@DamonLinker I threw a lot away when clearing my house this winter. They turned to dust in my hands.
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SamuelGoldman
4.1K posts
SamuelGoldman
@SWGoldman
Heavy into lots of different worlds.
Washington, DC Katılım Mart 2010
2.5K Takip Edilen9.5K Takipçiler
There are good reasons to mourn midcentury literary culture (as well as reasonable criticisms). But the physical quality of mass market paperbacks isn’t one of them.
Varad Mehta@varadmehta
They were terrible, though. Bad print and awful paper stock. Bindings that fell apart halfway through. Just unpleasant objects all around. At least the ones from the ’70s and ’80s. Their quality did improve in the ’90s.
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@eric_weinberger My parents had one of these setups. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
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Those trademark angles - you knew it instantly
Computer ♥ Records@ComputerLove_
Bang & Olufsen, 1983.
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SamuelGoldman retweetledi
1. Jewish
2. From the Midwest
3. Took a non-Jewish sounding name
4. Hobnobbed with the elite but was never one of them
5. Used his outsider status to both thrill and critique that same elite
Jay Gatsby is Bob Dylan
Armin Rosen@ArminRosen
Really important literary detective work from David Samuels, who compared various manuscript versions of The Great Gatsby in the Princeton library's Fitzgerald archive and found abundent proof of the title character's Judaism tabletmag.com/sections/arts-…
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@stevenfhayward I do wonder if the rise of AI will promote a return to biography and narrative, since those are things the brain robot doesn't do so well.
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A meditation on the precipitous decline of academic history.
stevehayward.substack.com/p/the-slow-sui…
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@nmosvick Whatever their particular views, I do wish people would make clearer distinctions about origins vs. trajectory.
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@SWGoldman One also can think of the difference between arguing conservatives shouldn't view the founding itself as merely protestant and liberal and arguing that the American tradition evolved over time towards a liberal one, such that the American Right also became increasingly liberal.
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Rightfully so. Conservatives shouldn't take on a Hartzian view of the American founding. Better to understand the varying and competing intellectual strands alongside the American compact tradition back to 1607.
Russ Greene@GreenPlusAnE
Michael Knowles: some on the right claim the American founding was “irredeemably liberal and Protestant.” “I am not persuaded by that.” Points to natural law influence, etc.
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@nmosvick "Consensus" was something of a straw man, but I think you do get closer to that in someone like Boorstin than Hartz. BTW Boorstin was an Oklahoma Rhodes Scholar contemporary of Willmoore Kendall.
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@SWGoldman I appreciate the nuance! As a matter of the 19th and 20th century, his argument is certainly, as you say, plausible. It might be more interesting to explore Hartz v. not only "Hartzian" views, but neowhigs and other members of the "consensus school."
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@nmosvick I think plenty of people did read Hartz that way. But the actual argument is IMO more interesting and plausible (though obviously not conclusive) than he gets credit for.
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@SWGoldman Fair points. I concede that I was thinking more of a school of thought, historiography, rather than Hartz's particular thesis. There may be a better way to categorize a liberal reading of the Founding that is both normative and historical.
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@nmosvick It's also worth noting that he thought this was a bad thing, not so much because it overwhelmed organic conservatism but because it made socialism impossible at the same time. In that respect, connected to the original "American exceptionalism" thesis.
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@nmosvick For Hartz the "Lockean" quality of the American political tradition is more sociological than intellectual, and becomes dominant in the 19th century with the exhaustion of the New England patriciate and the Old South planters, rather than at the moment of creation.
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@TwisteChristian @varadmehta People rightly complain about today’s slop, but there was plenty of material crappiness in the past too.
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@varadmehta @SWGoldman True. I have a buddy that does videos of opening old baseball card packs. The cards from the early 80's are such shit, it's almost hard to believe they were every popular. The paper was cheap, the text mottled and fuzzy, the photos could've been taken with a polaroid. :)
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@SWGoldman People pining for mass market paperbacks from three or four decades ago probably haven't picked any up lately.
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@mstokes1981 @Kin_Loch It's also funny that the agent in the front looks like Dennis Franz
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We used to be a proper country. Look at the blazer, chino, footwear combinations.
The Name of War@TheNameofWar
Secret Service agents responding to the Augusta National Golf Course incident where an armed man took hostages and demanded to speak to President Reagan, Oct. 23, 1983.
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@IvankoBarbell @suzania I think he’s confusing introspection with something like “the therapeutic”. Rieff is the classic source on that.
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@SWGoldman @suzania What a bizarre take. Must be missing some context. Indeed, the canon refutes the claim in general & in particular (for the modern) Shakespeare, Johnson, among others. If anything we’re prob less truly self-aware now. IIRC, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self good on this
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He claims that “thinking about what you are doing and about what you should do” originated in Vienna in the 1910s-20s.
Before that, he says, no one either felt guilt or thought about what their purpose was or questioned their own goals.
More Perfect Union@MorePerfectUS
Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.
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