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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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12 Mar, 4 tweets, 2 min read
1. Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer has a chapter titled "Married To Tolstoy" about favorite Rothian theme of the pain great writers inflict on the near & dear. Could easily be Married to Dickens, Married to Woolf, Married to Cheever, Married to Naipaul, etc.
2. But if being in the shadow of genius is hazardous, an arms length proximity can be nurturing. Consider Glenn Gould & Robert Fulford who were next door neighbors & best friends at age 9 going forward.
3. By Fulford's account, even when he was 9, everyone around Gould expected great things about him. There was even a teenage Salieri in the neighborhood who bore a grudge against the budding Canadian Mozart.
4. Gould was a genius, Fulford not that, in fact a poor student who dropped out of high school to become a sports writer. Yet through the spark of his friendship with Gould Fulford ended becoming, unexpectedly, a writer & critic of distinction. More here: thenation.com/article/cultur…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
10 Mar
1. The Lincoln Project. Brooklyn Dad Defiant. That Abramson guy. Truly we are living in The Twilight of the Resistance Grifters.
2. I think @samuelmoyn's analysis of Never Trump holds up really well except he was too generous! In the form of The Lincoln Project, Never Trumpism was pure grift. The recent NY story documents this in detail.
3. I mean look at this shit. Gangster shit.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
8 Mar
1. Once an author writes a book it might belong to them in terms of copyright but it also belongs to the world as a creation. But some writers try to self-cancel. Some thoughts on this with reference to Rosemary Tonks, Sidney Hook, Kafka, Virgil, Seuss, James Gould Cozzens, etc.
2. Part of the frustration with the cloddish Dr. Seuss discourse is that what is clearly an attempt by estate to do brand management got recast in cultural war terms. But authors do brand management all the time by selecting what to put out into world & what to keep in print.
3. Seuss himself engaged in brand management by not keeping in print such now embarrassing juvenilia as "Boners: By Those Who Pull Them" and "The Pocket Book of Boners."
Read 13 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
8 Mar
1. Manchin's often gets profiled as a moderate or a conservative but his actual political stance is a bit odder than that. Being a Dem Senator from a very red state, he's figured out a way vote with his party on major legislation while keeping a distance.
2. I think a lot of Manchin's behavior is more performative than ideological. He has a lot of voters who aren't Dems & don't like the Dems, so he needs to have very visible public spats with Dems. But he rarely abandons Dems on decisive votes.
3. Look at this recent actions. If scuttling Neera Tanden's nomination was the price to pay for a vote for $1.9 trillion stimulus, I'm not going to shed any tears. The trimming of UI top up by 3 weeks was bad, but pales against one of the biggest stimulus in history.
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
3 Mar
1. As Andrew Cuomo is enmeshed in multiple scandals, there's an interesting inter-Democratic debate about double standards. Dem elected officials have been good about hold Cuomo to account but, as @michelleinbklyn notes, there's some base complaint about "Frankening"
2. We've seen in Trump era not just asymmetric polarization but also asymmetric accountability. Trump & other GOP pols & bigwigs get away with outrageous stuff while lesser Dems offenses get punished. "But her emails," in short.
3. There are divergent ways to handle asymmetric polarizations. Dems could say double standards means we should also go partisan & defend our miscreants against all evidence (i.e. no standards > double standards).
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
1 Mar
1. I have some good news and bad news about Trump's CPAC speech.
2. The good news is that although Trump gestured at running again it was a low energy performance and his heart didn't seem in it. That could change but right now he doesn't seem in campaign mode.
3. The bad news is that Trump even if Trump doesn't run again he's very intent on maintaining his stranglehold on the GOP. Many gestures about punishing his Republican enemies.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
26 Feb
1. We've had roughly a year more or less, depending on where you live, of isolation and social distancing. Good time for a reckoning of how it's changing us.
2. In the latest New Left Review, the sociologist Dylan Riley has some suggestive thoughts on how the isolation is a paradoxically collective act: maintained by a social infrastructure and also a shared global experience of a type never seen before.
3. The collective nature of the isolation has also, paradoxically again, energized a new wave of activism, both in terms of the global BLM movement (the biggest protests in American history happened last year) & the anti-masking/QAnon/MAGA agitation.
Read 4 tweets

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