snip...
REH More seriously, the death of publishing is the birth of the Internet except no one but the TV pundits gets paid. AC Possibly REH That is like comparing TV sitcoms to Shakespeare. The problem is that modern commerce has turned everyone from actors into audience or consumers who care little about doing most things. AC It maybe that too much television watching has so affected individual identity that everyone seems to walk, talk and dress like they are playing a bit part in some sort of made for TV movie. Why worry about what's on stage when the stage is everywhere and they only have to worry about their own acting, their own scripts, their own makeup--their own utterly self-conscious behaviour. Also to add to the decline of public intellectuals conversation: There must be a conversational space for such things. Larry King Live doesn't quite do it. 15 second sound bites doesn't do it either. Maybe, paradoxically, a 500 channel universe changes things in such a way that if you can't make your point in 25 words (or 10 images) then the audience switches channels, or switches off. REH Profession is not joy and fulfillment but drudgery and profit is the only rational value. That was the meat that I threw out from Posner but was met only with a deafening silence. Instead we got more stories about global warming that no one knows about. It is always easier to speak of the external. Maybe global warming begins in the head and really means that we all have a fever. But the great songstress Peggy Lee who taught us about fever with the purse of the lips and sway of her ample body died yesterday. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] January 22, 2002 Thinkers in Need of Publishers By RICK PERLSTEIN Every semester brings a new symposium, every season a new book, every Sunday a new furrowed-brow disquisition. The topic is "public intellectuals" - writers and thinkers who address a general audience on matters of broad public concern - and the theme is decline. Russell Jacoby, who coined the phrase, delivered the consensus judgment in the title of his 1987 book, "The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe": There are none to speak of. And as Mr. Jacoby noted in the splashy 2000 edition, "Happenings since its publication do not cause me to revise its main points." The old lament is now back under the elegiac title "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline," a book by the federal judge Richard A. Posner, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago's law school. Why, the question runs, are there no more public intellectuals? Ever the gentlemen, both of these authors claim to indict impersonal forces: for Russell Jacoby, the disappearance of cheap bohemian neighborhoods; for Richard Posner, a technical failure in the intellectual- services marketplace. But in the final analysis both end up tacitly playing the same blame game. Once giants roamed the earth: George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright Mills and Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, smart people writing for ordinary people, openly and unashamedly, on issues people care about. And now? Nothing save the gusts of postmodern academics and the ill- informed bleats of publicity-hound law professors. The previous generations of non-university intellectuals, the Jacoby-Posner story line goes, were made of sterner moral stuff. "A literate, indeed hungry public still exists," Mr. Jacoby writes in the 2000 edition of "The Last Intellectuals." "What is lacking is the will and ability to address it." I would like to interrupt this bit of rote programming. Where are all the public intellectuals? A well- stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen. In one direction: an author of two literary, daring and original travelogues about life on the cusp between wilderness and civilization, who is also a gifted miniaturist of the city � la Joseph Mitchell. In another direction: an erudite and fearless muckraker whose freelance expos�s of international rogues and investigation of the corporate takeover of American universities are but two achievements of a young career spent writing on just about everything under the sun. In still another direction: the editor of a searing (self-published) magazine of media criticism, at work on a critical study on the history of advertising. And a freelancer who has just come out with a rattling new study on the depredations of the American prison system. And there are more than a few impressive young literary critics and cultural reporters in my neighborhood, too, one of whom also happens to be a smashingly effective film critic. These are just a few people I know. My Brooklyn neighborhood happens to be unusually well stocked with but-for-the-name public intellectuals. But they are plentiful in other cities: young men and women without university affiliations, who rendezvous in barroom salons, are under 40, practice exacting self-discipline and don't sell out. All can hold their own with professors in one or more areas of expertise. If you read widely you have read them, even the ones who have yet to find much public success: in the dwindling numbers of newspaper book reviews, in the corners of the Sunday paper labeled "Insight" or "Outlook"; in one of the few quarterly magazines that still pay something or one of the few magazines that publish writing on serious issues. But are they equal to any from those golden generations - the Orwells, Mumfords, Paul Goodmans? Are they great, or potentially great? To attempt an answer would be foolish. For what is on display in most debates about public intellectuals is nostalgia, and nostalgia is systematically cruel to the present. We only remember those who pass the test of time: the stars. Then, in our minds we remake the past in these lions' images. Here in the unruly present, however, we are thrown back on nothing more than our critical discernment to make judgments. It's also hard to judge because it isn't fashionable to look for young intellectual talent any more. People once believed there were notable independent intellectuals because they were instructed to seek out and prize them. "The most brilliant young critic of our day," trumpeted the cover of Norman Podhoretz's first book, an anthology of essays that was published when he was 33. There is no such trumpeting today, partly because there are no such anthologies being published today. I can think of several brilliant young critics who deserve them. The story I'm telling is really one of extraordinary resilience and willpower. Just try, as many young writers do, to support yourself writing book reviews. You can still string together enough income for a rice- and-beans year from what you can turn out in cultural essays for newspapers and semi-prominent magazines: maybe 30 pieces, probably averaging about $400 each. You can even end up, after a few or more faithful years, with a middle-class sinecure at some publication, perhaps with the perquisite of a year's leave to write a book someday, maybe even to become some future generation's intellectual giant from the good old days. But the farm teams are folding. In the 90's, future household names were writing regularly for magazines like Lingua Franca and Feedmag.com. Both ceased publication last year, as did several book-review sections. Other regular outlets have cut back precipitously - paying less, shutting out new voices. Academia, once a potential solace, is out: at the professional conferences these days new Ph.D.'s walk around with a kicked-in-the-teeth look. The non-Ph.D.'s, of course, are not even in the game. And still they write. That's the thing. The fact is that there are no "last intellectuals." The will and ability to write smartly and well for a general audience seems to be indomitable. The intellectuals are there; the public need not feel starved; we need no more jeremiads. What today's public intellectuals need are publishers, and maybe a few publicists, too. Rick Perlstein is author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus." Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 6:19 AM Subject: Will Russia make it? > Court bailiffs entered the studio of Russia's last remaining independent > television station, TV6, last night in the middle of a talkshow, and > literally pulled the plug. > > According to Russia's Press Minister, this action has been taken because > TV6 was bankrupt and its closure, dramatic though it was, is the same as > happens in Western countries. That's as may be, but some would say that it > was the result of some oil oligarchs who were close to the Kremlin moving > against other oligarchs who owned TV6 whose programmes were not afraid of > openly criticising President Vladmir Putin's regime. > > Others say that it's nothing to do with that but is mainly a personal > vendetta by Putin against Berezovsky, one of the main owners of TV6, a > former oil oligarch who campaigned against Putin and who lives in Spain to > avoid being arrested by the Russian police. > > TV6's anchorman, Yevgenny Kiselyov, has said that this has been the first > step back to authoritarianism in the post-Soviet period. Russia's Press > Minister has responded by shrugging his shoulders and saying that when > TV6's broadcasting licence is auctioned on March 27, then Kiselyov and the > rest of TV6's journalists and executives, can put in a bid. > > Because of their experience, the TV6 team will have no trouble finding > financial support from Western capitalists. It remains to be seen whether > they will be allowed to win the licence. > > It seems to me that this is going to be of exceptional importance to the > future of Russia because the country has been dithering for ten years > between going backwards into totalitarianism (its "natural" state, whether > under communism or the Tsars) and forwards into Western-type capitalism. I > don't think it can dither for too much longer. This TV6 case may be the > flutter of the butterfly's wing that will swing the situation one way or > the other. > > Keith Hudson > > __________________________________________________________ > "Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in > order to discover if they have something to say." John D. Barrow > _________________________________________________ > Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > _________________________________________________ >
