Political Cynic thinks of the long dead American Poet Frank O’Hara!

The opening paragraphs are not exactly replaced, but a black & white photo of three long dead American literary figures : John Updike, John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller at an event in New York, in 1966 © Getty Images provides a backdrop of a kind.

Editor: Just a sampler of the chatter:

-can Will Lewis survive at the Post – slow down the British takeover of American newsrooms?- peak Substack?- the BBC under a Labour government?–season two of Succession get the Murdochs so right- that columnist at the FT?- A rash hire, wasn’t it?

Editor: notice that Ganesh includes himself in this collection. But note Ganesh’s warning:

When journalists convene, some or all of these matters get an airing, which is an excellent reason to be elsewhere. The challenge is to build and maintain that alternative circle.

Editor: Note that Ganesh is not Frank O’Hara, his chatty poems, riffing on themes were once the rage, of another time and place , unknown to Ganesh? This just an aside. The next paragraph offers something like an uncanny riff on O’Hara in an ominous tonality.

Even the greatest cities on Earth fail to honour their central promise: that of wide-ranging human contact. Urbanites live near a jumble of different people but, in the absence of strenuous effort, end up in the social swim of their own and adjacent professions. This ghettoisation sets in during those hard-working years after university. By 30, it is difficult to undo. So — and here I address the young, chiefly those starting work this autumn — avoid this trap from the beginning. For it is a double curse. First, it creates a single point of failure. If your job goes, much of your social life goes with it. 

Editor: Ganesh broaches the subject :

…of Nassim Nicholas Taleb – who clocked that the great moderns — Darwin, Marx, Freud and the Einstein of the annus mirabilis —

That is, each had enough exposure to life outside their specialism to produce unlikely swoops of thought. (Taleb might have added Keynes, who was in and out of Cambridge.) For the rest of us, toiling at a humdrum level, the point still holds. No writer, management consultant or engineer should consort too much with their own. Employers half-understand this. It has become Leadership 101 to drag in high performers from alien fields to disclose their “insights” for staff. But it won’t do. You have to socialise with them at length. You want their patterns of thought, not so much their thoughts. 

Editor: it doesn’t take much to provoke Ganesh’s political imagination

Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.

Editor: Ganesh describes America Liberalism, failing to recognize that it is dead!

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Law is a great subject and career. I’ve come to know it a little bit for a side project. But all professions have their deforming effects. And those of law are all over modern American liberalism.

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An exhausting primness about words and their use. (A good thing in a contract dispute. Less so in a conversation with the electorate about gender and other.

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The right was quicker than the left to spot that something had changed in the public mood in those years after the 2008 crash. Because it was cleverer? No. But perhaps because it was less bovine and insular.

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Editor: That Black & White photograph of John Updike, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller finally figures in the most oblique way in the Ganesh essay!

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It is yours to find and retain friends of diverse kens in your own life. One needn’t emulate the twenty-something John Updike, who quit New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, in part to meet people who “aren’t in [his] game”. But no effort at all, and even that game is lost. 

Editor: Updike was another sexually obsessed heterosexual, in a very crowed and boring field of American Literary Writers. He also wrote Bech: A Book reviewed here. The Reader might look to Joan Didion’s ‘Play It as It Lays’ of 1970, Kate Millets Sexual Politics of 1970 , and Eva Figes Patriarchal Attitudes also of 1970! In furtherance of educating one’s self !

Political Cynic