reprint from old blog circa 2006-7

look at this, which I cut and pasted from some website:

Meghan O’Rourke is one of the brightest new voices in contemporary poetry and American culture. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, earned her B.A. from Yale in 1997, and that summer began her literary career at the New Yorker, first as an editorial assistant, then in 2000 as an editor.  Since 2002 she has served as culture editor for Slate, and in 2005 was named co-poetry editor, with Charles Simic, of the Paris Review.

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From Yale to New Yorker to The Paris Review . . . is how it goes.   The tradition continues.  The road is paved: see the quotes from Bourdieu below.

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What is Meghan O'Rourke's secret?  Why her?  Why is she showered with these prestigious jobs,— why does she have a bigpress book that duly and automatically gets a rave in the NYTimes (prepaid for, as it were) when other poets her age who are a dozen times better than her (—okay, that wouldn't be that hard—) can't even find a publisher . . .  her "career" is a gilded glidepath, greased with opportunity.

What poet her generation wouldn't want the Kenyon Review to call them "one of the brightest new voices in contemporary poetry and American culture" . . .

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I repeat: why her?  There have to be at least two hundred poets her age who write better poems than her.  And her prose isn't any better: Slatejournalese, N'Yawkerpap.

How can such a mediocrity be so successful?  . . .

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These thoughts from Bourdieu might be relevant to the O'Rourke case-file:

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Pierre Bourdieu: "School [the institutional education system] actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality."

(Or: [Po-Biz] actually reproduces the cultural division of society in many visible and invisible ways despite its apparent neutrality.)

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London Review of Books, 20 April 2006: Bruce Robbins writes that

Bourdieu had "an extreme scepticism about the structures of formal democracy, which he believed functioned so as to disguise the hereditary transmission of privilege, allowing the success of some and the failure of the rest to appear as an innocent process of selection on merit."

From the same review (p. 18): 

"[For Bourdieu,] domains like art and science, which appear to be free from the political and economic constraints operating elsewhere, are in fact structured by an aggessive competition for 'symbolic capital' that is neither open nor equitable. In one way or another, things are arranged so that rewards end up in the hands of those who started at the top of the social hierarchy." 
  

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