a portrait of the artist as a young man

Writers as Readers

Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be…the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader—which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me).

[David Foster Wallace in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007]

Summer Account

They spent the summer days applying for jobs and writing reviews, the nights drinking bourbon at the pub under a picture of James Joyce, listening to Wilco b-sides and trying to figure out their failed relationships.

Auden on Reviewing

“To write about a poet, for others who have not read him is not criticism but reviewing, and reviewing is not really a respectable occupation.  When a critic examines the work of a well-known poet, he may, if he is lucky, succeed revealing something about it which readers had failed to see for themselves; if, on the other hand, what he says is commonplace or false or half-true, readers have only themselves to blame….But a reviewer is responsible for any harm he does, and he can do quite a lot.”

Douthat, Salam, n+1

n+1 in conversation with Reihan Salam
and the NY Times’s Ross Douthat

The New School’s Tishman Auditorium
66 W. 12th St.
Tuesday, October 20 at 8:00pm
Free and open to the public

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger for TheAtlantic.com.

Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is a columnist for Forbes.com and The Daily Beast, and a contributing editor of National Affairs and National Review Online.

Salam and Douthat co-authored Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008).

[I wish I was in New York tomorrow]

The Value of Reticence

Not everything that can be said should be said. Reticence is a particularly important virtue, especially in a time when everything as well as everybody is overexposed. Obscenity, we have learned, is the loss of interiority that occurs when the private becomes public and the public invades the private. All too often people become complicit in the colonization of their own inwardness by soliciting the very publicity that inevitably undoes them. When this occurs, thoughtful refection gives way to thoughtless spectacle: I am seen, therefore I am. What those who seek the spotlight rarely realize is that exposure decreases rather than increases in terse in them. When there is nothing more to see or say, People moves on. As the churn rate accelerates, 15 minutes becomes 15 seconds, which in turn becomes 1.5 seconds.

[Mark C. Taylor in his new memoir, Field Notes from Elsewhere]