PK on Menand

About PK Peter Kang (PK) graduated from Columbia College in 2005 with a bachelor of the arts degrees in both American history and film studies. He currently runs a design company in Queens, NY. Peter's first Menand text was American Studies, which he read over winter break of his junior year in college. He was also very much influenced by Menand's The Metaphysical Club and used it as a source of inspiration for his senior thesis in history on Northern philanthropy and black education in the South in the early nineteenth century. More: www.peterkang.com

Favorite Menand articles/chapters

The Metaphysical Club, Chapter Thirteen: Pragmatisms
In this chapter, Menand details the culmination of ideas and intellectual developments of his protagonists: law and experience (culture) according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James’s pragmatism (and Charles Peirce’s reaction), and Dewey’s instrumentalism. Menand skillfully ties together the intellectual arrival of pragmatism and makes the understanding of pragmatism accessible to the present-day reader through examples such as the process of deciding between lobster and steak and the wiring of the mind to successfully shoot free throws.

Bad Comma: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar
The New Yorker, 6-21-2004
Menand’s scathing review of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is not really an article that aims to discredit her work as it is an attempt to address what she may have actually intended with her book: that people should care more about writing. Menand argues that punctuation has little to do with making a writer’s work any better, but that the cultivation of a writer’s “voice” is what makes for good writing.

American Studies, A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker
The commercial success of The New Yorker in the 1960s, writes Menand, owed itself to an editorial commitment to an anti-commercial approach. By being in tune with the (anti-commercial) tastes of a homogenous upper-middle class, The New Yorker of old was able to monopolize a small slice of the population and turn it into a cash cow.

Menandisms and favorite Menand lines

On pragmatism and “cashable belief”: “Shooting free throws if you are a basketball player, or learning how to get out of a box if you are a chicken, are simple examples of what [William] James was talking about. A difficult example is belief in God. James thought that belief in God ‘works’ in the same way that learning to shoot free throws – or to tie your shoes, honor your father and mother, or get out of the box – works: each time it issues in a successful action, it gets reinforced as an organic habit… If behaving as though we had a free will or God exists gets us the results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.” (The Metaphysical Club, 355)

On the sixties and counterculture: “The silliest charge brought against the sixties is the charge of moral relativism. Ordinary life must be built on the solid foundations of moral values, the critics who make this charge argue, and the sixties persuaded people that the foundations weren’t solid, and that any morality would do what got you through the night. The accusation isn’t just wrong about the sixties; it’s an injustice to the dignity of ordinary life, which is an irredeemably pragmatic and ungrounded affair. You couldn’t make it through even the day if you held every transaction up to scrutiny by the lights of some received moral code. But that is exactly what the radicals and the counterculture types in the sixties did. They weren’t moral relativists. They were moral absolutists. They scrutinized everything, and they believed they could live by the distinctions they made.” (“Life in the Stone Age,” American Studies)

On Pauline Kael and her method of movie criticism: “Her favorite analogy for the movie experience got seriously overworked, and was lampooned as a result, but it does have the virtue of simplicity: a movie, for her, was either good sex or bad sex. For the quality of sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the glamour of the partner. The best-looking guy in the room may be the lousiest lover – which is why nothing irritated Kael more than a well-dressed movie that didn’t perform… She thought that people who claimed to enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey more than The Thomas Crown Affair were either lying or were guilty of sex-in-the-head.” (“The Popist: Pauline Kael, ” American Studies)

On Alain Locke and pluralism: “Locke knew [Franz] Boas’s work well, and he began by asserting Boas’s distinction between racial difference and racial inequality. The first is biological, the second is social; but they are constantly being confused. As Boas had said back in 1894, it is illogical to prevenft a group from developing a civilization and then to attribute its failure to develop a civilization to biological inferiority; but that is what Europeans had done. They had created a history of racial invidiousness and then they had called it natural. And whether they choose it or not (and Locke had once tried not to), individuals are the bearers of that history. ‘Really, when the modern man talks about race,” Locke said, “he is not talking about the anthropological or biological idea at all. He is really talking about the historical record of success or failure of an ethnic group…[T]hese groups, from the point of view of anthropology, are ethnic fictions.’” (The Metaphysical Club, 396-97)

Menand Moments

My first exposure to Louis Menand's writings came at a Barnes & Noble during the holiday season of 2003. I was browsing through the pile of recommended books – The Da Vinci Code being the most prominent – and I noticed a copy of American Studies. I picked it up and read a few lines from the Preface and was immediately drawn to its style and content. I especially liked the way he compared history to building demolition:

“You can watch for hours while workers move a few planks on a temporary scaffolding. Maybe a man with a blowtorch is laboring in futility on a huge steel beam. Nothing else is going on. Two days later, a floor has disappeared. At the end of three years, the derelict structure has been obliterated and a new tower, whose erection was similarly mysterious, shimmers in its place. I was a witness to this transformation several times, but somehow I never saw it.”

It was a nice way to be introduced to the writer who would influence many aspects of my intellectual growth in college. About six months later, I began to read The Metaphysical Club and was left in awe by the dramatic and entertaining way he told the story about some New England scholars and an invention called “pragmatism.” For the next year, I would try my best to emulate the style and clarity of Menand’s prose in my film and history theses (inevitably falling short, but grateful for having a source of inspiration for the rough process).

One day in April 2005, I had a sudden urge to email him. I looked for something interesting to ask, and knowing that he had edited a read on academic freedom, I decided to ask him for his thoughts on Columbia’s academic freedom controversy, by then in the national spotlight, from allegations of intimidation involving faculty in the Middle East Asian Languages and Cultures Department. He was prompt with his reply, and I was very pleased to have interacted with my academic idol although I wish I had asked something smarter and more provocative. You can read about the exchange in detail in my blog entry from April.

There are many great writers out there besides Menand who have received greater recognition and critical acclaim. What has made Menand a personal favorite for me has been his focus on American history and the way he writes to reevaluate and historicize various aspects of American culture. You cannot help but to notice an appreciative tone in his approach to reconstructing the contexts of his subjects, whether it is the dignity of The New Yorker editorial staff under William Shawn or the pensiveness of Maya Lin as a memorialist post 9/11. Menand is astute and precise in using his sources, and he is never afraid to challenge established texts, which always makes for an interesting read. What brings all his qualities together is the clarity of his prose – the concise sentences, many of them extended by semicolons or inverted by chiasmus (Menandisms that grow on you), and his own brand of wit that compares complex ideas to mundane things (e.g. modernity to a “wreckage yard of traditions” or judicial action to carving a boneless goose). It is a voice I’ve grown used to, and I hope there will be more of it.