The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
Finally finished the April 29 books article comparing writing about the Depression to writing about the recent recession. Fascinating. I'm going to type my favorite passage, partly to help myself commit it to memory:
"The Great Depression left people more helpless and isolated -- Agee's sanctified tenant farmers are passionate and alone -- but the new depression seems to have produced less hope. Over the years, the structures that were built during the Roosevelt Republic to secure Americans against another catastrophe -- banking regulations, collective bargaining, federal credit, business-labor coöperation [ ;D] public education, a scrupulous press -- have steadily eroded. So has the public's faith in institutions, and the idea of sure upward movement through each successive generation. Americans have been thrown back on their oldest belief of all, the cult of the individual. Its current deities, objects of worshipful fascination, are celebrities and entrepreneurs who preach the native philosophy of mind-cure, handed down from Emerson by way of Napoleon Hill to Oprah Winfrey and Timothy Ferris: if you can think it, you can do it -- you are responsible for your own success, your own failure."
Front-Ranger:
Hmmm, I'm definitely going to have to read that article! I currently hold similar views but am more hopeful because of the new tools, chiefly the Internet, that make individual influence and power more accessible to the general population.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on May 18, 2013, 11:26:37 am ---Hmmm, I'm definitely going to have to read that article! I currently hold similar views but am more hopeful because of the new tools, chiefly the Internet, that make individual influence and power more accessible to the general population.
--- End quote ---
Me too, and I think it helps. Look at what has happened in the Middle East. Or even in the U.S., you can see instances where the freedoms of the internet have helped unleash opinions that might have been repressed by the previous rigid gatekeepers -- and I say this knowing that the gatekeepers were mass media and I was essentially a (low on the ladder) one of them. The internet has opened the door to many more opinions, and that's ultimately liberating for all. But it's still too slow a process for my taste.
southendmd:
Annie P. has a story in the new fiction issue. It's titled "Rough Deeds".
She even uses the word "whoreson".
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: southendmd on June 09, 2013, 05:55:27 pm ---Annie P. has a story in the new fiction issue. It's titled "Rough Deeds".
--- End quote ---
What's with Western writers and tire irons? Sherman Alexie mentions one in his story in the same issue as A.P.'s story.
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