We’re proud to announce that Michael Seidenberg, our friend, reader and all-purpose sage, is featured today as part of Etsy’s documentary series “Handmade Portraits.” (Read the whole post on Etsy).

From The New Inquiry’s foundational text, Lewis Hyde’s, The Gift: 

For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

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Hillary Clinton’s gown, worn at the inaugural ball of William J. Clinton in 1993. 

From Crossfire, CNN, March 8, 1994. Hosts: Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan. Guests: Democratic Party strategist Ann Lewis in Washington and Camille Paglia in New York. On Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater scandal. 

KINSLEY: We’re going to get into that shredding in a little bit, but let me ask Camille Paglia. I don’t know about you, but I encounter extraordinary antagonism towards Hillary Clinton, far beyond anything that could be explained by Whitewater or health care or anything like that, and I do think, it seems to me, that a lot of it at least is old-fashioned resentment of a successful, powerful woman. Now isn’t that fair? 

PAGLIA: I don’t agree with this, because I’m a Clinton Democrat. I loved Hillary during the campaign. I wrote articles about her. One appeared in England, a cover story, and so on, but I have been bitterly disappointed in her performance ever since they took office. I’m judging her not as a woman but as a person in the public life. I feel that she has no idea how to maintain herself in that high position. She just hides from accountability. I find her arrogant. I find her cold. I think that there was too much unctucous genuflection in front of her, that the liberal media had only one image of her for the last year, and they’re starting to wake up to reality, seeing her in action here. I think she has fumbled and bumbled and shown a kind of lack of character. The first moment when I began to have a chill about her was inauguration gala night, when Clinton sat there enjoying himself, ver effusive, very open, and she sat there with this like pursed expression on her face, very tight. 

[…]

KINSLEY: Now, Camille, if a man, say Pat Buchanan, to pick a man at random, had said that he was against Hillary Clinton because he didn’t like the way she pursed her lips at the inauguration ball, he’d be savaged for sexism. 

PAGLIA: As a woman and as a feminist, I can state that I am not critiquing her as a woman. I’m critiquing her as a person in the public eye…What I’m saying is that week after week, month after month, her old reputation, coming from the far right, of being the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock, has proved to be true! …There is something manipulative, cold, and self-witholding about her that it has taken the liberal media a year to realize, and they—-

LEWIS: Wait a minute—

BUCHANAN: All right. Let’s get Ann Lewis back into this. 

LEWIS: If we’re going to talk about Hillary Clinton as a Person, can’t we just stop and look at the year she’s had? I’m stunned to hear this kind of language being thrown around. Here is a woman who one year ago relocated her family, including a teenage daughter, and those of us with teenage children know that isn’t ever easy to do, changed her job, left friends and her sort of support network behind— 

PAGLIA: Oh, give me a break!

LEWIS: — moved to a strange city—

PAGLIA: Oh, what a sob story. 

KINSLEY: Hold on, Camille. 

PAGLIA: Oh, the violins, the violins!

LEWIS: I am going to finish my talking—

PAGLIA: What a sob story. 

LEWIS: — moves to a strange city, her father dies— 

PAGLIA: Oh, her father dies. 

LEWIS: —her friends are under attack—

PAGLIA: Oh, please. 

LEWIS: This has been personally very difficult. 

BUCHANAN: Ann Lewis— 

LEWIS: — and to see her now criticized for what somebody remembers as an expression on her face—

BUCHANAN: Ann, excuse me—

LEWIS: — seems to me so grossly unfair, it’s appalling. 

PAGLIA: That is absurd— ridiculous! 

BUCHANAN: Camille, can I get into this? 

PAGLIA: They want special standards for women! That’s what you’re asking!

LEWIS: Camille, I’m asking for common standards of decency and human dignity. 

PAGLIA: Decency? 

[…]

---

Excerpted from Camille Paglia: Vamps and Tramps (1994)

Andy Warhol, “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” (1962) 

Like the early capitalism Marx and Engels described in The Communist Manifesto, Masscult is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition and taste, dissolving all cultural distinctions. It scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture…the process destroys all values, since value judgments require discrimination, an ugly word in liberal-democratic America. Masscult is very, very democratic, it refuses to discriminate against or between anything or anybody. All is the grist to its mill and comes out finely ground indeed. 

- Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” (1960)

---

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking…All of this is really American”

- Andy Warhol, (1977)

“Here is someone … who has an enormous, inordinate, neurotic fear of disorder. And that’s from which he makes his art. He always has his people in a moment of disorder. They think they’re in control, they think they have power, they think they have order, and then he just slips the rug out from under them to see what they’re going to do.”

-Drew Casper, “The Master of Suspense” The News Hour, April 13, 1999.

(via)

My vocation [as a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance has made me a man, generosity would make me a book.

- Jean Paul Sartre

A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore must submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift.

[…]

For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

- Lewis Hyde, The Gift

“I want to find out why I’m working,” Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn in “Holiday.” Grant’s character, a grocer’s son who put himself through Harvard, wants to take time off from a promising business career, and Grant makes the proposal sound at once existential and lighthearted—as if he wants to investigate not because he’s especially troubled or especially gifted but because this is the sort of thing human beings like to know, and he happens to have the means to try to find out. “The answer can’t be just to pay bills and to pile up more money,” he says.

- Caleb Crain, “It Happened one Decade” The New Yorker

But will people pay for art untethered to tangible things, when it can be replicated and transmitted with the push of a button? How are creative types supposed to sustain themselves and their efforts? After all, despite the plummeting cost of online distribution, art still requires an artist, a flesh-and-blood person who does the work and must be paid. 

[…]

It is a cruel parody of the traditional distinction between art and commerce. As the critic Lewis Hyde observes, “When the song of one’s self is coming all of a piece, page after page, an attic room and a chamber pot do not insult the soul.” But the same message reduced to an economic truism—decline in industry profitability won’t hurt artistic production because artists will work for beer—rings not just hollow, but obscene.

- Astra Taylor, “Surfing the Net,” The Baffler

“The Adderall Diaries” is my seventh book. I have my following, but I’m not famous. I didn’t want to travel thousands of miles to read to 10 people, sell four books, then spend the night in a cheap hotel room before flying home.

[…]

I decided to try something I hoped would be less lonely.

[…]

When you read in people’s homes you’re reading to a reflection of their world.

[…]

The readings mostly went very long, over an hour with questions, and people didn’t leave… In a weird way the readings began to feel like an extension of the book.

- Stephen Elliott, “The D.I.Y. Book Tour,” The New York Times

This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet’s testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is provided in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “if I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”

- Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

___

“Now,” says Mr. Gradgrind, “what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, Sir!” 

- Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Monologue from The Cruise (1998) 

The image makes me think of this conversation with this woman the other day. She was this fastidious Judaic type woman in very sexual slacks and we were talking about the grid plan. And I made the comment that the grid plan emanates from our weaknesses—this layout of avenues and streets in New York City, this system of 90 degree angles—to me the grid plan is puritan, it’s homogenizing, in a city where there is no homogenization available. There is only total existence, a total cacophony, a total flowing of human ethnicities and tribes and beings and gradations of awareness and consciousness and cruising. And this woman turns to me and goes, “Well, I never even thought of that,” she goes, “I can’t imagine it. Everyone likes the grid plan.”

And of course the question is like, “who is everyone?” I mean, it’s just what I had said. Whoever that is under the white comforter cuddled up with 34th st. and Broadway, existing on the concrete of this city, hungry and disheveled, struggling to crawl their way onto this island, with all of their imagined rages and hellishness and self-orchestrated purgatories… I mean, what does that person think about the grid plan?

Probably much more on my plane of thinking, my gradation of being, which is like, let’s blow up the grid plan and rewrite the streets to be much more a self-portraiture of our personal struggles rather than some real estate broker’s wet dream from 1807. We’re forced to walk in these right angles. I mean, doesn’t she find it infuriating?

By being so completely legion to the grid plan, I think most noteworthy is this idiom, “I can’t even imagine changing the grid plan.” She’s really aligning herself with this civilization. It’s like saying, “Well, I can’t imagine altering this civilization. I can’t imagine altering this meek and lying morality that rules our lives. I can’t imagine standing up on a chair in the middle of a room to change perspective. I can’t imagine changing my mind on anything. I, in the end, can’t imagine having my own identity that contradicts other identities.”

When she says to me after my statement, “everyone likes the grid plan.” Isn’t she automatically excluding myself from everyone? “How could you not like the grid plan? It’s so functional! Take a right turn, and a right turn, and a right turn, and there’s a red light and a green light and a yellow light. It’s so symmetrical!”

By saying that everyone likes the grid plan, you’re saying “I’m going to relive all the mistakes my parents made, I’m going to identify with and relive all the sorrows my mother ever lived through. I will propagate and create dysfunctional children in the same dysfunctional way that I was raised. I will spread neurosis throughout the landscape and do my best to recreate myself and the damages of my life for the next generation.”

I remember 1963 Kennedy was assassinated; it was announced over the radio. At the time, I was rehearsing in the office of Leiber and Stoller. We called it a day. Everyone was in tears. “Come back next week and we will be ready to record ‘Go Now’”; and we did so. I was happy and excited that maybe this time I’ll make it. ‘Go Now’ was released and right away it was chosen Pick Hit of the Week on W.I.N.S. Radio. That means your record is played for seven days. Four days went by, I was so thrilled. On day five, when I heard the first line, I thought it was me, but all of a sudden, I realized it wasn’t. At the end of the song it was announced, “The Moody Blues singing ‘Go Now’”. I was too out-done. This was the time of the English Invasion and the end of Bessie Banks’ career, so I thought. America’s DJs had stopped promoting American artists.

- Bessie Banks on American History

(Image via)

n+1’s new publication, What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation is now available for purchase. 

The collection includes a contribution from The New Inquiry editor, Rob Horning, “The Death of the Hipster.” 

Rob writes, 

It’s impossible to obtain objective distance from hipsterism; if you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of its “taint”—as n+1‘s announcement of the event noted. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” I thought that would be the core of the discussion, the paradoxes of that apparent truth. In always pushing ourselves to repudiate hipsterism, we may drive ourselves to new ways to conceive of our identity—but what good are these if these are always ripe for becoming the new modes of hipsterdom? What good is it to stay a few steps ahead if you always remain on the hipster path? How do we stop running that race, stop worrying about the degree to which we are “hip”, the degree to which our treasured self-conceptions can be made into cliches against our will?

The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster.

Some excerpts from Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s Speedology (2002)

1. The Fastest Way to Adventure is to Stand Still

Boredom is an illusion. Boredom is the continuous state of not noticing that the unexpected is constantly arriving while the anticipated is never showing up. Boredom is anti-cruise propaganda. 

2. The City as Autobiography

We are not visitors, tourists, nor inhabitants of New York City; we are New York City. The city is our moving self-portrait and a living art installation carved out on an island of rock, even the cracks of the sidewalk are crying out on the topic of our lives. The city is a profound opportunity to understand ourselves. 

3. This is No Time for Historical Accuracy

Nothing I say can possibly be defended. I am not interested in being right or wrong; my priority is to be joyous. 

As a tour guide, I approach history the same way Charlie Parker would approach a jazz standard. I am not here to recapitulate the notes exactly as they were composed but to find myself within the notes and collaborate with what has been before me to chase after everything I could ever be. My study of history is mostly an attempt to impress women. 

4. Fear is Joy Paralyzed

Society— the greatest self-hatred the earth has ever witnessed— is a mediocre improv comedy piece we’re all living despite ourselves, one that would be impossible without fear effectively taking on ingenious disguises throughout the adventure of each and every day […] We do not have agendas, agendas have us. 

5. Gregariousness is Great

New York City is a summoning of souls and a tribal ceremony of collected ancient agonies and conflicts brought to a new landscape for healing. A New Yorker is someone who runs wild with healing. 

6. The Soul is the Only Landmark

Salvation is seeing everything as it already is. 

7. Being Alive is Sexy

The world is an involuntary orgy. 

8. What is Created is Destroyed

Many decry the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, the great beaux arts railroad terminal that was knocked down and replaced by the fourth Madison Square Garden. They ask, “If the city is a great teacher, why would it destroy a great building and put a lousy one in its place?” the answer: Pennsylvania station was too beautiful. The anecdote may be a catastrophe from a preservationist’s point of view, but it is a masterpiece from a dramatist’s. It’s just the way Tennessee Williams would have written it. Many will then ask, “Why is the city issuing forth these dramas?” The answer: the city wants to entertain us. 

9. The Most Significant Thing About Suffering is That We’re All Doing It

[…]

10. Our True Selves Are the Greatest Parties Ever Thrown

You are a better party than you have ever been to. […] To live in a city is to realize that life is a procession of different versions of ourselves that we meet over time. Evolving is the meeting between who you were and who you just became. 

11. Having Faith in Humanity is Supposed to be Fun

Fun is active faith. Faith is the celebration of “I don’t know.” The city is a bravely unfolding movie entertaining us so effectively we are hypnotized by it. The movie is a comedy about mammals in a movie taking the movie seriously and deciding it is a tragedy. 

12. I Am Not Getting Laid

I want to make it clear, from the beginning, that I am not currently getting laid as I write this and this fact colors everything I say. It’s the one statement that makes perfect sense of Nietzsche’s work. 

Bennett Miller’s 1998 documentary, The Cruise  is one of the greatest films ever made about New York City.

Watch it on Netflix instant play immediately. 

Let me direct your attention this Sunday afternoon to Scott McLemee’sThe Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson for The National. Quite unlike the ”old-fashioned sort of literary intellectual, inclined to Luddism,” McLemee is ever resistant to the uncurious (sometimes anti-curious) defeatism much more typical of his handwringing peers. Better than young, he is an optimist at heart. Sometimes in spite of himself.

McLemee writes, 

The old-fashioned book is a piece of technology - one quite as plugged into vast, complex networks as any computer screen. Besides the machinery required for printing and distributing a given volume, there are intricate systems involved in acquiring manuscripts and preparing them for publication. And then there are the means through which books become known to the world - a set of convoluted processes called marketing, publicity and reviewing.

[…]

Each publishing house has a sense of the state of the game, and of what it might be able to do with its next move. There is a constant awareness, not just of one another’s market shares, but of respective degrees of prestige and ability to attract desirable manuscripts from authors. The “value chain” involves bookkeeping, while the “field” is defined by a more complex logic - one in which the accumulation of information and symbolic power counts for more than strictly economic factors.

[…]

The economic downturn that began in 2008 has amplified the normal (indeed, structural) tension and uncertainty of publishing. “When it becomes much harder to play the game in the old way,” Thompson writes, “even for those players whose dominant position in the field gives them all the advantages, then the doubts are more likely to surface… Economic turbulence gives rise to renewed questioning of the rules of the game and to new ventures that could, to some extent, change the rules.”

[…]

…[T]his could mean that the whole board is in play in some new way. And in that case, a savvy pawn may have better strategic possibilities than a cornered king. 

Read the whole piece here. 

I also recommend browsing the archive of his Inside Higher Education column, “Intellectual Affairs” for (amongst other things) a thoughtful account of the changing nature of literature and intellectual life in the information age.

pp. 26-27 Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café”

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be a man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip barer his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.