1. I have a few thoughts on the CIA, literary modernism, abstract expressionism, Nina Simone, heavy metal music, torture podcasting, and, for old times sake, Jack Kirby.
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9. With music, the CIA eschewed high modernism, rejecting the experimental works of Milton Babbitt & John Cage. Instead, they suborned Louis Armstrong (via the State Department) and Nina Simone (unwittingly recruited by a CIA front organization to perform in Nigeria).
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10. The preference for popular genres in music (as against literature & painting) was motivated by racial politics. Sponsoring Armstrong & Simone was a way to combat the idea America was racist & make an appeal to decolonized peoples in Africa & Asia.
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11. Music -- primarily African-American music -- was the CIA's gateway into popular culture, opening the door to later adventures like using a front to recruit Jack Kirby for a fake sci-fi movie to be shot in Iran (Argo). Here's some of Kirby's never used set designpic.twitter.com/ypPpyek83r
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12. Some more thoughts on the CIA's cultural policy here (and go listen to the Winds of Change podcast -- it's great).https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/wind-of-change-cia/ …
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And it looped back on itself; have you come across the essay
@RonRosenbaum1 wrote for Harpers in 1983 about New Criticism and Angleton's obsessive molehunts? -
ngleton used> his mysteriosomasteryof ambiguity to discover <false> ambiguities in suspected mole testimony. Empsonian ambiguity involves the enriched reading one gets from two truths.
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Angleton attended a poetry reading in Washington just before or after the time he may have ransacked Mary Pinchot Meyer's studio looking for her diaries - according to Peter Janney in his book on her murder. Who was the featured poet? Am morbidly curious.https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510708938/marys-mosaic/ …
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The new criticism dealt in irony and ambiguity. What you describe here is unabiguous torture bb/c he was unambiguously <wrong> about the supposed treasonous conduct of his many unfortunate mole candidates. ( see my NYT mag piece"The Man Who Created the Cold". Empson is innocent!
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Hi - do you have any sources on close reading and torture? It's relevant to some research I'm doing, but a websearch has turned up nothing. Thank you
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