Frank Kogan

From: Frank Kogan
Subject: Re: Landscape envy and other symptoms
Date: Sunday, September 22, 2019 2:00 PM

Mark, I don’t think the Warshow link hurts your flow in the least.* The meat of Warshow’s complaint is something I might post on someday, since it nails what I consider the intellectual defect of behavior that we feebly call “class” or “tribal”; let’s say “group affiliation” (though that doesn’t work as a designation either): “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.” Warshow’s formula is a bit facile of course, but the complaint can be given nuance; and anyway, it applies pretty much to what gets called groupthink, and is a danger whenever attitudes and opinions and styles (incl. styles of discourse) become social markers, which is pretty much always. The nuance would have to take into account that social markers and group identity — for instance an identity as an “intellectual” — can include not just the appearance but the reality of solving problems and genuinely taking account of counter evidence and alternative ways of thinking and genuinely understanding ideas outside the group’s etc. So that something is a social marker doesn’t necessarily run counter to its doing what it says it does. But it certainly provides a motive for people to (in the language of my not-very-coherent critique of indie-alternative PBSishness) use social markers or symbols or feelings as stand-ins for events. Anyway, Warshow’s formulation can be aimed at much more than the old New Yorker.

As for Wolfe, perhaps his writing style will retrospectively seem embarrassing, if I ever return to him; I reread Acid Test about 16 years ago and it read okay, and read Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby for the first time — in his day his hipness was almost instantly superseded; but the breadth of what he was plumping for wasn’t, a lot of it not being many people’s idea of hip until he fingered it.

Do any of you know much about Edgar Scherick and Roone Arledge? I basically only knew Arledge as a name on credits when I was a tyke, but Scherick and he were the two ABC executives who concocted ABC’s Wide World Of Sports (“The Thrill Of Victory, The Agony Of Defeat!”), and there’s overlap with Wolfe on subject matter (stock cars, demolition derby). ABC was the scrappiest and least-watched of the big three networks and perhaps Scherick and Arledge were simply looking for cheap content to compete with the guys who had the Big sports (football, baseball, basketball, hockey), but starting with track and field and then taking in all sorts of very specialized or outré “sports”; log-rolling and downhill skiing and bowling side-by-side, an unexpected and maybe unintended social leveling that likely helped to confound the idea of legitimate “sport.” In a way, Wolfe in Esquire is trying to do the same (much more deliberately) on full-scale cultural level, for him this stuff not just being “sport” but “art” — or beyond and potentially better than art. So “architecture” for him is Las Vegas, and scandal sheets are an art form, etc. Anyhow, Kandy-Kolored is a good place to start; the title essay may be the best thing he ever did. But Acid Test did move me; wasn’t nearly as intense for me in the re-read, the adventure and the falling apart pertaining less to my 2003 than to my 1970. But there is a story there (and for Willis some profound questions).

*Mark, admittedly I didn’t get what your post was about until you explained it in Footnote 6.

From: Frank Kogan
Subject: Re: Landscape envy and other symptoms
Date: Sunday, September 22, 2019 3:56 PM

It’s obviously the Kofsky J&P Satanics review I remember.