I agree it's interesting, but wrong. I can say without footnote, quote, or spell checker, and thankfully without editorial rigmarole, Absolute Horseshit!
And worse. It's simply ignorant to make that kind of pronouncement. What Jill Lepore is saying is that she can't find enough interesting things to read and talk about at parties or whatever she haunts. So you need a counterexample. Fine. I've got a stack of nearly forty books few of which were from libraries published since the late 1990s on my shelves just to unpack Leo Strauss. And dear Leo, little evil that he was, has spawned a entire cottage industry of publishing. What made him perfect to study was his own meandering search through the intellectual circles in Weimar in the 1920s, Paris and London in the 1930s, and the US from the 1940s until he died in 1972. His arch nemesis was Hannah Arendt and they followed each other through the same sequence of cities and groups at nearly the same time. They represent between them the conservative and quasi-left wings of the intellectual circles of the 20th century. In order to figure out Strauss, I've had to retrace and assemble in my mind, that not very well documented history in its sequence. It's turned out to be interesting to me, even riveting because it laid the foundation for my own generation's confrontation with the blood bath wars of the century. Arendt and Strauss were at the height of their powers exactly when I was in school as a student from 1961 to 1969. I haven't got there yet but that will be the big pay off---the way both reacted to the black, student, and mass uprisings against the grand facades of power: the institutions of state and public life as well as the intellectual currents and countercurrents working out their tapestries. What a job that is to work on. It's something grand and scary. Maybe that's why it hasn't been done much. Shit the 20th century has been over and not-nearly-dead-enough for a decade. 1900-1914 wasn't waiting around on the 19thC to stroke out. The obits were numerous, articulate, and revolutionary in their own rights. As for the present, I really don't quite understand what Lepore is talking about. During the wars in Iraq and Afganistan you could find panel after panel of comentary by a long list of public intellectuals in print, journalism, and video through the internet. It became a global intellectual phenomenon and was limited only on my own language restrictions. This was vastly aided by Al Jazeera English, which has since disappeared---probably because it was so effective in its presentations, panels, interviews, and video documentaries. A long list of writers, academics, journalists, video crews, and articulate nobodies, carried on about the wars, the corporate take overs of politics, societies, natural resources, and the consequences of global climate change the environment and on and on. Where has Lepore been? I can honestly say, I've never had this kind of access to a public intellectual life that was so easily attained. Like so many things, you have to know what you are looking for, before you can find it. Maybe that's Lepore's problem. She doesn't know what to look for so she can't find it. Now it takes a few minutes to a few hours of sorting. You don't have to be in the right place at the right time. What I missed was the ordinary voice of somebody I never knew existed speak. Last June during the Cairo uprising against the Morsi retrograde regime, some video crew and its talking head, focused in on a twelve year old boy who was explaining the demands of the anti-Morsi crowds. It was stunning how articulate, simple, and commanding this kid was, schooled in the best places, in the streets, and at the dinner table arguments between the members of his family, men and women arguing over the state of the nation. It was the kind of thing you might read in Tolstoy or Trotsky. New Yorker cartoon. Plop. Plink. Splat,... Oh dear, what's that funny noise? It's raining intellectuals again, Jill. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
