance. He usually has little of value to say, and he tends to write biased articles. However, in this instance he was called out by the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, who forced him to make a retraction. Filler works under an editor who feigns intellectual substance but is more precisely a graying impresario presiding over a decaying literary publication. Though I don't know enough about Zaha Hadid to say anything in her defense, I appreciate the steps she took to bring accountability to Filler.
In recent years I have had to develop convoluted, time-consuming methods to determine what art, fiction, music or film I might enjoy partaking in. I have found that reading a review - or several reviews - is no guarantee that I will have sufficient information to determine whether I would find a particular work worth reading, hearing or seeing. Thus, after a concentrated effort over a number of years, I now refrain from wasting my time on reviews, except to read them for entertainment. My expectation is that if something of great artistic merit should materialize, I may only come across it by accident. What does this say about the value of critics?
Money has obviously corrupted the visual arts, but what about the others? It seems that it has done damage there too. If there is any good new fiction, I haven't seen it, though I must confess to liking Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, which, not coincidentally, is a satire of the art world; Houellebecq may have been influenced by Hughes. The same goes for music, which, as far as I can tell, is going nowhere. Film is a more problematic area to sum up, because it seems to have become the central art form of our time. Thus, auteur directors such as Éric Rohmer, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and Milos Forman have become de facto major artists, while mainstream directors such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron have enormous box office success and still gain the approval of most critics. Film critics are showing us their penchant for touting the blockbusters: that's where the money is. It is easy to understand why a critic might not be effusive about Éric Rohmer, yet in my opinion he is one of the best filmmakers ever, even with his limitations.
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Confirmation Bias
When I engage in activities such as this blog, because of my nature, I am usually conducting experiments in the back of my mind. One of those experiments relates to studying the Internet for its possibilities as a useful entity. Since I started the blog, I have been looking at websites that I hadn't seen before. I now believe that earlier I was inappropriately fixated on the NYRB and its blog, and that I had been laboring under some illusions regarding the NYRB's nature and intellectual integrity. Probably because it was one of the few places where one could find in-depth, well-written articles on a variety of topics, and because writers whom I respected such as Tony Judt and Freeman Dyson were contributors, I lulled myself into a false sense of its quality and openness. After examining a variety of websites, I now think that the NYRB is a limited organization that caters to a narrow group, and that most of the ideas that you find there are predictable, because they are the views that their readers want confirmed. There is nothing whatsoever about it that might be construed as cutting-edge.
Beyond the content of the articles in a publication, one gets a sense of its readership from its blog posts. The NYRB appeals to well-educated, relatively affluent liberals who like high quality and think of themselves as having broad interests, though they actually care mainly about hot-button liberal issues and some of the humanities, particularly from an academic viewpoint. They don't care much about science or empirical arguments. This flies in the face of the NYRB's image as a paragon of the open exchange of big ideas. Other less pretentious sites, particularly 3 Quarks Daily, have broader intellectual appeal. The latter attracts people who are interested in the sciences and philosophy, but also leaves room for virtually all of the humanities. From the standpoint of blog commenting, 3 Quarks Daily is far more open, because it allows posters to post without moderation. Like all websites, it has limitations, but by drawing from many websites, being well-managed, and placing little emphasis on image control, it is much more appealing to me than the NYRB.
Confirmation bias is a topic that has been widely discussed in recent years. I came across it in the context of economics, which now has a branch called behavioral economics, a break from the past, when most economists assumed that people always acted in rational self-interest. They've finally realized that irrationality pervades human life, and they are now rethinking some of their earlier ideas. This research focuses mainly on investor behavior, where, for example, men tend to be unrealistically confident, and women tend to be unrealistically risk-averse. There is now an entire industry based on making money from your investment mistakes. On a broader scale, confirmation bias relates to many other human behaviors, but decision-making is its focus in economics.
In a speculative, anecdotal way, I have been trying to determine what kind of person, if there is such a person, would be attracted to this blog. It is hard to obtain much data on this, because very few people look at it at all, and I have access to very little information about those people. Other than a handful of regular readers, I get new readers who click on a link to this site that shows up when I make posts on other blogs. I can't always tell much about where they are located other than their country, but often I can also determine their city. As you would expect, most of the pageviews are from the U.S., since most of the websites I comment on are in the U.S. and a very large chunk of English-language Internet activity is in the U.S. What surprises me is that I seem to be more likely to be viewed in Iceland, Ukraine, Russia or China than in the northeast U.S. where I live. This makes me ask what websites the people in the northeast go to.
The answer, which I can't prove, is probably that they are going to websites that are familiar to them and that present worldviews with which they are comfortable. That would not be unlike me when I regularly went to the NYRB website. I get the impression that the Internet is relatively ghettoized, and it seems to be dominated by commercial organizations like Amazon.com and Facebook that herd people into some sort of profit model by meeting their human needs. In the context of this post, one might say that they are drawn to sites that affirm their worldviews, don't challenge them much, and make them feel good about themselves: their biases are confirmed. In theory, American viewers are more satisfied with their lives and don't feel as much need to explore as the residents of Russia or China. Of course, there are other reasons why people in Russia or China might be interested in this blog, but I'm assuming for the moment that these pageviews are not from criminal organizations or government spies.
The working hypothesis that I've arrived at is that most Americans think they already know enough and don't need to know much more: they certainly don't need to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones. Thus, when commercial organizations such as the NYRB, the New Yorker, The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and so on, beckon them, whispering "Narcissism is OK," they happily indulge. That only leaves dissatisfied people in less privileged countries who stand outside and look in through the window out of curiosity. Here in the U.S., we are easily distracted from the underlying chaos of our existence by the Murti-Bing pills* freely dispensed by the government and corporations alike.
*From The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz.
Beyond the content of the articles in a publication, one gets a sense of its readership from its blog posts. The NYRB appeals to well-educated, relatively affluent liberals who like high quality and think of themselves as having broad interests, though they actually care mainly about hot-button liberal issues and some of the humanities, particularly from an academic viewpoint. They don't care much about science or empirical arguments. This flies in the face of the NYRB's image as a paragon of the open exchange of big ideas. Other less pretentious sites, particularly 3 Quarks Daily, have broader intellectual appeal. The latter attracts people who are interested in the sciences and philosophy, but also leaves room for virtually all of the humanities. From the standpoint of blog commenting, 3 Quarks Daily is far more open, because it allows posters to post without moderation. Like all websites, it has limitations, but by drawing from many websites, being well-managed, and placing little emphasis on image control, it is much more appealing to me than the NYRB.
Confirmation bias is a topic that has been widely discussed in recent years. I came across it in the context of economics, which now has a branch called behavioral economics, a break from the past, when most economists assumed that people always acted in rational self-interest. They've finally realized that irrationality pervades human life, and they are now rethinking some of their earlier ideas. This research focuses mainly on investor behavior, where, for example, men tend to be unrealistically confident, and women tend to be unrealistically risk-averse. There is now an entire industry based on making money from your investment mistakes. On a broader scale, confirmation bias relates to many other human behaviors, but decision-making is its focus in economics.
In a speculative, anecdotal way, I have been trying to determine what kind of person, if there is such a person, would be attracted to this blog. It is hard to obtain much data on this, because very few people look at it at all, and I have access to very little information about those people. Other than a handful of regular readers, I get new readers who click on a link to this site that shows up when I make posts on other blogs. I can't always tell much about where they are located other than their country, but often I can also determine their city. As you would expect, most of the pageviews are from the U.S., since most of the websites I comment on are in the U.S. and a very large chunk of English-language Internet activity is in the U.S. What surprises me is that I seem to be more likely to be viewed in Iceland, Ukraine, Russia or China than in the northeast U.S. where I live. This makes me ask what websites the people in the northeast go to.
The answer, which I can't prove, is probably that they are going to websites that are familiar to them and that present worldviews with which they are comfortable. That would not be unlike me when I regularly went to the NYRB website. I get the impression that the Internet is relatively ghettoized, and it seems to be dominated by commercial organizations like Amazon.com and Facebook that herd people into some sort of profit model by meeting their human needs. In the context of this post, one might say that they are drawn to sites that affirm their worldviews, don't challenge them much, and make them feel good about themselves: their biases are confirmed. In theory, American viewers are more satisfied with their lives and don't feel as much need to explore as the residents of Russia or China. Of course, there are other reasons why people in Russia or China might be interested in this blog, but I'm assuming for the moment that these pageviews are not from criminal organizations or government spies.
The working hypothesis that I've arrived at is that most Americans think they already know enough and don't need to know much more: they certainly don't need to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones. Thus, when commercial organizations such as the NYRB, the New Yorker, The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and so on, beckon them, whispering "Narcissism is OK," they happily indulge. That only leaves dissatisfied people in less privileged countries who stand outside and look in through the window out of curiosity. Here in the U.S., we are easily distracted from the underlying chaos of our existence by the Murti-Bing pills* freely dispensed by the government and corporations alike.
*From The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Noam Chomsky
When I was growing up, I had little cause to be political about anything. I was a white Anglo-Saxon male living in prosperous suburbs, and my parents and grandparents had never been persecuted. Though my great-grandparents on my mother's side were more or less forced out of Turkey because they were Armenian, that was never discussed at home. My mother spent her life pretending not to be Armenian and identified herself as Greek. We had never seen a black person in England, and when we moved to the U.S. in 1957 my mother explained to us that if we saw one we shouldn't call him a "nigger," which was the first time I heard that word.
During the 1960's, the antiwar and civil rights movements seemed legitimate to me. I agreed with them in principle, but thought that since they were obviously right there wasn't much to say about them. I did not feel any of the "white guilt" that many well-off white American liberals felt, because I wasn't well-off or American. The absurdity of guilt-stricken American liberals became apparent to me when I arrived at college in 1968.
I recently saw an amateur documentary made by a college acquaintance in 1969. It features several other college acquaintances as they plan and execute a confrontation with the college president about the small number of black students on campus. It is painful to watch. They are naive and ideological, the black students want nothing to do with them, and the president squirms under pressure to take actions that he probably can't. Later on, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia in 1970, two students burned down the R.O.T.C. building and were caught because they burnt themselves in the process and went to the local hospital for treatment. In this sort of environment it was hard for me to take campus activism seriously. Even so, by the time I was a senior I had begun to see the college as a corporate entity that stayed afloat by preying on students who aren't substantively different from ordinary consumers. This led me to small acts of terrorism, but I wouldn't call them political.
Over the years my political awareness has increased somewhat, but I still have difficulty voting, because politics, politicians and political activists seem stupid to me. However, along the lines of insidious corporate activity, I began to think more about political brainwashing during the Gulf War (1990-1991). I was then living in Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan's hometown. Up to that point I had thought of the Dixon natives as relaxed, likable and slightly agrarian; they were poorly-educated and unimaginative, but reasonable and pacifistic. I was surprised to learn, through their enthusiastic support of the war, that underneath they were conservative Republican war hawks. Further investigation showed that pretty much the entire state of Illinois is like that once you get outside of Chicago and college towns.
I have never read any of Noam Chomsky's books, but because he is widely considered to be one of the leading public intellectuals in the world, I've watched documentaries about him and seen him on TV. What interests me at the moment is that even though I'm not political and don't follow this stuff closely, I've generally come to the exact same conclusions that Chomsky reached decades ago on my own: governments and corporations manipulate the public in order for private entities to enrich themselves or secure their positions, and democracy is ignored in the process. Frequently, as a result, populations at home and abroad are criminally abused. In particular, Chomsky is highly critical of the actions of American presidents: "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." The funny thing is that he is not a fanatic and has ample facts and examples to back up everything he says.
One of the reasons why I'm discussing this is that it highlights points I've made earlier about conventional wisdom and conformity. Many important issues are swept under the rug by the media, and as a consequence few people think about them or react. Chomsky also makes criticisms of intellectuals similar to ones I've made. I am intrigued by the fact that he used to appear in the NYRB but no longer does. I wouldn't be surprised if he has been banned there because he calls out intellectual charlatans when he sees them: that is what they are at the NYRB. I might add that Chomsky is another classic "smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn," though he actually grew up in Philadelphia.
With the limited exposure I've had to Chomsky, there are only a couple of criticisms that I can think of. First, he is not an effective communicator. He is not concise, and therefore has little chance of winning over most people. He writes book after book and can talk for hour after hour on whatever topic he chooses, always in a low, unmodulated voice. Second, he identifies himself as a libertarian socialist or anarchist, neither of which I consider to be an adequate substitute for the current system of capitalism and nominal democracy. What kind of government can be against authority?
I'm not interested enough to explore Chomsky's political goals in detail, but from what I know they do not seem plausible. I suspect that he is an idealist regarding human nature, which is where I part company with him. The impression I have is that he thinks free speech and public awareness can create an environment in which authorities will be forced to work for the public good rather than for special interests. If you have read my earlier posts, you will know that I am far less sanguine about human nature. That is why I advocate an authoritarian system of governance that is immune to attempts at manipulation by individuals or special interests. I don't think that, given the nature of our species, a functional democracy is possible. Individual freedoms must be impartially curtailed according to a rational program. My ideal political party might be called the Zookeepers. How popular do you think that would be?
During the 1960's, the antiwar and civil rights movements seemed legitimate to me. I agreed with them in principle, but thought that since they were obviously right there wasn't much to say about them. I did not feel any of the "white guilt" that many well-off white American liberals felt, because I wasn't well-off or American. The absurdity of guilt-stricken American liberals became apparent to me when I arrived at college in 1968.
I recently saw an amateur documentary made by a college acquaintance in 1969. It features several other college acquaintances as they plan and execute a confrontation with the college president about the small number of black students on campus. It is painful to watch. They are naive and ideological, the black students want nothing to do with them, and the president squirms under pressure to take actions that he probably can't. Later on, when the U.S. invaded Cambodia in 1970, two students burned down the R.O.T.C. building and were caught because they burnt themselves in the process and went to the local hospital for treatment. In this sort of environment it was hard for me to take campus activism seriously. Even so, by the time I was a senior I had begun to see the college as a corporate entity that stayed afloat by preying on students who aren't substantively different from ordinary consumers. This led me to small acts of terrorism, but I wouldn't call them political.
Over the years my political awareness has increased somewhat, but I still have difficulty voting, because politics, politicians and political activists seem stupid to me. However, along the lines of insidious corporate activity, I began to think more about political brainwashing during the Gulf War (1990-1991). I was then living in Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan's hometown. Up to that point I had thought of the Dixon natives as relaxed, likable and slightly agrarian; they were poorly-educated and unimaginative, but reasonable and pacifistic. I was surprised to learn, through their enthusiastic support of the war, that underneath they were conservative Republican war hawks. Further investigation showed that pretty much the entire state of Illinois is like that once you get outside of Chicago and college towns.
I have never read any of Noam Chomsky's books, but because he is widely considered to be one of the leading public intellectuals in the world, I've watched documentaries about him and seen him on TV. What interests me at the moment is that even though I'm not political and don't follow this stuff closely, I've generally come to the exact same conclusions that Chomsky reached decades ago on my own: governments and corporations manipulate the public in order for private entities to enrich themselves or secure their positions, and democracy is ignored in the process. Frequently, as a result, populations at home and abroad are criminally abused. In particular, Chomsky is highly critical of the actions of American presidents: "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." The funny thing is that he is not a fanatic and has ample facts and examples to back up everything he says.
One of the reasons why I'm discussing this is that it highlights points I've made earlier about conventional wisdom and conformity. Many important issues are swept under the rug by the media, and as a consequence few people think about them or react. Chomsky also makes criticisms of intellectuals similar to ones I've made. I am intrigued by the fact that he used to appear in the NYRB but no longer does. I wouldn't be surprised if he has been banned there because he calls out intellectual charlatans when he sees them: that is what they are at the NYRB. I might add that Chomsky is another classic "smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn," though he actually grew up in Philadelphia.
With the limited exposure I've had to Chomsky, there are only a couple of criticisms that I can think of. First, he is not an effective communicator. He is not concise, and therefore has little chance of winning over most people. He writes book after book and can talk for hour after hour on whatever topic he chooses, always in a low, unmodulated voice. Second, he identifies himself as a libertarian socialist or anarchist, neither of which I consider to be an adequate substitute for the current system of capitalism and nominal democracy. What kind of government can be against authority?
I'm not interested enough to explore Chomsky's political goals in detail, but from what I know they do not seem plausible. I suspect that he is an idealist regarding human nature, which is where I part company with him. The impression I have is that he thinks free speech and public awareness can create an environment in which authorities will be forced to work for the public good rather than for special interests. If you have read my earlier posts, you will know that I am far less sanguine about human nature. That is why I advocate an authoritarian system of governance that is immune to attempts at manipulation by individuals or special interests. I don't think that, given the nature of our species, a functional democracy is possible. Individual freedoms must be impartially curtailed according to a rational program. My ideal political party might be called the Zookeepers. How popular do you think that would be?
Labels:
Capitalism,
Democracy,
Intellectuals,
NYRB,
People,
Politics
Friday, February 28, 2014
Intellectuals
I have some further reflections on the responsibilities of intellectuals, who, as a group, have been highly disappointing to me. That is because I hold them to a higher standard than artists and academics. This can be confusing, because all three labels may apply to the same person.
Let's start with Bob Dylan. Early in his career, he displayed the characteristics of an artist. He seems to have been someone who always wanted to be a rock star, but lacked the musical ability, voice and physical presence. He overcame these limitations with his natural ability as a lyricist, through which he inadvertently became famous during the antiwar and civil rights protests of early '60's. However, it later became clear that he wasn't much of an ideologue on political issues, and he certainly was not an academic or an intellectual. In hindsight, it appears that he unconsciously channeled his poetic gifts when he needed them but never cared much for politics and never was a thinker. I now see him as a narrowly talented person who is of limited interest once you look beyond some of his intriguing lyrics. It took me several years to figure this out and realize that my expectations should always have been low.
Another person who influenced me early was Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here, I think, was an intellectual and an artist who was not an academic, though he held a position at Cambridge. Oddly, much of his writing intrigues me in the same way as Bob Dylan's, because it contains complex and unfathomable ambiguities. Clearly he was uncomfortable as an academic, and he published almost nothing. What we have is mostly lecture notes, often recorded by others. He liked to make things, and was an aeronautical engineer and an architect before becoming a full-time philosopher. His interest in philosophy grew out of his interest in logic. I hold it against him that he did not leave an intelligible body of work behind him. He taught philosophy in an academic context, and ought to have provided greater clarity. Beyond that, he was not a public intellectual at all, and we don't know his positions outside philosophy. He had some artistic sensibilities, but was not a full-fledged artist.
George Eliot is the kind of intellectual that I admire. She was self-taught in multiple areas and relatively late in life decided to write fiction. Although she was not an academic, she had the breadth of knowledge and discipline of one. There is no dispute that she was an artist, producing stories, novels and poems, though some find her a little heavy-handed as a writer. She was also an editor and contributor to the Westminster Review, which puts her well into the intellectual camp. What I admire about her work is that, through her characters, she shows how people find meaning in life and deal with the issues of their day, all within the context of human progress. The latter detracts somewhat from her artistry, but more than makes up for it in seriousness. If you like seriousness, you probably won't find anyone better. Growing up, she was religious, and she later spent much of her life struggling with Darwinism. If you want to read writers who know important things, you can't do much better than George Eliot. Unfortunately, she's been dead since 1880.
When I think of contemporary intellectuals I think of the contributors to The New York Review of Books, and here I have problems with many. Although I haven't read his historical works, Tony Judt was another kind of intellectual that I admire. There was little artistry there, but he was a solid academic who became a highly effective public intellectual when he was drawn into public issues. His essay, "Bush's Useful Idiots," astounded me. He did not mince words about the Israel Lobby either. He made me think, "Isn't this what intellectuals ought to do when something is seriously wrong?" The fact is, with very few exceptions, they don't. On the contrary, they are more likely, like Christopher Hitchens, to publicly support the Iraq War.
Another NYRB contributor, Paul Krugman, was mentioned in an earlier post. I find him to be a pure academic, with no artistry, implausibly occupying the position of a public intellectual. He doesn't seem to be knowledgeable outside of economics, and his liberal leanings look like something he learned by age 12 and never thought about much. Beyond a narrow range of economic issues, I find him worthless. Moreover, he doesn't write well and has been ineffectual even as a liberal spokesperson.
Finally, there is the NYRB contributor Lorrie Moore, also mentioned earlier. Ostensibly she is an artist, in the sense that her primary vocation is the writing of fiction. Here, as I've said, she has become stale. I particularly liked this review of her most recent book, which appeared in The Globe and Mail: "...looking beyond the cosmetic glimmer of Lorrie Moore’s sentences at times reveals something essentially hollow. If television’s primary goal is to keep us watching television, something similar can be said of Bark: its stories tend to feel like easily consumed entertainments, with intimations at wisdom and meaning just compelling enough to keep us reading." She is also an academic insofar as she has taught in university English departments for 30 years. As an intellectual I consider her a complete failure. I think she is incapable of writing a Judt-like essay. If she speaks out at all, it is usually by awkwardly inserting political views into her stick-figure characters' mouths.
If I have any conclusion, it is that artists can do what they like and academics can do what they like, but if they choose to enter the arena of public intellectuals, they had better know what they're talking about and they had better say it well. In my opinion, they carry greater social responsibility than mere artists and academics.
Let's start with Bob Dylan. Early in his career, he displayed the characteristics of an artist. He seems to have been someone who always wanted to be a rock star, but lacked the musical ability, voice and physical presence. He overcame these limitations with his natural ability as a lyricist, through which he inadvertently became famous during the antiwar and civil rights protests of early '60's. However, it later became clear that he wasn't much of an ideologue on political issues, and he certainly was not an academic or an intellectual. In hindsight, it appears that he unconsciously channeled his poetic gifts when he needed them but never cared much for politics and never was a thinker. I now see him as a narrowly talented person who is of limited interest once you look beyond some of his intriguing lyrics. It took me several years to figure this out and realize that my expectations should always have been low.
Another person who influenced me early was Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here, I think, was an intellectual and an artist who was not an academic, though he held a position at Cambridge. Oddly, much of his writing intrigues me in the same way as Bob Dylan's, because it contains complex and unfathomable ambiguities. Clearly he was uncomfortable as an academic, and he published almost nothing. What we have is mostly lecture notes, often recorded by others. He liked to make things, and was an aeronautical engineer and an architect before becoming a full-time philosopher. His interest in philosophy grew out of his interest in logic. I hold it against him that he did not leave an intelligible body of work behind him. He taught philosophy in an academic context, and ought to have provided greater clarity. Beyond that, he was not a public intellectual at all, and we don't know his positions outside philosophy. He had some artistic sensibilities, but was not a full-fledged artist.
George Eliot is the kind of intellectual that I admire. She was self-taught in multiple areas and relatively late in life decided to write fiction. Although she was not an academic, she had the breadth of knowledge and discipline of one. There is no dispute that she was an artist, producing stories, novels and poems, though some find her a little heavy-handed as a writer. She was also an editor and contributor to the Westminster Review, which puts her well into the intellectual camp. What I admire about her work is that, through her characters, she shows how people find meaning in life and deal with the issues of their day, all within the context of human progress. The latter detracts somewhat from her artistry, but more than makes up for it in seriousness. If you like seriousness, you probably won't find anyone better. Growing up, she was religious, and she later spent much of her life struggling with Darwinism. If you want to read writers who know important things, you can't do much better than George Eliot. Unfortunately, she's been dead since 1880.
When I think of contemporary intellectuals I think of the contributors to The New York Review of Books, and here I have problems with many. Although I haven't read his historical works, Tony Judt was another kind of intellectual that I admire. There was little artistry there, but he was a solid academic who became a highly effective public intellectual when he was drawn into public issues. His essay, "Bush's Useful Idiots," astounded me. He did not mince words about the Israel Lobby either. He made me think, "Isn't this what intellectuals ought to do when something is seriously wrong?" The fact is, with very few exceptions, they don't. On the contrary, they are more likely, like Christopher Hitchens, to publicly support the Iraq War.
Another NYRB contributor, Paul Krugman, was mentioned in an earlier post. I find him to be a pure academic, with no artistry, implausibly occupying the position of a public intellectual. He doesn't seem to be knowledgeable outside of economics, and his liberal leanings look like something he learned by age 12 and never thought about much. Beyond a narrow range of economic issues, I find him worthless. Moreover, he doesn't write well and has been ineffectual even as a liberal spokesperson.
Finally, there is the NYRB contributor Lorrie Moore, also mentioned earlier. Ostensibly she is an artist, in the sense that her primary vocation is the writing of fiction. Here, as I've said, she has become stale. I particularly liked this review of her most recent book, which appeared in The Globe and Mail: "...looking beyond the cosmetic glimmer of Lorrie Moore’s sentences at times reveals something essentially hollow. If television’s primary goal is to keep us watching television, something similar can be said of Bark: its stories tend to feel like easily consumed entertainments, with intimations at wisdom and meaning just compelling enough to keep us reading." She is also an academic insofar as she has taught in university English departments for 30 years. As an intellectual I consider her a complete failure. I think she is incapable of writing a Judt-like essay. If she speaks out at all, it is usually by awkwardly inserting political views into her stick-figure characters' mouths.
If I have any conclusion, it is that artists can do what they like and academics can do what they like, but if they choose to enter the arena of public intellectuals, they had better know what they're talking about and they had better say it well. In my opinion, they carry greater social responsibility than mere artists and academics.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Boycott The New York Review of Books
I've generally stopped reading the NYRblog, but today I went back to look at the comments on Pico Iyer's article relating Proust to Buddhism, and I noticed that they had deleted all of my comments that had been there previously. A few months ago they did the same thing on another article on which I had made comments. This must indicate something. The comments I wrote on Iyer's article were carefully considered and received a lot of "likes." Moreover, there had been a discussion between me and another commenter that is now unintelligible, since they completely removed my comments but left his intact.
The main reason that I started this blog was for personal freedom of speech. I found it frustrating and unfair to subject my thoughts to moderators whose policies extend no rights to their readers. Ever since I became critical of the NYRB, which had been one of my primary sources for web articles for over 3 years, they have stopped replying to my emails, have deleted some of my comments at the moderation stage and have deleted others after initially posting them. I urge anyone who cares about free speech to boycott the NYRB and stop reading the NYRblog.
The main reason that I started this blog was for personal freedom of speech. I found it frustrating and unfair to subject my thoughts to moderators whose policies extend no rights to their readers. Ever since I became critical of the NYRB, which had been one of my primary sources for web articles for over 3 years, they have stopped replying to my emails, have deleted some of my comments at the moderation stage and have deleted others after initially posting them. I urge anyone who cares about free speech to boycott the NYRB and stop reading the NYRblog.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Websites
Over the last few days I've been looking at the website 3 Quarks Daily (http://www.3quarksdaily.com/) and would like to recommend it. The content is more appealing to me than that of any other site I've come across. I am continuing to look at Berfrois (http://www.berfrois.com/), which is also very good but does not appeal to me quite as much. Both of these sites draw content from multiple sites, which gives them an enormous advantage over sites that rely on a fixed group of writers.
3 Quarks Daily, as the name suggests, values science, but it covers the arts quite well too. There seems to be somewhat of an emphasis on Pakistani topics because of the backgrounds of some of the editors. Berfrois has a very English feel to it and reminds me of the LRB and the TLS. So far I would say that both sites are far more interesting to read than the NYRblog.
I have to confess that, while I don't particularly enjoy reading purely scientific essays, I have reached the point of becoming nauseated by literary essays. I've had a go at engaging the literary community over the last few years, and here is my conclusion: they are frivolous people who have little of value to say. Creating art is one thing, but writing about it is usually a waste of time once you get past the basic facts. My impression is that the literary community is guilty both of not producing much of anything that I would consider to be art and of doing almost nothing of importance to identify, draw attention to or solve any of the problems facing mankind. Collectively they are like a bunch of flakes who moved to an art colony in 1968 and never came back - except that many of them now have substantial incomes from universities, literary works, arts foundations and journalism. Collectively I find it impossible to take them seriously.
3 Quarks Daily, as the name suggests, values science, but it covers the arts quite well too. There seems to be somewhat of an emphasis on Pakistani topics because of the backgrounds of some of the editors. Berfrois has a very English feel to it and reminds me of the LRB and the TLS. So far I would say that both sites are far more interesting to read than the NYRblog.
I have to confess that, while I don't particularly enjoy reading purely scientific essays, I have reached the point of becoming nauseated by literary essays. I've had a go at engaging the literary community over the last few years, and here is my conclusion: they are frivolous people who have little of value to say. Creating art is one thing, but writing about it is usually a waste of time once you get past the basic facts. My impression is that the literary community is guilty both of not producing much of anything that I would consider to be art and of doing almost nothing of importance to identify, draw attention to or solve any of the problems facing mankind. Collectively they are like a bunch of flakes who moved to an art colony in 1968 and never came back - except that many of them now have substantial incomes from universities, literary works, arts foundations and journalism. Collectively I find it impossible to take them seriously.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
The New York Review of Books III
In my quest to find a replacement for the NYRB, I have taken a brief survey of what is available. I'm sorry to report that there isn't much there unless I'm willing to make enormous compromises. The Chronicle of Higher Education isn't bad, but it is directed specifically at academics, and I am not one. I used to subscribe to the Wilson Quarterly but found it a little too conventional for my tastes. The London Review of Books isn't bad, but it is too literary for me, and basically I've had it with literary writers. I presently subscribe to The Times Literary Supplement, which, for me, is better than nothing, but obviously it emphasizes things literary. I have tried some online sites with mixed results. The New Inquiry seemed like a children's website when I first looked at it. Another site, Berfrois, is actually quite good, but it sort of overlaps with the London Review of Books in its outlook, though it has somewhat less of a literary emphasis. My main problem with it is that it has very few comments, which gives it kind of a dead feeling.
The dilemma seems to be that what is available for reasonably intelligent people who like to read interesting articles and discuss them online is quite limited. The NYRB is a sinking ship of octogenarians who have been singing the same song for 50 years. They will all be dying soon, so they don't care about anything complicated like innovation, new ideas, reader expectations, or anything like that. Most of their peers are already dead.
If the NYRB is literary, most of its competitors are even more literary. People who get involved with literary projects seem to fall into two categories: the seasoned experts who got their foot in the door several decades ago and are fairly established, and the idealistic neophytes who have fallen prey to them. The experts often teach in writing programs and on college faculties, or they line up gigs like the regular writers at the NYRB and churn out what in effect are newspaper columns. Under this model, the writing becomes repetitive and inconsequential. The neophytes are even more problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, they have bought into an idea that is essentially false. The majority of them will never have successful careers as writers or teachers, and they are doomed to stay at the bottom of the pyramid of the Ponzi scheme. Secondly, being over-educated and coming primarily from upper-middle-class backgrounds, they don't know anything interesting. In the most general terms, the American literary world consists of vacuous people who got good scores on the verbal section of the SAT.
Believe it or not, I am quite open minded and would appreciate any compelling arguments that might cure me of what you may perceive to be my jadedness.
The dilemma seems to be that what is available for reasonably intelligent people who like to read interesting articles and discuss them online is quite limited. The NYRB is a sinking ship of octogenarians who have been singing the same song for 50 years. They will all be dying soon, so they don't care about anything complicated like innovation, new ideas, reader expectations, or anything like that. Most of their peers are already dead.
If the NYRB is literary, most of its competitors are even more literary. People who get involved with literary projects seem to fall into two categories: the seasoned experts who got their foot in the door several decades ago and are fairly established, and the idealistic neophytes who have fallen prey to them. The experts often teach in writing programs and on college faculties, or they line up gigs like the regular writers at the NYRB and churn out what in effect are newspaper columns. Under this model, the writing becomes repetitive and inconsequential. The neophytes are even more problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, they have bought into an idea that is essentially false. The majority of them will never have successful careers as writers or teachers, and they are doomed to stay at the bottom of the pyramid of the Ponzi scheme. Secondly, being over-educated and coming primarily from upper-middle-class backgrounds, they don't know anything interesting. In the most general terms, the American literary world consists of vacuous people who got good scores on the verbal section of the SAT.
Believe it or not, I am quite open minded and would appreciate any compelling arguments that might cure me of what you may perceive to be my jadedness.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
The New York Review of Books II
After commenting at The Chronicle of Higher Education recently I was struck by how open it was compared to the NYRblog. The comments appear immediately, without moderation, and you can almost have a real-time discussion with other commenters. Comparatively speaking, the NYRblog is run by a Nazi regime. All comments are moderated, and often the moderation occurs only once a day, sometimes taking several days. Thus, if you make a comment on Monday, it may appear on Tuesday. If someone makes a comment on your comment, that probably won't appear until Wednesday, etc. The process is like pulling teeth. I must also mention that if a moderator doesn't like your comment for any reason, he or she may delete it. This goes beyond profanities, insults and incoherence. If they disagree with your comment or believe that it is too critical of the NYRB or one of its writers, they may delete it. There is no discussion with the moderator, and you have no recourse. This has happened to me more than once. For example, I submitted a comment on Tim Parks's article of January 11, which was not positive but certainly was civil and honest, and it was deleted. I suspect, after writing emails last year to Matthew Howard, Director of Electronic Publishing, Robert Silvers, Editor, and Rea Hederman, Publisher, in which I complained about the decline of the NYRB, and to which I received no replies, that I have been blackballed by the NYRB. This is the best they could do for a long-term subscriber to the print edition and the most prolific commenter at the NYRblog since its inception. The warm and fuzzy feeling that is simulated on their website is basically a lie.
I had hoped to generate some discussion here about the limitations of the NYRB in order to find or create better means of discussing issues that interest me. I am terribly disappointed with the NYRB but have no interest in leading some sort of vendetta against it. At this point I would go further than Russell Jacoby does in his excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education and say that it's a lost cause. Whatever intellectual interest it ever had has mostly evaporated. I only wish that I could find an adequate substitute.
I had hoped to generate some discussion here about the limitations of the NYRB in order to find or create better means of discussing issues that interest me. I am terribly disappointed with the NYRB but have no interest in leading some sort of vendetta against it. At this point I would go further than Russell Jacoby does in his excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education and say that it's a lost cause. Whatever intellectual interest it ever had has mostly evaporated. I only wish that I could find an adequate substitute.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
The New York Review of Books I
I have been reading The New York Review of Books on and off for several decades. Often it was a primary source of intellectual stimulation to me. Recently I have been looking closely at the quality of its articles and the nature of its blog section. Rather than taking a position of intellectual leadership, the NYRB seems to have adopted the role of a niche player that caters to well-educated, upper-income readers who prefer well-written, traditional, full-length essays for their leisure reading. As a matter of editorial policy it has always supported its writers, even when they are closet hacks lacking in real expertise, and this quality seems to have worsened in recent years. If there were an alternative publication, I would just switch to it and not be particularly bothered, but the fact of the matter seems to be that there is no other in this intellectual wasteland that is the United States of America.
What triggered my concerns about the NYRB was the quality of its blog. At first it seemed that that would be an ideal place to engage in extensive discussion with competent readers and writers. The outcome has been a great disappointment. Many of the blog articles are straight opinion pieces with little to back them up. Or they are arbitrary articles about presumptive aesthetic works that are of no real interest. This would be enough to disappoint me, but the isolation of the writers from the readers and the moderation policies in themselves severely limit the quality of the blog. Poet W, translator X, historian Y or writer Z jot down trivialities and pet peeves for pay, a few comments are made, usually of the adulatory sort, and that's it. Many comments never see the light of day, which isn't always beneficial, though sometimes it is. The authors almost never engage in the conversation. The NYRB is coasting along on its reputation with complete disregard for those readers who see discussion as a route to better ideas and their propagation. I've given up on the New York liberal media in stages: first, The New Yorker, then The New York Times, now The New York Review of Books.
This topic doesn't seem to interest anyone other than myself, so I don't expect any replies, but I would be interested in your thoughts.
What triggered my concerns about the NYRB was the quality of its blog. At first it seemed that that would be an ideal place to engage in extensive discussion with competent readers and writers. The outcome has been a great disappointment. Many of the blog articles are straight opinion pieces with little to back them up. Or they are arbitrary articles about presumptive aesthetic works that are of no real interest. This would be enough to disappoint me, but the isolation of the writers from the readers and the moderation policies in themselves severely limit the quality of the blog. Poet W, translator X, historian Y or writer Z jot down trivialities and pet peeves for pay, a few comments are made, usually of the adulatory sort, and that's it. Many comments never see the light of day, which isn't always beneficial, though sometimes it is. The authors almost never engage in the conversation. The NYRB is coasting along on its reputation with complete disregard for those readers who see discussion as a route to better ideas and their propagation. I've given up on the New York liberal media in stages: first, The New Yorker, then The New York Times, now The New York Review of Books.
This topic doesn't seem to interest anyone other than myself, so I don't expect any replies, but I would be interested in your thoughts.
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