Great as always and a final platform I would sign onto – I had the constant whiplash this year of feeling a profound alignment with the Emersonian/anti-machinic rhetoric on here and then turning on a football game with genuinely vile "kamala is for they/them" ads and immediately libbing out. Here's to better choices ahead.
This should have been read at both conventions. Silence, then the MC: Thank you Mr. Pistelli for your whole -hearted support. Moving right along now...
Flattered to find my phraseology scattered throughout this post. Yes, it's a very high risk/high reward game you've been playing-as I keep probably over-dramatically thinking, it's quite easy for the artist-theorist to go from being the Ezra Pound of the Station of the Metro to Ezra Pound, voice of making the trains run on time, perhaps without ever changing where one stands. Henry James seems right for the cultural mood, though I've been gravitating toward Mann as well lately.
Thank you—of all my interlocutors, I have taken your cautions most seriously. Insofar as this can be pledged, I pledge to stay on the James/Mann side of modernism and not the Pound side.
That's too funny; synchronicities abound! I re-read Doctor Faustus in August, a work so finely tuned to my tastes—holograms of ironies, madness, Beethoven, and so on—that one's mileage may vary, but I found myself saying, for the second time, "This may be the best thing written in three-quarters of a century." Then, on election night, I kid you not, I dreamt of a dilapidated oak-paneled library lined entirely with various editions of The Magic Mountain. Naturally, I picked it up for a re-read first thing Wednesday morning. What do you think this pull toward Mann signifies, or portends? Perhaps nothing (I say "nothing" as if it weren't the secret of the universe) more than what John echoes, or channels, in this week's brilliant essay: "Man is the master of contradictions; they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they."
Fantastic, as could be expected. On reflection, my ‘outside perspective’ was self-defeating except perhaps on a meta level of illustrating how easy it is to construct a petulant narrative of How the Election Outcome Proves that I was Right about Everything and there is already a glut of these on offer. My only problem with utopian sentimental aestheticism is the first part - perhaps I'm just too much of an inveterate materialist! Although I completely agree with peace as a precondition for justice.
Same re: materialism. Deeply compelled by this vision but also deeply compelled by a different history that begins, say, with millennia-long price series for bushels of grain, or changing femur lengths and lifespans. No one denies the existence of both, I think, but the question of their interrelation remains difficult.
Thanks, MJE and Julianne! Yes, the question of interrelation is *the* question. I'm not *not* a materialist—I attempted to speak intelligibly about tariff policy in relation to Robert Frost's worldview in my last podcast—but I do prefer to emphasize "the active side...developed abstractly by idealism," since it's the side I understand best and can plausibly do something about.
I know. You could hardly write such excellent accounts of the world of ideas if you didn't have a feel for the material history. Focusing on that angle is an extremely reasonable position! And it's not like the world is suffering from a deficit of statisticians, or statisticians manqué (i.e. all of us)! I was lecturing myself on this subject sternly this very morning: "Just write a history of rhyme and leave this life expectancy business alone!" But here I am reading about the death of Wordsworth at 80.
Well said. We rely on the human imagination to come up with new ways to shape our material reality, but I think we also need to reckon with the fact that sometimes there is just not enough material reality to support competing Utopian visions.
Great as always and a final platform I would sign onto – I had the constant whiplash this year of feeling a profound alignment with the Emersonian/anti-machinic rhetoric on here and then turning on a football game with genuinely vile "kamala is for they/them" ads and immediately libbing out. Here's to better choices ahead.
Definitely relate—thank you!
This should have been read at both conventions. Silence, then the MC: Thank you Mr. Pistelli for your whole -hearted support. Moving right along now...
Flattered to find my phraseology scattered throughout this post. Yes, it's a very high risk/high reward game you've been playing-as I keep probably over-dramatically thinking, it's quite easy for the artist-theorist to go from being the Ezra Pound of the Station of the Metro to Ezra Pound, voice of making the trains run on time, perhaps without ever changing where one stands. Henry James seems right for the cultural mood, though I've been gravitating toward Mann as well lately.
Thank you—of all my interlocutors, I have taken your cautions most seriously. Insofar as this can be pledged, I pledge to stay on the James/Mann side of modernism and not the Pound side.
That's too funny; synchronicities abound! I re-read Doctor Faustus in August, a work so finely tuned to my tastes—holograms of ironies, madness, Beethoven, and so on—that one's mileage may vary, but I found myself saying, for the second time, "This may be the best thing written in three-quarters of a century." Then, on election night, I kid you not, I dreamt of a dilapidated oak-paneled library lined entirely with various editions of The Magic Mountain. Naturally, I picked it up for a re-read first thing Wednesday morning. What do you think this pull toward Mann signifies, or portends? Perhaps nothing (I say "nothing" as if it weren't the secret of the universe) more than what John echoes, or channels, in this week's brilliant essay: "Man is the master of contradictions; they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they."
brilliant work, an absolute bonanza.
Thank you!
Fantastic, as could be expected. On reflection, my ‘outside perspective’ was self-defeating except perhaps on a meta level of illustrating how easy it is to construct a petulant narrative of How the Election Outcome Proves that I was Right about Everything and there is already a glut of these on offer. My only problem with utopian sentimental aestheticism is the first part - perhaps I'm just too much of an inveterate materialist! Although I completely agree with peace as a precondition for justice.
Same re: materialism. Deeply compelled by this vision but also deeply compelled by a different history that begins, say, with millennia-long price series for bushels of grain, or changing femur lengths and lifespans. No one denies the existence of both, I think, but the question of their interrelation remains difficult.
Thanks, MJE and Julianne! Yes, the question of interrelation is *the* question. I'm not *not* a materialist—I attempted to speak intelligibly about tariff policy in relation to Robert Frost's worldview in my last podcast—but I do prefer to emphasize "the active side...developed abstractly by idealism," since it's the side I understand best and can plausibly do something about.
I know. You could hardly write such excellent accounts of the world of ideas if you didn't have a feel for the material history. Focusing on that angle is an extremely reasonable position! And it's not like the world is suffering from a deficit of statisticians, or statisticians manqué (i.e. all of us)! I was lecturing myself on this subject sternly this very morning: "Just write a history of rhyme and leave this life expectancy business alone!" But here I am reading about the death of Wordsworth at 80.
Well said. We rely on the human imagination to come up with new ways to shape our material reality, but I think we also need to reckon with the fact that sometimes there is just not enough material reality to support competing Utopian visions.