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Note
6th January 2012
Growing Up Yeezy
The internet is still blowing up about the Kanye West tweet-athon from the other night (most succinctly contained here), and for good reason. As someone who was awake to witness as it unfolded live… I mean… it was mesmerizing. I didn’t know if it would ever end, and more importantly, didn’t know if I wanted it to. What started out as a resume (in 140-character chunks, of course) became a memoir, then a mission statement, then a memoir again, then a series of ideas on education reform, then probably a simultaneously self-deprecating/aggrandizing statement on the pain of having SOLID ART and IDEAS just THRIVE INSIDE YOU.
Rereading all these tweets over the past day or so as they were quoted on other sites or retweeted with commentary got us thinking about another poet, thinker, and (very probably) egomaniac we hold dear to our hearts…
Paul Goodman!
Author of Growing Up Absurd, among MANY other books and essays, Goodman inspired Jonathan Lee to make the Ebert-approved documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life. For more info on Goodman, you can still see the film in a few theaters.
For uncanny Goodman/West parallels, see below -
Goodman: “When you students try to do something about it, in order to save my kids from being fried, whether what you’re doing is right or wrong it’s something!”
Goodman: “The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes.”
Goodman: “We propose banning private cars from Manhattan Island … Present congestion & parking are unworkable, & other proposed solutions are uneconomic, disruptive, unhealthy, nonurban, or impractical …”
Goodman: “It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own.”
Goodman: “The issue is not whether people are ‘good enough’ for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.”
Goodman: “Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It’s the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it’s the kids who really take it in the groin.”
Kinda makes you think they’d have gotten along, huh? I personally can’t believe Kanye hasn’t sported a classic Goodman pipe yet, bedazzled or no.USE THIS WEEKEND TO FILL OUT YOUR DONDA APPLICATIONS.-
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