21 jul 2011

Platonic Milieu

What's your Platonic ideal of the cultural ambience? For example, for the character in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," it was Paris of the 1920s with Picasso and Hemingway. For me it might be the Madrid of the Residencia de Estudiantes when Lorca lived there, or the Cedar Bar in the 1950s. If you don't have one, that's just as good. It means you aren't as susceptible to myth-making. Would you be bored by Mallarmé's Tuesday salons? Or Plato's academy. I'm sure I would be.

(No particular research agenda behind the question. I'm just curious.)

2 comentarios:

Clarissa dijo...

Ukraine between 1986 and 1989. People would gather in big crowds in the streets to recite poetry, talk about history, politics, literature that had been censored for decades. Everybody carried huge stacks of literary magazines and exchanged them with strangers right in the streets. That was the moment that belonged to the intelligentsia and was very joyful and intellectual. I remember that time but I was too young to take part in it. My parents had a blast, though. We couldn't go anywhere without my father or my mother stopping to give a speech and attracting a crowd for a debate.

Of course, the disillusionment was really rough once this moment ended.

Jonathan dijo...

That sounds exciting, kind of like the movida madrileña after Franco's death--though not much remains of that.