Dear John

As we discussed, I have established this blog for our project. It all seems a bit much, but I suppose we’ll grow into it. Our big idea, as you well know, is that the humanities disciplines as currently configured owe an unacknowledged debt to arguments that Hollywood provoked, in the university and outside of it, in the early twentieth century, about the prospectus for improving populations by managing aesthetics. Your contention was that we have a lot to discuss and that we might as well do it in full public view, to amuse as well as enlighten those few idlers with time enough to read it.

Mark