"Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Worth seeing? Mneh!"

Wrote W.H. Auden in the poem "Moon Landing," published in The New Yorker September 6, 1969. Here's the facsimile page for subscribers. But anyone can read it here.

I ran across it just now because, writing about a perfectly healthy woman who'd undergone assisted suicide, I'd stumbled across a 2011 piece in The New Yorker that brought up the word "meh," which naturally sent me to the OED. 

According to its etymology page, "meh" probably came from the Yiddish word "me" — which means "be it as it may, so-so" — and, we're told, "It is unclear whether there is any direct connection with (earlier) mneh."

The OED's quote for "mneh" was what you see in the post title, W.H. Auden, in 1969, poetically dumping on the trip to the moon.

"Kramer’s old uniform—camp-collar shirts in colorfully printed silk or rayon, sack pants that pull up a little short at the ankle to reveal white socks, clunky-soled shoes, a thin gold chain..."

"... is new again. This summer, the stylish young men I’ve seen around New York have continued their rejection of the once-inescapable skinny pants and check shirts in favor of something a little looser and decidedly more louche."

Writes Amanda Mull in "It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Everyone Started Dressing Like Kramer/It’s the summer of Kramercore" (The Atlantic).

"Years of stretch fabrics that really needed the stretch have given way to breezy textiles and retro short-sleeved knits with a natural slouch, idiosyncratic prints, a lot more color, and maybe a little bit of embroidery. There are fewer sneakers and more loafers. And then there are all those camp collars.... Tired of the sameness and omnipresence of new clothes and nostalgic for a past that many of them don’t remember, young people have plunged themselves into thrifting and vintage resale, hunting for weird or interesting things from the ’90s and early 2000s."

"'If equal affection cannot be,' W.H. Auden wrote, 'let the more loving one be me.'"

"In the romantic quest to find a person with whom to share a life, though, we really do seek someone who will fully reciprocate our feelings. We’re warned, accordingly, not to press ourselves on someone who, in the old formula, is 'just not that into you.' Friendships are different; they come in a variety of intensities. Romantic love, if you’ll indulge the caricature, has a toggle switch; friendships come with a dimmer switch. Some friendships have the 'one soul in two bodies' intensity that Montaigne wrote about. Other friendships involve vague good will and an actual conversation every other year. You seldom see each other, but you have a blast when you do. Is there any real friendship between you two?"

So begins an answer from the NYT "ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah, answering a question from a person who "pretend[s] to like" someone who considers him a friend. He sees this person as unpleasant and depressed but continues to get together with him, seemingly out of pity for him. 

Here's the Montaigne essay, "Of Friendship." 

The University of Oklahoma course modeled on a University of Michigan course taught by W.H. Auden in 1941.

Auden's course, "Fate and the Individual in European Literature," had 6,000 pages of reading, writes Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education...

The Divine Comedy in full, four Shakespeares, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Faust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke, T.S. Eliot. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, with millions of people tuning in each week to the Met’s Saturday broadcast, but it’s hard to imagine anything less consonant with millennials’ attention span than one of Wagner’s Teutonic enormities. Auden assigned three of them....

The Auden-based course at Oklahoma is a small but significant instance of how it may be done. Western-canon talk offends many people in the humanities these days, the few faculty traditionalists often contesting the progressive orthodoxy....

I advise the traditionalists to try the Oklahoma way. Design your Western-civ or Great Books course and ramp it up to Auden levels. Be frank about the reading challenge. Boast of the aged, uncontemporary nature of the materials. Highlight the old-fashioned themes of greatness, heroism and villainy, love and betrayal, God and Truth, and say nothing against intersectionality and other currencies. Your antagonists are mediocrity, youth culture, presentism, and the disengagement of professors and students. You occupy a competitive terrain, and your brand is Achilles, Narcissus, the Wyf of Bath, Isolde, and Bigger. Let’s see what happens. Let the undergrads decide.

Quite aside from traditionalists, I'd like to talk to the kind of progressives who are outraged that the Brooklyn Museum hired a white woman as its curator and historian of African arts and architecture. I presume the woman, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, studied very hard to acquire the credentials that won her this position. Yes, here, read about it:

Trained in all periods of African art and architectural history, she specializes in the early modern period, with a focus on Christian Ethiopian. Her research centers on cross-cultural exchange, early globalization, transcultural art, and the depiction of non-Western cultures in museums and popular media.

In September 2016, she successfully defended her dissertation Building Faith: Ethiopian Art and Architecture during the Jesuit Interlude, 1557-1632. Based on research conducted in Ethiopia, Italy, and Portugal, the project considers the relationship between Roman Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox art and architecture in early modern Ethiopia. She is currently at work on several new projects, including a revision of her dissertation and a project on the links between Ethiopian Orthodox painting and the global textile trade. She is also completing an article on the relationship between foreign design, native labor, and local agency in early modern Christian Ethiopian architecture....

I imagine that Kristen Windmuller-Luna believed that she was embracing the very best progressive values, and yet now she finds herself treated with hostility for taking this path.

What is the message to the next Kristen Windmuller-Luna, who wants to become an excellent scholar within the humanities? Would you advise her to specialize in African art?

The unintended (I think unintended) consequence of the criticism of the Brooklyn Museum is to tell white students who want a career in the humanities to specialize in the European tradition and take courses like W.H. Auden's.

The traditionalists will win with the assistance of the anti-appropriation progressives, and the universities will wake up from their dream of multi-culturalism and diversity. With progressive support, white students can feel that they should concentrate on the culture of white people.

I'm putting that bluntly not because I like it, but because the progressives who are participating in this dynamic don't seem to notice or to want to talk about it.