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Baffler Archives: Ancestors

Columns

The Stranger
The concept of “the stranger” suggests that foreignness is a psycho-cultural as well as a geographical matter. A stranger is not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today—and stays. He is a potential wanderer: although he has not moved on from the ...

Science of Clothes
Whereto does all this lead; or what use is in it? In the way of replenishing thy purse, or otherwise aiding thy digestive faculty, O British Reader, it leads to nothing, and there is no use in it; but rather, the reverse, for it costs thee somewhat. Nevertheless, if through this ...

Man Is Not a Rock
This conversation between Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Austrian writer Elizabeth Markstein happened in Vienna during the summer of 1972, and it’s believed (by us, anyway) to be his first recorded interview after being expelled from the Soviet Union for no good reason. ...

Pull It Like You Mean It
October 28, 2014
Note: The following is an excerpt from a never-before-published speech by author Paul Goodman to the Luther League of America’s Conference for Professional Youth Workers. Goodman delivered the lecture in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 8, 1961. The title is our fault. —The ...

Landowners
An excerpt from James Agee’s Cotton Tenants (1936), published by Melville House and The Baffler. The essential structure of the South is, of course, economic: cold and inevitable
as the laws of chemistry. But that is not how the machine is run. The machine is run on ...

If I Were President
The new President, like all Presidents before him, began his office by throwing out men unlike himself and by gathering around him men of similar views. But Mills also got two other types into his official and unofficial family of advisors. Some men of very different but still ...

Feminism for Men
February 03, 2014
Feminism is going to make it possible for the first time for men to be free. At present the ordinary man has the choice between being a slave and a scoundrel. That’s about the way it stands. For the ordinary man is prone to fall in love and marry and have children. Also the ...

Life and Times of a Libertine
My subject lies before me like a patient awaiting the knife—my fair country, ravaged bride of the wilderness, struggling to bring forth a new civilization. This is no normal birth: the mother is still no more than a girl: her hips are too narrow; surgery is indicated. The ...

Cotton Tenants
January 21, 2014
James Agee submitted this previously unpublished article about tenant farmers in Alabama to Fortune Magazine, where he was a staff writer, in 1936. Fortune rejected the article, for reasons unknown, and Agee expanded it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published in ...

Jean-Arthur Rimbaud
Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote this lecture—published in English for the first time here—for Jean-Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–1891) one-hundredth birthday. Bernhard was twenty-three when he delivered it at the Hotel Pitter in Salzburg before a small audience that called ...

X Minus X
Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life, the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the boulevard, is bare; And after that paradise, the dance-hall, is closed; after that theater, the clinic, is ...