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9 June
Just last week, I was commenting on Robert Quine, easily one of the most interesting guitarists to come out
of the New York underground of the 1970s. And now a friend passes along news that Quine is dead. This article says that Quine discovered the Velvet Underground while a law student in St. Louis. Which
seem very, very unlikely, considering Andy Warhol had barely heard of the Velvets at that point.
While I'm on a nitpicking kick....Christopher Hitchens had an article at Slate yesterday called "Not Even a Hedgehog: The Stupidity of Ronald Reagan." In the body of the piece,
the titular allusion is explained, sort of, as follows: "The fox, as has been pointed out by more than
one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a
hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump."
What is happening here: For various reasons, Hitchens doesn't want to mention Isaiah Berlin, who divided all writers
and thinkers into the two categories mentioned. And Hitch can't recall where Sir Isaiah got the distinction. Hence the invocation
of a philosophizing multitude, of indeterminate size.
In fact the original source was Archilochus, whose work survives only in fragments -- most of them obscene,
which has always made me suspect that Berlin was probably missing something in quoting that line. (My memory is
probably not to be trusted on this, but I seem to recall that in his defense of the free press in Areopagitica, Milton
considers Archilocus the extreme case of what could be publishable.)
In any case, Archilochus was a poet, not a philiosopher. Also, it would take an extremely generous definition
to call Sir Isaiah a philosopher -- though that is perhaps a rant for another day.
7 June
Somebody once said: "I always hope that Kenny Rogers is in good health, because when he dies they're gonna play his songs
on the radio all day long."
And in much that spirit of loathing at the prospect of the inevitable forced march through certain memories
-- a public celebration of things better off buried in an unmarked spot, on a moonless night -- I have, for some
years now, dreaded the news of Ronald Reagan's passing.
This morning, a thought came to mind -- the aftermath of digesting as much of last night's Sixty Minutes as
we could stand. (Switched it off halfway through; the gorge becoming buoyant at hearing they were about to do a segment on
the man's irrepressible sense of humor.) To whit: Let nobody say that liberalism has a monopoly on the therapeutic
conception of politics. "He changed America by making us feel good about ourselves."
What a vacuously privatized notion of leadership (let alone of politics or the common good). Jimmy Carter
got no end of grief for having read Christopher Lasch and coming forth with that bit about the nation's "malaise." But the
candidate who "lifted" that malaise did so only by giving the culture of narcissism a happy pill.
Or as Steven Shapiro puts it at his always-interesting site The Pinocchio Theory, the Great Communicator "created an ugly social and cultural climate in America, one that is still with us today: a climate
of cynicism, greed, selfishness, bigotry, frat-boy self-congratulatory boorishness, and blame-the-victim disdain for 'losers'
and the weak, all buttressed by a willfully ignorant, proudly vapid, feel-good-at-all-costs Pollyanna-ism."
That about covers it. Could be worse, I guess. How is Kenny Rogers feeling, these days?
4 June
Thanks to a shift in work schedule, my wife now gets every other Friday off. The nature of my own job is such that I
need to spend a lot of time scanning new books, trying to figure out which ones are worth more time, which is something than
can best be done in my study at home.
But not, dear reader, on her Friday off. Oh, no. Das ist verboten.
On such a day, I am condemned to wander the earth for a certain time. Either that, or sit in this florescent-lit
cubicle farm of alienated professional labor.
Commentary by internalized voice of friends: Dude, you are so whipped.
Subvocal response: You have no idea.
Then again, she has to put up with being married to writer. Which is no picnic when it's not going particularly
well. (For example, recently.)
Upon arriving at the aforementioned cubicle this morning, I find an e-mail message from a reader who,
while digging through some boxes of stuff from the Austin punk scene of twenty years ago, came across a copy of issue
2 (dated November 1982) of the zine Plan 9, containing an article about the Big Boys. He wonders about
the availability of other issues.
My jaw drops. Amazing to think of anyone else having a copy of Plan 9, let alone looking at it again. We did
three issues. The first two had a print run of maybe 50. Assembled with typewriters and scotch tape, and
printed (if that is the word) at a copy shop. Beginning with the second issue, my girlfriend examined the originals
to make sure we hadn't taped down hair or inky fingerprints.
Such perfectionism paid off. So did getting that article about the Big Boys. Our third issue broke out of the
two-digit print run, and included an interview with the Buffalo Gals -- which, with hindsight, was maybe even more of a contribution
to the documenting of the scene, since they disappeared without ever issuing a recording. We ran some pieces by the guy
who played bass for a band called Talmadge d'Amour, which had a sort of cult following. (What the hell am I saying? Every
band in question had a cult following. Except ours. We could barely get our friends to come to the rehearsal space. Too bad
for them. We kicked ass. Especially when got tuned up, which, admittedly, took a while.)
I forget whether we ever ran anything about China Nine, another band lost to history. Their debut was (afraid the only
word for it is kind of tired, here goes) electrifying. It was one of those shows with half a dozen bands,
the opening one being a hardcore group called the Fudge Tunnels, memorable only for their name.
Nobody had any idea who China Nine was when they took the stage. No expectations, except that they would pretty much
have to be better than the Fudge Tunnels. Everybody in the place was busy being punk-rock bored; you know how that goes.
But after about two songs they had the crowd going nuts. Hypnotic stuff with drones, an intricate rhythmic section, an
excellent female lead vocalist who played a solo on some kind of home-made steel drum .... You didn't know whether
to dance or to trance out. There was energy that flowing back and forth between the stage and the pit. (Not quite literally:
the "stage" was probably about two feet higher than the crowd.)
By the end of their set, there was no way we'd let them leave the stage without playing some more. The singer said something
like, "Well, those are all the songs we've written. Sorry!" More stomping and howling. They looked at each other with what
appeared to be astonishment. A sort of "what just happened here?" moment. If memory serves, they played one of the
numbers again as an encore, jamming on the instrumental part for a bit longer than they originally had.
And no, they never got out a record. I saw them play a couple more times, and recall how soon the
happiness and astonishment in their faces that first night turned into something harder. In any case, that first
show was one of those moments that stick with you. An experience that takes the top off of your head.
As for Plan 9 -- that was a long time before the zine explosion of the early 1990s. The
phenomenon itself was already decades old. It sure did feel like we were inventing the wheel, though.
At some point in late 1982, the magazine Texas Monthly ran a short article about punk zines. It
was illustrated with, among other things, the cover of our first issue. Aside from listing the contents, this
consisted of a collage in which a movie still of Lon Chaney as a double amputee was superimposed on an H-bomb
exploding in the background. The meaning of which (if any) now escapes me.
But what I do remember is finding out about the Texas Monthly article. The other editor and I were
backstage at Club Foot, trying to interview Richard Hell, who was in town to promote his second Voidoids album.
It was nowhere near as good as the first. We did not say so. It was hard enough being a couple of nerds in the presence
of such an awesome and legendary (and I mean the following in only the most respectful way possible) asshole.
Now, one of the things I loved about the first Voidoids album was the guitar playing by Robert Quine. Who was not
present. (He may have been off recording The Blue Mask with Lou Reed. Some astonishing guitar on that album, too,
especially the title cut.) No transcript of our interview with Hell survives, which is probably for the best. But here,
for posterity, is the high point:
Me: So where is Robert Quine?
Hell: Probably in New York, doing Quaaludes.
Anyway, some other Austin hangers-on backstage, upon learning that we were from Plan 9, said: "You guys
are in the new Texas Monthly." We assumed they, too, were on drugs. As a matter of fact, they were. But as a trip to
the Seven Eleven soon revealed, they were also entirely correct.
So the next issue, we printed a hundred copies.
And lo! -- so many decades, so many disappointments later -- someone writes to ask if there
are any available. Small world. I'm afraid not.
Bright idea: Time to make the full run available in a limited edition book. And maybe also ttime to reprint the
seven or eight issues of a newspaper called The Spark (you know, like Lenin's Iskra) that a bunch of
us radical-student-activist types did in 1986-87. Yep, that'll sell like hotcakes.
2 June
Yesterday, around lunch time, an editor here at the Chronicle forwarded an item from an Australian newspaper
about a new French novel in which the author uses no verbs. So I dashed off my own piece, also sans verbs, which ran this morning at the website.
Last time I checked, it was the single most e-mailed article of the day. A little while ago, somebody from National Public
Radio called to see if I might be available to yack on the matter. Kind of strange, since I haven't actually read the book,
but it seemed like a good chance to talk about Eugene Jolas's "The Revolution of the Word" and Raymond Queaneau's
Exercises in Style (in which the author narrates a pointless incident on a bus about a hundred times, using
a different style in each telling).
Indicating this was, perhaps, my undoing. I probably should have sounded wacky. Or indignant. Or, best case scenario, indignantly
wacky. Anyway, NPR just called to say they wouldn't need me after all.
C'est la vie. If they had proposed an interview about some article that took weeks to research and write, I would
be pretty disappointed at the change of plans. But given that the entire process of composing this piece coincided
with the eating of a peanut-butter sandwich, it's no big deal.
27 May
I'll be hosting an online colloquy with Michael D.C. Drout, co-editor of the journal Tolkien Studies, next Thursday at
noon. Questions and comments welcome here.
26 May
Slavoj Zizek weighs in on Abu Ghraib. To go by the contributor's note, somebody at In These Times thinks Zizek is actually a psychoanalyst. Well,
only in the sense that Freud called "wild" (the sort of thing that worried him).
From The Guardian, a smart unpacking of some implications of Susan Sontag's essay on the torture photos.
There is a politics to the affect elicited by these images -- an ideological component to whether you feel disgust or
shame.
Of course, there are also, undoubtedly, viewers who experience only vicarious gratification. Or the special
thrill of self-righteousness at ammouncing that they can see the "truth" of America, caught on film.
24 May
A little bird tells me that three prominent members of the Workers World Party (the folks who control International ANSWER)
have just been expelled.
This is sort of like announcing that the three tallest dwarfs have been forced to leave the circus. But hey,
you read it here first.....
Sorry, no more discussion of it is possible at the moment. I started writing at about 6 a.m., finished an article
for the Chronicle, and so am, at present, capable of little besides contemplating this inspiring image.
21 May
Payment for the latter arrived yesterday. That can only mean one thing: More hillbilly music for the portable CD player.....I'm sorely tempted to track down a boxed set of (mostly) instrumental cuts by Speedy
West and Jimmy Bryant, whose stuff from the early 1950s is some amazing fusion of swing, proto-rockabilly, and bebop. Check
out this review of a recent selection of their work. Very highly recommended. Some of the playing will make your eyes pop out of your
head.
Stalin.....the New York Times Book Review....and the creativity of displaced white folks at midcentury, determined
not to work for a wage if it could possibly be avoided.
Well damn. No need to write an autobiography now (as a couple of friends have been suggesting, tongue evidently
not in cheek). That about covers it.
19 May
Oh, wait, now I get it.... It took long enough. But finally the little light bulb has gone off over my head, and
it now seems clear what has been missing from this site, throughout its first half year.
Namely, logrolling. I have failed to promote my friends' work. This is bad.
Yeah, verily, I shall sin no more.
That cartoon-like moment with the lightbulb occured yesterday, while reading Rick Perlstein's latest piece on American
politics in The Village Voice. It suddenly hit me that his articles there were not just a matter
of Rick either procrastinating on his Nixon book or seeking to finance it through moonlighting, or both (though that's
possible).
The list of articles you will find at the bottom of this page constitute a remarkable body of reportage in its own right. They ought to be turned into a book. Hint, hint.
Just to get into one aspect of Rick's work: Unlike maybe 98 percent of the stuff I see about the relationship
between the "Christian" and the "right" parts of the Christian right, his reporting actually gets it. I don't
know know how better to put it.
Most so-called coverage on the intersection of religion, politics, and culture in the "red states" is the product of
a rather thoroughgoing failure of imagination and intellect. Reporters and commentators just let a bunch of stereotypes
and facts-that-ain't-so do the work of actually paying attention.
A case in point -- something Rick did not write about, but which bothered me quite a bit -- was the flood of self-assured
commentary that surrounded The Gospel According to Mel Gibson, a couple of months ago. Why were fundamentalist
Christians flocking to it? They must be anti-Semites! Like Mel's dad, they probably didn't even think there was a Holocaust!
Because after all (so went the argument), a concern with the agonies of the Passion was a paleo-Catholic thing. Ordinarily
fundamantalists don't care about Christ's torments.
Reading and listening to this, I thought: You guys really don't have a clue, do you?
I grew up in the Bible Belt. Lived in trailer parks, went to Wednesday night fellowship, underwent full-immersion baptism. (Note
to my Catholic friends: What's up with the sprinkling? Do you guys not get that baptism is a "type" of
death and resurrection? I know you folks don't read the Bible or anything, but it looks like you are good at symbols,
so it stands to reason you ought to get that right. [nota bene: tongue in cheek throughout]) No later
than my tenth birthday, I was puzzled unto the sublime by the apocalyptic visions of St. John on Patmos in
the Good News for Modern Man edition -- the flatness of that translation somehow never erasing the psychedelic
strangeness of it all.
And so even now -- at a distance of a quarter century, plus a change or two of cosmological moorings
-- I can remember two related things. Points that the folks pontificating on the fundamentalist South seem never
to comprehend:
(1) Some fundamentalist ministers are really into the passion. Long descriptions of the agony, the
bloody crown, the spear in the side, the nails going into the wrists (not the hands). You can diagnose
all this as sadomasochism or whatever. I mean, that too, no doubt. But just don't treat it as Mel Gibson's
belated personal contribution to the Counter-Reformation. I was sitting through this stuff in 1975.
(2) Whenever the pulpit became a scene for the narration of the Gethsemene death trip, the emphasis
was always on the idea that we were the ones killing Jesus, through our sins. Not "them," not an Other. The
idea of the Jews as a race or a present concern just never came up.
I'm kind of reluctant to mention this, but a lot more theological imagination went into trying to account for
the existence of black people. And Lord knows (if you will pardon the expression) the folks in black churches
must have had related discussions vice versa, starting from different axioms. But as far as any kid in my Sunday
school was concerned, the Jews were part of the distant past. Sort of like the dinosaurs, or the Founding Fathers.
So anyway, when people on the East Coast start pontificating on Southern fundamentalist culture, I end up chewing
my tongue.
It's still kind of tender, in fact. I did a lot of that in the 1990s. It was either bite the tongue or
yell at people. Now I just grind my teeth -- trying to figure out how, one day, to write about what Patterson Hood calls "The Southern Thing."
In any case, my friend Rick Perlstein writes about the world of Christian fundamentalism without being a native informant.
But he never once indulges in the stereotypes, half-truths, or "knowing" comments typical of people who, for example, think
that "evangelical" means the same thing as "apocalyptic."
Indeed, Rick's grasp of that basic difference informed his last article, on Bush. One moment in the article really drove home to me that Rick listened to people: He stresses the
fact that the Bible study group Dubya was in when he converted was concentrating on the book of Acts,
with its demand to evangelize the world.
That "Great Commission" was a basic aspect of church life when I was a kid, in the 1970s. Obviously
it is now many years (and a crucial early-adolescent encounter with Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not A Christian) later.
But Rick's article suddenly delivered an almost deju vu-like recollection of the implicit tension between the narrative
of Acts and that of John's apocalyptic visions.
And that is not "just" a theological nuance. Political and psychological differences hang on it. Really big ones. But
detecting them requires the journalist to have an almost anthropological capacity to listen for the distinctions
through which people in a given community make sense of the world, and themselves.
It would be nice to good to think that Rick is not unique among journalists and commentators. But it would be wishful indeed
to suppose he's not a rare bird. So go buy his Goldwater book, damnit. And purchase a new copy, at a retail bookstore, so he gets some royalties.
I'd like to think that one day Rick might write a short volume on the peculiar set of entanglements between
the Christian right (apocalyptic and/or evangelical) and Zionism. Some of this is very strange. The identification
with Anne Frank among some fundamentalists, for example, is something it would be good to have documented and explained.....
17 May
We've joined the UwC's "alliance of weblogs." (We = me + my book-devouring tapeworms)
This week, discussion begins
on the chapter on Dostoevsky in Julia Kristeva's Black Sun. The text of which is available in PDF here. If for some
reason you can't download it, drop me a line and I'll forward a copy.
Also worth checking out, for basic orientation,
is the discussion of Black Sun in the collection of interviews with Kristeva that Columbia University Press brought
out a few years ago.
The series New French Thought is winding things up....The challenge of writing this Hot Type column for the Chronicle didn't just come from squeezing a set of longstanding preoccupations into the very tight
strictures of a short, reported article (one that had to be fully comprehensible to someone unfamiliar with anything
involved). I also wanted to use the space to alert people already interested in this stuff to some worthwhile projects. Christofferson's
book is fascinating. And I really hope an anthology of Rosanvallon happens. His talk at the conference was a high point.
Made me wish I could read French without pain.
My review of a book on secularism appeared in yesterday's issue of Newsday.
7 May
According to an essay appearing in Slate this week, the situation comedy Friends embodied and defined a generation. Okay,
sure. As the credit-card wielding hipster with no meaningful sense of irony, but plenty of "irony," might say: "I'm willing
to buy that."
Well before the whole "Gen X" concept/brand made its big debut in the early 1990s, I was trying to come to some kind
of understanding of the notion of generational identity by reading Karl Mannheim's big essay. Just tried to find
it online, with no luck. But it made a strong and lasting impression, in that Mannheim dealt with really strongly
defined cultural and political cohorts. To translate his argument into terms not ordinarily used in the sociology
of knowledge: When historical changes are so massive and intense that they whack an entire society upside the head, it's going
to make some difference whether you have a clear memory of the pre-whack world order, or if you are relatively new on
the scene, so that you are not so much absorbing the shock as living with its aftermath.
Mannheim was writing in 1928. A primitive era, before the sitcom had been invented. And yet his ideas speak to us today!
Or maybe they don't. When I read "The Problem of Generations" sometime around 1990, it was while trying to
work out some understanding of how certain left-wing groups of the 1930s through the 1950s took shape. I
wasn't especially interested in my own generational identity -- perhaps because these old guys seemed so much more
interesting than any of my peers.
Sometime around 1992, the culture industry began working very hard to manufacture a generational identity for
people in my age cohort and younger. I was invited to purchase a baseball cap, and to wear it backwards. Having
listened to certain bands throughout the previous decade, I was supposed to list my music preferences as "alternative,"
and to spend a fair amount of energy (not to mention money) making sure that the CDs in my CD player were of a kind
probably not known to other people. Later, it was obligatory to know who somebody named "Dave Eggers" was, and to have opinions
on him.
Unfortunately, I still don't know who he is. Heir to the Better"N Eggs cholestorol-free egg substitute fortune?
Is he an "indie rocker"? There are so many points of confusion now, whenever I try to follow a conversation.
Part of the problem was no doubt the fact that, just about the time all this stuff was happening (the whole generational-identikit
being put together) I fell in love with someone who, to the best of my knowledge, has never in her life made
that quotation-marks gesture in the air, or joked about how cliched something was. And when we got married,
nobody gave us a CD player.
In retrospect, having passed 1992-1999 without spending more than around a hundred bucks on new music may have accounted
for just how anomic I became after starting to write full-time. The implicit rules of my social milieu held that I should
either like Stereolab or be in a position to say "throw away all your Stereolab CDs and listen to this!" But I could
never do so, thinking, as I did, that Stereolab was a manufacturer of stereo equipment.
Given my income as a freelance writer, I was more or less completely disqualified to participate in consumer culture.
But that was only "the final determining instance of the economy" ratifying a deep indifference that,
with hindsight, looks like social retardation.
Since early 2001, when I began having a disposable income, I've certainly pumped a lot of money into the used
CD market. Despite which, full participation in "my generation" proves elusive. For example, I have never watched
an entire episode of the show Friends. That Lisa Kudrow is sure cute as a bug's ear. But while channel-grazing,
I have never been tempted to keep watching. If a sitcom can define a generational identity, I'm afraid that in this case,
it does so indirectly, by excluding me from the communion of the laugh track.
In Slate, Caitlin Macy writes: "What the show brilliantly identified, in its palatable, mainstream way, is that
we are—perhaps more than any before us—a generation that defines itself by its friends."
At one level, this statement embodies the logic best exemplified by Ike's line about how "things are more like
they are now than they ever were." My recollection of Mannheim's paper was that it took generational conflict
as a decisive factor in the shaping of cultural style. Identity emerging from difference. A clash of worldviews, made
inevitable by the incompatability between ways of grasping social experience. And so on. But what Macy is pointing
to is not a conflict so much as a continuation.
What the Boomers and the Generation X brands ... wait, make that "generations" .... have in common is an insistance that adolescence
is not something to endure and get out of the way, but rather an option that can be kept perpetually available. America's
sanctioned norm of adolescence is that it is a time when the self can be produced (defined) through conflict
with authority figures -- in part as a process of assimilating those authority figures. But come on, that notion is
now (to use the ultimate term of contempt) history.
What defines authority? According to Richard Sennett, whose book on the topic I reread every so often, authority
embodies the combination of power and legitimacy. And he only agency embodying authority now (in the lifeworld
of the cohort under discussion here, anyway) is the credit card company.
A guess about the future: In the next decade or so, a real generational difference will begin to crystallize out.
Why? Because history has indeed been whacking the entire society upside the head. Lots of people haven't noticed. I mean,
they saw the TV reports and all. But that's not the same thing. Anybody now at home in the gemeinschaft of
a sitcom is going to be on one side of the generational divide. Let's go ahead and call them the clueless farts
who are forever young.
Not me. Tomorrow I turn 41. And the thought of living in a big old apartment where all my friends stop by uninvited
to talk about their romantic lives strikes me as a scene from hell itself.
5 May
On Monday, I was interviewed by Rachel Donadio of the New York Observer, who had just learned that the "Arts
and Ideas" section of the Times would be shutting down, come September. Her first question was something like: "Did
A&I set the pace for intellectual coverage?" There might have been somebody in the world who could have answered
"yes" to that. But I honestly have no idea who it would be.
My guess is that Ms. Donadio is getting some sleep right now, because she must have been mainlining the
coffee to finish her article, which just appeared. Quite the triumph over a killing deadline. (Still, I do wish she had quoted my
remark about how many weekends I searched A&I, trying to figure out where the Ideas were hidden.)
I've been thinking a lot, for rather a long time now, about the problems involved in what we could call (for want of
a better term) the journalism of ideas. Have done a very little writing and speaking in public about it. But if somebody
wants to throw some fellowship money this way, I probably have a book on the topic in me, waiting to be unveiled. Or
at least a few months' worth of pondering the matter in some writers' colony, or think tank, or something.
Anyway, it's interesting to see that others, too, have pondered the mystery of why A&I was so lame, so
much of the time. I love the headline that Romenesko gave for its link to the article: "Brainy journos cheer demise of NYT's Arts & Ideas Section." (For those readers who are not "journos," it bears explaining that Romenesko's Media Watch page is the clearing house for professional news, gossip, etc. -- something most journalists check at least once a day.)
One aspect of the problem is what I tend to think of as "news desk epistemology," which holds that, in
principle, any reporter can "cover" any given development using certain techniques that are more or less equally valid,
or at least transposable, from one situation to the next. Whether it is a philosophical debate or the election of
a dogcatcher, the journalist brings the same tool-kit to the task of reporting it.
Now, there are things about this approach that I do like, at least in the abstract. But it creates all kinds of
problems when the "beat" is something less tangible than a war, a scandal, or some other event that is simply "out
there," happening in the world, in some relatively unproblematic way.
For one thing, it means that there will be a very strong tendency for cultural coverage to be influenced by
the work of publicists. It also means that any given development will be framed in terms of conflict and/or "the hot new trend." (How much do I loathe that expression? More than words can express.) The cumulative effect
is stupid-making.
Obviously it doesn't have to be that way. A look at some of the cultural coverage in British papers shows that. The
readership of, say, The Guardian is probably not that demographically distinct from the kind of people
who read A&I -- but the difference is, as Mark Twain put, that between lightning and the lightning bug.
I've got plenty more to say on all this, but it must wait until the sabbatical.
3 May
Last night, we're watching that show where Roger Ebert reviews movies alongside some not-terribly-bright guy who
writes for the same Chicago paper, and they run some clips from a new film that looks so lame that I can't
even remember its title or premise.
Anyway, one clip shows Christopher Walken in a phone booth, playing one of those, you know, Christopher Walken-type characters. And the
scene is just riveting, the way they almost always are. (Despite which, the thought of seeing the film
itself remains utterly without appeal.)
With hindsight, it appears that Rita and I had the idea simulataneously. One of those moments when you Become
As One Mind. Don't know if this sort of thing can be patented, but if so, we want to claim joint ownership. Here
goes:
Somebody should compile a series of videos/DVDs consisting entirely of Christopher Walken scenes. As things
now stand, you would have to watch a lot of terrible movies just to get to them. And quite a few of them were direct-to-video
releases that might not ever be rereleased. So we're talking potential loss of cinematic heritage, here. The
way to slice through this Gordian knot is through an anthology, for which I want to propose as a title The Walken Monologues.
If you are reading this, Christopher, have your people contact my people. Make that "our people."
**
This discussion might well get an unusually large readership, including folks who don't ordinarily see
the Chronicle. (Afterwards, a link to the transcript will be archived here, along with the others.)
Until starting to work on this piece a couple of months ago, I knew of Kirk only at second hand -- from
accounts of the history of American conservatism in general and William F. Buckley and The National
Review in particular. My vague impression is that Kirk was probably sort of like George "I'm not an intellectual
but I play one on TV" Will.
Just for the record, that is totally unfair. (To Kirk, I mean.) As a study in the history of ideas, The Conservative
Mind is quirky, but utterly absorbing. The same is true of Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot's Moral Imagination
in the Twentieth Century (1971). There is a monograph to be written on the Eliot-Kirk connection. For that
matter, it would be good to have an edition of their correspondence.
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