jerkish

Philip Roth in emails to the New Yorker:

“Trump is ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency,” Roth told the magazine in a string of emails. He “wield(s) a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

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kathedersozialisten?

Were Adorno et al prescient re the emergence of someone like Trump? This is what Alex Ross suggests:

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming

 

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....wrong kind of rococo....

That's Trump. So, here is more Yeats who stands for certain ideals.

"I am rereading him now not only for those laudable goals, but also for his own strenuous, chastened, even tormented ambivalence toward those goals, for his divided mind."

http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture-poetry/stephen-burt-reading-yeats-age-trump?utm_content=buffer66bc1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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Things fall apart

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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