For my money, the pieces on William James and the 1960s are the two crown jewels of this collection, but there are some other treasures, as well. These include a fond memoriam to Pauline Kael and a dissection of Larry Flynt’s life and legacy.Menand is staggeringly learned and even more staggeringly incisive. But it’s refreshing to note that he’s not perfect. He has, for example, a bothersome habit of starting sentences – or even whole new paragraphs – with “So that….” I’m not familiar with the planet on which this locution sounds correct (or even coherent), but I imagine it must be several light years from our own. Here is an example to give you an idea of how vexing this tendency can be for even the most careful reader:"[Former Harvard President James Conant:] wanted his faculty to think that the university was committed to academic freedom, and would not pursue investigations into the politics of its members; and he wanted the government to think that Harvard was staunchly anticommunist, and would not act as a shield for teachers who were manifestly disloyal. It was a very shaky contraption, and fortunately for his reputation as a champion of academic freedom, Conant left for Germany before he was ever required to fly it.So that when [historians:] Diamond and Hershberg cite, as circumstantial evidence that Conant acted as an FBI informant, a memo to J. Edgar Hoover from the bureau’s chief agent in Boston noting that Dr. Conant has “indicated his respect for the Bureau’s work and his understanding for its many and varied interests,” they are possibly eliding two points." (98, italics mine)I still have no idea what Menand was trying to convey in that passage. Nor can I guess what possessed him to make use of such an awkward, semantically flaccid construction as “So that.” And yet, he does so several times throughout the course of the essays collected here.
"[Pauline] Kael never gave anyone credit for good intentions. “Art,” as she put it back in 1956, “perhaps unfortunately, is not the sphere of good intentions.” She wasn’t interested in abstractions like “social significance” or “the body of work.” She had to be turned on all over again each time. Her favorite analogy for the movie experience got seriously overworked, and was lampooned as a result, but it ddoes have the virtue of simplicity: a movie, for her, was either good sex or bad sex. For the quality of sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the glamour of the partner. The best-looking guy in the room may be the lousiest lover—which is why nothing irritated Kael more than a well-dressed movie that didn’t perform. “If a lady says, ‘That man don’t pleasure me,’ ” she explained to the readers of Holiday in 1966, “that’s it. There are some areas in which we can still decide for ourselves.” She thought that people who claimed to enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey more than The Thomas Crown Affair were either lying or were guilty of sex-in-the-head. There were a lot of people like that around before 1967. “What did she lose at the movies?” asked a puzzled Dwght Macdonald when he reviewed I Lost It at the Movies, in 1965. Case in point."
Do You like book American Studies (2003)?
Hey Pat! I see you got a new baby on your back!Who IS Louis Menand anyway? I love him in the New Yorker (just wrote a great piece about Kerouac) but know nothing about him. How's that for open confession of ignorance online?deb
—Pat
