Jan
25
“What was important then was this sense, this supposition, that sixties scene-bursters such as Christgau, Willis, and Goldstein were destined to inherit or hijack in slow motion the intellectual-journalistic establishment of The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent and become the presiding grown-ups of this generational power bloc. They had the brains, the ambition, the range and grasp, and the lengthening track record of a countercultural commissariat set to inherit the big desks in the editorial offices and give culture its marching orders. Yet it didn’t happen, they never assumed command; their schemas never got off the drawing board. Ice formed on the ceiling, the elevators got stuck between floors, they were no match for Harvard—choose your own metaphor, but the upward push that seemed inevitable was somehow arrested and the books never completed that might have planted their flags on the surveying heights. That’s one of the advantages of sticking around in life long enough: you get to see how other people’s stories turn out, though it doesn’t do your own story any good, the future having laid its own special snow-covered wolf traps just for you.”
One of my favorite moments in Lucking Out. (via zachbaron)
