“The ‘Delirious
Professions’…Fear…(and)…Shoes”
The title comes from Paul Valery, early 20th
century French polymath (although best known as a French symbolist poet) to
mean “All those trades whose main tools is one’s opinion of one’s self, and
whose raw material is the opinions other have of you.” Leonard refers to them
as the people that make the “…snow jobs and acid rain of our emotional
weather.” The essay is a sort of
follow-on to his review of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire
contrasting the tunnel blindness of both Wolfe and Paul Berman’s commentary on Bonfire in Dissent Magazine in 1991.
About the “delirious professionals,” Leonard writes, “Wolfe
can’t get enough of them with his zippy…jazz fugue of the latest language” and Dissent “…isn’t interested in these
people”…both catching a compelling but incomplete view of the First
and Third World collision that was New York City in the late ‘80s and earl
‘90s.
New word: presbyters = priest (…then why not just say
priest?)
New learning: Irving Howe (literary critic and
socialist) used to refer to Senator Al D’Amato as “pickle head"....yes...I think I see it...
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