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END_OF_INTELLIGENT_WRITING
August 14, 2006
September 11, 2006
KOSTELANETZ_RISING
"The Death of Intelligent Writing" (1973)
by Richard Kostelanetz
I intended to give this book the
This is subtitled "first 13" treatment first, and
"Literary Politics in America" then dig in further later
if it seemed warranted...
FIRST13
The subject at hand is But it's already clear that to
cliques, tribes... the do it justice it's going to
tendency to form blocks need closer attention.
of friends that back
each other up For now, an analysis
irrespective of any of the first few
actual merit. dozen pages....
Kostelanetz claims that this is a
"growing" problem, which threatens
"the end of intelligent writing".
Right there we have a question
that seems like it should be
a testable claim. My first thought
is "'twas ever thus"... how can
he support the notion that this But for that, I'm actually
problem is getting worse? going to have to RTFB.
He presents an intellectual history
of post-war America, and I'm going
to need to delve into the details. This may very well be
another book like "The Last
Intellectuals" where the
historical survey itself is
as at least as interesting
My second thought -- to jump ahead the thesis it's supposed to
a bit, perhaps -- is that it's not prove.
entirely clear to me that this is
an avoidable problem in any sense. And he has a
willingness to be
snarky, to cast
My own experience is that these aspersions...
issues are endlessly problematic.
This is not
Just as an example: I'm an occasional such a bad thing.
college radio DJ. Part of the game
is to identify interesting music,
by new, relatively obscure artists.
You don't have to do this for very
long before you become a member of If you edit a publication,
the scene, rather than just an you're going to get to know
observer; you make friends with a bunch of writers; some of
some of the muscians. Now when you them are going to become
play their stuff on the air, can your friends. And a lot of
you be sure you're being objective? them are going to be your
Must you *stop* playing music by friends because of a shared
anyone you're on nodding terms with? mindset, a similar set of
intellectual attitudes.
Are you now supposed to do a "full
disclosure" of any associations? There is no way you can avoid
How tight does the association have favoring these friends, and
to be before you get to the point it isn't clear that you
where you need to disclose it? should: when you're after a
Is there any way you can do this certain kind of write-up, and
without sounding smarmy and you know where you can get it,
presumptious, trying to claim will you pass that up in
personal connections with the stars? pursuit of "fairness"?
How is anyone -- yourself
included -- going to tease
out whether you sincerely
hold their work in high
regard, or just like them as
To come at it from another human beings?
angle: the idea that
individuals work best in
isolation is an exaggerated
romantic notion. HEROIC_ART
Often, good work is the
result of a group of people
supporting each other:
a scene, a movement, a subculture.
GOING_UNDER
Kostelnetz makes the point that the names
of identified scenes often don't make sense
literally (e.g. the "Southern Writers" does
not literally include all writers from the Another example: "New
south); he makes the point that these American Writers"
groups often have inflated claims (a anthologies that only
"Southern Rennaissance", that produced only represent a tiny
one really great writer)... fraction of the
actual new American
He could be correct about all of writers, representing
these things and still miss-out only a small number
that the social interconnections of selected groups.
of this kind of group may
actually be necessary in some
sense for them to do what they
can do.
All Kostelanetz can see when
he looks at these things is
a corrupt back-scratching that
gets in the way of making
decisions based on merit.
But how *do* you make
decisions based only
on merit?
What kind of institutions
could be established
that would encourage such
things?
MERIT_INSTITUTIONALIZED
Further, there's a
possibility that a
number of his premises
are wrong, or at least
severely dated, e.g he
believes that the
reason reading is in
decline is *because* of
a decline in quality
from this cliquism.
What about the
distraction from
other media
(television, movies)?
How is it possible for reading time
to stay constant in a world with an
explosion of new artforms?
Is there any reason it should?
There is also a possible problem with
the conspiratorial air about it his
presentation, even as he tries to THE_THEORY_OF_CONSPIRACY
dispell it.
E.g. he discussed the difficulty of finding
a publisher for the work as evidence that
his thesis may be correct: the cliques don't But it's okay with me
like to hear criticism. if he dares to call it
"conspiracy"...
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