In Memoriam L.H.L.

I know said I'd write a lot on the Mets, but fear not, gentle un-Metsthusiastic reader: my Vision roams far beyond the Diamond. To that end, I'll begin this blog with an exercise in superfluity, and append a few words to those of Lewis Lapham.

Lapham, editor of Harper's since before I was born, retired this month. I've subscribed to Harper's for the last couple years, largely because it costs only ten bucks a year, unlike those shameless profiteers at The Atlantic or The New Yorker (also, Harper's sends renewal notices every couple months or so, so it's easy to sign up for several year's worth on the rationale that "Well, who knows if these clowns will ever replace Lapham if they aren't guaranteed readers through 2017?"). I don't know that I'd begin a subscription today. I've generally enjoyed their articles. I've even remembered some of them: David Foster Wallace attempting a modern history of linguistics here, Arthur Miller writing fiction about beaver dams there, first-person essays on Kentucky strip mining and Colorado evangelicals. Sure, the unabashed left-wing approach of most articles grows unjustifiably shrill, at times; but much of the writing itself is very good and, at the very least, lacks the bullshit patronizing anthropology of, say, a New York Times Magazine feature. In any case, the writers' hearts are in the right place.

Among the Harper's writers, this verdict particularly suits Lapham himself. His monthly Notebooks (to be continued 6 times yearly) opened each month's issue with three breathless, hyperbolic pages of political observations, cultural pronouncements, and punchline-metaphors. He was a political hipster, spouting assertions of taste. He was a white Elvis Mitchell, free-associating with gusto. Lapham's columns were intellectual comfort food of the worst, flab-inducingest, kind, but every month I'd take them out to Lincoln Field and read with uneasy joy as he excoriated Washington's war on a proper noun. Even in one of his more recent excesses -- when he described watching as speeches at the 2004 Republican Convention "affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal," in an article published before the Convention -- are excused somewhat by their accuracy.

Predictability, curmudgeonliness, and disdain for scoundrels, served up in a stew of fatty sentences: fitting that Lapham signed off as editor with a Notebook lamenting the decline of clear prose in an age of corporate advertisements and a video commons. With the assistance of quotes from Wallace Stevens, Walker Percy, Orwell, Simone Weil, J.M. Keynes, and G.K. Chesterton, he concluded vaguely that thoughtful citizens and writers make society healthy. Yes, he had a point, but one so broad as to be unremarkable. Nobody disagrees that a people 'suckled at the machine-made breast of corporate entertainment' are less well-off than those ... well, not so suckled.