If you’re a reader willing to challenge your tenderly cultivated prejudices, or a writer who appreciates a literary high-wire act executed with compelling understatement, or an academic with the wit to recognize the smelly little orthodoxies of your trade for what they are, then place a honking large flag on your calendar: Three Cheers for George Scialabba, Thursday, September 10, at The Brattle Theater at 7 p.m.
Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Rick Perlstein, and Nikil Saval will be among those speaking in appreciation of Scialabba.
Scialabba is a master of an underappreciated genre, the essay-review, which is decidedly more than the sum of its parts. Birthed in the early 19th century in the pages of The Edinburgh Review, the essay-review owes its contemporary purchase to the influential vigor of The New York Review of Books and a host of varietals, which have flowered in London, Dublin, Rome, Los Angeles, and Boston — where Scialabba is a sometime contributor.
Transcendence is the aim of the essay-review, to connect the dots of a given subject in such a way as show something surprising, relevant, and original was staring us in the face. So many of us keep our eyes wide shut. Not Scialabba. Consider his take on T.S. Eliot: why the seemingly crusty conservatism of Anglo-American poet is in fact unalterably at odds with industrial capitalism.
Scialabba, general speaking, is a man of the Left. But his concept of the social good owes more to Wilde and Morris than to Marx and Engels. This is not to say he’s fuzzy. The analytical tools Scialabba employs — often with inventive precision — were manufactured by Friedrich Nietzsche and José Ortega y Gasset, two not exactly cozy thinkers.
Thursday’s Scialabba symposium and celebration is stamped with paradox.
The event, organized by Scialabba’s colleagues at The Baffler, marks his retirement last week from Harvard University. Not, as you might imagine, as the Coolidge Cabot Cheswick Professor of Whatever, but rather as a long-serving member of the clerical staff. Somehow, I think, George Orwell would approve: Honest work for an employer not about to go out of business. Approve or not, Orwell would certainly relish the irony.
