BookForum

[Otto]

They've got some of the older articles online.

This one's quite interesting:

"Left Behind - Daniel Bell and the Class of 68"-- by Paul Berman.

(...)
The phrase "in the world, but not of it" strikes me as pretty astute on the
topic of the New Left, too-the New Left that commanded the allegiance of
several million Americans in the '60s and '70s but was never able to break
into conventional political life, with a couple of exceptions. For the New
Left too preferred to dwell apart, in its own world of dreams and moral
postures. This habit did the movement no harm at all, by the way, in regard
to cultural issues-which is why it succeeded in capturing whole
neighborhoods in a number of cities, and used those neighborhoods to conduct
experiments on cultural matters, and sent those experiments orbiting outward
to the rest of American society. Nor did a few unworldly habits do the New
Left any harm at the universities, once the graduate-student militants had
succeeded in shoving aside the populist anti-intellectuals. But the kind of
movement that was capable of capturing a student neighborhood or an English
department was never going to capture a state assembly.

Bell's book made two additional observations that seem to me on the mark. He
noted a strange and repeated tendency on the part of the American Left to
lose the thread of continuity from one generation to the next, such that
each new generation feels impelled to reinvent the entire political
tradition. This was true of his own generation, the young radicals of the
'30s, who brought to bear very little knowledge of what their own parents
had done in the 1910s. The same observation applied in spades to the '60s
and '70s-which is why so many young intellectuals of the New Left dismissed
Marxian Socialism in the United States as merely a dusty relic of the
discredited anti-Communist past. But I am struck still more powerfully by
Bell's third observation.

"Among the radical, as among the religious minded," he wrote, "there are the
once born and the twice born. The former is the enthusiast, the 'sky-blue
healthy-minded moralist' to whom sin and evil-the 'soul's mumps and measles
and whooping coughs,' in Emerson's phrase-are merely transient episodes to
be glanced at and ignored in the cheerful saunter of life. To the twice
born, the world is 'a double-storied mystery' which shrouds the evil and
renders false the good; and in order to find truth, one must lift the veil
and look Medusa in the face."
(...)
http://www.bookforum.com/berman.html

Otto

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "rich" <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: "Pynchlist" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 8:48 PM
Subject: BookForum


> here's a peek of the cover of Pynchon bookforum with Prof Corey on the
cover
>
> http://www.panopticist.com/archives/111.html
>
> awaiting my copy this week
>
> woo-hoo
>
> rich
>


	

	
		
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