General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsObama, in a "letter to one of his romantic partners"..
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/05/the-young-obama-literary-critic-122253.htmlBy BYRON TAU | 5/2/12 10:14 AM EDT
Vanity Fair excerpts some of David Maraniss forthcoming Obama biography, exploring the future president's time in New York and his relationship with two women as the young Barack Obama struggled with race, identity and his purpose in life.
In this letter to one of his romantic partners, Obama holds forth on literature praising author T.S. Eliot's "conservatism" and saying he respects it more than some "bourgeois liberalism."
Obama:
I havent read The Waste Land for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statementsEliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when hes less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said theres a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalismEliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but its due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letterlife feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliots irreconcilable ambivalence; dont you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
MADem
(135,425 posts)College is the time when smart kids explore. Obama was a smart kid.
Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)[font size = 6] NOT
cbdo2007
(9,213 posts)I liked it and think it displays our President as a great thinker and philosopher.
MADem
(135,425 posts)came over in good reads--and the article, in the full context, is a good read.
Anyone wanting an "Ah HA" moment out of this snippet is going to be very frustrated, indeed.
GoCubsGo
(32,100 posts)They'll be pissed off because he uses lots of big words, and they won't be able to understand any of it.
sufrommich
(22,871 posts)paragraph like that?
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)That literally made me laugh out loud.
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)imagine bush writing a single sentence contained in that letter.
Aristus
(66,522 posts)I tryed to read this T.S. Eliot guy, but I cudden't git past the whole T.S. part. I mean whaddaya call him, anyways? "Hi T!" heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh. Anyways, The whole stuffed men thing was kinda stupid. If ya put somethin' inside of 'em, them they wudden be hollow no more would they? Heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh. If I was t'end the world, you dang sure I'd end it with a bang, if you know what I mean! Heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh!
Yours awesomely,
George"
Swede
(33,310 posts)Roses are red
and so is bacon
poems are hard.........
Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)lamp_shade
(14,851 posts)yellowcanine
(35,704 posts)Poll_Blind
(23,864 posts)PB
MADem
(135,425 posts)I don't think he could carry off a single sentence of that caliber!
SammyWinstonJack
(44,130 posts)sufrommich
(22,871 posts)TBF
(32,139 posts)They are too busy learning how to take bogus tests to prepare themselves for their burger flipping "service careers".
antigone382
(3,682 posts)lol
I don't have a problem with saying you respect certain types of conservatism. It doesn't mean you agree, it just means you acknowledge that certain types of conservatism can come from a nuanced and principled worldview...
frazzled
(18,402 posts)to their romantic partners, full of deep thoughts and philosophical musings? (Well, most of us wouldn't have written as well as this; but it's true that we used to discuss literature, philosophy, art, and theater with people, even our lovers.) Now people text: what r u doing?
I can't imagine GW Bush (or Willard Romney, for that matter) writing such a literate letter to a 'romantic partner.'
cbdo2007
(9,213 posts)It's MORE communication with LESS content.
CTyankee
(63,926 posts)I still have some of my papers from grad school and I used to write lots of "high concept" essays...some of them I have re-read and couldn't understand...
frazzled
(18,402 posts)I come across a book from college in which I had madly underlined things and written notes in the margin (imagine that!). I have no idea why I was so worked up over Heidegger or Wittgenstein. I can't fathom it at all now. As for graduate school ... what was I even THINKING?? Thinking--deep thinking--is a necessary activity for the young, even if it does come back to embarrass or confuse you a bit later in life. I'm pretty sure there are some young people who still do it; though the means for transmitting such thoughts to others are getting more scarce, and the repercussions (accusations of effeteness or nerdiness) more immediate. It used to be cool to discuss "deep" topics (of course, maybe it was the drugs).
I have been complaining for the last decade about people not having conversations anymore. When we'd have people over for dinner, the topic would always be what they were doing in their work or some award they'd won or a project on the burner ... as if I cared ... rather than some random, fascinating topic of discussion. It all seemed so egotistical and self-important: I stopped having dinner parties, except for close friends; and even then sometimes I'd have to announce "okay, no more shop talk."
I don't think Obama should be embarrassed: he was participating in the passionate exploration of ideas that are the province of the young. He should be proud he had such a phase.
CTyankee
(63,926 posts)at an earlier year in our lives that can seem to be a bit estoteric later on. OK , fine.
I'm just saying that these media outlets want to make it seem stupid and vacuous for their onw ends.
It won't work. Not this time. No more of using your best attribute against you. We've caught onto that game. It's over.
This subject is just a sideline...
Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)Aside from sports.
frazzled
(18,402 posts)really, anything except advertising what you're doing in your work ... because work is not the whole of life, and this is a dinner party, after all
How about:
(1) A discussion of a movie you saw or a book you read about.
(2) Is the digital world we live in causing us to think in different ways?
(3) Is football becoming too dangerous to its players?
(4) How could cities become more amenable to walkers?
(5) Gin or vodka? (pros and cons)
(6) At what age is a person wisest?
You know, things that fly into the room around the second glass of wine.
Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)has changed us. It has caused us to feel the pressure to respond immediately. To voice mails, to faxes, texts,
to emails. In the past, you had the automatic breathing room time of waiting for the US mail (or interoffice envelope) to deliver a request for action. If you didn't want to answer the phone, you just didn't, and you never would even know what people
wanted. Less stress, for sure.
I have a personal theory also, that instant business news is a major root of many of our problems. Long ago, say you
owned IBM, you might pick up a newspaper once in a while and see it went up $.50/share, and you were happy. Now, you
see fluctuations by the second. You also see every move IBM makes and every financial report. This has caused companies to worry
about constantly improving earnings. The only way they can do that is to cut staff and cut benefits and cut salary increases and ship jobs overseas. That, to me, is why the middle class has been screwed and real income growth stagnant. Solution: ban CNBC. haha.
magical thyme
(14,881 posts)his romantic partner is Alex.
bluestate10
(10,942 posts)magical thyme
(14,881 posts)ps...it was a joke!
TrogL
(32,822 posts)The footnotes are indeed important otherwise line 425 doesn't many any sense, which Obama seems to have missed (unless that's what he means by "ambivalence". America itself sits at the moment at a similar cusp.
myrna minx
(22,772 posts)FloridaJudy
(9,465 posts)You mean he didn't text "Waht's up with u 2nite?" the way most college students do now?
My head explodes when I try to imagine any of the Republican candidates writing something like this! I had to Google "Münzer" and "prosopography" to make sense of this, BTW. Most Republicans I know wouldn't bother, since it's not covered in the Bible.
MADem
(135,425 posts)So, twenty or thirty years from now, will we be reading the college tweets of the presidential candidates, I wonder?
Enrique
(27,461 posts)I don't have any clue what I wrote in personal letters when I was 22, but I'm certain I don't want it published in Vanity Fair.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)yellowcanine
(35,704 posts)MADem
(135,425 posts)BumRushDaShow
(129,950 posts)msanthrope
(37,549 posts)Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)Prism
(5,815 posts)This makes me admire him more.
Old and In the Way
(37,540 posts)Read it a few times and I really can't say that I grok his thoughts here. But I do understand that this excerpt shows he has deep intellectual capacity and I'm thankful we have someone who is capable of critical thinking, leading this nation.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)He certainly knows the material, but there's nothing here that people haven't said before.
Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)It's evident that he's thinking about it, not merely parroting.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)It's a conventional take on Eliot but well and thoughtfully stated.
deutsey
(20,166 posts)GeorgeGist
(25,326 posts)JI7
(89,287 posts)JI7
(89,287 posts)LibertyLover
(4,788 posts)is that one of the women Mr. Maraniss interviewed for his book knew President Obama at Occidental College. They reconnected in New York and began dating. I remember that one of the things the birther types kept complaining about was that nobody was coming forward from Occidental or Columbia claiming to have known Obama while he was there, so he must have lied about his time at those schools. Oooops, there goes that theory.