am i the only simp on this beeyatch…

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… who has anything good to say about Garry Wills?

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i have to be honest and say i have no idea who he is

― gareth, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i think NIXON ANTAGONISTES is brilliant, and so is his book on the GETTYSBURG ADDRESS: his book on John Wayne is a bit meh however

years ago, he wrote a really excellent piece in the nyrb on dickens's sympathy for non-standard sexuality (tattycoram in bleak house, fagin in oliver twist), which actually caused me to go and READ DICKENS!!

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(sorry, i always forget that ellipsis fucks with the thread layout)

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Mark - have you read his bk on John Wayne? It looked sort've ho-hum, to be honest, but this opinion is based only on a casual flick through in a remainder bkshop.

― Andrew L, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Oops I should've read yr post more carefully, rather than casually flicking through it etc etc

― Andrew L, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

erm yes, andrew, see above: the problem is he is not a massive scholar of westerns, so his conclusions are speculative… it's hohum by GW's standards, def. the sight and sound line was, this is better written than most film studies (!!) but doesn't break the new ground it thinks it does

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(sorry i meant speculative rather than comparative) (speculative is good obv too, but sometime's he's saying Wayne was good because [xx] when actually 3/4 of non-Wayne westerns exhibit [xx]//0

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

here are some of his ten million titles

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

but was it really worth it to read dickens? really?

― Josh, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

haha i'll get back to you

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

more americans with opinions please!! (brits haf nevah heard of him apparently so you can keep more piped down if you want)

― mark s, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I've read many of his NYRB reviews but none of his books (see The Lazy Person's Guide to Having Vague Cocktail-Party Opinions on Public Intellectuals): most of them I've found relatively fascinating and largely agreeable, which is to say that he's one of my favored NYRB contributors. That said I would probably be at a loss to identify him with any particular viewpoints or general philosophical frameworks, so I'm ill-qualified here. Besides which though Kerry is right on the other thread about his being a "star" non-emeritus non-teaching type at Northwestern, I am of the opinion that Evanston deserves at least one of those, if not enough to compete with the University of Chicago's massive worldwide successes w/r/t free markets and the atomic bomb. ― nabisco%%, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Also I hear he is very bad with HTML.

― nabisco%%, Friday, 24 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

three years pass...

i'm taking time out from studying for finals to read "lincoln at gettysburg": it's pretty good! lots of great stuff about the history of oratory, lincoln's subtle revision of the declaration of independence, and the context in which the address was given (a northern newspaper declared that abe had insulted the union dead by saying that all men are created equal!).

i haven't read a lot of wills before, so i'm definitely looking forward to reading his nixon book (tho i'm kinda with greil marcus when he wrote that nixon was such a depressing person that he never wanted to read another word about him ever).

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, 8 May 2006 01:48 (nineteen years ago)

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