M&M has been evolving from its initial focus on extended ruminations about agricultural and environmental issues, broadly conceived, to something sufficiently broad that the initial blog description, "earthy observations" had become false advertising. It's no less earthy, even vulgar, but it is other things as well.

This Scott McLemee column, pointed to by a Holbo post that even he has abandoned to die a painful and lingering death at this point, contained the phrase "loiter with intent" as a description of the behavior of a sort of low-income socialist cafe culture that met in cafeterias and automats in New York in the 1930s.

"The cafeterias and the automats were the center of New York intellectual life back then," ... "You'd buy a sandwich or a piece of pie, both if you could afford it, but what you really went there to do was talk."

They were public intellectuals long before anyone thought to coin that phrase, embodying a tradition of working-class self-education that was both non-academic and passionate about high culture...

An old comrade of theirs once told me that, as a merchant seaman during World War II, he had been attracted to the Jacobson's group -- a small organization known as the Workers Party -- because its members read better novels than the Communists did.

P&J (as one came to think of them) were argumentative, plain-spoken, and averse to the gestures meant to announce that one is (ahem!) a qualified expert. That hardly meant condoning intellectual sloppiness. They loved expertise, but not rigamarole. A manuscript by an academic on an interesting topic was always a source of pleasure to them. Above all else, P&J believed in the educated general public. That notion was essential to their version of left-wing politics. The thought that you could be both "subversive" and incomprehensible to 90 percent of the audience made them laugh, not quite with joy...

Now, it's best not to sentimentalize the cafeteria and its circumstances, at least not too much. In the 1930s and '40s, smart people didn't loiter with intent to argue just because they enjoyed the prospect of constituting a "free floating intelligentsia." They were there for economic reasons. The food was cheap, the jobs were scarce. Academe was nothing like the factor in the nation's economic life that it is today, and few saw a career there as an option...

Nor was the discursive style of the cafeteria intelligentsia all brilliant rhetorical fireworks and dialectical knife-juggling. I suspect that, after a while, the arguments and positions began to congeal and harden, becoming all too familiar. And the familiar gambit of "you lack the theoretical sophistication to follow my argument" seems to have had its place in cafeteria combat...

So maybe a paradise of the unfettered mind it wasn't. Still, in reading academic blogs over the past couple of years, I've often wondered if something like the old style might not be rousing itself from the dustbin of history.

For one thing, important preconditions have reemerged -- namely, the oversupply of intellectual labor relative to adequate employment opportunities. The number of people possessing extremely sophisticated tools in the creation, analysis, and use of knowledge far exceeds the academic channels able to absorb them.

Much was elided and his primary objective, to explore the possibility that blogs are modern analogs for that old cafeteria culture if you squint just right, is (mostly) ignored. What interests me is the idea of an educated general public being essential to a progressive society, and the necessity for rigamarole-free plain speaking if you hope to have any effect or influence beyond a small circle of adepts cloistered in the tower. That doesn't mean that arguments need not be sharp or that metaphorical blood will not be let.

I see this cafeteria tradition as being yet another instance of pub talk and the British autodidact tradition. I suspect that a scholar could cite many other instances in various historical places and times and that this is dead common in every age and place where society is rapidly evolving. More squinting may be required.

So I stole it, the phrase that is, and M&M will now be described as Loitering With Intent. Don't be fooled by the ragged clothes and poverty food, but take a seat if you have sharp knives and enjoy a little blood sport that offers no prize money or even trophies beyond scars given and received.