Log24

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

In Memoriam

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:22 am

See also Russell Baker in this journal.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

For Maxwell Perkins …

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:56 pm

(and Stephen King)

"Imagine a world in which … you start watching a mini-series
so long that you will not know how it comes out until
your grandchildren start arriving in Paradise."

— Russell Baker, op-ed, The New York Times , Nov. 16, 1988

Friday, October 17, 2003

Friday October 17, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:15 pm

Happy Birthday, Arthur Miller

Miller, the author of “The Crucible,” is what Russell Baker has called a “tribal storyteller.”

From an essay by Baker in The New York Review of Books, issue dated November 6, 2003 (Fortieth Anniversary Issue):

“Among the privileges enjoyed by rich, fat, superpower America is the power to invent public reality.  Politicians and the mass media do much of the inventing for us by telling us stories which purport to unfold a relatively simple reality.  As our tribal storytellers, they shape our knowledge and ignorance of the world, not only producing ideas and emotions which influence the way we live our lives, but also leaving us dangerously unaware of the difference between stories and reality.”

— Russell Baker, “The Awful Truth,” NYRB 11/6/03, page 8 

Here is a rather similar view of the media:

“Who Rules America?”.

The attentive student of this second essay will have no difficulty finding a single four-letter word to replace both of Baker’s phrases “rich, fat, superpower America” and “politicians and the mass media.”

Baker’s concern for “the difference between stories and reality” is reflected in my own website The Diamond Theory of Truth.  In summary:

“Is it safe?” — Sir Laurence Olivier

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