Blah Blah Blah New York In The Seventies

“This was the last period in American culture when the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow still pertained, when writers and painters and theater people still wanted to be (or were willing to be) ‘martyrs to art.’ This was the last moment when a novelist or poet might withdraw a book that had already been accepted for publication and continue to fiddle with it for the next two or three years. This was the last time when a New York poet was reluctant to introduce to his arty friends someone who was a Hollywood film director, for fear the movies would be considered too low-status.”
 — I swear to God, forty years from now someone who is currently in her 20s will be crafting a special Snapchat Review of Emoji visual essay about how the mid-teens in New York was the last time the listicle-makers still had their proper place as the age’s arbiters of cultural capital. Anyway, if you can stand to read one more thing about New York in the ’70s — an era now as distant from our own as World War II was from then — this Edmund White piece at least has the advantage of relative brevity to recommend it.