Another excellent newsletter. If I donned my politics cap I’d say there was a way in which Trump becoming the figurehead of that movement(the vitalist underground? It never had a name before him, although it did exist) encoded the inevitable return to philistinism, made its loss inevitable despite whatever perverse aesthetic pleasures the spectacle of the Don himself may have offered. Certainly that was how I felt at the time-I started drifting away when he pulled out ahead and fully fell away when he won in 16. An underground can’t survive when your man is the president of the United States-which is why maybe the only real move for an artist (barring truly extreme circumstances) is as you’ve alluded a couple times this year a kind of quietism
Thank you! I agree about quietism, and agree that the Trump moment is probably irrecoverable, but I think I disagree about Trump himself. There's always an underground, but he had a particular ability to embody the reactionary avant-garde just by being a rhetorical nationalist as a persona entirely comprised of gay, black, Jewish, Italian-Latin, and thus all-around New York cosmopolitan signifiers, themselves grafted onto his uncanny physique-visage. It made even his own golfing philistinism seem somehow vanguardist. The counterexample would be Obama, a simulacra even in 2008 of yesteryear's counterculture, thus its inexorable middlebrowization. (I am tempted to reverse both Morrison and Coates: Trump was the first non-white president. Surely this goes too far, but he really may have been the first totally culturally non-WASP president, certainly much more than Kennedy or Obama with their impeccable "class.") He probably won't be president again, though there are too many variables—recession? two-front war with Russia-China? two elderly men's health? deep-state capacity? legal outcomes?—to know for sure right now. I only see it, though, if he runs as the '90s liberal he is at heart, against the (and De-) sanctimonious, which itself would be interesting.
Great piece. Thank you John! You're absolutely right - the Quillette piece seems spectacularly wrong-headed.
Another excellent newsletter. If I donned my politics cap I’d say there was a way in which Trump becoming the figurehead of that movement(the vitalist underground? It never had a name before him, although it did exist) encoded the inevitable return to philistinism, made its loss inevitable despite whatever perverse aesthetic pleasures the spectacle of the Don himself may have offered. Certainly that was how I felt at the time-I started drifting away when he pulled out ahead and fully fell away when he won in 16. An underground can’t survive when your man is the president of the United States-which is why maybe the only real move for an artist (barring truly extreme circumstances) is as you’ve alluded a couple times this year a kind of quietism
Thank you! I agree about quietism, and agree that the Trump moment is probably irrecoverable, but I think I disagree about Trump himself. There's always an underground, but he had a particular ability to embody the reactionary avant-garde just by being a rhetorical nationalist as a persona entirely comprised of gay, black, Jewish, Italian-Latin, and thus all-around New York cosmopolitan signifiers, themselves grafted onto his uncanny physique-visage. It made even his own golfing philistinism seem somehow vanguardist. The counterexample would be Obama, a simulacra even in 2008 of yesteryear's counterculture, thus its inexorable middlebrowization. (I am tempted to reverse both Morrison and Coates: Trump was the first non-white president. Surely this goes too far, but he really may have been the first totally culturally non-WASP president, certainly much more than Kennedy or Obama with their impeccable "class.") He probably won't be president again, though there are too many variables—recession? two-front war with Russia-China? two elderly men's health? deep-state capacity? legal outcomes?—to know for sure right now. I only see it, though, if he runs as the '90s liberal he is at heart, against the (and De-) sanctimonious, which itself would be interesting.
You know, I always wondered why Creative Writing and English were separate once you got to college...
I think it's because the ruling class invented English in the mid 19th century but the CIA didn't invent Creative Writing until the mid 20th century.
At first I thought you were joking but on a hunch did a search and omg
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/
Lol no I was being literal, I'm just not sure how much it matters. I mean, were we supposed to write socialist realism instead?