Matt on Menand

About Matt Matthew Baron is currently an undergraduate at Yale University majoring in mathematics. He is interested in pursuing a research career in biology and medicine. He is a staff writer for the Yale Daily News and also a contributor to The New Journal, an undergraduate magazine on which he currently serves as Publisher. Matt enjoys studying history, especially Greek and Roman history, as well as early modern European history. He is a bookworm and thoroughly enjoyed reading James Joyce's Ulysses cover-to-cover without skipping a word.

Favorite Menand articles/chapters

FAT MAN: Herman Kahn and the nuclear age.
The New Yorker, Issue of 2005-06-27

THE WOMEN COME AND GO: The love song of T. S. Eliot.
The New Yorker, Issue of 2002-09-30

BEST OF THE “BEST”
The New Yorker, Issue of 2004-01-12

THE END MATTER: The nightmare of citation.
The New Yorker, Issue of 2003-10-06

“Jerry Don't Surf”
A review of the movie Saving Private Ryan
The New York Review of Books, Volume 45, Number 14, September 24, 1998

“Goblin Market”
A review of the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The New York Review of Books, Volume 49, Number 1, January 17, 2002

“Lust in Action: Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt”
(from American Studies)


Menandisms and favorite Menand lines

1
American Studies is a collection of essays about modern life, which Menand says is characterized, most importantly, by the process of change. In an interview, Menand said that, in pre-modern societies, the most a person could hope for, over the course of his life, is to adopt and preserve the culture into which he was born; in contrast, a modern person can hope to introduce new ideas and traditions and, in effect, change the culture around him.

Says Menand, “Not every culture is like this, but American culture has been like this since the late nineteenth century. It is the culture of modernity where the highest praise one can receive after death is to be declared to have been ‘ahead of one’s time’—which, in life, is pretty much the definition of unhappiness. Happiness is being in one’s time, and the essays in this book [American Studies] are all, in one way or another, about efforts to cope with that fact under the conditions of modern life.”

The greatest example Menand gives of the changing nature of modern life is contained in the following passage, one of my favorite from American Studies, which I quote:

"Back in the 1960s, a group of filmmakers, Drew Associates, was invited by the Kennedy administration to film its enforcement of the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama—the incident that culminated in George Wallace’s famous “stand in the schoolhouse door.” This film that was produced, Crisis: Behind the Presidential Commitment, covers events both at the White House and in Alabama. It is sometimes shown on public television, and it dramatizes the culture friction [that Christopher Lasch, a reactionary cultural critic,] writes about. Robert Kennedy, in the White House, and his deputy, Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach, in Alabama—Ivy League liberals, supremely assured of their virtue—are seen discussing their strategy for handling Wallace as though Wallace were an inconvenient road hazard, a man, in their calculus, of no moral account whatever. And Wallace is seen arriving at the university and accepting expressions of support from the people waiting to great him with the easy familiarity of a man who knows them and is part of a genuine community.

Wallace was as successful a populist as the postwar era produced, and the Kennedy administration was undoubtedly the incarnation of the modern liberal mentality as Lasch conceives it. There is something slightly chilling about the confrontation, as there is when you watch any ancient and deeply rooted thing smoothly and expertly obliterated by the forces of 'progress.' But Kennedy and Katzenbach were right, and Wallace was wrong."

2
On reading J.R.R. Tolkien as a child:

What pulled me in [to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy] was the "complete world" effect, the illusion of spatial and temporal extension beyond the boundaries of the story proper… The red and black hand-drawn map, folded and pasted into the back of the hardcover edition, which names places never explored in the book—Haradwaith, Tolfalas, Khand: what went on there?—was darkly wonderful to an eleven-year-old imagination. (from the essay “Goblin Market”, The New York Review of Books, Volume 49, Number 1, January 17, 2002)

3
The humorous Menand at his finest:

The trouble with Clinton is that he is, in the considered and no doubt heartfelt words of George Bush, a bullshit artist. A bullshit artist is not the same thing as a liar (though this may seem like the kind of distinction a bullshit artist would make). Clinton always sounds like he is trying to please everyone because he is always trying to please everyone. This is the basis of his approach to government. And since he can’t always please everyone, he often finds himself obliged to warm the truth a little. This is not because he wishes to deceive you; it’s because he wants you to know that his heart is in the right place. (from “The Mind of Al Gore” in American Studies)


Menand Moments

I first came across Menand for a terrible reason. While still in high school, worrying, as all high school students do, about college admissions, I came across Menand’s New Yorker piece about the Early Decision process, entitled, “THE THIN ENVELOPE, Why college admissions has become unpredictable.” In a world in which everybody has something to say about college admissions, Menand was, in his usual manner, completely original. And Menand’s sense of humor, with his characteristic wry hint of elitism, grabbed me. I saw—one cannot fail to realize—Menand’s “voice” is more distinctive that perhaps that of any other writer alive today. And then, after that, I inevitably proceeded to The Metaphysical Club and American Studies. Since then, I’ve read almost every article Menand has written for both The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.