Word: intelligentsiae
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...sounds awfully unfazed by this steady depletion of the ranks of “serious’’ critics—a depletion she has observed from a high and uncompromised vantage point. Since the early sixties she has been a major figure among the New York intelligentsia (“the Dark Lady of American letters,’’ said Norman Podhoretz), and she has with remarkable energy written novels, screenplays, drama and essays, the last two decades of which are collected here. In none of these endeavors has her tone faltered from...
...wholly unadmirable. Sontag simply isn’t much fun to read. The mind I detect in the pieces about literature, about Borges and about travel, is sensitive and intelligent. She has forged a deserved reputation for herself as the preeminent woman of fine art in the New York intelligentsia...
...Ensler will tell you, much of Western culture is built around metaphors about the penis as dominator or conqueror. But odd though it is, women rarely think about, let alone talk about, vaginas. When they have, it has often been in big books by the feminist intelligentsia and mostly in the context of a power struggle--vaginas as a target of oppression (Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape), or vaginas as a primal, mysterious force that intimidates men (Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex). Ensler's contribution is to embrace both those traditions...
...always jump over it. But the question is, does he deliberately contribute to this underestimation? I think he probably does, and I imagine he does so in much the same way as a Republican predecessor did who was also underestimated. Dwight Eisenhower was roundly derided by the liberal intelligentsia as a Mr. Malaprop, a golf-playing, crony-loving dim bulb. But Stephen Ambrose, in his classic biography of Eisenhower, describes how Ike deliberately mangled the language to put reporters off the track or to get them to think that he didn't fully comprehend the issues. Ike found that...
...good runs, as did the musicals "La Plume de ma tante" and "Irma la douce"; the young Hepburn entranced New York audiences as Colette's Gigi and Jean Anouilh's Ondine. Novels from Germany, Italy, Japan - pretty much any nation the Allies had conquered - were must reading for the intelligentsia. Jean-Paul Sartre was so famous he was parodied in Hepburn's Paris frolic "Funny Face...