I knew Tony Judt only secondhand. I first encountered him in my first year of graduate school, as part of a seminar designed to introduce new PhD students to the principles of good historical writing. Judt’s book Postwar stood at the end of a line that included Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, and other history books that have become, in some sense, immortal. And Judt’s Postwar was the only one of the ten books that I chose to read in its entirety rather than skim that term.

Of all the arguments that Judt makes in Postwar, his criticism of intellectuals struck me the hardest. No serious engagement with the outside world, no real anger about contemporary issues, no general goal beyond self-replication on the one hand; too much “high-cultural pretension” and “hardening crust of knowing cynicism” on the other.

Well, that was me, wasn’t it? Part of the process of becoming an academic “lifer,” I thought, meant that you had to give up the active life in favor of the contemplative. I would condescend to set someone straight about medieval conspiracy theories (“You don’t actually believe what Dan Brown says, do you?”), but I couldn’t be bothered to care much about the modern Middle East. I rolled my eyes, as did many of my colleagues, whenever someone mentioned the name “Bush,” and could regurgitate received opinion about his policies if pressed, but I usually just kept my mouth shut about such things. As long as I wanted to be a professor, I felt that it was better to restrict myself to the library or the classroom.

Postwar began to draw me out of my complacent reverie. Over the next year or two, I took a particular interest in Judt, even though he was technically outside of my area of academic interest (of course, to a medievalist, much is proscribed). I read his book Reappraisals, a book of previously-published essays which again beat the drum of intellectual engagement. Alongside portraits of the select few leftist intellectuals who tried to make a difference in the postwar world — Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi — Judt also blasted people like Eric Hobsbawm who were too in love with ideology to see the world as it was, rather than as it should have been, and contemporary liberal “intellectuals” who failed to speak up against the Iraq war as “Bush’s useful idiots”. And, for the first time, I heard Judt’s voice, even though he was in Manhattan and I was in northern Indiana, thanks to NYU’s broadcast of his lecture “Disturbing the Peace: Intellectuals and Universities in an Illiberal Age.” I wrote down one passage in particular from his lecture:

Those of my academic colleagues who spend their days substituting meaning for fact — “meaning,” with heavy scare quotes, and “fact,” with even more — cannot expect to be taken seriously at night when they condemn George Bush or some pompous neo-con for sneering at reality-based views of the Middle East. If we want to be taken seriously, we’d better stop talking about positional verities. If we want to be taken seriously, we should stop placing “truth,” “reality,” in witty scare quotes. And not just stop it when we walk out the doors of the campus, but stop it in the classroom too.

As Timothy Garton Ash noted, Judt was one of those people who shunned “personal peacock display, factional or clique positioning, hidden agendas, score-settling, or serial, knee-jerk revisionism” in favor of “seeking the truth.” Of course, sincerity and engagement can still be trumped by ignorance or a lack of expertise — which leads, in Judt’s words, to an epidemic of “blah-blah generalists — and then you’re David Brooks. And you’re garbage.”

It would be the worst sort of sappy sentimentalism to say something like Tony Judt chartered a course for my life. But he has given me a lot to think about. I’ve since given up graduate school (in large part, but not entirely, because I became disenchanted with its insular nature) and I try to be both informed and engaged, though now that I’ve left graduate school and have to pursue expertise on my own time, I wonder whether I am becoming one of those “blah-blah generalists.”

In some sense, too, I am not sure about Judt’s call for a return to social democracy and the moderate, collectivist state, a theme to which he returned in the last few years of his life. I don’t doubt the passionate intensity with which he wrote Ill Fares the Land. But at first blush, I found myself agreeing more than I expected with The New York Times Book Review’s relatively unpraising review, which suggested that social democracy as Judt envisioned it is neither doable nor desirable in the United States. Then I realized: I simply don’t know enough about the topic to have an informed opinion; better withhold judgment until later.

Most of Judt’s obituaries dwell on his views about Israel or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better-known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which took his life. Obviously, both things defined him in important ways. But I think of him mostly as a teacher in the best sense of the word: as someone who introduced me to the intellectual history of Europe and, by doing so, upended my self-satisfied view of the world and made me a little more skeptical about my own, and others’, ironclad beliefs and breezy dismissals.

Obituaries (or eulogies, whatever this is), like book reviews, are challenging things to write. In this case, I’ve probably avoided the Scylla of mere synopsis or dishonest sensationalism only to stumble into the Charybdis of underwhelming self-indulgence. Maybe so. But better to do this, I think, than to try and define the life of someone whom I knew only at a distance, and to paraphrase someone who wanted his epitaph to read, “I did words.”

Besides, others can describe Judt better than I can:

• “The Liveliest Mind in New York,” New York Magazine
• Review of Postwar by the executive editor of The Economist
• Review of Postwar in The Wall Street Journal
• Obituary, The Telegraph
• Obituary, The New York Times
• Obituary, The New York Review of Books

And he can describe himself better than anyone:

• “Night,” about living with ALS
• “Edge People,” about the idea of identity and its many abuses
• “Words,” about his relationship with reading, writing, and speaking
• “The Wrecking Ball of Innovation,” about the perils of seeing the world in purely economic terms
• “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?,” about the “evisceration of the public domain” at the hands of the political right, and the left’s inability to stop it
• Excerpt from Ill Fares the Land, which expands on the themes Judt brought up in the previous two essays

I. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

Before he showed off his hip-thrusting skills as Sergio the saxophone player and Senator Scott Brown on his last stint hosting Saturday Night Live, Jon Hamm paused to make fun of men who say that they identify with Don Draper — “which I’m pretty sure means that they just really want to cheat on their wife,” said Hamm, with a knowing grin.

That comment perfectly encapsulates the majority of critical and not-so-critical reactions to Don Draper: as the old chestnut goes, women want him, men want to be him. Dayo Olpade of the Slate.com blog XX Factor calls him an übermensch; Katie Baker, writing for Newsweek, reports that her female friends describe Draper with terms like “a straight-up man” with “shoulders to cry on and a jaw that causes women to swoon,” who “makes me feel like a woman via the TV”; and, in Brooklyn, he is “every Park Slope mom’s fantasy,” according to one 40-year-old housewife. Frank Rich of The New York Times sees him as a cultural touchstone for bailout-era America, while James Stewart of The Wall Street Journal brings up Draper’s name in order to wax nostalgic about a time not only when men were men, but when American-made cars were cars. Even Alan Taylor, who directed the pilot and three other episodes of Mad Men, called Don Draper — and Jon Hamm — a “wonderful icon of maleness.”

To wit: Jon Hamm’s delivery, which alternates between diamond-hard and downright sentimental, and the bon mots of Matthew Weiner et al.

But there is a kind of winking acceptance about Draper’s home life, and in particular his philandering (as another gendered cliché goes, a woman who sleeps around is a slut, whereas a man who sleeps around is a stud). Here’s Katie Baker, again:

By any measure, the character’s a cad. He constantly cheats on his wife. He skips town for weeks and won’t write or call. He doesn’t talk much, and anesthetizes any feelings with copious amounts of booze. He’s an enigma, a locked box of a man who resists, maddeningly, easy explanation. And yet he excites an attraction among women — particularly ones my age, women in their late 20s and 30s who were born after the era that Mad Men portrays — that seems unmatched by any leading man on television today.

To paraphrase, he may be a philanderer, but just look at those shoulders. And as a result, despite his many, many faults, Don Draper really manages to escape the umbrage of critics, producers, and housewives alike, and to resist what Vanity Fair’s Bruce Handy called the “wised-up, at times even loathing nostalgia” that people have for, say, the casual anti-Semitism or sexism that pervades the show.

But surely there’s more to it than Jon Hamm’s perfectly square jaw.

II. Man-children, Metrosexuals, and SAHDs

In the 1960s, fictional characters discovered the psychoanalyst’s couch. J.D. Salinger’s 1957 novella “Zooey,” for instance, is not only steeped in Freudian terminology (“you listen to the conversation of a bunch of nitwit college students, and you decide that everything’s ego, ego, ego”; “Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. ‘Cessation from all hankerings.’”) but in many ways exemplifies “the talking cure,” as carried out by two precocious Manhattanites. By the mid-sixties, the emotional lives of men became the subject not only of novels, like Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, but also children’s literature, such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and even books on political philosophy, like philosopher Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies and Jacob Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, which argued that Plato and Rousseau, respectively, were secretly totalitarians because of psychological traumas from their past.

As men in particular got in touch with their emotions, they lost touch with their masculinity. According to conservative columnist George F. Will, the 1960s ushered in the fall of masculinity. “Permissive parenting,” feminism and pacificism (which Will lumps under “1960s radicalism”), the end of the Western as a viable genre of film, the transition from movie stars like Cary Grant (“dapper and debonair”) to Hugh Grant (“a perpetually befuddled boy”) — all of this, Will writes, were the first signs of the apocalypse of Man.

By the time the frat-boy mags like Maxim and FHM, the metrosexuals, and the stay-at-home dads (“SAHDs” for short) arrived, real men were in full retreat. Today the only men left are emasculated, disaffected, and affected, a far cry from the days of the gimlet-eyed, coolly competent protagonists of Ernest Hemingway or Ian Fleming. “If you just compare [Draper] to, say, Patrick Dempsey on Grey’s Anatomy,” says one Park Slope mom, “Dr. McDreamy comes off as a whiny little sensitive bitch.”

Just look at the man-children of Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, who are dragged kicking and screaming into grown-up situations and responsibilities, or the indecisive and impotent characters like Miles Roby of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, or Sam Clay of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Even the new Captain Kirk from 2009’s Star Trek comes off more as an immature brat than the Shatner incarnation. A.O. Scott, The New York Times’s movie reviewer and sometime cultural critic, has talked about Gen X’s arrested development, The Guardian documented the spiritual plight of twentysomething “YUCKIES” (Young Unwitting Costly Kids), and the themes of wrongness, error, and failure have been explored over 400 episodes and counting of This American Life. Before long, we might all be crying for our mothers.

This is not to say that all of these characters are somehow incapable of being good, entertaining, thought-provoking, or even poignant — I dare anyone to say that the business of writing comic books, as presented in Kavalier and Clay, is any less intense than most battle scenes from war novels, or that perpetual losers like Miles Roby are too one-dimensional to evoke anything but pity. Nor do I want to suggest that, after millennia of heroic heroes, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf to Robinson Crusoe, such a change isn’t welcome. But it is clear that, as far as pop culture goes, we are awash in protagonists that are anything but heroic in the classical sense, and even insurance advertisers have noticed.

III. Ecce Homo

Enter Don Draper, the last John Wayne among a cultural landscape filled with Jon Gosselins. He embodies a particular brand of heroism that tacks somewhere between the independent, mysterious, hoisted-by-his-own-bootstraps kind, featured prominently in spaghetti Westerns, and the much more familiar kind of “business-heroism” that celebrates competence, professionalism, and workplace acumen, and that elevates lawyers, doctors, and teachers into fictional heroes.

Among these Perry Masons, Men With No Names, and Dr. John Carters, Don Draper tacks the right course between mysterious and familiar, superhuman and sub-human, the object of both sympathy and envy. On the one hand, he is unnaturally impeccable in dress, speech, and action, and extremely good at his job. On the other hand, his vices — sex, booze, unannounced vacations — are also safe, relatable, and suitable for your typical upper-middle-class WASP. He works in the field of advertising, which everyone encounters on a daily basis, but whose inner workings are a mystery to the general public. He has enough self-doubt and inner turmoil to keep viewers interested, but not enough to threaten his masculinity. As The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates put it:

[Mad Men] has that same rejection of good and evil, that same detailed humanity that we loved about The Wire. But also, to its credit, it lacks the anger which ultimately contaminated The Wire’s final season. Furthermore it rejects the naked cynicism that’s poisoned efforts as diverse as Crash and Desperate Housewives.

Duality, “detailed humanity,” and a lack of overwhelming anger or cynicism — put another way, Don Draper manages to be complex without being too dark, or too discomfiting.

At the same time, if you try to pin Don Draper down, he comes off as downright confusing. After all, the audience is just as hoodwinked by Dick Whitman’s past as his contemporaries are. We know just enough to feel sympathy for him — that Dick was an orphan, that his adoptive parents were cruel and abusive, that he drove his younger brother to suicide — but not enough to understand how his past affects his motivations or intentions. Except in the pitch for the Kodak Carousel, we never see the Draper family in happier moments, so it’s easier for us to excuse his philandering because we only ever associate Betty with fighting and general misery. And we see Don’s aggressive, bull-headed streak succeed in the conference room and bedroom so many times that we consider it an asset, even though it alienates his wife and children at home.

So when Don drowns his ennui, we the viewers slide into stupor along with Don. We know what he’s escaping from, but not why; in fact, we know so little about Don Draper’s inner life — except through the odd non-verbal metaphor, such as his Christ-like bath in the ocean towards the end of season two — that we can never quite see what makes him tick.

As a viewer, it’s frustrating that after three years, I can see that Don Draper is still in motion — he’s founded a new ad agency, decided not to fight Betty’s divorce, and, as he confided in Anna Draper, “I have been watching my life. It’s right there. And I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can’t.” — but I don’t know what he’s moving towards, or what exactly is driving him. And I can sympathize with Ross Douthat, who points out that Don Draper is mysterious to a fault, especially when compared to Breaking Bad’s Walter White.

I think, however, that Don Draper’s almost-but-not-quite backstory is actually an asset. After all, as Alexander Pope (or was it Tower of Power?) said, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: people tend to prefer what they understand only partially to what they understand, warts and all. We like Don Draper for the same reason that people took Wall Street‘s Gordon Gekko to be a role model: on principle, we understand that we shouldn’t like them, and in our guts, we know that they are misguided or corrupt in some important way. But Mad Men only mines Don’s past for sympathy, and never quite delves deeply enough into his psychology to see his true motivations.

And because the portrait is incomplete, we can easily shrug off Don’s shortcomings and worship without guilt Don’s abilities to make, do, and act in ways that are increasingly rare in the age of redefined masculinity. I suspect this is the reason why The Atlantic’s Peter Suderman argued that Don was likable only for his personal demeanor, for instance.

Don’t get me wrong: Don Draper is neither simple nor badly thought-out. But the reason that he ranks among the contenders for future television icon rather than the ranks of cable cult heroes is precisely because of this cocktail of character ambiguity, traditional masculinity, and pop-cultural timing. In other words, Don Draper as a character depends much more on what happens off-screen than what happens in the world of Mad Men alone.

Illustration by Priya Rajdev.

— Bert Pierce, “Automobiles: Drowsing,” The New York Times, August 19, 1954

Hobbits know particularly well that going out your door is a dangerous business, and one of those dangers is losing yourself along the way. Of course, usually such loss is far less dramatic, and far more temporary, than getting caught in the grand sweep of events. But for several days, I felt — and acted — like I was someone else. My sole purpose was to maximize efficiency and minimize the chances of car trouble. As a result, I only allowed myself to think about the trip, and I kept myself busy by logging my miles traveled and projecting my time to destination and calculating my gas mileage. I was an automaton, not a person, and only with difficulty could I resurrect the personality that I’d buried beneath the utilitarian demands of interstate driving.

But then, it’s easy to retreat into one’s self when, for most of your day, you’re trapped inside a car cabin with little connection to the outside world. The drab scenery and the endless, unfurling asphalt are bad enough; the sense of isolation and monotony are redoubled when you’re in the middle of Montana with no passengers and no phone service.

The view down I-94

It’s day five of my trip, around 1 p.m. Mountain Time, and after four hours of steady driving it’s time for a break. I pull into Butte, Montana for lunch, in search of something a little more nourishing than a hamburger or a granola bar, some combination of which has made up my last four meals. After noting the prices at the two downtown gas stations ($2.90, probably more expensive than I can find at the next town over), I pass a Taco Bell and a McDonald’s before finding a local bakery and a parking spot. I pull in, mentally gauging my progress so far (230 miles in four hours, which means that at this rate I should hit Spokane in another six) and what garbage I need to throw away before I leave (there’s a granola bar and an empty coffee cup in the passenger-side seat). I record my odometer reading in my trip log (135,507 miles) and get out of the car, resolving to take twenty minutes or less for lunch so I can stay on schedule for the rest of the day. I scan the menu board and settle on a sandwich with more vegetables than I’ve probably eaten over the last two days. I hear the cashier say something, and assume she wants my order, so I give it to her.

She gives me an odd look, and about five seconds too late, I realize that she was asking about my Seahawks cap, not my lunch order. It takes me a moment to stutter out an excuse, because I haven’t spoken to a human being for almost eighteen hours, and it takes my mind a second to get into a conversational gear. Clearly, I was still getting over the effects of my own particular brand of highway hypnosis.

To Great Harvest Bread Co., Butte, MT

My car has no working CD player, and, Luddite that I am, I don’t own an mp3 player. Instead of carefully selecting playlists to reflect my mood or location, I was completely at the mercy of broadcast radio, which only once obliged me: as I pulled out of Billings, Montana, and saw a range of mountains from the ground for the first time in almost five years, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” came blasting over the radio. But the rest of the time, the music selections ranged from inappropriate (Michael Bublé is not road-trip music) to downright insulting — there’s nothing worse than hearing “Meet Me Halfway” when you’re only about two hours or so into a ten-hour drive.

The year before, I’d driven from Indiana to New Jersey, and during the long, lonely drive across middle Pennsylvania I got used to hearing nothing but alt-country (song of the trip: “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus) and conservative talk radio. Montana and North Dakota — which are about as reliably red-state as “Pennsyltucky” — were much less stereotypical, radio-wise: fewer alt-country, a surprising amount of NPR, and even a Top-40 station based out of Bozeman (96.7 KISN FM) that my car continued to pick up even when the rest of the FM band was static. Not that it provided much human contact; instead of a full-time DJ, the radio station is controlled by something called “Jelli,” where people can go online to vote for their favorite songs, which are then announced on-air by a synthesized voice.

The little car that could

It felt a lot like being in the desert, with nothing except nature and the occasional machine to accompany me down the long stretches of I-94. Which meant that it was easy to become abstracted, to let reflex and reaction take over and not think too much about anything in particular for hours on end.

In the throes of reverie, Moses saw a burning bush, and St. Anthony the Great fought demons; me, I just got a lead foot. In fact, as I screamed down the Rocky Mountains, I felt like I was in the middle of a Mario Kart level — specifically, DK Mountain from Double Dash. In retrospect, that should have been the point at which I realized I was becoming dangerously unhinged. The 4,000-foot-high roadways that veered off seemingly at right angles, the 6% downward grade (which means that every 100 horizontal feet of road drops 6 vertical feet), the runaway truck ramps: it all seemed so cartoonish that I didn’t take it terribly seriously. I raced down I-94 at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour — which, I looked up later, was right around the takeoff speed of an SF-260, an airplane that weighed as much as my car. If only my little Focus had wings, I could have been flying.

Welcome to Idaho! Now turn hard left, or else.

In the end, it’s much easier for me to explain my trip in terms of numbers and figures than it is in terms of memories. To wit: 43 hours in the car, 2,254 miles, 75.46 gallons of gas, and — luckiest of all — 74 pictures, from which I can piece together the scattered fragments of submerged memory into something that resembles, however vaguely, a story.

I.

Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field — by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has — the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person.

— John Podhoretz, “Thinking on Film”

In April of 2008, Sean Means, the film critic at The Salt Lake Tribune, began to compile a list of his colleagues who no longer had their full-time gigs. Since January, ten major publications, including Newsweek and the Village Voice, had eliminated their film criticism spots, and another eleven would follow suit: by the end of the year, there would only be 126 full-time reviewers left in the United States. No wonder critics declared that the sky was falling.

Of course, professional movie criticism has always faced the twin specters of public indifference and fifth-columnists who denounced the field from the inside, including Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir (“film criticism… had a nice 50- or 60-year run, and is now a thing of the past.”), and Variety’s editor-in-chief Peter Bart (who suggested that critics only review Oscar-caliber movies in the latter part of the year, advice that his successor took to heart in March of 2010). The prognosis for film criticism was not good.

It’s undeniably true that the Golden Age of film criticism is long gone. As Jerry Roberts points out in his recent book The Complete History of American Film Criticism, film critics had their heyday in the 1970s, when their mandate was clear expose cheap sentimentalism, champion art-house and independent films, and be unafraid to say that most movies, like most TV shows, most plays, and most other pieces of art, were pure dreck. Newspapers tripped all over themselves to hire new film critics (such as Siskel and Ebert, David Elliott, and Malcolm Johnson) and universities began to offer courses in film, while established critics started looking back on film’s past to write “revisionist criticism” — for example, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker eviscerated Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as “a shallow masterpiece.” And criticism could influence the film industry itself: in 1988, Anne Thompson of The New York Times found that reviews in four publications — the Times itself, New York Magazine, TIME, and Newsweek — could make or break a movie’s box office run, and film executives purposefully released bad films during weeks when Vincent Canby of The New York Times was on vacation, to avoid the guaranteed hit to their box office totals that a critical evisceration would entail.

Not so anymore. These days, even the best critics can’t save an independent film from obscurity, and there is a huge disconnect between critical and public opinion — see, for example, the disparity between a list of best movies according to the general public as opposed to one according to critics and filmmakers. The tide turned against professional critics in the 1980s and 1990s, who were overpowered by (in Roberts’s words) “buy-off junkets, the blurbmeisters working at full fraud, and the media overkill on TV,” and by a growing sense that full-time critics were cranks, cynics, and — worst of all — elitists.

Thus the push-back that led, as critic Phillip Lopate notes, to the rise of the everyman-as-critic, armed with nothing more than, say, a blog, a ticket stub, and a few good turns of phrase:

Since Americans dislike the idea of being lectured to or (God forbid) taught about movies by specialists, the field continued to promote witty amateurs… the gentleman critic who was not taken in by arty nonsense, and therefore would protect his middle-class readership from their insecurities about the difficulties of new cinema, settled in for a long run.

II.

I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since… every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation.

— George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan”

Surviving film critics tend to fall into three separate camps: the blurb machines, like Gene Shalit, Joel Siegel, or Peter Travers, who give favorable reviews to the vast majority of films that they see — 84, 72, and 68 percent, respectively (Ebert clocks in at 53% positive); the legacies, like A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times and Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times, who work for major print publications and who are just as likely to give a long discursus about cinematic history or treat their review as an exercise in satire as they are to write straight plot summary with commentary; and the middlebrow, who try to be somewhere in between the old guard and the advancing army of bloggers, commenters, and aggregators.

Take, for example, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, who thinks that “critics should be educated about the wider world, should know a lot of film history and a little film theory, should be more concerned with the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of a movie than with the ‘whats,’ should seek to spark debates and disputes and challenge the audience’s preconceptions,” but also that above all critics need to be “funny and lively and engaging,” since writing reviews is most like “performing stand-up comedy.”

And that means sticking to the topic at hand — films and celebrities — period. It’s not clear, for example, that O’Hehir knows anything about Paul Krugman, that he’s read the J.M. Coetzee novel on which the film Disgrace is based (even though he has), or that he can say anything meaningful about Reagan’s America except by way of regurgitating its buzzwords. Nor, I think, would he have it otherwise, even though he clearly is a smart, well-read guy; pretentiousness and elitism are cardinal sins in his worldview, and he considers it the reviewer’s job merely to provide soundbites and laugh lines, not to provide long-winded theoretical or philosophical discussions.

As it turns out, O’Hehir is echoing an old line of thought. In 1831, the essayist Thomas Carlyle ranked reviewers among “the lowest of true thinkers,” mere summarizers who could never truly articulate the genius of a work of literature. William Wordsworth agreed, writing that reviewers “cannot be supposed to be in a state of mind very favourable for being affected by the finer influences” of “genuine” literature. In other words, thought Carlyle and Wordsworth (and O’Hehir), critics are blowhards and idiots, not worth the paper they’re printed on. They all but acknowledge the fact that the easiest way to entertain the public is to turn every column of film criticism into a feel-good factory, where even the worst films get the rubber stamp of approval.

Thus O’Hehir says, without a hint of irony, that the first real compliment he ever got about his work, one that “in many ways still means the most,” was listening to two ladies on a train laugh at a review of his. Having denied that film criticism should or even can have any other purpose — having declared that anything else is fin de siècle-style decadence and depravity — O’Hehir leaves us with only one possibility: it is good for a temporary emotional jolt every once in a while. It is a curiously nihilistic attitude to have. But then, when you’re one of a dying breed, how else can you think about the future except in the most pessimistic terms possible?

III.

The glory of American film criticism has been its double life as American essay. Granted, the internet gives virtually everyone an opportunity to expound at length about movie love, but can the formal pressure and elegance of the best essay-writing be brought to bear on a medium that seems to relish amoebic stream-of-consciousness?

— Philip Lopate, “Critics in Crisis”

On December 10, 2009, Red Letter Media posted a seventy-minute video review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that got mentioned on Kottke.org, Ain’t It Cool News, and even SciFi Wire, the official blog of the Sci Fi (or wait… is that SyFy?) channel. Technically speaking, apart from the psycho-killer subplot, the review is more or less a cinematic essay: it has an argument, individually-signposted segments, and is supported with plenty of evidence — see, for example, the review’s emotional (and critical) climax, the part about lightsaber duels. There are a few laugh lines and quotable quotes, but most of the time it’s a steady, point-by-point deconstruction of a disappointing movie.

Most importantly, the review avoids some of the commonest pitfalls of the amateur reviewer (and amateur he is; in an interview with Heeb magazine, the reviewer, Mike Stoklasa, says that “I’m not a reviewer or critic by nature”). It is not a mere thumbs-up-or-down record of the reviewer’s subjective reaction to the film, or a simple paraphrase or synopsis of a movie’s content; neither does it try to turn the movie into an allegory or commentary on something that it isn’t, as amateur critics on both sides did with Lord of the Rings, for example. It flies in the face of box office results and agrees with many of the print-media dinosaurs like Jim Hoberman of Village Voice and both critics at The Washington Post, who thought that the movie was less than stellar.

Of course, Stoklasa’s review came out eleven years after Phantom Menace did, and it is probably not going to affect too many people’s buying habits. But it does show that people are interested in nuanced film criticism, as opposed simple reviews, which are released a few days before a movie opens in order to tell people why they should or shouldn’t go see it. Put another way, reviews are ephemera, designed to exert pressure on the moviegoing public and then fade away, while criticism, at its best, is much more permanent, and has much less economic influence. Opinionated viewers can do the former task just as well as anyone; but it takes a little more time and enthusiasm to do the latter.

In other words, perhaps those delivering early post-mortems on film criticism are confusing the death of a medium with the death of a message. It will probably never be the case again that a single review can translate into millions lost or gained at the box office, nor should we expect that the same people who read Thomas Friedman columns will also want to read extended critical essays that talk about Stravinsky and the French New Wave and the grammar of cinematography, as Pauline Kael’s 3,500-word review of Last Tango in Paris demanded of its readers.

But there are vital signs from the world of film criticism. Sean Means, curator of “The List,” decided that many of the critics who had lost their jobs had also “landed on their feet — finding work at other publications, sometimes in other fields, but often in a better job than they had before.” Roger Ebert’s blog gets nearly 100 million views a year. Even A.O. Scott of The New York Times declared that there was a future for film criticism.

So film criticism will probably go the way of literary criticism, a field dominated by magazines and websites with a limited reach (in the low to mid-thousands of subscribers or regular visitors), where criticism is written by enthusiasts who are speaking to enthusiasts with a level of thoroughness and complexity that rivals even academic criticism — see, for example, The Millions, The Nervous Breakdown, or The Morning News’s Tournament of Books.

But we should not confuse influence with quality. A good film critic, in the words of the 19th-century essayist Matthew Arnold, should be able to deal not only with his or her chosen medium, but also “with the immense field of life… lying before him”; should not to kowtow to public opinion and congratulate every artist merely for existing, but ought to be “perpetually dissatisfied” with “poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation”; should, ultimately, be able to create something new and truthful, beyond mere description and imitation. According to Roger Ebert, “this is a golden age for film criticism… Never before have more critics written more or better words for more readers about more films. But already you are ahead of me, and know this is because of the internet.” That seems right to me.

Photo by Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

But there was much more to Keynes than monetary policy. And since we’re officially in a Golden Age of Keynes, it seems perfectly appropriate to ask: how else might John Maynard Keynes have been perfectly at home in 2010?

I. Hooking Up

The “hook-up culture” has raised plenty of alarm bells in the media, from The Boston Globe’s pop neuroscience (which reports that women’s’ brain chemistry makes them more susceptible to post-hook-up depression), to the cultural conservatism of Psychology Today (which argues that hook-ups threaten traditional marriage). Maybe we’re not on the brink of Chilean-style public orgies, but the world of interpersonal relationships is undergoing a minor revolution all the same.

Keynes would have fit right in. He was part of the Bloomsbury group, which, as his biographer Robert Skidelsky put it, was a “sexual merry-go-round,” in which “bourgeois sexual conventions were damned as prime examples of cant.” The statistically obsessed Keynes actually kept running logs of his sexual partners from 1901 to 1915, listing his partners by initials (DG for Duncan Grant, his on-again, off-again paramour) or by general description (“16-year-old,” “Jew boy”). In 1925, he married the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, but kept a lover until 1927.

In other words, nothing about Keynes’s terrible twenties (he was born in 1883) would raise many eyebrows in post-Lehman Brothers America. In fact, he could have easily explained his sexuality on Facebook: “It’s complicated.”

II. Ambiguous Sexual Identity

As a freshman in college, Keynes fell in love with a classmate named Arthur Hobhouse, and over the next seventeen years Keynes had a series of male lovers and no small amount of casual sex with other men. He wrote love letters, some sappy (“Despite your treasonable thoughts, I very much want to see you again… Anyhow get well, keep honest, and — if possible — like me. If you never come to love, yet I shall have your sympathy.”), some rather pathetic (“Dearest Duncan, I came deeply needing some open sign of affection, and although I felt you had affection for me underneath, you seemed sodden and had none to give away to me.”); he referred to one of his lovers as a “frivolous young butterfly.”

Yet no one ever called him homosexual, and neither did Keynes identify as such. At best, he called his sexual encounters “Higher Sodomy,” which conflated sexuality with a definite air of classism; as his Bloomsbury colleague Lytton Strachey observed, Keynes et al. were only doing “what all of Us — the terribly intelligent, the unhappy, the artistic, the divided, the overwhelmed — most intimately worship, and most passionately, most vainly, love.” And Bertrand Russell, one of Keynes’s classmates at Cambridge, flatly denied that any “homosexual relations” took place, even though there were plenty of Cantabrigians who slept with each other, many of whom Russell knew.

Strip away the intellectual pretenses, and Keynes becomes an MSM — a man who has sex with men, but who does not openly identify as gay or bisexual (see also the “down-low” culture among African-American men). Keynes did not really lead a double life — his friends and family generally supported his sexual proclivities. But he continued to flirt with young men well into his sixties, even though, strictly speaking, he had remained monogamous with Lydia since 1927.

Keynes’s (relatively) hypocrisy-free lifestyle seems moderate when compared to those of Idaho senator Larry Craig, “Tickle Me” Eric Massa, and anti-gay activist George Rekers. But like his economic theories, his lifestyle choices seem perfectly at home in the twenty-first century.

III. Architecture Blogs

Keynes was the sole academic in an artists’ collective, and counted painters, authors, and art critics among his close friends. “The ancient world knew that the public needed circuses as well as bread,” wrote Keynes in 1936, and he encouraged the British government to fund theater groups, symphony orchestras, and dance troupes. His arts boosterism gained enough attention that in April of 1942 Keynes was appointed the chairman of Britain’s Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA).

But most of all, Keynes thought that the state should support architecture. One year after he became the chairman of CEMA, he wrote, “The lack of buildings is disastrous… we do have to equip, almost from the beginning, the material frame for the arts of civilisation and delight.” And, later: “I plead for a certain moderation from our controllers and a few crumbs of mortar…We look forward to the time when the theatre and the concert-hall and the gallery will be a living element in everyone’s upbringing.”

So to get in that properly Keynesian mood, not only should you be reading your Krugman and your Financial Times, you should also be browsing sites like BLDGBLOG, eVolo, and A Daily Dose of Architecture.

IV. The I-Banking Lifestyle

By the time he was 30, Keynes made the modern equivalent of $200,000 a year, half of which came from investments; when he was 50, he made closer to $750,000 a year. He also got screwed by the markets once in a while. In 1920, he lost about $1 million (in today’s dollars) on a bad currency speculation. And two stock market crashes destroyed his net worth: it dropped by about $1.5 million in the 1929 crash, and by $13 million in the 1938 crash.

Such a personal balance sheet might be familiar to the modern investment banker. But Keynes’s spending would be even more so, from his generous patronage of the arts to his multiple residences, which included a country estate and a London pied-à-terre.

Keynes also had similar tastes to the current I-banking crowd when it came to art: he bought paintings not just by his Bloomsbury friends, but also by the masters: Picasso, Delacroix, Gauguin, and, according to his friends, “the worst picture Cézanne ever painted.” In one whirlwind weekend of picture-buying, he spent nearly $800,000 in today’s dollars — which, while it might not rival the $106.5 million paid for a Picasso earlier this year, is still impressive.

V. Lady Gaga

I’ll admit, it is a stretch to suggest that, were Keynes alive today, he’d have The Fame Monster on his iPod. But let’s review the evidence: Keynes loved theater and dance, belonged to artistic groups (Bloomsbury, CEMA, various Cambridge clubs), and even hung out with part-time performance artists (“Bloomsberries” Virginia Woolf and Duncan Grant perpetrated the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, for instance). He also believed that “the permanent problem of the human race” was not how to solve its material desires, but how people ought “to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for [them].” In other words, like John Adams, he studied economics so that others could study art, music, and other beautiful things. In other words, he was ultimately an aesthete.

But more than that, he seems like a kindred spirit for Lady Gaga. After all, Keynes was “anxious above all to avoid stating a conventional opinion,” according to one of his students, and saw himself as nothing short of an intellectual, cultural, and sexual revolutionary. Once his career took off, he adopted an entirely new persona, to the point that he changed his wardrobe (though he insisted on wearing handmade socks and silk underwear) and even tried to modulate his voice — although he did both of those things in order to look more normal, not less so. He was a global superstar and part of a cultural aristocracy, and had the ego to match. All things that could describe Lady Gaga. It’s probably farfetched to imagine someone as “establishment” as Keynes ever straying into the orbit of a pop music superstar, but still — doesn’t Keynes seem equally at home in 2010 as he was in 1936?

One of the few virtues to living such a peripatetic life is that it allows me to hoard nostalgia. According to Don Draper, nostalgia is “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone,” and it can be shocking how often and unexpected those twinges can be. They accumulate with every relationship severed, every suitcase packed, every “let’s-keep-in-touch” email sent. That unheimlich feeling that you get when you see someone for the first time in twelve years and realize that although their hair and clothes and eyesight might not be the same, there’s still something familiar about them is nostalgia too. If anyone ever feels like a melancholy, nostalgic soak, I’d suggest fetching yourself a nice glass of whisky and clicking through the Facebook photo albums of those of your high school friends whom you haven’t seen in a while.

In other words, nostalgia isn’t the sole preserve of retirees, grandparents, and college professors. Instead, it’s an easy self-indulgence, one that requires nothing more than an ironclad belief that things used to be better.

And that makes nostalgia a very fraught thing. It’s perfectly possible, for instance, to feel nostalgic about things that you wouldn’t ever want back. Take, for example, the poor reception to the recent remakes of Knight Rider and The Day The Earth Stood Still, or the half-resurrection of the new wave band The Cars. On a larger scale, the aftermath of the second World War still “exercises a powerful hold on the British imagination,” according to historian Robert Hewison, even though nobody would ever want to go back to postwar Britain. Clearly, some things are better left in the past.

Meanwhile, feelings of anxiety or helplessness in the face of large, impersonal forces, can trigger that kind of politicized nostalgia that, as the perpetually red-faced, foaming-at-the-mouth Frank Rich will tell you, can turn into screeches of resentment and calls for the arresting of all political change per se, in the name of a golden age that never really existed. For example: Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s attempt to promote “Confederate History Month” was an attempt to conjure up the romantic, Gone With The Wind-type images of antebellum Virginia without all that messy slavery business. Or the firestorm over the Texas Board of Education’s historical revanchism (“Texas Gives the Boot to Liberal Social Studies Bias,” reads the state Republican Party’s blog), in which matters of historical interpretation were settled 10 to 5 along party lines. Beware politicians who wield the past for any reason.

It’s not the case that this is the only mixture of politics and memory that’s based on half-remembrances and partial truths, of course (there are still plenty of viable Communist parties in Europe!). But nostalgia, because it’s so easily accessible, has a nasty way of turning into unthinking reactionaryism, as our friends in the Tea Party have a way of reminding us at least once a week.

To quote Milan Kundera: “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” In other words, it’s better to leave nostalgia where it belongs, as a sentiment that’s best suited to private thought rather than public action. (I leave the question of cultural nostalgia open for debate; after all, no remakes whatsoever means no Bewitched on the one hand, no Battlestar Galactica on the other).

Which brings me to the point of all this hand-wringing. The idea for this series, Keywords, came from a book of the same name, written by Raymond Williams in 1976. That book tried to explain those kinds of words that everyone knows the definition of until they think about it a little bit harder — art, culture, society, liberalism, and so on. It was a modernist project in every sense: it sought to delimit, once and for all, the lexical boundaries of these words and the sum of human knowledge on them. A big task, even for such an influential literary critic as Williams.

This series, on the other hand, has been much more solipsistic, and intentionally so: who am I to hold forth about huge abstractions, when I can barely wrap my mind around my daily experiences? In that sense, it was a really more of an in-joke that only I knew about (until now, that is). But the study of concepts is a bit limiting — one should either go big or go home, and I guess I’m not interested or patient enough to write a book along the lines of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod just yet.

I thought about ending with the kind of treacly platitudes that seem to be appropriate for such occasions (here’s what I thought of just now: “In the end, everyone has to find his or her own keywords.” Get it?). But I’ll refrain, just this once: after all, it’s time to move on to the next series of self-indulgences.

The term “Asian flair” first appeared in the mid-nineties, in lifestyle magazines like Vegetarian Times and Los Angeles Magazine, but it took the current crop of Food Network celebrity chefs to elevate it into a culinary catchphrase. In a typical day of programming, viewers might see Rachael Ray prepare a “a speedy meal with Asian flair” (yum-o!) or Robin Miller serve up something resembling pad thai, complete with tabasco and a bit of fish sauce to give it some you-know-what. Fans can buy Barefoot Contessa-branded Indonesian ginger marinade (“Add fresh Asian flair to chicken, pasta, fish, and vegetables”) or Bobby Flay’s cookbook Burgers, Fries, and Shakes, in which he provides a recipe for Chinese five spice powder (helpfully re-dubbed “Asian seasoning”) so that grill aficionados can flair up their fries, potato chips, or onion rings. From ingredients that might be completely alien to the average American palate (lemongrass, taro, nam pla) to ones that are probably in any well-stocked pantry (ginger, garlic, lime) — all fall under Asian flair’s ever-expanding lexical umbrella.

As the Food Network goes, so goes the cooking public. Some commenters on the Food Network website, for instance, praise recipes like Tyler Florence’s duck with roasted pears or Paula Deen’s Asian chicken salad for their adequate flair-ness. Occasionally, however, even these domestic divas get hoisted on their own petard. One Susie from Crown Point, Indiana, for example, declares that Sandra Lee’s wonton soup recipe “is not even remotely close to having any Asian flair.”

On the other hand, professional restaurant critics, who have been singing the praises of Asian and Asian fusion restaurants for decades now, seem to consider the phrase déclassé. The New York Times’s Frank Bruni never once remarked about the flair quotient of any of his meals; his predecessor William Grimes did only once. Pat Bruno, of the Chicago Sun-Times, used the phrase twice in the last ten years, and the former Boston Globe restaurant critic Alison Arnett used it a whopping four times in her fifteen-year tenure, a record among major American newspaper critics. A typical Zagat guide, in comparison, will use the phrase three or four times each issue.

It’s the same with cookbook writers. “Asian flair” is featured prominently in general-purpose books like The South Beach Diet, The New American Heart Association Cookbook, and Cookin’ with Coolio, but the only Asian chefs who use it are explicitly on a mission to bring their cuisine to the wary home cook — for example, Annie Wong and Jeffrey Yarborough, co-authors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Asian Cooking, or Corinne Trang, author of The Asian Grill and Noodles Every Day, whom The Washington Post called the “Julia Child of Asian Cuisine.”

Still, there are only so many times that one can hear a white, middle-aged host talk about “Asian flair” (or refer to hoisin as “Asian barbecue sauce”) before wondering whether the home-cooking industry has become a bit, well, culturally tone-deaf; as Andrea Nguyen, blogger at Viet World Kitchen and author of the cookbook Asian Dumplings, writes, “We don’t all look and cook the same.” Yet there doesn’t seem to be any room on for-profit television networks for chefs to try to encourage home cooks to make the kind of food that one might find in Chiang Mai, Manila, or Hong Kong rather than the food court at the local mall; public television seems to be the main refuge for the next generation of Martin Yans and Ming Tsais. Conversely, the Food Network’s only Asian chef, Masaharu Morimoto, is not quite franchise-ready: his reputation rests mostly on his culinary ability rather than his television presence (unlike, say, Bobby Flay and Guy Fieri), and he has no show of his own and no big endorsement deals (only one cookbook, no knives, no pots and pans, no eponymous “garbage bowls”). In fact, given his heavy accent — he’s usually subtitled when he appears on Iron Chef or other Food Network programs — he might be a little too Asian for prime time. (Meanwhile, Brian Boitano has his own show?!)

A friend of mine (who hails from America’s garlic capital, and who consequently knows a thing or two about food) pointed out, quite rightly, that the whole idea of “Asian flair” is meant exclusively for the teeming masses rather than culinary cognoscenti. After all, the Rachael Rays of the world aren’t trying to please professional chefs, upscale restaurant owners, and Chinese grandmothers — their base consists of home cooks with the right equipment and a well-stocked pantry, but a limited sense of adventure.

So the routine appearance of coconut milk, whole cardamom pods, and hoisin sauce (as long as it isn’t called “Asian barbecue sauce”) in the arsenals of non-Asian non-chefs like Rachael Ray and Guy Fieri might be a sign that Asian food of all kinds is finally edging its way onto American dinner tables, and not just in a take-out box. Even if the buzzword “Asian flair” teeters a little too close to cultural insensitivity on the one hand and plain old overuse on the other, this is still a big victory for those trying to expand the American palate. After all, only a bare majority of Americans actually cook for themselves anymore, and even then, only if the definition of “cooking” includes ingredient assembly of any kind, like making a cold-cut sandwich. If such mainstream attention is not enough to inspire pilgrimages to New York City just to eat at Momofuku Ko, at least it is prompting some people to buy fish sauce and rice noodles from their local megamart in order to give pad see ew a first, unsteady shot.

Image courtesy of Joe Pitz

Take, for example, this octave by Tim Torkildson:

In this modern day and age
Sans-serif is all the rage.
Typeface, point, and spacing too
Are as bland as canned beef stew.
Cursive is no longer seen.
Gothic is a mere pipe dream.
Fonts are nothing but homogenous;
I’d as lief we were androgenous!

It goes off the rails a bit at the end, but for a little bit of versified whimsy, it’s not bad.

As far as these guerilla poets go, Torkildson is about as accomplished as they come; in February he sent in “An Ode to the Overdraft Fee” (written in rhyming fourteener couplets, if you really want to know), which the Times’s Bucks Blog incorporated into an official post:

They’ve got a little racket at the bank just down the street,
It doesn’t cost them anything, and business is repeat.
If you use your debit card and funds are running low,
The overdraft protection triggers fees that grow and grow.
The charges mount so quickly that before you can respond,
They’re hauling you away and you will need a quick bail bond.
Like a check that bounces, there’s a boomerang effect,
And before you know it your pure credit has been wrecked.
The Feds have put a damper on this billion-dollar scam,
But banks know that their customers will follow like a lamb.
And never change the way they pay for every overdraft,
The bank gets all the money while the public gets the shaft.

But Torkildson doesn’t have much of a web presence. According to the Bucks Blog, he is from Ban Phe, Thailand, and a quick Google Search seems to suggest that he’s an ex-circus clown who now teaches English overseas.

Larry Eisenberg, who keeps a similarly low internet profile, tends to stick to limericks:

Minaya has fondness for Age,
Great players, who aging, grow sage,
Willie Mays & Hank Aaron,
Both beyond comparin’,
Hey Omar, two more to engage!

Eisenberg is both prolific and popular. Several commenters have singled him out for praise or recommended his posts, and one enthusiast even signed his or her post “Eisenberg’s my American Idol.”

Wage thieves are low beyond low,
The sleaziest crim’nals I know,
Their scams are impure,
Victimizing the Poor,
Hard jail time they ought undergo!

It turns out that Larry Eisenberg has some real literary cred, too; between 1962 and 1988, he published short stories in popular sci-fi periodicals such as Fantasy and Sci-Fi, Galaxy, and Asimov’s. Even though he hasn’t published fiction since then, and even though he’s had an internet connection for less than two years now, he still finds the time to comment, and comment frequently.

Still, as much as I learned about some of these people, I didn’t know what drove them to write poetry, and write it in the form of comments on The New York Times. I needed to go straight to the sources.

Fortunately, two of the Times’s most dedicated poet-commenters answered my call. The first was Karen Lyons Kalmenson, a self-described “poetess by nature” and the Poet Laureate of the site Baby Boomer Knowledge Center, who happily agreed “to share my / knowledge / and not be / misconstrued.”

Unlike Torkildson and Eisenberg, Kalmenson is more of a free-versificator, and has a self-diagnosed case of “ee cummings disease,” which is to say that she eschews capital letters altogether. Take these two examples:

the idea of a free fall
to me sounds insane
but, then again
i would not even
board a plane

sprummer is not a bummer
but winter is a splinter
away from the cold
i wish i could run
like a sprinter

Kalmenson is certainly not going for craft points, especially when compared to other members of what she calls the Times’s “commentculture.” Despite her title, however, she does not see herself as the heir to a poetic tradition. She claimed to be “not much of a serious reader,” although “as a teen, i did have a solid appreciation of the vision and aesthetic of poe, and even the bard shakespeare,” and she rarely reads other people’s poems except on blog posts to which she is also responding. Instead of trying to create finely-wrought poetry, she finds inspiration in “anything that amuses, infuriates or is even mildly intriguing an excuse to write a poem,” and writes not so much from the heart as from her “ever giggling funny bone.” Most of all, she is much more sparing, both with her answers to me and her online verse; whereas other posters have racked up thousands of comments, Kalmenson has about 1,400, many of which are not even poems. In a word, she is the Dharma to the rest of the comment-poetry world’s Greg.

Michael Dennis Mooney, the other person who responded to me, was Kalmenson’s opposite in almost every way. Whereas Kalmenson sent me one succinct email, Mooney was profligate in his responses. Over the course of twenty emails, he not only answered the questions that I asked but also offered his poetic pedigree. Of all the commenters out there, Mooney was the only one who was clearly dying to show off his literary knowledge. He claimed influence from a variety of different poets, including Martial, Chaucer, and Pope, and wrote that “George Gordon Lord Byron was perhaps the greatest writer of light verse ever!”

Mooney, however, has a complicated relationship with the Times, and a bit of a persecution complex about his poetry (or as he calls it, his “wicked nasty obnoxious radical opinionated broadsides”). After a string of nearly 2,400 comments, his last comment appeared on the Times’s website on January 1, 2010. He accuses the Times moderators of waging a campaign to silence him, for a variety of reasons, and collects the poems that the Times moderators do not approve on his own personal blog.

For example, he claims that the moderators simply “didn’t understand” one of his poems, which was written almost entirely in what seems to be a New York patois (complete with a pronunciation guide at the end):

Ah heah how you gots one dem whaddycalls-its.
You knows, wheah dey jams da whole message in, in a few woids…

Hey, Ah heahs youse more busier den a one ahm paypuh-hanguh
Wid da prickly rash. Ya doan have time to antsa no phone!…

So peoples dey gotta send da message wid text
So you can READ da phone youse ‘salready yappin on…

Sorta takes da joy outta it, ‘swhat Ahm talkin bout, whadda youse tinkin?!
Dis idda phone yer already yappin on, already readin on, already messaging on [...]

(It goes on, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it either.)

Mooney thinks that the moderation staff removed another poem that obliquely poked fun at Eliot Spitzer because “[I] think they feared a lawsuit from Eliot Spitzer, who can be very aggressive via the court system.” And the poem that got him “unofficially barred from the gated community of commenters”? A short satire about Tiger Woods’s extramarital affairs, which even leads off with a William Blake reference:

Tiger, Tiger burning bright
In the sex clubs of Orlando
Guess it’s time you took a break
And lived life with more candor
Must’ve been weird, your secret life
Never an unserviced erection
Shouldn’t you, though, have taught the wife
Some proper club selection?
[...]

But no poet gets thwarted by a little censorship. It didn’t stop Milton, and it certainly isn’t going to stop someone who is standing in the shadow of Martial, John Donne, and W.H. Auden. Thus Mooney has created pseudonyms, complete with alternate email addresses and fake backstories, in order to post his comments unfettered. For example, he describes his character “Marilyn Ann Nardollilo” as “outrageously flirtatious,” and is currently “trying to get [Ben] Schott to write to her, at times.”

Whereas he praises Ben Schott’s blog for being “amusing, dryly, gently witty and erudite,” he is far less charitable about his fellow poets. He castigates them for being “all elbows and no manners” (except for Tim Torkildson, “the best of them so far”), and singled out Kalmenson and Larry Eisenberg for being “poor craftsmen” who were “competing for who could be the worst hack.” In particular, he riffed on Kalmenson’s title (“Boomer Poet Laureate”), calling her “the luareate [sic] of the deluded and the barely literate.” He even told me that he’d written an email to Ben Schott calling them “the poetasters” and “the doggerelistas” (Schott, by the way, never responded to this or any of Mooney’s emails).

Apart from the trials and tribulations of Michael Mooney, though, the Times staff seems to accept their community of poet-commenters. Torkildson, of course, got a poem published on the Bucks Blog, while Ben Schott held a limerick competition (limericks being one of the most common forms of versified comments), and even took an idea for a weekend competition from Michael Mooney, before their relationship soured. Still, they clearly do so with an occasional note of exasperation, judging from the introduction to the limerick competition: “This weekend, Schott’s Vocab is bowing to the inevitable and soliciting limericks.” Understandable, I suppose, when the people to whom you’ve given a forum and the occasional bit of encouragement get a sense of entitlement about the whole deal — for example, when Michael Mooney writes that “I believe I should get a free copy of [Schott’s Miscellany]” for his constant stream of “reader rejoinders.”

These poet-commenters, in other words, are doing the poetic equivalent of mugging for the camera. For some, like Kalmenson and Eisenberg, the draw is simply being able to show off for an audience. For others, like Mooney, the Times offers a proving ground, a place for him to perform literary feats of skill and daring and to thereby cement his self-identification as a writer of light verse. Clearly, they must enjoy it: between the three of them, Eisenberg, Kalmenson, and Mooney (including his alias, Maddy Nardollilo) have written nearly ten thousand comments over the past twelve months, with Eisenberg alone responsible for over half of them. And this is just the tip of the poetic iceberg; other members of this fractious literary brood are at least as profligate as Eisenberg et al., such as one Robert Marino, who clocks in at nearly 5,800 comments.

What about the rest of the commenting world, those who are neither the bloggers themselves nor the poets competing for their virtual patronage? Some praise, some put-downs, and—this being The New York Times, after all—even an occasional bit of formal criticism (“Too many wrongly stressed syllables to be good limericks,” writes Dono about one of Larry Eisenberg’s poems).

Put another way, the combination of cheers and jeers elicited by the comment-box poetry of The New York Times is proof that Thomas Babington Macaulay was right when he wrote, “perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”

Take the retrospective in The New York Times, which careens between the Scylla of pop psychoanalysis and the Charybdis of scandalmongering. It compares Salinger not only to his own characters — he was “never much of a student,” according to the story; just like Holden Caulfield, the reader is supposed to infer — but to legendary eccentrics like Howard Hughes and Thomas Pynchon. Then, it dwells at length on Salinger’s reclusiveness, dietary habits, and sex life. In between such episodes, it mentions his writing, which, it implies, drew heavily on his psychological highs and lows. No surprises there: this is obviously a pre-written post-mortem, with everything already in place except the cause of death. But the piece also tries to draw Salinger into the age of Tiger Woods, Anna Nicole Smith, and John Edwards, when our celebrities need to be flawed enough to milk for a full “news cycle,” but not so off-putting that we want to change the channel. The “Salinger legend” intrigues people precisely because he was a kind of latter-day monk — part ascetic, part hermit, all oddball. His writing never clued us in to his seduction-by-mail of Joyce Maynard, or the fact that his daughter Margaret found him cold and alienating, but when each of them wrote books about it, boy, did we care all of a sudden.

Clearly, literary canonicity does not mean personal saintliness, and it’s no longer up to literary iconoclasts and professional reviewers to try to bring Salinger down: now everyone is free to admit that Salinger’s characters can be whiny, spoiled, or worst of all, sanctimonious. And at least one twenty-first century high school English class has failed to project their own teenage angst onto Holden Caulfield, which is what we were supposed to have been doing all along. Although I’d venture to say that their collective reaction to Holden — “Shut up and take your Prozac” — probably tells us as much about their parents’ generation as their own (or, I should say, my own). But Holden Caulfield taught us all of that in the first place — the cynicism, the ironic distance from the world, the complete inability to articulate emotion except for a deep-seated restlessness. The warts-and-all portrait of Salinger is just the consequence of fifty-some years of reading, and understanding, Catcher — cultural payback, if you will, and maybe even a tribute to its lasting impact.

Personally, I find the fascination with Salinger’s personal business a little perplexing. Not that I’m trying to be prudish here, or to suggest that he somehow “deserved” his privacy just because he wrote some popular stories. Rather, my question is simply this: how do the details of his personal life somehow enrich our experience of his writing? I get that relatives, not newspapers and magazines, are supposed to be the ones writing treacly eulogies, and maybe it’s true that Salinger put a lot of himself into his characters, and a lot of Joyce Maynard into Franny Glass. But Salinger was always detached from his works, and we only ever “knew” him as he was mediated through his characters, whether Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, the anonymous narrators of “The Laughing Man” and “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” or Buddy Glass (who indirectly claims authorship for Nine Stories anyway). The only thing that Salinger ever intentionally wrote as himself, I think, is the dedication to Franny and Zooey, which is not all that exciting — beyond the fact that even Salinger felt compelled to half-sincere modesty once in a while.

So if psychologizing Salinger is best left to fools and biographers, where does that leave the rest of us? In danger of believing in a particular brand of solipsism, I think, since the literary press wants us to project our teenage selves onto Holden, and do whatever interpreting we want (because nobody really gets them) with the Glasses.

I’ll concede the point that we get into Salinger what we read into his work. But the conventional wisdom is a cop-out; Holden, remember (and most people don’t), ends up in a psych ward, which—to say nothing of affectations of world-weariness—is probably not anything we want to encourage teenagers to aspire to. And surely the Glasses are there to do more than just confirm what Catcher already told us: instead of “phonies,” we get “section men” and TV producers.

So let me offer a modest alternative reading. To me, Salinger’s corpus is not a celebration of cynicism, but a cautionary tale about its dangers. Between Holden and the Glasses, we have characters who are so jaded or traumatized by the adult world, or else so absorbed in it — and in themselves — that they’ve submerged their emotions in favor of complete, self-righteous detachment. As they are a bit superhuman themselves, their reactions tend toward the extreme — and provide most of the sheer pleasure of reading Salinger’s work. But underneath all the verbal fencing and the libidinous misadventures, Salinger warns us that the worst thing you can do in this world is to is forget how to connect with other people (doubly so if you can’t even talk to children!). No wonder Salinger ends every single one of his stories with a short meditation about the consequences of love (and, always, either Platonic or familial love, never erotic love): either his characters revel in its simple joys (“Down at the Dinghy,” Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, “For Esmé — With Love and Squalor”) or suffer because of its absence (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggilly in Connecticut,” “The Laughing Man,” “Pretty My Mouth and Green My Eyes”). As Buddy Glass gradually realizes in Seymour, An Introduction, or Holden in Catcher, or Franny in Franny and Zooey, only through the love of others can we attain true goodness, and wisdom, and beauty.

Maybe you don’t agree, and maybe I’ve got Salinger pegged wrong altogether — it’s quite possible, since I’m only an admirer and frequent reader, and nothing approaching a bona fide literary critic. But that, you have to understand, is why I find the emphasis on Salinger’s personal life and the rote repetition of Cliff’s Notes themes to be so superficial, and so unsatisfying. Tragicomic, even.

But the only way to properly remember Salinger, I think, is to go and read him. That’s what I’ll be doing, anyway.

Of course, every commentator or pundit worth his or her salt is equal parts journalist, polemicist, and gadfly, some with a dash of liar thrown in for good measure. But now, non-journalists of all stripes can instantly broadcast their anger, often times long before their conscience can catch up. Shame? How twentieth century.

And at a time when any jackass can publish their dumb thoughts whenever they want, there are bound to be some large-scale breaches in the social contract. Thus Alice Hoffman, an author known more for her magical realism than her vitriol, suddenly unleashes a (relatively G-rated) Twitter outburst after a snippy review of her novel The Story Sisters ran in The Boston Globe. Or the first commenter on a story about historian and essayist Tony Judt’s battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, writes, “There is a God, it seems.” Or John Stossel attacks the writer of a retrospective on Billy Mays as being “an elitist young author.” (Full disclosure: obviously, that author is me, and what’s actually ridiculous about that blog entry is that that Stossel calls Billy Mays a “free market hero” and a “public servant” completely without irony. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Small wonder, then, that there is a general decline in civility — a trickle down of anger and thinly veiled hatred, which leads to Tea Parties, outbursts of “You lie!” in the middle of presidential speeches, and plenty of stress eating.

This is not a new observation; musician and “digital pioneer” Jaron Lanier has just written a book that, in part, discusses the “culture of nastiness” on the web. But you don’t need to be Yoda to realize that the amount of sheer vitriol coursing through our collective veins also scares people. Ted Koppel thinks as long as we are angry, “our national pendulum will swing wildly between anarchy and authoritarianism.” So did Hannah Arendt: she wrote that totalitarian states worked because they managed to harness the “self-centered bitterness” of an “atomized and individualized society,” whose members were more likely to tear each other apart than do anything constructive.

But is there a moral here? Beyond emphasizing the need for the “undo send” feature to become standard in Gmail, I’m not sure that anything can be done to change the way people interact with an email link or a comment box — even if they do realize that there’s a human being on the other end.

I’m getting dangerously close to making a pompous generalization about human nature, so I’ll stop short and let someone else do it for me. The very first strip of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is a pretty angry one. After “good ol’ Charlie Brown” walks past a boy and a girl, the boy turns to no one in particular and says, “How I hate him!” It set the tone for fifty years of lost baseball games, destroyed kites, and unrequited love from the Little Red-Haired Girl. What incivility; what pessimism! And what a glimpse of truth. That first strip is shocking for the same reason that YouTube comments, Pitchfork reviews, and NBC’s treatment of Conan O’Brien are shocking: they reveal the casual callousness and undercurrent of anger that permeates everyday life. No one ought to be surprised about all of this, but, like Charlie Brown, who always tries to kick the football even though he knows that Lucy will just pull it away at the last second, we never quite allow ourselves to believe the worst in other people — or ourselves. Maybe that’s part of the reason why we’re so angry all the time.