Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Great blogs

It's six in the morning, and I'm still awake, because I've spent the past seven hours absorbed in two blogs I discovered when I went hunting for pictures of Jean Arthur and Myrna Loy.

One blog is pictures, pictures, pictures.


The other has fewer pictures, a lot more words. Miss O'Malley, despite being a Red Sox fan, appears to be passably literate.


Here, she features a wonderful excerpt from the one and only Camille Paglia:

Genuine radicals did not go on to graduate school. If they did, they soon dropped out, or were later defeated by the faculty recruitment and promotion process, which rewards conformism and sycophancy. The universities were abandoned to the time-servers and mercenaries who now hold many of the senior positions there. Ideas had been relegated to the universities, but the universities belonged to the drudges.

There is a widespread notion that these people are dangerous leftists, "tenured radicals" in Roger Kimball's phrase, who have invaded the American establishment with subversive ideas. In fact, they are not radicals at all. Authentic leftism is nowhere to be seen in our major universities. The "multiculturalists" and the "politically correct" on the subjects of race, class, and gender actually represent a continuation of the genteel tradition of respectability and conformity. They have institutionalized American niceness, which seeks, above all, not to offend and must therefore
pretend not to notice any differences or distinctions among people or cultures.

2 comments:

TAS said...

Well, I sincerely apologize for burdening your eyes with all those "pictures, pictures, pictures" but, in our own defense, I should point out that on the occasions when we've attempted a more textual enterprise the response has been negative; quite demonstrably so.

But even if this were not the case, you would be in error concluding that we are not more than "passably literate," simply because we don't feed the blogosphere's tributaries with stirring accounts of our daily lives or churn out slab after slab after brain-drying slab of semi-literate cinephilic boilerplate as so many of our beast friends in this racket do. Such judgements do not, I think, have the shine of excellence upon them. Ultimately, no one gives a damn what anyone has to say about anything; and to this fact we are hostage, if few others are.

So I once again apologize for having offended your sensibilities, but our blog is what it must be.

Adrian said...

um, it wasn't a criticism! see the title of the post - "great blogs." i really love your blog! the passably literate remark, made about the other blog i linked, was a joke, jeez.