Thursday, October 06, 2005

The next generation of intellectual liberals, N+1.  [archive.org]

It's not the anti-intellectualism of this country that drives me nuts, it's the intellectualism that claims so proudly to go against the grain while being consumed with envy. In the Stocks (including 'The Ballad of the Stockholder Intellectual'), full of naive moral confusion and self pity, as if Gore Vidal doesn't have a good broker. Joan Didion in her recent piece in the The Times Magazine on life after her husband's death referred to "Jose. Who was in our household." She and John Gregory Dunne had at least one servant, and he cried.

Didion's clear-sightedness is beyond these teenage idiots. The Chatroom Society:"Though there may not be a great writer left, literature still rules." Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop: "I've wondered why there's no philosophy of popular music... Everyone repeats the received idea that music is revolutionary. Well is it? ...Is pop truly of its time, in the sense that it represents some aspect of exterior history apart from the path of its internal development?"
My god, what colossal willed ignorance; the absolute inability to look for oneself, at oneself, at one's tastes and preconceptions, and simply to describe them.
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In the Stocks.  And less than a year later they're publishing a managing partner in private equity, reviewing books and writing about  art collectors.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:47 AM

    Er, wait. I'm confused. "Radiohead, or the philosophy of pop" appears in the third printing of n+1 as a Mark Greif article. Perhaps I am misreading you though...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous11:25 AM

    Yeah, It's pretty garbled isn't it?
    In the stocks
    The chatroom society
    the philosophy of pop

    all in the third issue of N=1

    ReplyDelete

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