Well, it only took them a week. Apparently, we don't live up to the stinting and unsentimental assessment of Jewish New York intellectuals once offered by Irving Howe.
The "dialectics" comment hurt. And to think I'm sweating to the Partisan Review oldies day in, day out. I guess I'll just have to write about Stalin and Trotsky more often. Here is Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber:
Looks like everyone around here is just too shy to mention it, but all this week Crooked Timber has been among the blogs discussed and/or vivisected by “Movable Snipe,” a regular feature at the website Jewcy.com. The various CT-related entries are all conveniently located here. To be honest, I found the comments (whether on CT or otherwise) somwhat puzzling. Not hard to understand, by any means, but…well, puzzling. And then it hit me.
In a classic essay called “The New York Intellectuals,” published almost forty years ago, Irving Howe described what he called the “style of brilliance” cultivated by one generation of Jewish-American writers:
It is a kind of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura and display. Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, willfully calling attention to itself as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle —such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the New York writers. In most of these essays there was a sense of tournament, the writer as gymnast with one eye on other rings, or as highly skilled infighter juggling knives of dialectic.
But an older generation’s example can be a burden—one that, in this case, the Movable Snipesters have clearly shed. In response to a recent CT item on embodied energy, for example, we read this:
Next post: embodied energy. What the hell is that? I have to go to some other website to read about this thing—energy consumed in creating one unit of product X, wha?—and then back to the CT to read more? I don’t have time for this. Do you have time for this?
Not when there’s TiVo!
The “style of brilliance” that Howe described was forged in the 1930s and ‘40s by cerebral young writers who felt alienated from mainstream American culture. Fast forward a few decades, and all is transformed. Now, it seems, young Jewish writers feel free to be just like their fellow citizens: Unthinking yet unapologetic; averse both to dialectical juggling and to looking up the word “dialectics”; incurious and proud….
The melting pot works and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
One truly admires the symposium bathroom break pedantry on display here ("not hard to understand, by any means"). We're not even treated to a pro forma tribute to democratic tastes from this lectern, what with that remark about unthinking and unapologetic "fellow citizens." McLemee must have tenure already. Credat Judeaeus Apella, non ego, professor.
And hey, talking of Jews, what's with the lumping of all tribal scribblers into the category of thwarted New York Intellectuals? Some of us are entertainment lawyers, thank you very much. (Michael Helke's not so much as a Litvak; he's our shabbos goy, our Dwight Macdonald.)
I personally take offense at that "dialectics" jab. Here I am, sweating to the Partisan Review oldies, day in, day out… Guess I'll have to blog about Stalin and Trotsky and Kronstadt even more often.
Ah well. At least Scott got the orthography of "TiVo" right.