During the holiday service there was an opportunity to voice aloud concerns, griefs and gratitudes. We at LNB, trying to maintain our holiday spirit, have begun to peruse these as comic material to be shared with like-minded friends. Far too often such rankings are a ludicrous collection of works by personal associates and useful colleagues โ though sometimes even family enters into the picture. Because I worked very hard on it.
We think of this page as a place to express admiration for excellence or to make observations about artistic or, increasingly, political disappointments. Some call this criticism. Alongside the presentation of new work, this task was once the purview of the paper periodical. Any artistic opinion carries with it a kernel of self-justification, of course. And, in fact, sometimes that self-centered seed blooms into a creation fully independent of its origins, cultural criticism becoming a work of art.
There are some excellent bloggers and electronic magazines. Content, we are advised, must be geared toward promotion and marketing. Taken from a recently published volume of their correspondence, the missive delivers an early version of a now-familiar tragic narrative:.
This despite the fact that in the past years and months we were very close friendsโฆ At the outbreak of war we were all together for a summer break in a small village near Paris. Benji was in excellent shape. He had finished part of his work on Baudelaire and was prepared to do some extraordinary thingsโฆ. Arendt opines:.
And he succeeded. His horror at America was indescribable, and he told friends that he preferred a shorter life in France to a longer one in America. We like to think that Benjamin would have felt less alienated in America than he feared. Having survived the red-hunting fifties, he would come into his influential own the following decade. Most importantly, after the travel visa difficulties of the McCarthy era had been resolved, Benjamin would be able to make regular visits to and from his beloved Paris.
