Friend of the pod
is back for today’s episode, which is one of my once a month paid episodes, so if you’re not a paid subscriber you’ll only get the first 20 minutes or so.Our conversation turned out to be another installment in the informal series of post-mortems I seem to be conducting on the heterodox moment in the early 2020s when there coalesced a loose collection of critics of wokeness who still in some sense identified with the left.
What did we think we were doing? Was it worth it? Did it help anyone? Did it change anything? Was it all just kind of masturbatory, and if so is that worthwhile anyway? Are beauty, intellectual curiosity, and vibing with one’s sense of vocation sufficient ends in themselves? Is our job as writers even to think about what’s strategic or impactful?
We also talk about Blake’s ongoing project on Michael Denneny, the pioneering gay editor and theorist who worked with Hannah Arendt and became one of the central figures in post-Stonewall gay intellectual l…
