"Joe Strauss to
Joe Six-Pack"
(Editor's sneering headline
for a David Brooks essay
in today's New York Times)
and Back Again
"I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14, 1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine today….
The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era….
The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel* or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one….
Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said."
— David Brooks,
The New York Times,
June 16, 2005
The Time essay begins by quoting Hemingway himself:
"All stories,
if continued far enough,
end in death,
and he is no true storyteller
who would keep that from you."
New York Times obituaries.
Here is the
middlebrow part —
— and here is a link that returns,
as promised in this entry's headline,
to "Joe Strauss" —
complete with polkas.
* "Judaism is a religion of time, not space."
— Wikipedia on Heschel.
See the recent Log24 entries
Star Wars continued,
Dark City, and
Cross-Referenced, and last year's
Bloomsday at 100.
