Yes, I read it and agreed with much of it, especially this:
"Rufo is in that measure correct to apply an assemblage of tactics taken from the cultural Left and social-conservative Right to organize an anti-woke campaign. Tragically, however, his tactics, mirroring those of his enemies, subject the professions to a further round of politicization and top-down assaults on their autonomy—their basic sense of self-respect and capacity to organize and police themselves, as they pursue their legitimate aims. To which he might well, and again rightly, respond that these professions have shown themselves unworthy of autonomy. But the task of ending the culture war, and of escaping a cycle of woke and anti-woke polemical campaigns through our institutions that continually wear away at Americans’ shrinking faith in their legitimacy, requires moving beyond Rufo’s tactics, his visions of history, and his anti-institutional appeals, and toward a re-founding of the basic compact between the state and the professions."
I was trying to express contempt above but was maybe too subtle!
For your Italian-American greats: Jim Croce, the too-short-lived folk singer whose narrative songs spanned past his upbringing and out across the larger midcentury America of brawlers, racers, weepers, and lovers. He's a little older than the "minor beatnik" era, if he's not disqualified by his art form.
As to Rufo and his bipartisan ilk: they are too often the Malvolio to creative genius, never its Benvolio. Dourly severe and secretly ambitious, these activists want to wed literature and literary institutions by force for their own advancement (we can only hope they're as easily duped as Malvolio himself). Better for someone to call literature "sweet prince," even if he gives him enough freedom with which to die. (Side note on Rufo's manifesto, to shake the Shakespeare: If another dissident-right missive that references "the Gospels" as straight-faced support for its admitted "agitprop," I'll have to get me to a nunnery.)
Thanks—I didn't even get into music, not because it's not qualified but because I'm not!
Yes, the anti-woke's reading of classic or traditional—or religious—texts is as badly one-dimensional as the woke's. As if the Logos had anything to do with political pamphlets. And as if more than one Gospel "stated" any such thing!
Have we forgotten about Gilbert Sorrentino already? From his novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things:
"A friend of mine, years ago, after a first trip to Mexico, was deeply impressed by the Mexican Indians. He had read The Plumed Serpent and tripped over it. What most struck him was the image, bright in his mind, of these Indians, squatting by the side of the road, impassive, “their eyes like black stone, onyx, sitting there as if waiting for death.” In his speech, “death” came out “Death.” Another friend, who was a Mexican, said that they were waiting for the bus to come along and didn’t feel like standing. So Lawrence and a dozen movies were shaken to their foundations. The first friend was outraged and wouldn’t speak to the Mexican friend for two weeks. His Plato was impugned. The world is NOT what I want to make it? He returned to Lawrence in a rage. Those Indians! A bus? A bus!? He was personally attacked, he felt. They were waiting for Death!”
Thinking about Italian-American writers: what about George Scialabba? I think he’s a pretty great and major critic, if perhaps still under-read. Since you are including Paglia as an example I think he would count, too.
I like Scialabba a lot, but I guess I would see him, not to sound unduly harsh, as a more minor figure, a genial explicator of other's ideas rather than an imaginative force in his own right.
I’d still probably agree with the plague on both houses line-at least in the realm of the spirit, Rufo is the greater threat down here at the moment. One does wonder what the NYT et al think they’re accomplishing giving him so much press-the sort of thing I’d have been interested to hear you and Sam’s back-and-forth on if you were still doing the podcast. I have such mixed feelings about the politicization of art-sure it’s distasteful, but can we really escape from it? There *is* something dishonest about the way of reading where one denatures and homogenizes the dangerous energies etc-one thinks of that passage in Mrs. Dalloway about Septimus returning to Shakespeare after the war, which maybe in one sense was what the entire “woke” era of letters was about. I just don’t know that art has the power either side thinks it has: if it did, we’d be in a very different place.
I probably don't think Rufo's the greater threat. Those guys don't have the numbers, either on the inside or the outside of the power structure, to do what they're trying to do, at least not to the whole country. I suspect he's being used by the centrists within the liberal class as a battering ram so they can retake things from the woke and will then be discarded. DeSantis, the incarnation of the Rufo model of politics, is fading fast, leaving the right side of the field to Trump and Haley, who for various reasons and though at odds with each other aren't going to sign on to full Catholic theocracy, as Trump's two-step on abortion suggests. If I turn out to be wrong, though, you can tell me you told me so through the crumbling mortar between the stones of the Inquisitorial prison. I'd worry much more about the tech utopianism on the right and (more importantly) the center, about the eugenic charter cities on the moon and whatnot, than about the old-style reactionaries, which is why I designate the likes of Hanania the main adversary—and why I keep trying to get word to Grimes!
(Non-eugenic and non-corporate-sovereign cities on the moon would be fine. I'm not a Luddite.)
Art doesn't have this power *yet.* As Picasso said of his portrait's resemblance to Gertrude Stein when someone objected that it didn't look like her, "It will."
Yes, I agree re: the centrists and Hanania, at least over the long term. In the short term I’m worried about a Caesarism that would borrow tricks from Rufo while discarding the transcendent principles from which he derives his juice, but I suppose you could argue we’ve had that already, or that we’ve never stopped!
Right, we already have the tricks; in that sense he is equivalent to his opponents. For what it's worth, Dimes Square seems to have moved on from the Catholic thing to the Hanania thing, tickets available soon:
Lol that’s not too surprising – I think that crowd always wanted to be the elect scaring the (metropolitan lib) straights, and open biological racism is a much easier way to do that then being a ruthenian orthodox sedevacantist or whatever Dasha is!
It's just so boring. Even if one sincerely believes it, what can actually be done with it if one is an artist or a philosopher? Now in line with Blake I have my own scaring-the-straights take on this subject, sort of an inverted Sailer-Hananiaism, in that I do think this group-level reification is pretty much inevitably where "Newton's sleep" leads, is the only thing coarse enough for the materialistic-scientific eye to perceive, which is why we need robust poetic critiques and renovations of science, and why woo-woo quasi-scientific figures like Oxman don't bother me at all. Ironically, the woke have the right instinct when it comes to this kind of thing, hence my disaffiliation from the IDW or Yang, but they've bungled it badly with their incorrigible bad taste and their confusion of poetry with politics. Everybody should read Fearful Symmetry even though its 80 years old! It's a good book to separate those who hated wokeness because it was a cruel parody of liberation and those who hated it because they preferred slavery.
lol: "Spinoza with his geometric style and his detached monism depresses my will to live and is thus evil on the terms of his own theory. "
Frye's Fearful Symmetry is such a masterpiece one almost weeps thinking of it.
Agreed, they do not write them like that anymore.
Idk if you'd have seen my essay on Rufo this summer (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/the-long-march-of-the-anti-woke-and-its-uncertain-destination/)--not sure there can ever be enough contempt for him! Watching the footage of him speaking at New College is really stomach turning: Heidegger's rectoral address retarded-redux
Yes, I read it and agreed with much of it, especially this:
"Rufo is in that measure correct to apply an assemblage of tactics taken from the cultural Left and social-conservative Right to organize an anti-woke campaign. Tragically, however, his tactics, mirroring those of his enemies, subject the professions to a further round of politicization and top-down assaults on their autonomy—their basic sense of self-respect and capacity to organize and police themselves, as they pursue their legitimate aims. To which he might well, and again rightly, respond that these professions have shown themselves unworthy of autonomy. But the task of ending the culture war, and of escaping a cycle of woke and anti-woke polemical campaigns through our institutions that continually wear away at Americans’ shrinking faith in their legitimacy, requires moving beyond Rufo’s tactics, his visions of history, and his anti-institutional appeals, and toward a re-founding of the basic compact between the state and the professions."
I was trying to express contempt above but was maybe too subtle!
Blake, I have the copy of that issue sitting on my desk and plan to read it soon!
For your Italian-American greats: Jim Croce, the too-short-lived folk singer whose narrative songs spanned past his upbringing and out across the larger midcentury America of brawlers, racers, weepers, and lovers. He's a little older than the "minor beatnik" era, if he's not disqualified by his art form.
As to Rufo and his bipartisan ilk: they are too often the Malvolio to creative genius, never its Benvolio. Dourly severe and secretly ambitious, these activists want to wed literature and literary institutions by force for their own advancement (we can only hope they're as easily duped as Malvolio himself). Better for someone to call literature "sweet prince," even if he gives him enough freedom with which to die. (Side note on Rufo's manifesto, to shake the Shakespeare: If another dissident-right missive that references "the Gospels" as straight-faced support for its admitted "agitprop," I'll have to get me to a nunnery.)
Thanks—I didn't even get into music, not because it's not qualified but because I'm not!
Yes, the anti-woke's reading of classic or traditional—or religious—texts is as badly one-dimensional as the woke's. As if the Logos had anything to do with political pamphlets. And as if more than one Gospel "stated" any such thing!
Have we forgotten about Gilbert Sorrentino already? From his novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things:
"A friend of mine, years ago, after a first trip to Mexico, was deeply impressed by the Mexican Indians. He had read The Plumed Serpent and tripped over it. What most struck him was the image, bright in his mind, of these Indians, squatting by the side of the road, impassive, “their eyes like black stone, onyx, sitting there as if waiting for death.” In his speech, “death” came out “Death.” Another friend, who was a Mexican, said that they were waiting for the bus to come along and didn’t feel like standing. So Lawrence and a dozen movies were shaken to their foundations. The first friend was outraged and wouldn’t speak to the Mexican friend for two weeks. His Plato was impugned. The world is NOT what I want to make it? He returned to Lawrence in a rage. Those Indians! A bus? A bus!? He was personally attacked, he felt. They were waiting for Death!”
Ah thanks, I vaguely know he existed, but I haven't read him!
The Moon In Its Flight is a phenomenal story.
Can’t forget a novelist I didn’t know - thanks for the good look at Sorremtino, he’s now on my improved list.
Thinking about Italian-American writers: what about George Scialabba? I think he’s a pretty great and major critic, if perhaps still under-read. Since you are including Paglia as an example I think he would count, too.
I like Scialabba a lot, but I guess I would see him, not to sound unduly harsh, as a more minor figure, a genial explicator of other's ideas rather than an imaginative force in his own right.
I’d still probably agree with the plague on both houses line-at least in the realm of the spirit, Rufo is the greater threat down here at the moment. One does wonder what the NYT et al think they’re accomplishing giving him so much press-the sort of thing I’d have been interested to hear you and Sam’s back-and-forth on if you were still doing the podcast. I have such mixed feelings about the politicization of art-sure it’s distasteful, but can we really escape from it? There *is* something dishonest about the way of reading where one denatures and homogenizes the dangerous energies etc-one thinks of that passage in Mrs. Dalloway about Septimus returning to Shakespeare after the war, which maybe in one sense was what the entire “woke” era of letters was about. I just don’t know that art has the power either side thinks it has: if it did, we’d be in a very different place.
I probably don't think Rufo's the greater threat. Those guys don't have the numbers, either on the inside or the outside of the power structure, to do what they're trying to do, at least not to the whole country. I suspect he's being used by the centrists within the liberal class as a battering ram so they can retake things from the woke and will then be discarded. DeSantis, the incarnation of the Rufo model of politics, is fading fast, leaving the right side of the field to Trump and Haley, who for various reasons and though at odds with each other aren't going to sign on to full Catholic theocracy, as Trump's two-step on abortion suggests. If I turn out to be wrong, though, you can tell me you told me so through the crumbling mortar between the stones of the Inquisitorial prison. I'd worry much more about the tech utopianism on the right and (more importantly) the center, about the eugenic charter cities on the moon and whatnot, than about the old-style reactionaries, which is why I designate the likes of Hanania the main adversary—and why I keep trying to get word to Grimes!
(Non-eugenic and non-corporate-sovereign cities on the moon would be fine. I'm not a Luddite.)
Art doesn't have this power *yet.* As Picasso said of his portrait's resemblance to Gertrude Stein when someone objected that it didn't look like her, "It will."
Yes, I agree re: the centrists and Hanania, at least over the long term. In the short term I’m worried about a Caesarism that would borrow tricks from Rufo while discarding the transcendent principles from which he derives his juice, but I suppose you could argue we’ve had that already, or that we’ve never stopped!
Right, we already have the tricks; in that sense he is equivalent to his opponents. For what it's worth, Dimes Square seems to have moved on from the Catholic thing to the Hanania thing, tickets available soon:
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1743773498936582228
Lol that’s not too surprising – I think that crowd always wanted to be the elect scaring the (metropolitan lib) straights, and open biological racism is a much easier way to do that then being a ruthenian orthodox sedevacantist or whatever Dasha is!
It's just so boring. Even if one sincerely believes it, what can actually be done with it if one is an artist or a philosopher? Now in line with Blake I have my own scaring-the-straights take on this subject, sort of an inverted Sailer-Hananiaism, in that I do think this group-level reification is pretty much inevitably where "Newton's sleep" leads, is the only thing coarse enough for the materialistic-scientific eye to perceive, which is why we need robust poetic critiques and renovations of science, and why woo-woo quasi-scientific figures like Oxman don't bother me at all. Ironically, the woke have the right instinct when it comes to this kind of thing, hence my disaffiliation from the IDW or Yang, but they've bungled it badly with their incorrigible bad taste and their confusion of poetry with politics. Everybody should read Fearful Symmetry even though its 80 years old! It's a good book to separate those who hated wokeness because it was a cruel parody of liberation and those who hated it because they preferred slavery.