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DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I’ve been hearing for most of my life — I came of age in the ’80s — that we don’t. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you called a snob.
James Joyce by Djuna Barnes
But a very fine, reasonably long essay by my Yale editor Steve Wasserman tackles the sources of American anti-intellectualism and shallowness and argues for the importance of complexity. I’m quoted briefly in there; these issue are the subtext, in some ways, to my book Culture Crash.
The piece, in The American Conservative, will appear in longer form in an anthology that comes out this spring.
just read the essay — now he makes an equivalence of sean hannity and stephen colbert; now, i think you’ll agree, that’s simplifying his argument, and it’s not a serious comparison.
Well, I won’t defend every line in this piece — I didn’t write it.
But is Wasserman saying these two are the same, or that they just demonstrate similar tendencies? He is pretty solidly on the left so I don’t think he seems them as identical.
This seems similar to Roger Dean’s recent criticism of the loss of craftsmanship in modern art. He is familiar to as as the artist of the Yes album covers from the 70’s, amongst other works.