I'm halfway through Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." I have a lot of thoughts on this -- in lieu of editing, I'll lay them out.

1) One of the major claims of the book is to relate "intellectualism" with "university" and "schooling" -- and to oppose this to unschooled, salt-of-the-earth common sense. He goes through a number of iterations of this (Methodist universities, Unitarianism, Jefferson, Tocqueville and the Sorbonne, next to Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, circuit ministers, etc). The differences is always, invariably, class-based --- "high church" vs. "low church," "gentlemen" vs. "professionals," "aristocrats" vs. "politicians" -- with the former having the benefit of a robust system of higher education.

2) For Hofstadter, this doesn't start with Jacksonian democracy, but with Evangelicalism and the low church movement, circa 1700 (?). McCarthy aside, he seems to be looking forward to figures like Jerry Falwell as modern variants of this split. What's interesting, though, is that this breaks down over access to education --- the argument of the Reconstruction Democrats isn't (or isn't only) that academic qualification is insufficient for practical political work, but that over half the population lacks access to it. Which is a problem! Hofstadter credits this -- he also credits a fundamental meanspiritedness, whereby, in lieu of advocating for real educational reform, the highly educated are held up for ridicule and namecalling, and effectively exiled to the far corners of political life.

I have thoughts on this -- on whether "utility" and "ineffectiveness" is a valid critique (a tangential issue), and, more centrally, on where the role of schooling and education falls in here. The other major -- and really cool -- part of the book, of course, is the roots between evangelicalism and Anglo-American intellectual life, which is something I'd really like to look into. That's all I've got to say for the minute, though.

It's quarter of eleven on a Saturday morning.

Library time!

I've been thinking a lot about "what kind" of writing I want to be doing --- whether I want to get back into thinking about journalism, of various stripes, or whether I want to start writing my dissertation. This sounds like a really pat, facetious thing -- of COURSE you don't want to start writing your dissertation! -- but it's actually a hard thing to think about. For instance: whether I actually want to get better at doing interviews? What other kinds of things qualify as "research" -- and whether I want to include them in what ultimately constitutes my "writing"? (oral history, yeah or nay!)

With that, I've been thinking about what to do with this blog -- whether I want it to be a place for publishing (my thoughts, short essays in development, writing of friends?) or whether I want it to be what it essentially is now -- a place for bookmarking random thoughts on what I'm reading. The trash bin operation -- the idea that you read and think X thoughts (which you write down) and subsequently prune into Y manageable thoughts (which you dog-ear for future reference, and hope you don't forget about). It's been marginally useful as the latter -- it'd probably be a lot more useful, on my end, if I tried to work these up into cohesive thoughts.

The idea, more broadly, for me, is how I want to think about writing as a process, in line with running workshops to generate branch income for Parts and Crafts (an awesome kid's education project a friend of mine is running). It seems like Working Text is a good corollary project -- a place for me to think about teaching, and to try out some ideas for group projects, seminar work -- all an excuse to get together and talk about work around the dinner table! Because I think I can stand to get better at my own writing -- but also because it's hard to do alone? Thinking about how to make this blog serve that project, I guess, is something I want to work on.

Any ideas? Help me construct my next life project! This, of course, is called crowd-sourcing therapy. Best answers will be posted on next week's show!