Thursday Dec 30, 2010

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I found this quotation on the Best American Poetry blog. I always hated "The New Yorker" and this helps me grasp why. But it could be applied to LOTS of media, eh?

"The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately." -- Robert Warshow (The Immediate Experience), emphasis POG....
saillesong:
lol I like that, very true.
captainamerika:
You are right, that could be applied to a whole lot of things you read in the media. I used to like The New Yorker, and subscribed for many years, but several years ago it started to annoy me. I don't say that it changed, but I did. I believe that to some extent I was using it as a sort of guide to how an educated, monied 'sophisticate' would see the world. An aspirational read, maybe. That is not the whole story, and they do have good articles and at least I don't grouse about the quality of the prose as I am wont to do sometimes. But the relentless focus on the rich, the Ivy-Leagued, made me finally realize that this magazine was not for me. I no longer had any desire to cultivate the attitudes of that set, because I was not and am not one of them, nor do I really wish to be, and reading a magazine ain't gonna do the trick even if I did want to become one of them.

But its not just them. Most people, most of the time, shape their views primarily via attitudes, not examination.

Time to stop writing. My comment is twice as long as your post, which exceeds the legal limit.

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