{"id":1731,"date":"2012-03-01T09:16:23","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T09:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1731"},"modified":"2013-05-27T19:48:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T23:48:33","slug":"mien-and-moue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1731","title":{"rendered":"Mien and moue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m always on the lookout for passages that articulate things I&#8217;ve observed more clearly than I&#8217;ve ever managed to express them. Here&#8217;s one from Tony Judt&#8217;s <b>Thinking the Twentieth Century<\/b> that applies equally well to milieux I have experienced:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;to become an insider at Cambridge or Oxford does not in itself require conformity, except perhaps to intellectual fashion; it was and is a function of <b>a certain capacity for intellectual assimilation<\/b>. It entails knowing how to &#8220;be&#8221; an Oxbridge don; understanding intuitively how to conduct an English conversation that is never too aggressively political; <b>knowing how to modulate moral seriousness, political engagement and ethical rigidity through application of irony and wit, and a precisely calculated appearance of <i>insouciance<\/i><\/b>. It would be difficult to imagine the application of such talents in, say, postwar Paris. (pg 56)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The details of mien and moue vary from place to place, and time to time (early-1960s Harvard not the same as late-1960s Stanford, in my own case, and present-day fashions are different again), but Judt really nails it with ethnographic precision and verbal elegance. I have the sense that Tony Judt <i>spoke<\/i> with semicolons&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m always on the lookout for passages that articulate things I&#8217;ve observed more clearly than I&#8217;ve ever managed to express them. Here&#8217;s one from Tony Judt&#8217;s Thinking the Twentieth Century that applies equally well to milieux I have experienced: &#8230;to become an insider at Cambridge or Oxford does not in itself require conformity, except perhaps [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tempora","category-zeitgeist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1961,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1731\/revisions\/1961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}