I was taught literature by Edmund Wilson’s son, RK Wilson. He was very funny: if you appreciated absurdities, irony and whimsy.

Hmm … are you sure they mean you well?

My own favorite formulaic literary demurral (very handy in the face of memes and social networking) is Djuana Barnes’s “I am sorry but the list of questions does not interest me to answer. Nor have I that respect for the public.”

My second favorite, mostly trotted out when well-meaning (and very welcome on that score) acquaintances suggest I give up the day job and go to grad school and become a teacher, or scrape up a living as a reviewer, is E. B. White’s wartime response to the secretary of the American Cheviot Sheep Society’s “Wouldn’t you like to send me an article for use in my Cheviot notes to the various sheep papers?”

Nothing would delight me more than to write exclusively about sheep, exclusively for shepherds. But I feel that I’d better relax till I know more about the subject.

To do the Cliffs Notes thing and cut to the chase (thus missing all the delicious prey), I agree with some others here that your nostalgia is delusional. No one in my family or in my hometown read Edmund Wilson, and any blogger has more chance of reaching them. Successful public intellectuals have always been either unsuccessfully intellectual or not constantly public. Political interventions are most effectively intervention-like when unexpected. Christopher Hitchens is no more interesting a thinker than P. J. O’Rourke and never has been; no, not even when I agreed with a few of his opinions. My peers’ lives seem somewhat happier than Leibniz’s or Spinoza’s, and that’s startling enough to get me through the day.

And some of us croak into the wind.

“The rise of blogs also seems to prove that people who are burbling with interesting ideas can’t resist putting them out there, paid or not.”

But ideas are—always have been—a dime a dozen. It’s development that counts, and development that distinguishes a pro from a dilletante like me. That’s why students are require to write theses, no? John Scalzi talks about an “hour a day.” For me, at least, it’s not enough time to really dig in to an idea and then write something productive about it, and just the presence of the deadline—knowing that once I get started I’m going to have to stop before I get where I want to go—is inhibiting. The ability to switch intellectual gears quickly seems actually to be a fairly rare one. Perhaps we need to cultivate it. Related, of course, is John Quiggin’s observation on the distractions of the internet. More than ever, perhaps, in the vast flood of information we are suddenly exposed to, we have a need to learn disciplined concentration. Historically, a lot of great intellectual work comes from silence and distance, and this is hard to come by in these days.

“but not enough to miss the sparkling range of discourse of… the 1950’s.”

yes, exactly!

Salient—I think you’re half-right; a lot of blogs take constant updating to remain interesting, but I think the people who run them find commentary and debate addictive so while they lament it sometimes they couldn’t help it if they tried, either.

But there are also examples of blogs like Fafblog or I Blame the Patriarchy where the owner buggers off for periods of time ranging from weeks to MONTHS ON END (was it years for Fafblog? felt like it) and yet they keep an audience checking back loyally till they reward them with a new post. That’s gotta feel pretty amazing.

The problem of the inundation of information remains, so most public intellectuals are not going to be very well-informed ones. But it is also possible to use new degrees of grammatical freedom (such as motion, sound, and print combined) to accelerate comprehension; for example see my own Ecolanguage (click on my name above.)

to him, it was a bit of a bloody nightmare.

But Mill did work for a living; he had a middle management job at the East India Company (where he wrote some truly hilarious and/or horrendous essays in explanation of why all that stuff about freedom and autonomy was void in situations where its exercise would be financially inconvenient for the East India Company) and was then an MP

I always think of John Stuart Mill in this context. To me his upbringing, his circumstance, is the epitome of the precious intellectual cultivation available only to a select few, the kind of life now available to many more. No longer (at least here, in Australia, and in other reasonably social-democratic countries with fair access to educational opportunities blah blah) do you need a father pushing studies on you at the tender age of whatever, no longer do you need a family with too much money and no desire to see you fritter away your life doing work-work…now, you can get a few degrees and find a university to teach at, half-heartedly, while cultivating your precious intellectuality.

I’m being flippant, here, but my point is that rather than bemoaning the system, perhaps we should bemoan those who take advantage of the system (by becoming intellectuals where in a previous time they might not have been able to) and then don’t do anything with it. Remain lacklustre. Become uninspiring. Produce little for the public and give less to their students. etc.