{"id":3131,"date":"2015-03-18T14:29:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T21:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3131"},"modified":"2015-03-18T14:56:10","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T21:56:10","slug":"in-praise-of-difficulty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2015\/03\/in-praise-of-difficulty.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;In Praise of Difficulty&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;b8rJJnGCXKiH3M8zWOVGbX2BXfYXXJBs&#8221;]<\/p>\n<p>DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I&#8217;ve been hearing for most of my life &#8212; I came of age in the &#8217;80s &#8212; that we don&#8217;t. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you called a snob.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_3132\" style=\"width: 251px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/250px-Djuna_Barnes_-_Joyce.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3132\" class=\"wp-image-3132 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/250px-Djuna_Barnes_-_Joyce-241x300.gif\" alt=\"250px-Djuna_Barnes_-_Joyce\" width=\"241\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-3132\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">James Joyce by Djuna Barnes<\/p><\/div>\n<p>But a very fine, reasonably long <a title=\"SW on difficulty\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/articles\/in-defense-of-difficulty\/\" target=\"_blank\">essay<\/a>\u00a0by my Yale editor Steve Wasserman tackles the sources of American anti-intellectualism and shallowness and argues for the importance of complexity. I&#8217;m quoted briefly in there; these issue are the subtext, in some ways, to my book <em>Culture Crash<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The piece, in The American Conservative, will appear in longer form in an anthology that comes out this spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;b8rJJnGCXKiH3M8zWOVGbX2BXfYXXJBs&#8221;] DO we need cultural seriousness, intellectual contemplation, works of depth and complexity? I&#8217;ve been hearing for most of my life &#8212; I came of age in the &#8217;80s &#8212; that we don&#8217;t. Just asking the question got you branded, when I was a kid, a sissy or a bookworm; now it gets you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[624,596,611,34,574,641],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-disruption","7":"category-culture-crash-the-book","8":"category-jaron-lanier","9":"category-literary","10":"category-middle-class","11":"category-middlebrow","12":"entry","13":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3131"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3135,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions\/3135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}