The New Yorker and The New York Times are far more important outside New York than in it. If you live in New York, you have so many sources of connection to what people are thinking, what's new, what's hot, what's au currant. But if you live in the hinterlands, you depend on the news from New York to keep you up to date.
The paper used to arrive on my driveway, but now we get it on line. The magazine we still get in paper form. It's an event, a continuity, seeing that jazzy cover every week. And it takes all week to read through the multi-page articles, where things are examined beyond the usual sound bite.
Like NPR radio, where I know the correspondents' names and voices, I've got to know the New Yorker authors, Jill Lepore, David Remnick, Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik.
Gopnik often has fresh insights and his book reviews are often the only thing I will bother to learn about the books, but this week he showed signs of that dread New York degenerative disease, which has yet to be named, but which, tentatively, I'll call Public Intellectual Supercilious Syndrome (PISS).
Characteristic presenting symptoms are the use of "ism" words, referring to isms with which I am not much familiar but which sound like something I can guess at, without really knowing.
"Presentism" is a new ism, which Gopnik has created for his review of several books in the March 20 issue. It's cute because it's a play on all the isms we read about in the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere in the New Yorker, and it's a fresh statement of a phenomenon which became very evident during the run up to the last election: "It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening without anything happening to stop it...if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished."
So that's cute, because he illustrates the sort of punditry he finds in the books he is about to review with this caution that what you hear about the meaning of the Trump election from many pundits is tripe, and they haven't the faintest clue what will happen next, certainly no more than you do.
But then we get a sentence like this one: "Mishra's thesis is that our contemporary misery and revanchist nationalism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic reaction to Voltaire's Enlightenment--with the Enlightenment itself entirely to blame in letting high minded disdain for actual human experience leave it open to a romantic reaction."
Can't you just see a Woody Allen movie with Woody standing in line in front of some guy spewing out this sentence, and Allen going ballistic?
But, wait. then Gopnik delivers this: "We can't understand either the history of liberalism that produced modern life or the history of colonialism that produced Mishra's post modern collage without first understanding why the wind blew only one way."
Got that?
Post modern collage?
Fortunately, there is Professor Google, but just try looking up post modernism and see where that gets you.
Suffice it to say you could rewire your house, rebuild your car's motor, do cardiac bypass surgery, organize a global company without ever having understood either of those sentences, or even the component words, like "post modern" or revanchist--actually, that one I got.
Does Rousseau's reaction to Voltaire actually drive anything of significance in today's America?
Well, maybe if you are a Constitutional "originalist" and you know that Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson and all those bewigged, silk stocking'ed founding fathers were very into the French, it might matter to you.
But really, Adam, is this the way you are going to deal with the reality of a President Trump?
Do the coal miners in Kentucky really care about Voltaire any more than they care to know about the origins of the universe?
Here's a modest proposal: Until President Trump and Steve Bannon leave the White House, let us ban from the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Times the word "post modern." Let us add this to the list of George Carlin's forbidden words, which will grow hair on your palms, curve your spine and result in peace without honor and will be bleeped out on radio or television should some one slip up and let that word fly.
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| Gopnik |
The paper used to arrive on my driveway, but now we get it on line. The magazine we still get in paper form. It's an event, a continuity, seeing that jazzy cover every week. And it takes all week to read through the multi-page articles, where things are examined beyond the usual sound bite.
Like NPR radio, where I know the correspondents' names and voices, I've got to know the New Yorker authors, Jill Lepore, David Remnick, Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik.
Gopnik often has fresh insights and his book reviews are often the only thing I will bother to learn about the books, but this week he showed signs of that dread New York degenerative disease, which has yet to be named, but which, tentatively, I'll call Public Intellectual Supercilious Syndrome (PISS).
Characteristic presenting symptoms are the use of "ism" words, referring to isms with which I am not much familiar but which sound like something I can guess at, without really knowing.
 |
| Postmodern Gopnik |
"Presentism" is a new ism, which Gopnik has created for his review of several books in the March 20 issue. It's cute because it's a play on all the isms we read about in the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere in the New Yorker, and it's a fresh statement of a phenomenon which became very evident during the run up to the last election: "It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening without anything happening to stop it...if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished."
So that's cute, because he illustrates the sort of punditry he finds in the books he is about to review with this caution that what you hear about the meaning of the Trump election from many pundits is tripe, and they haven't the faintest clue what will happen next, certainly no more than you do.
 |
| Read Rousseau and Voltaire |
But then we get a sentence like this one: "Mishra's thesis is that our contemporary misery and revanchist nationalism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic reaction to Voltaire's Enlightenment--with the Enlightenment itself entirely to blame in letting high minded disdain for actual human experience leave it open to a romantic reaction."
Can't you just see a Woody Allen movie with Woody standing in line in front of some guy spewing out this sentence, and Allen going ballistic?
But, wait. then Gopnik delivers this: "We can't understand either the history of liberalism that produced modern life or the history of colonialism that produced Mishra's post modern collage without first understanding why the wind blew only one way."
Got that?
Post modern collage?
Fortunately, there is Professor Google, but just try looking up post modernism and see where that gets you.
 |
| Post Modern Author: Still love her |
Suffice it to say you could rewire your house, rebuild your car's motor, do cardiac bypass surgery, organize a global company without ever having understood either of those sentences, or even the component words, like "post modern" or revanchist--actually, that one I got.
Does Rousseau's reaction to Voltaire actually drive anything of significance in today's America?
Well, maybe if you are a Constitutional "originalist" and you know that Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson and all those bewigged, silk stocking'ed founding fathers were very into the French, it might matter to you.
But really, Adam, is this the way you are going to deal with the reality of a President Trump?
Do the coal miners in Kentucky really care about Voltaire any more than they care to know about the origins of the universe?
 |
| Not a fan of Voltaire: He smokes Joan's post modern brand |
Here's a modest proposal: Until President Trump and Steve Bannon leave the White House, let us ban from the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Times the word "post modern." Let us add this to the list of George Carlin's forbidden words, which will grow hair on your palms, curve your spine and result in peace without honor and will be bleeped out on radio or television should some one slip up and let that word fly.
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteAgreed..I also think it would be prudent to ban all post intelligible passages such as the examples above-anything that takes more than three passes to figure out should be stricken from the page..
Maud
Oh, Maud:
ReplyDeleteAre you saying you have never had to read my unintelligible passages more than three times? I have failed utterly.
Phantom