#irving howe

[ouroboros8ontology]

Sherman’s parody is not only Jewish in its subject matter, it is Jewish in the technique of its humor, which like much Jewish comedy produces laughs by exposing the tender, airy, and sentimental to the rough, earthy, and practical. In Irving Howe’s formulation, Jewish humor’s classic strategy was “an irony which measured the distance between pretension and actuality.” To measure this distance, Jewish humor employed the yardstick of the commonplace, or what Howe calls the vulgar in its original Latin sense, the ordinary senses of kitchens and streets.

Mark Cohen, My Fair Sadie: Allan Sherman and a Paradox of American Jewish Culture

[grandhotelabyss]

Kleist's position was congenial to Cioran's. But its insistence that there was no escape from rational thought brooked no revolutionary foolishness. Susan acknowledged this with reluctance. "Politically, Cioran must be regarded as a conservative," she wrote. "He regards the hope of radical revolution as something to be outgrown by the mature mind." It is not clear how much Susan knew about Cioran's development, since he suppressed his first books, written in Romanian before his establishment in France in 1937. They would not be revived until after the fall of communism, but they reveal a youthful infatuation with radicalism that paralleled hers.Cioran had begun his political life as an extremist of the Right: a fascist. But the underlying process was the same, as one of his biographers has written, and had been common among twentieth-century intellectuals. It was not so different from the trajectory among Americans that Irving Howe had traced. The cycle "begins with intellectuals' critique of modern society, coupled with utopian, totalitarian solutions. It ends with their revulsion at the excesses of war, revolution, and totalitarianism, and a retreat into the de-politicized realm of art and ideas." A generation younger, Susan would become disillusioned along similar lines.

Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work

[rebira]

"That a people at the very bottom of the social scale, upon whom the heaviest weights of history descended, should nonetheless have expressed so much of its ethos through a complicated network of jokes, witticisms, satiric stories, symbolic shrugs and gestures-- this may be explained, if it can be explained at all, by the fact that humor was its first and only line of defense, though in a sense an impregnable defense. Only if they took the myth of the Chosen People with the utmost seriousness, yet simultaneously mocked their pretensions to being anything but the most wretched people on earth, could the Jews survive."

A Treasury of Yiddish Stories

[proverbiumseniorum]

"A critic ought now and then to hesitate."---Irving Howe, American literary critic, 1920-1993

“A critic ought now and then to hesitate.”—Irving Howe, American literary critic, 1920-1993

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[mayolfederico]

undici giugno

Alvin Langdon Coburn, Hobotnica, 1912

  Un inferno nucleare scuote la stella che scalda il nostro pagliericcio. Metà del combustibile è andato. Che ne è della Madonna di Piero ormai prossima al parto, del dio nascosto nel suo ventre, alla sinistra di chi guarda, oltre le tende sollevate con industriosa indifferenza, che ne è dei due angeli inservienti. Appaiono tutti così giovani.

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[schlemieltheory]

The Day of Judgment: Reflections on Sholem Aleichem’s “A Yom Kippur Scandal”

The Day of Judgment: Reflections on Sholem Aleichem’s “A Yom Kippur Scandal”

On Erev Yom Kippur (the Eve of Yom Kippur), it makes sense – at least for me – to ask how Sholem Aleichem, perhaps the most well-known and celebrated of all writers on the schlemiel – approaches Yom Kippur by way of fiction.  With this in mind, I thought of one piece that has Yom Kippur in its title, a piece which the literary critic Irving Howe believed illustrated the darker side of Aleichem’s…

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[infamoussayings]

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Irving Howe

[millionsmillions]

Irving Howe asks how Hemingway commanded the attention of a generation. Our own Michael Bourne recently answered that question, recognizing Hemingway as a middlebrow revolutionary.