CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Scott McLemee
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Decade Ends
Last year, I wrote a piece about the widespread tendency to treat each decade as if it had a distinct character or quality, and about the problem this causes given the lack of a commonly accepted way to refer to the present decade. The discussion spilled over into a second column.
Well, more than 18 months later, it seems that nothing much has changed. The topic has just come up at the U.S Intellectual History blog. I suppose something will crystallize out eventually but that won't be well into the 'Teens.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
"Brother West" Reloaded
My review of Cornel West's autobiography last week provoked a lot of discussion, well beyond anything I ever expected. (And more, it seems, than anything I have written in almost five years of doing Intellectual Affairs.) In today's column, I consider some of this -- and address, among other things, the question of whether I have a secret desire to send West a box of fried chicken.
Some of West's earlier and more substantive work will be considered in the article promised in my talk on "C.L.R. James and African-American Liberation" during the summer.
I need to get back to work on it and not be distracted by chatter -- let alone by the sort of "literary streetfighting" that involves a seedy guy bludgeoning his own head with a thesaurus (to make the voices stop) and then bleeding all over me.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Quel Fromage!
When last I was paying any attention, Ronald Radosh had just published one of the less memorable specimens of the "disillusioned radical turns right" memoir. I have rather a taste for that sort of thing. The psychology of the genre is fascinating, if not full of infinite variety.
But Radosh was no Whitaker Chambers. He wasn't even Ben Gitlow after he'd been doing the schtick for a few years and turned into a bore. Then again, the fault may not have been with the author; at least not entirely. It could be that I have grown jaded.
In any event, Radosh has again imposed himself upon my eyeballs, after almost eight years, via Pajamas Media, which comes as a surprise because at last report PM (hey, now, how did that coincidence go unnoticed?) was about to go under.
Friday, February 6, 2009
And the Lord Did Grin
Turns out that Monty Python got it right. According to Karl Steel there really was a Book of Armaments....
Bless the rifle and cannonball, and let the above blessing of the arms [be done] with all the appropriate changes, and let them be sprinkled with holy water. Let the gunpowder [pulveris tormentarii] be blessed, and the projectiles: namely, the bullets, whether of lead or iron, whether collectively or individually.
It was the 18th century -- rather post-Arthurian. Still, close enough.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
House of Brain
Ben Alpers charts the rise and fall, from Kennedy through Ford, of "the White House Intellectual-in-Residence" (not that it's existed as a post officially so signified, of course):
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Overlooked Historical News
U.S. Finally Gets Around To Closing Last WWII Internment Camp
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Happy 75th Birthday to the Catholic Worker
On this day in 1933, the first issue of The Catholic Worker appeared, promising to take seriously the church's program to "reconstruct the social order" according to the teachings of a certain revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and egalitarian organization from the Palestine, long ago.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Somebody Contact Ken Burns
It turns out everything Johah Goldberg says in Liberal Fascism is true. There are photographs.
But a lot of people won't believe it, just because of exchanges like the one described here, overheard during Goldberg's appearance last night at the Borders in downtown Washington, DC:
While waiting to hear him, the two guys in front of me had this conversation after identifying each other as fellow conservatives. (I swear I am not making this up.)Thanks to Henry Farrell for pointing out the latter item.
Guy 1: Man, I am suprised there weren't protesters outside or something--knowing this town.
Guy 2: Yeah, but if there were we could bring out the baseball bats and show them some real fascism.
Guy 1: uh, yeah...
Indeed. It put the rest of the conversation into perspective.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Gray Dawn
At a certain point while working on my review of Black Mass, the little light bulb went off over my head and I thought: "The best way of characterizing John Gray's outlook would be to say that it's like Isaiah Berlin in a really bad mood."
Quite right -- and yet not something I had room to unpack, since the word count assigned for the piece was strict. The final version comes to exactly one page of the New York Times Book Review, and is accompanied by a rather striking little piece of artwork:
I might have to write about Gray again. His understanding of Marx and Marxism is feeble indeed, which is probably a function of knowing it at second or third hand, via Sir Isaiah.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Best Served With Freedom Fries
My review of Cathy Wilkerson's book about how she came to be in the Weather Underground ran last week in Newsday. I've now posted it at my own website as well, so that it will remain available after the paper withdraws it. The text is available here.
A number of other reviews from the past several months, several on popular books of historical interest, are also available, listed on the homepage. Among them is my longish essay marking the twentieth anniversary of Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals.
As just noted at Quick Study, it is also available in translation in the second issue of La Revue internationale des livres et des idées, a new magazine sometimes described as "The Paris Review of Books." My Francophile mother-in-law is going to be seriously impressed. My family back in Texas, maybe not so much.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The South Will Rise Again
Thanks to Ralph Luker and Henry Farrell for the getting out the word about my column this week. It now occurs to me that blogging is a good way to follow a tangent on something that did not really seem to belong in the article itself.
In an unfinished manuscript left at his death, Laud Humphreys described meeting with a prominent Dixiecrat politician and his wife in 1948. When the politician left the room, his spouse began undoing Humphreys's tie so that they could all have a little party -- as, she explained, was their wont.
The biography of Humphreys explains that "this archconservative longtime segregationist served as U.S. Senator from South Carolina from 1954 until shortly before his death in 2003." But the at least the authors don't actually, you know, name him.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Think Twice
My essay on the 20th anniversary of Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectual will run in the new issue of Bookforum. It is currently available at the website -- though at 4000 words, minus any of the section breaks used to structure the piece, it is hard to believe that anyone could actually read it online.
Here's hoping the print incarnation is easier on the eyes. As if to provide evidence that some folks have made it through the "screen version," however, I've received a couple of messages from people asking about the concluding paragraphs. Is the scenario sketched there likely?
Friday, July 13, 2007
Apocrypha Now?
A friend has asked about a story that may be the academic equivalent of an urban legend. I had never heard it. I asked some journalists who cover higher education, and they also say it does not ring a bell.
But the thing sounds just plausible enough that it might really have happened. So at my friend's request, here is a call for leads in case there is anything to it.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Footnote to Folly
A very good explanation of the basic LaRouche template is given in a chapter of Architects of Fear, a book from the early 1980s by George Johnson, who I believe is still a science writer for The New York Times.
World history boils down to a war between the anti-technology agrarian oligarchs (reductionist followers of Aristotle, every one) and the city-building forces of scientific progress (who are Platonists).
The whole thing started in either Atlantis or Mesopotamia, or maybe both. I can't read my notes on that part.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Branded
In today's Inside Higher Ed, Mark Bauerlein writes:
After I left graduate school, more literary/cultural criticism anthologies appeared along with various dictionaries and encyclopedias. The process seems to have culminated in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (ed. Vincent Leitch et al), whose publication in 2001 was momentous enough to merit a long story by Scott McLemee in The Chronicle of Higher Education that included the remark, "An anthology stamped with the Norton brand name is a sure sign of the field's triumph in English departments."
For McLemee to speak of "stamping" and "branding" was apt, more so than he intended, for every anthology assigned in class carries institutional weight.
Uh, no, that would be precisely the overtone and degree of aptness intended.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The Movement of History
"The movement of history is heavy, and slow. The movement of history always takes place behind one's back. As your gaze is fixed upon something immediately in front of you -- the object of your anger, for example -- history makes a slight, almost imperceptible slither, or shudder, in a direction of its own choice. The distinguishing mark of this direction is that it is not the one you had anticapted. How history does this is not known. Because history is made up of the will of all individuals taken together, because these oceans of individuals are mostly, or always, in conflict, the movement of history is at one and the same time tightly bound, and outrageous....Study of the previous behavior of history does not prepare one for these shifts, which are discomfiting in the extreme. Nothing prepares you."
Donald Barthelme, "The Angry Young Man," Guilty Pleasures (1974)
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Feeling Freakosophical
The paperback edition of Freakonomics contains a postscript that mentions my review of the hardback edition. That piece ran two years ago this weekend. In the course of listing various comments that were not entirely enthusiastic, the authors refer to
a Newsday review, by Scott McLemee, which chided the book’s “style of evasive lucidity”; [and] a review in Time magazine, which said that the “unfortunately titled Freakonomics” has “no unifying theory … which is a shame.” (In fairness to ourselves, we should note that both the Time and Newsday reviews were largely positive.)
Now, it's true that I seldom reread my work after it appears and indeed tend to forget what I've written pretty quickly once the last revision is done. (Forward ever, backward never.) But this reference to the review as "largely positive" certainly came as a surprise, for I do have some recollection of the book, and it is not a fond one.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Rapture!
Very grateful to Ellen Heltzel (of the Book Babes) for the item at the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass about my column today, which discusses Robert Cawdrey's pioneering but long-forgotten dictionary from 1604.
Not too surprised that she notices some of the sexual lingo that I cited. When you say "Puritan," the notion of repression comes automatically to mind.
Friday, March 30, 2007
A Fresh Triumph of the Will
The trailers for 300 made it look so much like a video game (a cultural form with no appeal for me at all) that actually going to it never crossed my mind, even though I'm interested in the history.
Subsequent critical commentary on the film has only reinforced that decision -- while adding a layer of incredulity at the idea of the Spartans being portrayed as some kind of Republican focus group, a bunch of freedom-loving homophobes engaged in a joint campaign of the Culture Wars and the War on Terror.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
The End of the End of History
Jean Baudrillard, postmodern theorist of the simulacrum and major inspiration for The Matrix, died yesterday. As of this morning, the record for him in the Library of Congress online catalog indicates that he lived from 1929 to 2007. Considering you still occasionally come across entries for authors born during the Civil War whose death dates aren't indicated, this is pretty amazing.
I've put up something on Baudrillard here, or rather recycled it from an earlier publication. Such recycling seems particularly appropriate in this case. Most of whatever proved interesting or stimulating in Baudrillard consisted of ideas he had photocopied from the Situationists, especially Guy Debord's analysis of the society of the spectacle.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
World-Historical Individual-ism
In asking in my column yesterday whether George W. Bush might qualify as one of Hegel's "World-Historical persons," I left out one possibility that certainly crossed my mind while thinking about it.
For Hegel, the significance of such figures is not strictly a function of what they intend to do. Their intentions, their passions, even their human failings can prove to be indirect instruments of forces or tendencies in the historical process that they never fully understand.
Might GWB be playing a world-historical role even if his stated plans turn out to be as disasterous as they've been so far? Could his actual significance in the grand scheme of things be as catalyst for the complete destruction of U.S. power in the region?
I don't know. I'm just asking. (I don't endorse teleological thinking, in case you were wondering.) But a recent article in Foreign Affairs seems to suggest that is exactly what is happening.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Meta-Meta-Memetic Blogging
I'm keeping an eye on Wired News, in case they run something on Scott Eric Kaufman's pre-MLA experiment on meme transmission between blogs. Which, it sounds like, has taken an interesting turn
Please consider contributing to his project. If you aren't up to speed, you might look at my Crooked Timber post on it from yesterday. Or you could read a very slightly modified version of the same by a LiveJournal user who (1) removed a few words, including "albeit" and (2) inserted a punctuation mistake.
Plagiarizing a blog entry? Now that is some kind of lazy.
Monday, November 27, 2006
What a Paine
Some people find the problem of Christopher Hitchens endlessly fascinating. It is like the debates over the Russian Revolution that once animated some of us on the left: There is the challenge of determining just when the degeneration began; whether it might have been avoided; how many "seeds" of later miserable developments were always already present; and what (if anything) survived the catastrophic later course....
Monday, October 9, 2006
No One Could Keep the Whole of That Lecture in His Head at Once, Such Are Its Riches
Recent discussions of the state of military history in the academy have reminded me of a favorite passage in Dog of the South by the great American comic novelist Charles Portis. Then again, it does not take much. Dog of the South is some kind of masterpiece. And Portis himself deserves recognition beyond the cult following he has developed among people who have more or less memorized his work from periodic rereadings.
Monday, September 18, 2006
The End of History
An important article today at Inside Higher Ed reports on how the National Endowment for the Humanities is "revamping" its approach to funding the preparation of scholarly editions of historical documents.
"Revamping" is a euphemism. Another way to put it might be "gutting, with the long-term intention of completely destroying."
Saturday, September 9, 2006
Tricorder Readings Indicate That a Dangerous Cloud of Mind-Altering Anachronism May Soon Swallow Us, Captain
Some of the best commentary on American television around now is to be found at a blog called The House Next Door. To anyone interested in Deadwood, for example, let me strongly recommend scrolling down to the list of entries in the right-hand column. A couple of the blog's contributors are TV columnists for The Newark Star-Ledger, but they bring to their work far more attention to both visual form and social content than the job usually requires.
Consider the recent entry by Matt Zoller Seitz on the "facelift" now given to the original Star Trek episodes -- a set of digital tweaks that goes against the grain of what makes the show both a historical document and a continuing source of pleasure.
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
For These Things Are Unclean
"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination."
So we read in Leviticus 20:13, in the very King James English that God used to give His points extra special emphasis. That settles it. Not much ambiguity, is there? I hope you gay-marriage supporters out there will now just, you know, be quiet, and otherwise behave yourselves.
Okay, now let's talk about shellfish and other unspeakable foodstuffs from the sea. Consistency is important, and we've let this one slide too long.
Monday, September 4, 2006
The Constant and Irresistible Blogospheric Thrashing of the Piñata Formerly Known as Lee Siegel's Ego Must Stop, in the Name of All that is Decent and Holy. (Well, Okay, Just One More Whack.)
Some weeks ago, there was a clash between Lee Siegel and Christopher Hitchens. I cannot claim to have followed it at the time. The matter involved Mel Gibson, who does not command attention, at least in my book.
And now, as you may have heard or noticed, the "Lee Siegel on Culture" blog has disappeared down the memory hole at TNR Online, following the revelation that its eponymous pundit had an imaginary friend named "Sprezzatura" who showed up in the comments section to hail Siegel as "a powerful critic" who is brilliant, witty, and possessed of the virile prose style of a much younger man.
Siegel is in his forties (as am I). He probably knows the bit in Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise about that miserable period when you realize, not only that you aren't a bright young writer anymore, assuming that you ever were, but that the people who actually are bright young writers don't really pay any attention to you, let alone hold you in awe.
A lot depends on how much awe you were expecting, of course. Just how to handle this disillusioning episode of self-disenchantment is, in any case, one of the tests that life throws down. Guess what? Reading Cyril Connolly doesn't help all that much. (Trust me on this.)
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Listening to the Spokesbarbarian
I have been thinking a lot about the uses of the term "barbarian" -- the way it carries a whole string of associations and overtones. My first encounter with the question came while ignoring my high school teachers in order to read a couple of essays by Octavio Paz. And Friedrich Engels brings it up, too, come to think of it (here). But lately I'm thinking about its pop culture usages, in particular, as part of the subset of topics within some research on popular historiography from the 1920s and '30s.
By coincidence, there is a recent barbarian rampage in the mass media: The horde running amuck in the Capital One credit card commercials.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Gods, Graves, and Scholars
The reviewer of a recent book on Greek mythology for the Times Literary Supplement pauses to consider one of the most widely read compilations of the tales -- that Penguin standard, The Greek Myths by Robert Graves.
I knew that Graves's fascination with his own private quasi-Jungian "white goddess" cult was proto-New Age bullchowder. Turns out, it also left an imprint on his retelling of the classical myths.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
You Can Make a Career Out of Saying Stupid Things About Karl Marx
Well, perhaps not as easily as you once could. But there's no penalty for making perfectly groundless statements on Marx with an air of great certainty. In some quarters, doing so is obligatory.
For a fine round-up of the standard nonsense and its precise, well-documented refutation, there is now Marx Myths & Legends.
Frankly, I doubt it will do one bit of good. This is a matter in which total ignorance tends to be quite proud of itself.
Oral History at YouTube?
I don't know what to say about the videos put up by "geriatric1927", except that there is something fascinating and strangely moving about the whole thing. His name is Peter, he's 78 years old, and he's a blues fan. Also:
I am a widower living alone in the county in the middle of England UK. My life has been very varied but my love of motorcycles has remained with me all of my life (no, I don't have piercings or tattoos).
Well, here's hoping someone from the world of motorcycle scholarship is tuning in. The phenomenon also raises potentially very interesting questions about how the theory and practice of oral history might change in the new digital environment.
I throw this out in hopes it will spur discussion by those more qualified. Thanks to Bill Benzon at The Valve for posting on this.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Deep, Dark Thoughts from a Deep, Dark Mind
Few things are quite so instructive (if not quite in the sense he intends) as watching John Derbyshire pretend to wrestle with what he supposes to be deeply transgressive thoughts about matters of politics, culture, and morality.
The topics vary. The method does not. "Why, it is shocking to find myself considering things from this angle!" he says sotto voce. "Yet one must be brave, and consider the possibility that I am, in fact, completely correct."
Derbyshire has pleased himself, for example, with the paradox of being "a mildly tolerant homophobe". On a more soul-searching note, he has contemplated his own erotic horror of any female on the far side of puberty. And lest you imagine the man to be obsessed with sex but indifferent to violence, he now informs us on the moral obligation to slaughter civilians.
Saturday, August 5, 2006
The Duality of the Southern Thing
"The past isn't dead," as William Faulkner put it, "it isn't even past."
Not surprising that the one rock group around now really writing and performing from a condition of steady contact with that truth is a Southern band, the Drive By Truckers, most of its members from Alabama:
Ain't about excuses or alibis
Ain't about no cotton fields or cotton picking lies
Ain't about the races, the crying shame
To the fucking rich man all poor people look the same....
You think I'm dumb, maybe not too bright
You wonder how I sleep at night
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
Duality of the southern thing.
Friday, August 4, 2006
There Plans are Fasinating!
"'THE SHADOW PARTY' BY DAVID HOROWITZ AND RICHARD POE IS ONE OF THE BEST RESEARCHED AND WELL DOCUMENTED BOOKS THAT I HAVE EVER READ," writes a reviewer at Amazon, demonstrating the important rhetorical principle that yelling makes you that much more persuasive.
"...I FOUND THIS BOOK FASINATING BECAUSE IT TAKES YOU INTO THE INNER WORLD OF GEORGE SOROS AND SHOWS YOU HOW HE USES HIS MONEY AND WHAT HIS CONNECTIONS ARE WITH HILLARY AND WHAT THERE PLANS ARE FOR THE PARTY IN 2008."
Yes, well..."fasinating" says it all. And no doubt "there plans" are just terrifying.
Wikiality
Last year, Stephen Colbert single-handedly summed up certain deep warps in the epistemological fabric of American culture by coining a simple yet powerful word: " truthiness ." Now, it seems, he has enriched the language again.
"Wikiality" replaces the currently useless concept of "reality," rendered null and void following several recent developments in the Executive branch of the United States government. (I have no evidence for this, but know it to possess truthiness.)
More on Colbert's neologizing here.
"Wikiality" does not yet have a Wikipedia entry -- in part because the flood of Colbert fans has done some damage to the site -- but it's only a matter of time.
One day, of course, there will be courses on the history of the '00s. And yes, this will be on the test.
Thursday, August 3, 2006
Dumb and Dumberer-er
Perhaps you have already come across Laura Ventura’s recent opuscule Academics Footnote Liberals Exclusively, “brought to you by Accuracy in Academia.” It is available here.
But for your sake, I hope you have not seen it. It is the kind of thing that, while you are reading it, actually makes you dumber. My own IQ, for example, has now fallen 20 points just from providing the link.
Monday, July 31, 2006
In Search of Ancient Bloggers
Well, maybe not ancient....But a family newsletter from Canada early in the last century has features that anticipate elements we've come to associate with (some) blogging.
That parenthetical qualification is a matter of principle: All-encompasing generalizations about the form or content of blogging should be regarded with suspicion.
(Thanks to Frank Wilson for the tip.)
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Wikipedia Tells You Things You Did Not Know
American newspaper of record The Onion reports today:
"Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.
"'It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,' said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone.....
Too Long, Too Long
I'll have more comments later on Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America by Peniel E. Joseph. My review will run in Newsday sometime next month.
But for the moment, let me just say that it is a very good book -- as absorbing as anything I've read in a while -- and that it will deserve all the praise it is bound to get.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Action at a Distance
Last week, I pointed out a landmark work of Maoist propaganda from thirty years back, more or less.
A historical document, in other words, even if it was available via YouTube. (Last night, my wife said, "So is YouTube the new cable access television?" Good question! Discuss....)
But the feature film in question is not just a blast from the past. Turns out they are studying Breaking With Old Ideas down at G.O.P. headquarters. For proof, check this out.
Thanks to Rick Perlstein for serving as the crucial one degree of separation/connection.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Back into "The Jungle"
There has been a controversy, of sorts, over whether or not the standard edition of Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic The Jungle is the product of changes imposed on the author by his publisher. That is the claim of See Sharp Press, which publishes what it dubs The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, based on the serialized version of the novel as it first ran in 1905. The book offered by See Sharp is somewhat longer than the text issued by a commercial press the next year. But more, it is -- so claims the publisher -- "the version of The Jungle that Sinclair very badly wanted to be the standard edition."
When I say that there "has been a controversy" over this claim, the stress should be on has -- because the debate is now over.
Friday, July 21, 2006
The East Is Red! (Or Was, At One Point, Anyway)
Released in the People’s Republic of China in 1975, the film Breaking With Old Ideas came well after the high tide of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But it is saturated with late-phase Maoist values, even so, as perhaps even the title may suggest.
I have been looking for this movie on VHS or DVD for some time, with no luck. (The brisk international market for Cultural Revolution kitsch evidently does not include the cinematic bits.) Now, thanks to YouTube, you can watch it in a series of fifteen installments.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Working Through My Rieff
It seems the time to be “Rieff-stricken,” as Margaret Soltan puts it at University Diaries. Over the past week, I’ve written two pieces on the late Philip Rieff – one for The Boston Globe and the other for Inside Higher Ed. And each one only scratches the surface.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
"A Thesaurus of Incoherencies"
In the months after 9/11, you started hearing more and more references to Robert Kaplan as the closest thing to a geopolitical thinker to come from the ranks of roving journalistic correspondents -- apart from Tom Friedman, of course. They became the Mutt and Jeff of American punditry.
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