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From the essay on Dwight Macdonald ….

In a 1958 letter to the editors of Dissent, Macdonald responds to animadversions from his former friends Paul Goodman and Harold Rosenberg. Macdonald’s reply to Goodman, in particular, is telling. Goodman had accused Macdonald of “thinking with [his] typewriter”:

I’ve been trying to think, using my trusty Remington portable, why Paul feels so superior to and irritated with me, and I’ve decided it’s because he is a very abstract-type thinker while I’m more on the concrete side; or, to put it another way, he is a wholesaler of ideas while I’m a retailer. Paul goes in for big, basic philosophies of life, which he expounds in a confident way; he’s way up there in the empyrean, and my own earthbound little typewriter-ideas, always limited to some specific aspect of things, must seem intolerably trivial to him. He specializes in answers while I go in more for questions

Maybe we should be less concerned with questions concerning “The Titanic” and “tracking on topic” during vid-chats …

The full essay on Macdonald can be found at:

.https://areomagazine.com/2019/09/23/independent-critical-intellect-why-dwight-macdonald-matters-now/