Beginning of the First Dinner

 Dwight MacDonald: I was reading this new anti-colonialist who's the rage among my students: an Arab Algerian named Fanon.  

Daniel Bell: Ochen vey. 

Lionel Trilling: He's not Algerian, he's Caribbean.

Dwight: You know him? 

Jacques Barzun: Another leftist who thinks colonialism can simply be overthrown without consequence. 

Dwight: He had some interesting things to say about Algeria. 

Lionel: They all have interesting things to say! 

Daniel: All of them? 

Lionel: Of course! 

Daniel: So we should just read the Peanuts comics for its political insights? 

Diana: Careful Daniel, you'll have to explain to him what Peanuts comics are. 

(everyone laughs) 

Lionel: I've read the Peanuts. 

Daniel: If Lionel's read them he probably has them memorized from the first column to last week. 

(everyone laughs) 

Lionel: They're not without entertainment value either! 

Jacques: I agree. 

Dwight: My god, the Columbia common core praising Peanuts? 

Daniel: Next Jacques will be telling us The Beatles are a cultural achievement to place next to Wagner. 

Lionel: I've come to realize that there isn't a single cultural artifact from which one can't gain insight. 

Jacques: I would not go so far Lionel. 

Dwight: What sort of insight? 

Lionel: Human, cultural...

Dwight: I hope you don't mean aesthetic. 

Lionel: Of course there's aesthetic insight! 

Dwight: I'm shocked. 

Diana: Then you don't know Lionel. 

Lionel: Popular mediums are completely new mediums. We can't dismiss them simply because they have no precedent. 

Seymour: No precedent? Newspaper cartoons have been around for three generations!

Lionel: All I'm saying is that there are all sorts of mediums our generation will never be able to understand and we'll have to leave them for new generations to sort out. 

Seymour: Suit yourself. But I'm twenty years younger than you and I don't understand them. 

Diana: Edward, you're the strapping youngling here, what do you think of newspaper cartoons. 

(all eyes turned towards me)

Edward Said: I never had much use for them. 

Seymour: You see? 

Lionel: There are so many sources from which one can gain enlightenment, more and more I believe we vastly underestimate it. 

Jacques: So what do we do about the transcendent sources? Do we just file them away under no better than any other source? 

Lionel:  Not at all, there is still aesthetic/intellectual hierarchy, but that does not dismiss the value of popular sources. 

Dwight: Alright, well Lionel, since until Peanuts I was under the impression that you thought nothing transcendent's been done since 1930, whom do you think is writing transcendent work in our time? 

Lionel: Isaiah Berlin? 

Seymour: Isaiah Berlin? 

Lionel: You object? 

Seymour: Who would know? 

Diana: Everyone knows about Isaiah!

Seymour: He doesn't publish! 

Dwight: He's published! 

Seymour: His whole reputation is based on how good he is at dinners like this! 

Lionel: Nonsense! Have you read his Marx biography? 

Seymour: It's a small one volume thing from the thirties! What's he done since then?

Lionel: He wrote that book on 18th century figures. 

Seymour: Come on, Lionel, those are obviously just lecture transcriptions from some graduate student. And at the speed he talks who knows if that's actually what he said?  

Diana: Then he must be even better than his lectures if not everything was taken down. 

Seymour: Who would know? 

Dwight: So you think Isaiah Berlin's overrated? The greatest liberal philosopher of our time save Hannah. 

Hannah Arendt: I think he's the most overrated philosopher of our time. 

Jacques Barzun: He thinks the same of you. 

(everyone laughed, including Arendt) 

Seymour: My point is just that his reputation is as much based on word of mouth and how well he talks, not on anything he's written. Who knows if we even remember right what he has to say? 

Lionel: Fair. Well, whom do you think is doing transcendent work today?  

(go through people at the table... gets to Edward)

Edward... Franz Fanon? 

(everyone goes quiet) 

--------------------------------

Seymour: Not at all, but we know how good so whom in our time do you think of as a

Dwight: Can we get back to Fanon?

Daniel: You were saying he's Arab...

Seymour: Seriously Dwight? All that stuff about the West being anti-Black didn't clue you in that he isn't Arab? 

Daniel: He's from Martinique. 

DMD: I'm sorry, I was too focused on the substance of his arguments? 

SML: What substance? 

DMD: He says that subjugated individuals adapt white culture, white