Consider the following series of softball questions:
* Which authors do you most admire?
* When and where do you like to read?
* What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Are there any you steer clear
of?
* What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite
character or hero from those books?
* What do you plan to read next?
In what circumstances might such a series of patiently deferential questions be posed?
Well, perhaps by a remedial reading specialist, to a child with learning
disabilities whom we are trying to encourage. Also posed was the following question,
*If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
which would seem to be going a bit too far in the fad for
flattery of the child’s self-esteem, but such are the times in which we live.
However, this bucket of glurge did not appear in a Special
Ed handbook, nor in a newsletter to parents -- but in the Book Review section
of this morning’s New York Times, taking up most of a page:
The interview is surmounted by no identification whatsoever
of the interviewee, aside from a soft-tone flattering sketched portrait. Now, the only way in which her
responses could possibly be of interest to literate adult readers would be the
person thus polled were a noted literary critic nearing the end of a long and
productive career. But it
turns out that the interviewee thus fawned over was someone called “Amanda
Knox”. I had heard the
name somewhere, but had the impression it referred to a television actress, or
perhaps a lingerie model or pop star. And so I looked the wench up in Wikipedia.
Her only claim to fame, it turns out, is to have been an exchange student and
barmaid in Italy, whose roommate was then murdered. The circumstances involved astonishingly grotesque
details. She was accused and
convicted of the murder; accused
and convicted of slander for having falsely accused a certain man of the
crime. The latter conviction
stood; the former was overturned,
then turned upright again, with an order for a new trial, which now (the
accused being safely back in the US)
will never take place.
Ms Knox (or her ghostwriter) then penned a memoir of this sordid affair,
for which she received an advance of several million dollars.
Where actual guilt lies in all this, I have no idea, though
a perusal of this detaled account
will likely leave you thinking that, whether or not Ms. Knox
personally wielded the knife, she is not the sort of person you would want as a
baby-sitter for your child, nor even a member of your bookclub. And certainly not someone to whose
superior wisdom the President should defer, on the subject of his required
reading.
And with that, the New York Times Book Review -- a frequent
offender in this regard -- sinks yet another level in its fawning.
 |
| The author, greeting her admirers |
Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη, ἡ μήτηρ τῶν πορνῶν καὶ τῶν βδελυγμάτων τῆς γῆς
~
[Update 19 May 2013]
The very next issue of the NYT Book Review continues the sodden trend, with a full-page
review of two new books by Elinor Lipman.
I actually knew Mrs. Lipman back in Longmeadow -- her son
and mine played together (not very nicely); I attended one of her readings, and was much taken with her
charm, and with her story collection Into Love and Out Again. It may be that the new
books are also good -- but the review is a glop of goo. (Any single quoted phrase would damn it; but instead of wasting pixels, I shall donate them to the poor.) No-one with a functioning Y
chromosome would wish to go anywhere near books praised in such terms. Whether Mrs. Lipman has become
more gynecocentric, or whether the NYTBR has simply settled dreamily
into a pool of its own warm piss, is for others to discern.
For a possibly partly parallel feminine literary trajectory (again, a beautiful and charming author, whose early work I greatly enjoyed):
Rebecca Goldstein meets the Schroedinger Equation
For a possibly partly parallel feminine literary trajectory (again, a beautiful and charming author, whose early work I greatly enjoyed):
Rebecca Goldstein meets the Schroedinger Equation
[Update 26 May 2013]
The NYTBR partly redeems itself this week by printing an actual review (as
opposed to puff-piece lapdog colpoglossia) of the (ghost-written) Knox book
-- and by a male, no less (Sam Tanenhaus)!
The review begins (and this is nothing to the discredit of
Ms. Knox, but rather to the balloon-boy-addicted American public):
The dubiously accused almost always disappoint, once their
full stories are told. It is the
crime that magnetizes our attention.
Remove the stain of guilt … and what’s left?
As for the claim of the (at-one-remove) author to
guru-status:
Her candid summaries of flings and
one-night stands exude
triumphalism …For today’s young women … the ideal of sexual freedom seems to
derive more from Helen Gurley
Brown than from Susan Brownmiller.
Better yet:
The review shifts the focus away from the contingent individual caught
willy-nilly in the net, to the Gomorric landscape of Italy under that preening
malfaiteur Berlusconi, which formed the background to her sad flings. (I almost spelled it "Gomorrhic" -- but no, that's gonorrhea.)
[Update 15 March 2014]
The chancre of Amanda Knox
continues to ooze its luetic effluvia. Well observed by Ruth Marcus:
Read Belle Knox, the freshman’s nom de porn, on her decision to pay
tuition bills by performing in adult films, and you see the vulnerability
underlying the faux-feminist, hear-me-roar bravado about rejecting
slut-shaming:
“My experience in porn has been
nothing but supportive, exciting, thrilling, and empowering,” Knox — she chose the last name in a weird homage
to Amanda Knox, the college student accused of murdering her roommate in Italy
— wrote on the Web site xojane.com. “For me, shooting pornography brings me
unimaginable joy.”
[Update 4 June 2013]
The latest item from the literary front
Note:
There are so many anecdotes, swirling about like dust-motes, that it
were pointless to highlight this or that one. We need to focus on Big Game. And the biggest game in town these days, for short fiction,
is The New Yorker -- this is no straw-man (ahem, pardon, strawperson … American with straw …).
And their premier showcase for American fiction is their annual fiction
issue, which just came out (a double one, dated June 10 & 17, 2013). And the premier publicity slot is
the outside cover, taken up this issue with a full-page color ad from Amazon.
The ad is for the “Kindle Paperwhite”, boasting “Read in
Bright Sunlight”. This, if
true, is indeed a noteworthy engineering achievement; back in the days when I was editor-in-chief of Franklin
Electronic publishers, our would-be flagship proto-Kindle, the ill-fated “e-Bookman”
(many years before its time, alas) was notably deficient as regards the
display.
But that engineering detail -- the real reason you might
want to buy this model as opposed
to earlier ones -- is buried in small print at the very bottom of the
page. What grabs the eye -- being,
indeed, a stark paperwhite agains the background of color -- is a bit of
fiction that begins thus:
I don’t have to look up to know
Mom is making another surprise visit.
Her toenails are always pink during the summer…
Once again, Mother has found me in
my bathrobe….
Now think about this.
Ostensibly, Amazon is selling a piece of newly-engineered hardware -- both gender- and
genre-neutral. Yet of all
the prose they could have chosen, they picked something that might have fallen
out of some ditz-head’s FaceBook page. Not merely does it make no attempt to appeal to both
men and women: it features the
sort of trivial female narcissism that would send any normal male streaking to
the vomitorium.
All in all, it’s a helluva time for a straight guy to be
trying to sell books. But
for what it’s worth, you can check these out:
[Neubemerkung 23 III 14] Gar nachdenkenerregend, diese Geraetswerbung. Heutmorgens im NYTBuecherblatt gab’s ‘ne faustdicke Amazone die mannekinweise das Kindle hochhielt.
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