I’ve been reading The New Yorker for nearly fifty years (OMG!), but it has hardly ever upset me, and, until today, it has never presented me with anything that I would call, simply, odious.

What was notable in all the writing, above and beyond a mastery of language and of storytelling, was a palpable sense of ambition. These writers are not all iconoclasts; some are purposefully working within existing traditions. But they are all aiming for greatness: fighting to get our attention, and to hold it, in a culture that is flooded with words, sounds, and pictures; fighting to surprise, to entertain, to teach, and to move not only us but generations of readers to come. 

Nothing, nothing in the world, could disgust me more, in the pages of a magazine that cares about writing, than “a palpable sense of ambition.” Does it all come down to bats, hoops, and statistics — forever? Do the pimply ados rule, even though they’re in their forties? If so, shoot me now! (I leave for another time the way this passage echoes an upbeat quarterly report.)

It’s true: I think that public ambition is a terrible thing — if you’re not doing something better just for the private, personal sake of it, then go hang! I would rather die than push what I’m doing. It’s up to me to find out who’s doing good things, not the other way round. Serious culture rests on the the authority of connoisseurship. Everything else is just horrible awful preening.

I am so not an Anglophone at heart.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 5:21 am.