Things People Say and Other Reflections on This Time and Place

Manfred Wolf

Description

A compilation of searching essays on the way we live, think and communicate now.
Manfred Wolf, a longtime bold, original thinker, returns with a new collection of fearless, entertaining and often contrarian essays on a multitude of subjects. From the personal to the political, from “the righteousness mob” to the ramifications of giving advice, from our current cultural divide to the constantly evolving landscape of the way we speak now—Wolf examines each topic with his fierce, unique perspective, going beyond the easy clichés of conventional wisdom, whether it comes from the Left or the Right. Few readers will find their minds completely unchanged by these compelling and appealing explorations.

Sujets

• Essays
• Current events
• Politics
• Psychology
• Language
• Column
• Langage
• Actualité
• Columns
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 24 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663251039
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THINGS PEOPLE SAY AND OTHER REFLECTIONS ON THIS TIME AND PLACE
 
 
 
 
 
 
MANFRED WOLF
 
 
 
 
 

 
THINGS PEOPLE SAY AND OTHER REFLECTIONS ON THIS TIME AND PLACE
 
 
Copyright © 2023 Manfred Wolf.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
 
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5102-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5103-9 (e)
 
 
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date:  04/21/2023
Contents

Acknowledgments
Self-Published?
Foreword : This Time, This Place, These Thoughts
Things People Say
A Few Words About Words
Looking Back
Across the Years
The Sadness of the Expats
A Rescuer in World War Two
Publishing a Wartime Memoir
The Ever-Present Past
Notes on the Nineteen Fifties
The Dating Game Then and Now
Going on a Dinner Date in the Fifties
An Age of Conformity
Sixty-Eight Years Ago
The Way We Weren’t
Going to “The Village”
Continuities
In Search of “Timberland”
A Strange Ambivalence
Qualified Love Song to America
My Two Lives
The Tone of Our Time
Doing Something About It—a Fable
Contradictions in Our Culture
Fashion in Ideas
How the Effect Finds its Cause
How the Effect Finds its Cause, Part Two
How the Effect Finds its Cause, Part Three
Winners and Losers
Google, Logic and Free Speech
Ambivalence About Appearance
The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories
On Reinventing Oneself
On Reinventing Oneself, Part Two
Another Day and Still No Paparazzi! (Consider Yourself Lucky)
What Do You Really Want?
Bernie Madoff and the Problem of Evil
Thoughts on the Two-Tiered Society
Ever-Changing Culture Heroes
What’s Behind the Denial of Free Speech on Campuses?
Advice to My Grandson About Going to College
Scenes from an Academic Novel
Far More Than Farce
What We Mean When We Say “I Love You”: Conversation, Communication, Culture
What We Mean When We Say “I Love You”
In Defense of Necessary Vagueness
The Libido for the Simple
On Being Understood
Words and Deeds: Appearance and Reality
Hair-Splitting—or Brilliance?
The Arguments Couples Have
Annoying Advice and Problematic Criticism
Have You Had a Compliment Today?
How to Give a Talk
Conversational Styles and More
On Human Misunderstanding
On Political Correctness
Thoughts About Twitter
What, If Anything, Does this Poem Say?
The Personal Impersonal
Writers, Writing and Creative Writing
The Cultural Issues are Always with Us
A Great Divide
A Great Divide
Who is the Forgotten Man?
A Holocaust Survivor Voices his Fears
The Superego and the Id
What is the “Deep State”?
Three Right-Wingers
Three Right-Wingers, Part Two
Portrait of Rush Limbaugh
President Obama: The Professor and the Madman
Amnesty and the Enduring Question of Immigration
Another Note on Immigration
Both Sides in the Immigration Debate are Right
The Righteousness Mob
The Righteousness Mob, Part Two
The Righteousness Mob, Part Three
The Righteousness Mob, Part Four
A Great Divide, Continued
A Great Divide, Part Three
Gains and Losses in a Time of Tumult
What Outsiders May Not See in American Politics
Muslims in Europe Revisited
The Minister and the Media
European Muslims Look at the West
Is it a Religion of Peace?
Another Look at Multiculturalism
 
Scattered Thoughts, Opinions, Musings, Aphorisms and Would-Be Tweets
 
Afterword : Meditation on this Time, this Place
Acknowledgments

M any of the essays in this collection appeared first in the West Portal Monthly , and I’m grateful to Glenn Gullmes, the editor, for encouraging me, publishing me, and keeping his small but important paper going under often difficult circumstances.
My writing of columns started before the West Portal Monthly , and my interest in the genre began many decades before I had a regular slot, when I fell under the spell of a number of Dutch columnists, notably Godfried Bomans, Simon Carmiggelt, Renate Rubinstein, and Kees van Kooten. Their blend of story, humor and commentary inspires me to this day. To tell Americans about them I’ve given talks on the form at any number of conventions, including sessions of the Modern Language Association, the Dutch Studies Conference at Berkeley, and colloquia at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco.
Some pieces in the present collection were reprinted in the newsletter “Fromm Focus,” and I wish to thank the ever-kind and helpful Scott Moules for working closely with me to ensure that they had as much visibility as they did. Readers at the Fromm Institute, some of them former students of mine, responded warmly and took the time to comment.
One essay, “The Sadness of the Expats,” first appeared in “Dutch: the magazine.” I’m pleased to have contributed to that publication. I am grateful too to the Op Ed editors of the Sacramento Bee for occasionally publishing my contributions, here represented by “A Holocaust Survivor Voices His Fears.” I was pleased, too, to have my article “What’s Behind the Denial of Free Speech on Campuses?” in the Mercury News , and I am further pleased to have been featured with “What We Mean When We Say ‘I Love You’” on the highly regarded philosophy and language studies blog of the Scandinavian scholar Lars Herzberg. I am also delighted to have appeared a number of times as featured writer on Vernon Miles Kerr’s popular blog. Vernon is a much appreciated friend and former student at San Francisco State, where I taught most of my adult life.
A few pieces with a distinctly political bent appeared in Dutch versions in an Amsterdam-based on-line magazine, Veren of Lood . I am grateful for the encouragement of Frits Bosch and Pim Alexander.
Some of my readers have passed my work on to others, e.g., Linda Wertheim, Randy Cook, Herbert Lewis and Tina Martin, and I want to tell them (again) that they could pay no greater compliment to any writer, who after all wants nothing more than to be read and quoted. Tina Martin was reminded of my “Righteousness Mob” series during some heated political battles at local community meetings, and all four encouraged my contrarian or eccentric ways, which, after all, I was and am especially fond of.
Similarly, I’m touched by people I know less well who took the time to write me, or seek clarification, or recount an experience of their own. Though limited by a small circulation, I’ve been blessed with readers in different parts of the world, of whom I prize greatly Marie-France Plessard in Paris, Mark Shackleton and Andrew Chesterman in Helsinki, Sheila Gogol in Amsterdam, Susan Ellis in Texas, and, as ever, Elizabeth Davis in El Cerrito.
While I continue to feel that the greatest compliment you can give a writer is to read him or her, I’m even grateful to those who read in order to disagree. Especially among academics there is a tendency to quickly look for the holes in an argument and then grandly dismiss the whole thing. Though annoying, this still takes effort, which I appreciate.
I am especially grateful to the handful of readers who understood my reasoning in the series “How the Effect Finds Its Cause.” Marjorie Young and Merete Mazzarella and a very few others understood something that several historians I know did not—that I wasn’t impugning the sincerity of the people I wrote about, nor saying that they did not feel what they did. Few people grasped the argument I made, and while these pieces are not written in the Dutch column mode, this series is unquestionably the most original writing and thinking I’ve produced.
Finally, I want to express limitless appreciation to my editorial assistant, adviser, friend, and literary consultant, Yael Abel, whose help and unfailing encouragement made all my recent books possible.
Self-Published?

W hen I first started writing, decades ago, the embarrassing question I often got was, “Published or unpublished?”
Nowadays, a similar question can be equally unsettling. This one—though more innocently worded—is “Who’s your publisher?”—meaning, of course, “Do you have a real publisher?”
Still a painful question, but the answer is no longer simple.
The so-called vanity presses have given way to the more sophisticated print-on-demand publishers. No longer do authors end up with a thousand copies of privately—and expensively—printed copies in their basement, copies they’ll never sell.
By contrast, the print-on-demand presses produce books that are actually bought and frequently read. And unlike traditionally published books, they’re never out of print. Thanks to a whole lot of fairly new technology these