In the last several years I've often thought myself about what you call "the autodidactic" here: how to on the one hand escape from the stifling empiricism of academe that denatures all culture and relegates virtually the whole of human experience before the mid-19th century to a litany of stupidity and error safely encased in museum-glass, while on the other preventing the very real monsters trapped behind said glass from escaping into our minds and pens! I certainly don't have an answer, but we should all probably be looking for one. As for that Smith essay, I think I agree with his prologue that it lacks a characteristic subtlety (I do get what he's trying to do, but "unpunished barbarian scum" is almost certainly too far) and doesn't quite connect its points to say what I think he intended, though I suspect if you know his work it's not hard to guess. That said while I do enjoy the pod his critique of KNE-style leftism/liberalism and its tendency to display a limitless compassion that then melts into air when confronted with any kind of conservatism (regardless of its origin) is spot-on.
Right, it wouldn't have been my phrase, though I'm not sure it's transparently his phrase rather than the vocalization of a not-wholly-avowed impulse. I have a different minoritarian relationship to crime talk, which you may notice I avoid, since I also belong to a reputedly criminal ethnic sub-population. Not just reputedly either, for example (first cousin, this year):
I can't stop listening to KYE, but I don't have to like it. (Haters are fans too.) They're sometimes magnanimous in the abstract to certain right-wing arguments, but they use this to absolve themselves of ever having to talk about what's wrong with today's left, by which I don't mean "wokeness" but the actual institutions involved and the interests they serve. The trans lawyer they had on the anti-DeSantis episode who briefly described the way elite liberalism manipulates images of otherness to shift the discourse with a contemptuous disregard for any real people involved (germaine to crime/homelessness/etc. as well as to gender) said more relevant things in two minutes than those guys ever say! Alas, I enjoy irrelevant commentary on Norman Podhoretz and Whittaker Chambers too.
Oh I think he's vocalizing an impulse too, it just wouldn't have been my phrase either. I mostly do like KYE, although the following of insightful commentary on the failure of conservative policy with the same solutions from grad school gets tiresome sometimes. Their Podhoretz episode is great, largely because like our pulitzer-winner Norman is the type of writer and thinker who almost invites that kind of below-the-belt dunking by putting so much of himself on the page with so little regard for how he looks doing it (it's offensive to both she and he I'm sure, but I almost involuntarily associate "On Liking Women" with "My Negro Problem..." I suspect because both are extremely strong essays that employ the brilliant but also imo dishonorable strategy of copping to an embarrassing or socially unacceptable practice or belief.... then turning and accusing "and actually dear reader, you *hate black people/watch sissy porn and want to be abjected too.")
It's such an effective strategy, though—I do it sometimes myself! ("Actually, dear reader, you enjoy that your favorite writers are all Nazi rapists too...") Yes, the "grad school" thing is also irritating, as well as the way they showily allow themselves a certain margin for free-seeming humor or "real talk" and then (mostly Sitman) use a mandated mouth-violating anti-phrase like "died by suicide," reminding one of a down-with-the-kids (within limits!) youth-group leader.
It really is (incidentally I read that Morrison introduction to Birth of a Nation'hood" not long ago, and I absolutely get why you'd use it as a way of persuading the reader that sth, they don't know that woman the way they think.) Yes, the faux-edginess gets old, though it's not nearly as pathetic as the bizarre relationship the dirtbags had/have with Trump, where they didn't really take him seriously and mostly thought he was based for pissing off liberal winemoms, but also actually sincerely liking him would get you sent to the shadow realm in ten seconds flat. I almost felt like Adler-Bell and Sitman needed a literary advisor for that Podhoretz episode, (fwiw I wrote half of a thesis on Norman, he's a constant and uncomfortable presence in my understanding of American intellectual life in the late 20th century) they touch only a very little bit on how one suspects part of the reason he went the way he did is that he was a Leavisite critic in search of an absolute purity that James excepted our lit has never had, and certainly didn't have anymore by the 50's, and so all he could do as a critic was pan things like Augie March, etc.
In the spirit of "knowing the enemy" I read The Norman Podhoretz Reader pretty much right after it was published (just before the 2004 election, customarily lavish blurb from Ozick on the back), though I was perhaps a bit young and inexperienced to grasp some of the implications and should revisit...I mainly remember the rambling essay about why Lolita should have been censored and the prematurely enthused review of American Pastoral. The "Leavisite critic" observation is definitely interesting in light of the recent Martin Amis discourse, since he was a surprisingly Leavisite critic and yet a morally unbuttoned novelist, to a fault, pedo jokes and everything. I got a definite "failed novelist" vibe from Podhoretz, on the one hand. On the other, it's scary how willing one is, unless one is James, to throw critical principles right out the window when pursuing emotional effects in fiction, something Ozick has also mightily struggled with. As for Augie March, it shouldn't work, but it does, so what else can one say?
lol the Lolita essay I remember, albeit mostly because my advisor was flabbergasted by the title. As far as “failed novelist” goes, his first memoir Making It is probably the best thing he ever wrote: it almost reads like a novel and if he were fifty years younger it probably would’ve been published as such. On that note I remember even when I was writing that thesis in my dour student leftism thinking that it wasn’t the left, but literature that Podhoretz “sold out” to become a political thinker and polemicist.
In the last several years I've often thought myself about what you call "the autodidactic" here: how to on the one hand escape from the stifling empiricism of academe that denatures all culture and relegates virtually the whole of human experience before the mid-19th century to a litany of stupidity and error safely encased in museum-glass, while on the other preventing the very real monsters trapped behind said glass from escaping into our minds and pens! I certainly don't have an answer, but we should all probably be looking for one. As for that Smith essay, I think I agree with his prologue that it lacks a characteristic subtlety (I do get what he's trying to do, but "unpunished barbarian scum" is almost certainly too far) and doesn't quite connect its points to say what I think he intended, though I suspect if you know his work it's not hard to guess. That said while I do enjoy the pod his critique of KNE-style leftism/liberalism and its tendency to display a limitless compassion that then melts into air when confronted with any kind of conservatism (regardless of its origin) is spot-on.
Right, it wouldn't have been my phrase, though I'm not sure it's transparently his phrase rather than the vocalization of a not-wholly-avowed impulse. I have a different minoritarian relationship to crime talk, which you may notice I avoid, since I also belong to a reputedly criminal ethnic sub-population. Not just reputedly either, for example (first cousin, this year):
https://triblive.com/local/pittsburgh-man-charged-in-theft-of-church-bell/
I can't stop listening to KYE, but I don't have to like it. (Haters are fans too.) They're sometimes magnanimous in the abstract to certain right-wing arguments, but they use this to absolve themselves of ever having to talk about what's wrong with today's left, by which I don't mean "wokeness" but the actual institutions involved and the interests they serve. The trans lawyer they had on the anti-DeSantis episode who briefly described the way elite liberalism manipulates images of otherness to shift the discourse with a contemptuous disregard for any real people involved (germaine to crime/homelessness/etc. as well as to gender) said more relevant things in two minutes than those guys ever say! Alas, I enjoy irrelevant commentary on Norman Podhoretz and Whittaker Chambers too.
Oh I think he's vocalizing an impulse too, it just wouldn't have been my phrase either. I mostly do like KYE, although the following of insightful commentary on the failure of conservative policy with the same solutions from grad school gets tiresome sometimes. Their Podhoretz episode is great, largely because like our pulitzer-winner Norman is the type of writer and thinker who almost invites that kind of below-the-belt dunking by putting so much of himself on the page with so little regard for how he looks doing it (it's offensive to both she and he I'm sure, but I almost involuntarily associate "On Liking Women" with "My Negro Problem..." I suspect because both are extremely strong essays that employ the brilliant but also imo dishonorable strategy of copping to an embarrassing or socially unacceptable practice or belief.... then turning and accusing "and actually dear reader, you *hate black people/watch sissy porn and want to be abjected too.")
It's such an effective strategy, though—I do it sometimes myself! ("Actually, dear reader, you enjoy that your favorite writers are all Nazi rapists too...") Yes, the "grad school" thing is also irritating, as well as the way they showily allow themselves a certain margin for free-seeming humor or "real talk" and then (mostly Sitman) use a mandated mouth-violating anti-phrase like "died by suicide," reminding one of a down-with-the-kids (within limits!) youth-group leader.
It really is (incidentally I read that Morrison introduction to Birth of a Nation'hood" not long ago, and I absolutely get why you'd use it as a way of persuading the reader that sth, they don't know that woman the way they think.) Yes, the faux-edginess gets old, though it's not nearly as pathetic as the bizarre relationship the dirtbags had/have with Trump, where they didn't really take him seriously and mostly thought he was based for pissing off liberal winemoms, but also actually sincerely liking him would get you sent to the shadow realm in ten seconds flat. I almost felt like Adler-Bell and Sitman needed a literary advisor for that Podhoretz episode, (fwiw I wrote half of a thesis on Norman, he's a constant and uncomfortable presence in my understanding of American intellectual life in the late 20th century) they touch only a very little bit on how one suspects part of the reason he went the way he did is that he was a Leavisite critic in search of an absolute purity that James excepted our lit has never had, and certainly didn't have anymore by the 50's, and so all he could do as a critic was pan things like Augie March, etc.
In the spirit of "knowing the enemy" I read The Norman Podhoretz Reader pretty much right after it was published (just before the 2004 election, customarily lavish blurb from Ozick on the back), though I was perhaps a bit young and inexperienced to grasp some of the implications and should revisit...I mainly remember the rambling essay about why Lolita should have been censored and the prematurely enthused review of American Pastoral. The "Leavisite critic" observation is definitely interesting in light of the recent Martin Amis discourse, since he was a surprisingly Leavisite critic and yet a morally unbuttoned novelist, to a fault, pedo jokes and everything. I got a definite "failed novelist" vibe from Podhoretz, on the one hand. On the other, it's scary how willing one is, unless one is James, to throw critical principles right out the window when pursuing emotional effects in fiction, something Ozick has also mightily struggled with. As for Augie March, it shouldn't work, but it does, so what else can one say?
lol the Lolita essay I remember, albeit mostly because my advisor was flabbergasted by the title. As far as “failed novelist” goes, his first memoir Making It is probably the best thing he ever wrote: it almost reads like a novel and if he were fifty years younger it probably would’ve been published as such. On that note I remember even when I was writing that thesis in my dour student leftism thinking that it wasn’t the left, but literature that Podhoretz “sold out” to become a political thinker and polemicist.