Limited, Inc.

I am going to succumb to my temptation to make a lit crit point. Although I don't think Bob Dylan was reading Alexander Pope during what I consider to be his richest period - 1964-1968 - he was producing what I think of as an American dunciad. Instead of Fleet street, the mockery was aimed at the circle that was located between Andy Warhol's The Factory and Greenwich village. Alexander Pope was a master at catching a certain English conversational tone - something nosepent, with its fraudulent assumption of cultural supremecy - and collaging it into the most classical of English meters. He even makes it an object of one of his great lines, from Essay on Criticism: “A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.” Dylan of course exists in a different environment, one that mixed the inheritors of the romantics - with their creed that all arts ideally merge in music - with the reality of pop and advertising, where all language bec

I've been thinking about the press and their disservice to the public this election year. Specifically, the odd torpor they showed in investigating or even being interested in Trump's pathological love iife. Many people have told me that Trump's Access Hollywood remarks are only one in a series of racist and sexist remarks, and are nothing special. For liberals, I think this is definitely true. But the republican party, and America, has long had a large population of conserva tives who claim, at least, to find the character of their leaders as important as their policies. This constituency is served when the issue has to do with Democrats. From Gary Hart to Bill Clinton, the press was interested and investigative when it came to their sex lives. But when it came to Trump, until he was already a candidate and it was already October, they''ve been inert, disinterested, lazy and hopeless. For them, Trump speaking out against St. McCain was sin enough. But it would be t