Louis Menand
Louis Menand
Louis Menandis an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America...
writing people intellectual
I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.
writing people kind
If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
writing oddities ideas
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
running writing space
Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
writing sound timing
Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
writing thinking discipline
For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.
met particular toward warmth
When I met him, I didn't feel a particular warmth toward him.
figured hard
He's got everything all figured out. It was hard to get him off track.
art thinking people
I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.
strong thinking trying
I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.
thinking body curriculum
I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.
college views body
My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
criticism literature want
One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.
thinking issues taste
I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.