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As with anyone whose primary distinction is that his ideas were ahead of their time, Seldes did not himself hold my interest here; the fun part was having to imagine the state of the world when one idea or another was new. For example, Seldes pushed very early the idea that popular culture deserved the same kind of criticism and praise as high culture. He published his manifesto The 7 Lively Arts in 1924, after already praising Krazy Kat et al. in magazine articles for a few years.
Here's what came to mind, for me, in thinking about mid-20s culture before I read this book: Dada had already happened; Surrealism had just begun or was about to. Eliot and Joyce were established. What else... no rock and roll for a long time, though popular music existed. TV was decades away.
Here's what didn't come to mind, because I hadn't realized it: Radio was still brand-new as a popular medium. Radio.
Similarly, 1950s-era debates over whether television inherently made people dumber probably didn't-- I realized while reading-- have the knee-jerk qualities that debate always has when repeated today. Some of the people arguing remembered a time before movies; all of them could see the difference between the world of radio's mass debut and the world they lived in, which meant most of them had theories about what part radio played in that change.
Most of all, Seldes seems to have loved variety. Occasional creative disasters, to him, were just the price a network or publisher paid for trying new things in an attempt to higher instincts that were going unfulfilled in the audience-- maybe ones the audience didn't even know about yet.
Anyway, not earthshaking, but interesting, particularly considering how many of the controversies Seldes weighed in on have parallels today in debates at Pitchfork or ILX and forums of that ilk.
